Tag Archives: Peter Jackson

May 7, 2024 · 1:13 pm

TMBP Extra: Then and now

It’s spring 2024 A.D., and when we last saw the Beatles, they were vanishing before our eyes in the “Now and Then” video, ascending to Pepperland, probably. In the moment, it was a powerful and tidy conclusion to the clip and the greater arc of their career.

But to paraphrase Paul McCartney, there is no end to what they can do together. Having reclaimed the top spot on the charts in what they trumpeted as their “last song,” the Beatles have chosen to re-audition after all.

The Beatles don’t really do tidy endings. They keep the accidental outtake “Her Majesty” after the majestic “The End.” They break up the band in the most clumsy fashion. And now, after the triumphant back-to-back successes of the Get Back docuseries in 2021 and “Now and Then” last November, the Beatles exhume a movie George Harrison called a “fiasco” and “painful,” John Lennon said made him “sick” and Ringo Starr said had “no joy.” Ringo’s quote is from two weeks ago. Ringo still has issues with Let It Be. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to promote this thing?

Leave it to me, Ringo. I’m excited, because the return of Let It Be to Beatles canon is critically important, even as it comes off now as the Beatles trying to be completists.

Once I started listening to the full run of Nagra Tapes on my own in 2012, it completely changed my point of view on how the sessions played out. I’ve been writing that story here for 12 years.  And for most of that time – until Get Back premiered — I could only cross-reference the Nagras’ account with what amounts to a late 20th century antique (a video cassette of Let It Be) and nearly 50 years’ worth of public grievances. And that’s precisely why I didn’t think the film should have remained inaccessible for so long and truly feared it would stay buried. Because Let It Be didn’t tell the story of the Beatles breakup, the reaction to it did. This, above all else, is why Let It Be matters.

I first saw Let It Be on VHS in the mid-1980s – we rented it and subsequently pirated our own copy in a nod to the tradition of Let It Be/Get Back bootleging. Of course I bought into the idea that Let It Be showed their breakup – I was an impressionable fan, didn’t dig independently into it (where were the counter-narratives back then anyway?) and if the Beatles themselves said that’s the way to interpret the film, who am I to say otherwise? If it’s in Compleat Beatles, it was gospel. Also, remember we didn’t have the full Nagras leaked at the time, only a few hours of bootleg records, mainly of performances.

That VHS release, along with an edition on Laserdisc (a contemporary technology with the video cassette) and Betamax, represent the most modern formats on which Let It Be exists prior to its  streaming debut. I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating: In the time since street-legal Let It Be appeared on store shelves, you could have picked up A Hard Day’s Night on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K UHD and streamed it.

The last UK television broadcast of Let It Be came May 8, 1982, according to the Radio Times. The film was screened sporadically in American theaters into the mid-1980s, but then it simply disappeared. Other Beatles productions remained stocked, promoted and upgraded. Magical Mystery Tour (which had its own terrible reputation for a long time) was belatedly released on VHS in October 1988 – like the other Beatle movies, it had its subsequent reissues on modern formats.

Once in a while, Let It Be’s absence was made conspicuous to the general public.

Buried in a 1991 news story about the future collectible value of Disney VHS tapes (which was really a thing, I remember it!), a mail-order video store reported it was tracking down copies of Let It Be videotapes for $180. For context, you could have bought a decent name-brand VCR for that price – or about 10 new copies of “Star Wars” or “Driving Miss Daisy” (or 13 copies of “Sweatin’ To The Oldies”).

Only three years later, on Anthology Eve, a copy of Let It Be was truly priceless.

“[A]pparently the collectors who own it aren’t willing to part with the title,” said a representative from a different specialty video store in 1994.

That was 30 years ago.

Let it Be is haunted by more than a half century of degradation and denigration as a physical product and a featured work in Beatles history, a ruin by which it’s defined.

If you wanted to watch the movie prior to its Disney+ debut, you were forced to view it on technology that peaked in the 1980s in its native format or on a digital copy ripped from those same 40-year-old analog formats. It’s a bad experience. And even in 1970, the original theatrical release was trashed, including the decision to blow up and crop the original 16mm print to 35mm, and it was hit for poor sound quality too.

(David Bowie deliberately had the Blackstar LP, released days before his death in 2016, physically degrade before your eyes, employing a hard clear plastic sleeve destined to aid in wrecking your record beyond routine wear and tear on the turntable and viewable through a window in the front cover.)

Let It Be on Laserdisc

Before you even slipped your Let It Be Laserdisc (for instance) into your player, you were hit over the head with the breakup story on the back cover:

The Beatles were breaking up. The Beatles were boys becoming men. … One squirms as Paul snips at George and Ringo for not playing their parts correctly, as if the Beatles magic was of a kind that could be whipped into shape. But you can’t blame Paul, because he, like us, saw the Beatles coming to an end.

(Paul said exactly as much during 1990s interviews for Anthology, too: “When we got in there, we showed how the breakup of a group works. We didn’t realize that we were actually sort of breaking up as it was happening.”)

That the film originally reached theaters — a reported 225 in the U.S. alone — a month after the “PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES” headline shattered the music world is critical, but not alone in its importance. Some people still expected the wacky, scripted Beatles to appear on the big screen.

Let It Be followed Help! into theaters by less than five years (to get into that headspace, here are some films that came out in 2019 — it doesn’t feel like too long ago). Magical Mystery Tour, which was considered a misstep in its own time, was shown to British television audiences less than 2 ½ years prior.

Don’t think that matters? To give one example, Variety’s May 20, 1970, review of the film bemoaned “the Beatles’ past togetherness, the chummy camaraderie, the quickness to seize on a line and build a series of gags is no longer there.”

Los Angeles Times movie listings, June 20, 1970

We can nitpick even further and argue that if someone wanted to spend their $1.50 or 6/1 ½, maybe it was better spent on Woodstock, which was in theaters much at the same time (Woodstock was reaching more theaters as Let It Be completely ran out of steam). Running 100 minutes longer than Let It Be, the cinematic release of the concert documentary earned widespread critical and commercial acclaim.

Just a few pages away from the movie listings for Let It Be, reviews and stories touted the Beatles’ recent split, and record store ads promoted Paul’s new solo LP.

Or, as that same Variety review said, “If the film has an air of emptiness and resignation, it is because we know that this is almost certainly the last Beatles picture we are going to see.”

Let’s be clear about the Beatles’ audience, now and then. The younger Beatles fan base that exists today is utterly outstanding, bringing a completely different perspective on the group and, critically, lacking the baggage so many of us had to live with and work to shake free. I’m a second-generation fan, a born in the mid-1970s and too late to be around for Beatles’ first run, but I remember the possibility all four could one day reunite. And I remember hearing on the radio John was killed.

I grew up with The Compleat Beatles, Lennon Remembers, Shout! and later aged with Anthology and Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image – so the story was baked in: Let It Be was hell, period.

Even the Beatles’ own records promoted that this was a bad time.  The back cover  to Reel Music (1982) said “Let It Be poignantly documents the group’s disintegration while capturing their inimitable songwriting technique,” while the liner notes to Let It Be … Naked nearly 20 years later put it this way:

It is the Twickenham sessions that have characterised the whole Let It Be project as an unhappy one both in the minds of the Beatles themselves and anyone who saw the documentary footage in the movie.

In 1970, Get Back was merely the name of a song and an abandoned LP (and film title) while the Nagras sat securely in Apple Records’ vault. Multiple generations loved the Beatles, but they were all “first-generation” fans who witnessed the group’s evolution and dissolution in real time, not forced to read about it in a book or watching it from a documentary. When Let It Be was promoted in theaters, there wasn’t a new generation of fans to reach.

Let It Be movie posters as displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.

Much as the audience mattered, the four most important figures requiring appropriate contextualization are the Beatles themselves. To them, Let It Be wasn’t just a monthlong session in 1969 and a movie premiering after a breakup in May 1970.  The Let It Be experience spanned the 16 months in between too. That’s a long time.

It’s time that included rejected cuts of the film (“Let me put it this way. I’ve had three calls this morning to say [Yoko Ono footage] should come out” is how director Michael Lindsay-Hogg remembered the reaction to an initial screening).

Those 16 months included several rejected Glyn John edits of the soundtrack album, tapes eventually being dumped on Phil Spector and Paul hating much of what Spector did.

It included John saying he wanted a divorce from the Beatles, and later McCartney accepting it, properly beginning the Beatles solo era.

It had all of the Northern Songs drama and the disintegrating Apple. And Allen Klein brooding over everything.

All of that happened to the Beatles as part of their Let It Be-era experience, when a long and lonely “winter of discontent” really spans six calendar seasons. We can separate an 80-minute film from the period, but how could they?

The music wasn’t blackballed the same way the movie was. I always thought it was great, and I never bought John’s complaints about it (“[Phil Spector] was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it … When I heard it, I didn’t puke.”).

I may not have been in under the lights and in front of the cameras, but I do listen to the music and haven’t puked either. It makes me feel quite good! Let It Be made its CD debut in tandem with Abbey Road to great fanfare in 1987, capping the band’s reissue campaign on the new-ish format. A dozen songs from the sessions appeared on 1996’s Anthology 3.  Seven years later in 2003, a reworked mix emerged as Let It Be … Naked.  We can even throw in Reel Music and the Movie Medley for more examples that they fully incorporated Let It Be’s music into their catalog since its release.

I think the film just sat there as this giant symbolic target. It was harder to pan the companion soundtrack LP when it was such a smash – it had the biggest initial sale of any LP in American history at $26 million in 2 weeks. The movie, on the other hand, was a relative box office failure, pulling in $1.06 million gross. That sounds like a lot of money until you see A Hard Day’s Night made $11 million and Help! pulled in $12 million.

If the music from the same sessions have been tolerated by Beatles Inc. over the last 50 years, what was so damning about Let It Be’s visuals for so long? Was it the scant minutes featuring Yoko in the frame? The “confrontation” between Paul and George. The waltz? We know it wasn’t about Billy Preston, and the rooftop has long been justifiably lionized. The three completed songs performed in the basement (“Two of Us,” “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”) are perhaps staged a bit too formally, but those have resurfaced at various times in Beatle releases (eg., two of the three on the 2015 “1” DVD).

There is very little in the way of actual dialogue – as in full, extensive conversations — in Let It Be (and in its original print, which is very muddy compared to the MAL-enhanced sounds of the 2020s).

Much of that dialogue fits on one side of a 45, in fact:

George has been quoted multiple times referring to Yoko’s “freakout” with John in Let It Be – but that never made the final cut. An early edit long colored George’s opinion of the film – it wasn’t a first-hand memory, since he wasn’t in the room when Yoko performed with the others. Did George even see the theatrical version of Let It Be?

It’s probably a matter of simple bias: When you listen to Let It Be you can’t see Paul and George bickering, John asking if they can “play a fast one,” Paul yawning, Ringo looking like he’s going through the motions or Yoko just sitting there.

“I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all, if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

The result is actually backed up by science – what we hear isn’t as sticky as what we see.

Paul and George did bicker. Yoko did just sit there. That’s real, even if that’s not all they did.

What is spread out over eight hours in Get Back simply didn’t translate as well over 80 minutes in Let It Be. Some of that was by choice — maybe it could have benefitted by one less oldies cover and one more evolution of an original song — but there was really little wiggle room in the format.

We’re lucky to have Get Back, for its clarity of picture and sound, and all that footage. Normally a recording session wouldn’t have a particular story to tell — group frustrations come to a boil, a member walks out, but they rally and stage a memorable performance, etc. — and in 1969/70, the Beatles never intended to tell anything more than “this is how an album is made, and here we are performing it as the payoff” as the original TV concept.

And to that end – with Get Back as its companion — Let It Be should be considered an honest depiction of the band. Still, it’s always been a struggle to describe what exactly Let It Be is.

The original movie trailer (which was given an homage in the 2024 Disney+ trailer) asked viewers to view the band “rehearsing, recording, rapping, relaxing, philosophizing, creating.”  One movie ad was more blunt: “The Beatles singing their songs, doing their thing.”

Let It Be appeared on HBO in the late 1970s, and the cable network’s guide described the film on different occasions as “A film to make you smile” and, simply, “McCartney sings Besame Mucho.”

The original movie poster (“an intimate bioscopic experience”) and present-day blurb on Disney+ (“Available for the first time in over 50 years, the original 1970 film about the Beatles”) both tout the plain fact that Let It Be is a movie as it’s main descriptor.

It feels like the original VHS box got the story right, with a positive spin not common at the time:

An exhilarating documentary of the making of an album by The Beatles, the film concentrates on the many recording sessions that went into the production of the “Let it Be” album. It offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of this world-renowned group as well as the subtle relationships among the individual members. There is jamming of old songs and painstaking work on new ones. In search of a new direction, The Beatles play an inspired concert on the roof of their London offices.

In the announcement of the 2024 reissue of Let It Be, Peter Jackson said Get Back and Let It Be “enhance each other.”

 ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Get Back,’ while ‘Get Back’ provides a vital missing context for ‘Let It Be.’

That first part sounds reversed, but the director is absolutely right. Let It Be isn’t backward compatible because of how it directly influenced the subsequent 50 years of Beatles history. Let It Be owns it’s baggage, period.

Get Back told a specific story, but it was reactionary, too, not simply giving a nod to Let It Be, but deliberately clarifying — and in a sense undermining — some of the original film’s more negative moments.

My favorite example (of several): Paul tries to stifle a yawn in Let It Be,  50-year-old proof that the band is bored. But a drowsy Beatles performance of “I’m So Tired” results in a minute-long sequence in Get Back, with everyone yawning. George yawns his way through Paul’s magical “Get Back” origin story.

For all the drama in Get Back — agonizing over the band’s future, dealing with walkouts (George) and sit-ins (Yoko) — the only real resolution we get was to the problem of how to stage the show, by going onto the roof. Both films feature the same ending, with Get Back criminally dustheaping the full indoor performances, a robbery rectified with Let It Be’s restoration.

No matter how Michael Lindsay-Hogg edited Let It Be, he was stuck in his time. We all knew what came after the credits in 1970 — it wasn’t a gag reel or sneak preview, but a very public breakup, a breakup that was inevitable whether the January 1969 sessions were in front of cameras or not.

“We filmed the whole thing showing all the trauma we go through,” John said in the April 12, 1969, Melody Maker, which hit newsstands right around the time the “Get Back” b/w “Don’t Let Me Down” single was released and more than a year before Let It Be reached theaters.

Tellingly, there’s more to the quote: “Every time we make an album we go through a hellish trip.” (emphasis mine).

Let It Be was put together  in the Beatles’ time, yet could only reflect the past tense. It’s no accident Michael put Paul’s piano rendition of “Adagio for Strings” —  once voted the ““saddest classical” song — over the opening credits.

Fifty years later, with a different concept and such a different, wider audience, Get Back allowed — and still allows — us to dream on a future.  It freed the Beatles from the events that came after it. That story, so focused on the friendship of the band, directly set up “Now and Then.” The same rooftop ending delivered an alternate ending.

The existence of Get Back offers the original Let It Be the same liberation. Today, in 2024 and beyond, it’s indeed the climax to Get Back, the scar that healed over, at once an apocryphal footnote and a window into the post-breakup era — if you know to look for it.

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November 10, 2023 · 12:28 pm

TMBP Extra: Stay till it’s time to go

“The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before. Until then, The Beatles are alive and well and the Beat goes on, the Beat goes on.”

These were the instructions Apple publicist Derek Taylor articulated April 10, 1970, the marker for the end of the greatest pop music group there ever will be, the day the papers blared “PAUL QUITS THE BEATLES.”

That was more than 53 years ago, and it’s still not time to worry.

I felt compelled to write about “Now and Then,” the Beatles’ new single, and “last song,” even though I generally keep my focus to the Get Back sessions of a half-century earlier. One of the reasons I started researching and writing They May Be Parted in 2012 is because I thought I was investigating the endgame of the Beatles, and I wanted to understand that ending. Listening to the Nagra tapes of the sessions themselves, the January 1969 sessions weren’t what we were led to believe, a revision to history that now is mainstream opinion since the release of the Get Back docuseries.

I’ve posted some takes on “Now and Then” on social media and voiced a few others as a podcast guest, but since I have this permanent platform, I wanted to post here for posterity, too.  Maybe this is more for me than anyone else. I tried to keep my thoughts in some kind of order, but this is certainly a brain-dump of high order. 

“Now and Then” was released just over a week before I published this post, and today hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts. My feelings on the song and the accompanying video evolved in that short time, and may continue to, I’m sure. 

There simply won’t be and can’t be consensus on any aspect of “Now and Then.” Contemporary critics routinely called Beatlemania a fad. One writer famously said Sgt. Pepper was “ultimately fraudulent.” Abbey Road was described by another as “an unmitigated disaster.” So from the jump, we can abandon any thought of a common opinion and there doesn’t need to be. It only matters what it means to you, if anything. It’s like attending a funeral — you go because you feel compelled to mourn for your own personal reasons. 

Assuming we all know the original backstory – John Lennon committed the idea to cassette in the late 1970s and widow Yoko Ono handed the tapes of this and three other songs to Paul McCartney in 1994 for use as potential new Beatles songs – let’s pick things up in 2023 with the song’s rollout.

One basic truth to have any “Now and Then” discussion: We simply have to accept the fact this song and video exist in order for us to have a reasonable conversation about it. Whether the song should or shouldn’t exist never was our call. It was up to the two living Beatles and the two estates.  In the 1990s, the decision was made to break the seal and reopen the Beatles as an active unit. This is just a continuation of that act in the 1990s. 

Is it real, or is it TDK?

George Harrison left explicit instructions to his son, Dhani, and Jeff Lynne outlining how he wanted Brainwashed, his posthumous 2002 LP, to be finished after his death. John didn’t leave behind anything except for the music itself.  If the tape of “Now and Then” actually said “For Paul” in John’s writing, we just don’t know if that meant it was dedicated to him, meant to give to him to listen to or something else altogether.  It could imply there were tapes that said “For May” or “For Sean.” Maybe there were and no one else has seen them.

Since I’m picking up the story in 2023 via 1995, I’m not really going to get into John’s original intent or inspiration in writing the song, the deeper Lennon-McCartney relationship, the Carl Perkins “My Old Friend” stuff or anything along those lines. There are some terrific voices in the Beatles-sphere who can offer their opinions on that. But ultimately, the most important interpreter is Paul. If we all (myself included) can hyper analyze every word and every note the Beatles play and find deeper meaning, certainly Paul McCartney has the right to decode and determine how a song by his longtime songwriting partner and dear friend spoke to him.

The 2023 rollout window for “Now and Then” was highly compact, and it allowed for knee-jerk takes and then knee-jerk reactions to those initial takes.

Straight away, Paul stumbled into the first step of the rollout in June, saying AI was key to completion of the song. Really, the blame goes to the person who wrote the BBC headline: “Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song.”

The clumsy description spoiled the promotion of project from the outset, even if the actual use of the the technology wasn’t anything wrong. If he just said “we’re using same gadgets Peter Jackson used to clean up the Get Back tapes” it wouldn’t have put the rollout on the back foot from the start.

Jackson put together the magnificent making-of documentary, unveiled the day before the song’s actual release, on November 1, pulling together unseen home movies of John and Anthology-era footage of George. How remarkable it was to be able to enjoy them both so alive again. Watching Paul singing along to “Now and Then” in the 1990s was extremely moving. 

Regardless of whether the musical performances of “Now and Then” in the documentary were a solid sync job or authentic, the sequence made a straight-line link between the ’90s and now, pulling “Now and Then” into the Anthology era as second-act Beatles song and doing everything it could to ensure George was part of this story. Utilizing the Yellow Submarine time travel and timeline was deft, and little easter eggs like using Magic Alex’s sound “technology” was clever and really gave a deep nod and wink to let even the most diehards know, “We’re with you, and this new song can speak to you too.”

It’s entirely anecdotal, from social media, but people started to weep once they heard John Lennon’s voice in isolation. It took me until a few seconds later, when Paul joined him in harmony.

To me, that’s one of the most important and enjoyable features of “Now and Then,” which was officially released on November 2  — Paul owns his “old-man voice,” which he really hasn’t done during his solo career as it’s become more prominent. He’s treating his Beatles work separate from his solo work, which often takes him out of his realistic vocal range.  But for this final Beatles track, he leans into that feature of his singing voice as a complement to John, who in his mid-to-late 30s when he recorded “Now and Then” was about 40 years Paul’s junior at his current age. It would have been like John singing with an 81-year-old George Burns in 1977.

I think the strings do a great deal of heavy lifting. Superficially, this is the biggest difference with whatever they would have worked on in the ’90s, when they didn’t employ strings at all on “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” I found the arrangement lovely and not overwhelming, evocative enough of “I Am the Walrus” and “Eleanor Rigby” without overwhelming the listener.  

I’ll say the same for the harmonies that were sampled from “Because,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Here, There and Everywhere.” Giles Martin applied them tastefully and subtly enough into the fabric of the song it sounded completely natural. 

Ringo was typically fab on the kit, and his added color on vocals were welcome. But it’s too bad surviving guitar parts were mixed low as they were. Much has been said about Paul’s slide solo in tribute to George — it did make you miss George, and it probably would have had a little more flavor and guts to it had he been around.

I do really feel like they were playing together, instead of this cross-generational, cross-dimensional, analog-digital hybrid. It’s all very tidy, under four minutes, not at all ponderous and conscious of overstaying its welcome. 

I thought John’s original recording was a little slight — I didn’t love any of the original piano sketches as they were taped, to be completely honest.  Certainly they were never meant to be release-ready or anything close to it. 

In contemporary interviews from the Anthology era, Paul himself didn’t pull any punches when it came to the quality of the content itself. On what was clearly “Now and Then,” from the November-December issue of Beatlefan:

Yeah, what’s it called – I don’t know, it didn’t really have a title [Sings: “You know/it’s true; it’s up to you…] That beginning bit’s great and then it just goes a bit crummy. We all decided that it’s not one of John’s greatest songs. So that we’d have to manipulate all of that, which is just a little bit more difficult.

I think it’s worth considering how different a 1995 version of the song would have been. We can be assured the overall sound would be different with Jeff Lynne at the helm as originally planned. Would the song have been adjusted, arranged and edited the same way? At the minimum, George would have had a say in the song’s writing and arrangement, probably in a 50-50 manner with Paul (minus some percentage offered to Ringo Starr, to be fair).  This is in no way meant to come off crass, but without George’s presence, it freed Paul to fully arrange “Now and Then” with complete freedom. 

Even if every now and then he’d feel so insecure, Paul had the confidence to open up the door to collaborate with John as an equal partner, as he felt he had every right to do and had done so many times. If Paul thought the song’s original bridge was clunky, extraneous and “crummy,” he was justified in killing it. I know it seems insane to say “No, we don’t want to hear any more unreleased John Lennon,” but the Beatles were always great editors. Paul McCartney is a magnificent song fixer, and this is the ultimate, final fix.  

And this returns me to Get Back. I long heard on the Nagras and everyone has since seen in the series that the others explicitly trusted Paul with their songs. He led the way, whether it was John letting him arrange “Don’t Let Me Down” or George welcoming input to “I Me Mine.” That’s just two small examples in a career of such collaboration.

Does “Now and Then” sound like it belongs on a Beatles LP? Of course not, and why should it?  Not quite a mashup, but think of it like the single version of a compilation album. It’s pieces from four of the last six decades woven in under four minutes, I think quite seamlessly. At times “Now and Then” sounds natural in any of those decades, though without fitting comfortably in any of them, either.

What is the essence of a Beatles song? Is it the personnel or the sound? The Beatles didn’t always record as a quartet, certainly not as the years went on. You only needed one Beatle to make Beatles song sometimes. “I Me Mine” was written and rehearsed with no input from John in 1969, and then recorded with him out of the country and having quit the band in 1970. Yet it’s undeniably a Beatles song.

Paul and Ringo got together recently for lunch, but had to send each other files of “Now and Then” — they couldn’t even bother to record the last song in the same room. Maybe there’s something calculated to that: If they couldn’t be in the same room as John and George, then they wouldn’t record without them as a unit. They’d all be apart, together.

The Beatles’ wild variety of styles defines the group’s music. So if it’s not the personnel or sound that makes a Beatles song a “Beatles song,” maybe the essence of a Beatles song rests in its original time — the 1960s. But, as George and John sang in response to “you say stop” in “Hello Goodbye,” they can stay till it’s time to go. And they decided it wasn’t time to go.

In the last 30 years, since the Threetles first attempted “Now and Then,” we lost George Harrison, Linda McCartney, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Geoff Emerick and so many others, people close to the Beatles, their story and their music. John wasn’t the only one missing anymore, and each of these people to some degree must have been on Paul’s mind as he worked on “Now and Then,” this song of memories and loss. 

And to that end, it’s also quite clearly a song of closure. The promotion — so actively screaming that it’s the “last” Beatles song — leans completely into that. But the music does too. I’m not any kind music theorist, but I have two operational ears, and this is what I hear:

“Now and Then” is the only one with a conclusive ending. 

I love the concept of the butterfly effect, so let’s apply it here. There’s no answer, but what if “Free as a Bird” had the poor demo tape recording and “Now and Then” ended up salvageable in 1995? Maybe the quote I shared earlier, where Paul said it was “not one of John’s greatest songs” would have meant “Real Love” would have been the lone reunion song? We’re left to guess.

And that brings us to the video. It’s divisive and a little insane. 

There’s a lot to unpack. My initial reaction was that it was too contrived, too scattered. The 1990s Anthology outtakes were outstanding, as it was in the making-of film — images of George we hadn’t seen before and the Threetles at work. But my overall first impression was that this video was the kitchen sink, trying to stuff so much in four minutes: present-day performances, ’90s video, archival footage and photos. 

I would imagine that if they didn’t do the “Free as a Bird” video already, that would have been an apt solution. 

That’s one way to go, when there’s a member of the band who’s not around anymore, a creative film that had few images of the Beatles as they had been and none of the surviving members pictured in the ’90s. “Real Love” took a more straightforward approach, compiling moments from throughout their career with 1990s footage. But there’s no narrative.

Roy Orbison died shortly after the first Traveling Wilburys album came out in 1988, and in the “End of the Line” video, released a few months later, he was represented by a rocking chair with a guitar and a photograph shown during his vocal lines. It was moving and sad, but I don’t think it was an approach that would have worked for the Beatles, with half the band gone. It would have come off maudlin, and completely against the idea that “Now and Then” was a full-group effort. (Mind you, I don’t think “End of the Line” was maudlin — it was still in the early phases of mourning Orbison)

I was completely skeptical when I first saw 1967-era “Hello, Goodbye” John and George intermingling with 2023 Paul and Ringo. The word “cringe” was thrown around a lot on social media, and I get that. My thinking on the video quickly evolved from the first to second viewing — your milage may vary. 

We’re faced with two issues: Would the departed Beatles want to be represented this way? And if so, should it be as silly as presented? 

Paul as Beatle Paul (above) in 1980 and George as Beatle George (below) in 1974.

Let’s not pretend George and John didn’t revisit their Fab Four period in their solo years. Putting aside the many callouts in songs, either cryptic or overt, George did things like dress in the same Sgt. Pepper costume he wore in “Now and Then” and elsewhere, and John literally had the Beatles on the cover of a solo record. Complicated feelings they may have been, they never wrote off that time.

St. Pepper George in the 1974 “Ding Dong” video, one of many Beatle guises he employed as he tried to “ring out the old.”

In their day, the Beatles embraced comedy in their films and promos, and beyond into the solo years (George was the funniest of all, with his estate keeping that flame alive). Even with a wistful lyric at play, it wouldn’t be the Beatles’ way to match it with a bleak visual. 

One way they could have gone would have been to make multiple videos, something the Beatles did themselves over their career and when they went solo. Build out a full video of the ’90s sessions co-mingled with appropriate ’70s Lennon home or studio footage. The Beatles at work on their last song.

Another direction would be a more direct clip/highlight reel, something they added to the video for “Real Love,” but now with another 30 years of memories added, and earlier footage cleaned up.

Finally in the last video, they could have really owned the time-travel element and gone completely bananas. Stick Paul into the “How Do You Sleep” sessions. Put 60 years of Ringos into one room. Get the 1980 Paul pretending to be the 1960s Paul and put him on stage with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto. You get the idea. Really play into the fact these four guys were always together, even when we can document they weren’t.

Those were my knee-jerk impressions of the video, kind of a mixed bag. Then I watched the video again, this time with my wife, who helped me open my eyes to a better interpretation.

A lot of people really don’t like the video, and I get it. It’s jarring, uncomfortable and the technology — as impressive as it is — still isn’t perfect. 

Peter Jackson described the concept as “Ringo and Paul in 2023 trying to work on a song and they get invaded by the 1967 Beatles,” but I think there’s much more to it than that. 

It’s Ringo and Paul deliberately surrounding themselves with the John and George they knew so well. At a funeral, wake, shiva – this is when we remember and talk of the vibrant life of the person we’re remembering, sharp and in color, not memories of their weakness or death. These days are filled with silly memories and pictures from all across their lives, laughter among the tears. I don’t think there’s any doubt Paul and Ringo vividly remembered a vitalized John and George — and even their own former vigorous selves — when they were in the studio last year working on “Now and Then.”  It’s just the Beatles and their closest associates:  George Martin was embodied through his son, and Mal Evans through the MAL technology used to extract John’s voice. 

This part of the video isn’t meant for us, it’s for them. We just get to be voyeurs. 

As the video nears the end, their life literally flashes before their eyes. Again, the animation is awkward in spots, but I’ll argue in favor of the concept. When I look at a photo of people I’ve lost in my life, their memory isn’t stuck in that 4×6 print. They live, they move. Every time I see their face, it reminds me of the places we used to go, a concept Ringo and George certainly understood.  

And then we were snapped back into reality, the reality of 1964, and the Beatles all together in a single time and place. With their concluding bow, taken from their performance of “She Loves You” in the “A Hard Day’s Night” film, the Beatles vanish before our eyes, and the lights spelling out their name burn out. That was the point in the video I lost it. 

If the rest of the video was for the surviving Beatles, this ending was for us, the Beatles fan, the rest of the world. They were singing to us now, not each other. 

Deliberate or not, this ending evokes a dramatic sequence in The Compleat Beatles, an unauthorized but highly valuable biography of the band from 1982. In the sequence on the breakup of the band, we see the iconic black-and-white photos of the band from April 1969, with George, Ringo, John and Paul vanishing, in sequence, as “I’m So Tired” plays in the background, the aggressive lyric, “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.” 

In the “Now and Then” video, that tone has changed. Go to the source in “A Hard Day’s Night,” and you can hear the valedictory statement they give prior to their bow: “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” See, it does work both ways: If Paul McCartney and Peter Jackson can search for deep meaning in these kinds of things, so can I.

The Beatles have said “Hello, Goodbye” many times. Breakup rumors started in 1964, and continued until they actually broke up. Until their partial reunions. The only endings that ultimately matter are John Lennon’s death in 1980 and George Harrison’s in 2001.

I’ll bring things back one more time to Get Back, Let It Be and original breakup, with these points: No living Beatles (out of four) approved the Get Back edit by Glyn Johns in 1969 (it later came out packaged with the Let It Be reissue in 2021). That’s two fewer Beatles that approved “Now and Then.”

I don’t think they could have sold “Now and Then” as a genuine cosmic reunion of friends, not merely co-workers, without the Get Back docuseries coming first. That set the stage to a mainstream audience that the the Winter of Discontent was much milder than forecast. 

And thus ends the Beatles’ final act. Or does it?  Paul offered this relevant remark to his fan club magazine, Club Sandwich, in the Winter 1995 issue, when asked if Anthology was the “last word” on the group:

I don’t know. That’s the difficult thing. In the electronic press kit we all enigmatically said, “Where does the circle end and where does it begin? An end is a beginning, of sorts.” But to me, for now, it’s an end.

An entire new generation of fans had the experience of hearing the “last” new Beatles song as their first new Beatles song, something some of us got to experience in the 1990s, in the 1980s, in the 1970s and all the time in the 1960s. Where does the circle end and where does it begin?

There is no end to the Beatles, as long as they occupy our lives, our ears, our eyes. Don’t take it from me. Just ask Derek Taylor, who said this on April 10, 1970: 

“The Beatles have changed so many lives, that the need for them still exists. The hope that they represent still exists. And as long as that exists, then they have to exist. They’ve got to be there to fulfill that need, and who are they to take themselves away, to say ‘OK kids, that’s it’? …

“If the Beatles don’t exist, you don’t exist.”

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November 2, 2023 · 1:48 am

TMBP Extra: Every now and then

The Last Beatles Song

The Beatles website, as captured in the days leading up to the release of “Now and Then.”

The Last Beatles Song.

Let’s be a little more accurate and say with several qualifiers that it’s the last, new officially released Beatles song. The diehards already knew it from bootlegs, of course.

Not now, but back then, it was some other John Lennon vocal — not “Free as a Bird” or “Real Love” but the group’s 1964 recording of “Leave My Kitten Alone” — that qualified as the first last Beatles song.

“There is other unfinished recorded material of the Beatles which has never been released but ‘Kitten’ is the only complete track,” an EMI spokesman (presumably Brian Southall) told the Daily Mirror in September 1981. That same story said John’s death derailed initial plans to release the song as a Christmas 1980 single.

Daily Mirror, Sept. 19, 1981.

If you’re looking for a sign of the times and an indication of how much the coordination between the label and band have changed in 40 years for legal reasons and otherwise, here’s another quote from EMI:

We don’t need anybody’s permission to release the record because it was made for us before the Beatles set up Apple, their own recording company. But we would probably inform Paul McCartney who is still with us.

(George Harrison and Ringo Starr were still with them, too, by the way.)

Further details emerged later in 1981, when an AP report (citing the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner) said a dozen unreleased Beatles songs were in the vault, but only “Leave My Kitten Alone” would see daylight, probably in 1982 or 1983. Hope we didn’t get too excited back then because …

“At this moment, no, we are not planning to put out anything more.”

Just how do EMI and the Beatles lose a song and recover it years later?  Here’s a quick timeline:

  • August 14, 1964: The Beatles commit their ferocious cover of “Leave My Kitten Alone” — originally recorded by Little Willie John in 1959 and two years later by Johnny Preston — to tape at EMI Studios. It’s done in five takes, including false starts.
  • December 4, 1964: Beatles for Sale is released, and of its whopping six covers, none are “Leave My Kitten Alone.” We don’t hear of the song again in the Beatles career, not even during the Get Back sessions, when they played all kinds of things.
  • August 15, 1970: Apple flack Peter Brown tells Melody Maker that there is no unreleased recorded Beatles material. Even then, everyone knew better as Get Back session outtakes, for instance, were already circulating.
  • 1976: With the Beatles no longer under contract as an entity to EMI, the label began to take stock of what actually was in the Abbey Road archives, a lengthy process.  An in-house EMI compilation of songs that included “Leave My Kitten Alone” eventually made its way into collectors’ hands, and ultimately bootlegs.

This brings us to the early 1980s, and EMI’s admission that the song would ultimately be released.

The emergence of “Leave My Kitten Alone” was tangible and exciting at the time. It wasn’t a fringe bootleg or a brief mention in newspapers anymore. You could hear it on mainstream radio.

Here’s one example: For a solid month in late summer 1984, the song was listed among the “Most Played Singles” on Boston’s WBCN (the same station which happened to be the source of the famed Kum Back bootleg 15 years earlier).

From the Aug. 28, 1984 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

The excitement for the song wasn’t isolated to one market, either. I know because I remember it myself.

That child is going to miss you: My ’80s dub off the radio here accompanied by elementary-school-era scrawl on the label. As you can tell, I save everything.

It must have been some time in that same period in 1984 that one of the local New York radio stations (WNEW? WAPP?) played the song. I was 10, but already a fully formed Fab Four fan. I remember the station’s promotion was breathless — it was the “new” Beatles song, and I’d never experienced such a thing.

I grabbed a cassette tape not unlike the one central to the 2023 “Now and Then” promotional campaign (mine was Type II though, only the best for the Beatles). I hit play-record a few seconds into the song, and while I thought I was doing myself a favor at the time cutting out commercials, 40 years later, I wish I hadn’t lost the extra context.

By this time, the song’s release dovetailed with that of the compilation, Sessions, which has its own entire backstory. The LP and its lead single, “Leave My Kitten Alone,” had catalog numbers and release dates for early 1985.

There’s some debate if this is genuine or a fake, but it’s definitely some kind of sleeve for a “Leave My Kitten Alone” single.

Suddenly, the entire project was dead, reportedly because of objections from the three living Beatles and the Lennon estate, as well as the fallout from a new lawsuit between Apple and EMI.  Like so much else, the Sessions LP lived on in bootlegs, almost immediately. (I had mine on cassette, backed with Get Back.)

It took another decade, after all manner of legal issues were resolved, that Yoko Ono handed tapes of four demos by John — “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” “Grow Old With Me” and “Now and Then” to Paul in 1994 for the surviving Beatles to adorn for Anthology.

The technical (as well as critical and commercial) success of Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable” duet with her late father in 1991 made a Beatles recording with John feasible. Until then, every Beatles reunion suggestion centered around a replacement for John. This ensured the irreplaceable would not be replaced.

This “Kitten” had nine lives, finally hitching a ride with the next last Beatles song — “Free as a Bird” — onto Anthology 1, officially becoming canon 31 years after it was recorded.

And it left the door open for another to be the last Beatles song.

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August 11, 2022 · 9:28 am

Jan. 13: The Lunchroom Tape (Pt. 1)

I’ve previously dipped in and out of the lunchroom tapes in recounting the events of the weekend of January 11-12, 1969. Now that our timeline here has finally reached the afternoon of January 13, you’ll see some facts and points repeated from earlier, but now in its original canteen context.

It comes a little less than three hours into the Get Back docuseries (counting credits), about a third of the way into the entire series, and it’s a shocking and quite unnerving moment — as it should be. This could be the most unique sequence of the Beatles recorded on tape and one that most fans, even the self-proclaimed die-hards, probably didn’t know existed before November 2021.

Director Peter Jackson used the Beatles’ January 13, 1969, lunchroom tape to great effect. The chyron says it all, in clear, yellow type:

John arrives at lunchtime.

He and Paul go to the cafeteria for a private conversation.

They are unaware that the film-makers have planted a hidden microphone in a flowerpot.

Behold true flower power: A planter with a bug designed to capture a colony of Beatles. This is also where a real problem begins for viewers and, importantly, the historic record.

First, there’s the “who,” and this is the most important misrepresentation of all.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon did have a “private conversation,” insomuch as it wasn’t at a public venue but at the Twickenham Film Studios cafeteria.  But Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Linda Eastman and Mal Evans were there, too, and probably Neil Aspinall as well, all equal parties to the discussion.

At least one of that group knew a hidden microphone was in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s arsenal. Ringo and George Harrison found that out the previous week; they just didn’t know where or when their hired documentarian would deploy it.

“This is the bugging device, so we can surreptitiously bug your showbiz conversations,” Michael openly boasted on January 9, the day before George quit.

On separate occasions, both George and Ringo asked if “that” was the tape on which they were being secretly recorded.  A day later, on January 10, Michael suggested to the same pair that he could color the microphone to make it look like one of the director’s signature vices.

“Do you think if I paint this brown and put red on top it’ll look like a cigar?”

“You wouldn’t see the red, just the ash,” George replied.

At this moment on January 13, George was most certainly seeing red, dining away from the office that Monday. Ringo, among the quieter figures on the full lunchroom tape, never indicated any suspicion this showbiz conversation was being surreptitiously bugged.

—

For something so esoteric, we’re left with two distinct experiences: The Get Back version of the lunchroom, and the Nagra tape reality, which cut off suddenly after nearly 29 minutes but was recorded in a true, linear sequence — an actual conversation.

The Get Back docuseries’ timeline of events leading up to lunch was accurate: The group gathered upon John’s arrival on January 13. Paul wondered aloud where George was.

This wasn’t the first spoken moment on the lunchroom Nagra tapes – instead, that’s John, in medias res defending his relationship to Yoko in the context of his recently dissolved marriage to Cynthia.

(When John said “I would sacrifice you all for her” as the lunchroom Nagra recordings begin, a segment also transcribed in the 2021 Get Back book, any kneejerk reaction that it was about the Beatles’ current situation vis-à-vis Yoko should be tempered; on the tapes he already mentioned it was as “a husband.”)

Paul essentially began the lunchroom discussion – “So where’s George?” — with a bit of cheek. In the TV edit, John replied, “Well, he doesn’t want to be here,” per the subtitles, although it’s not entirely clear that’s what he’s really saying if you listen closely, and it’s difficult to even find that line on the Nagras.

Without going line-by-line – and I can, would you like me to? — that is the main takeaway on the televised representation of this lunch: It’s different.

On the tapes – omitted from the discussion in Get Back – Ringo quickly replied with a punchline: “It smells like George is here.”

So the evidence is clear from the absolute beginning: The Get Back lunchroom sequence and the full Nagra lunchroom tape are completely different representations of a specific, important moment in time. I don’t think the TV series was at all edited maliciously, but to dramatically distill a 29-minute sequence to six and deliver a specific narrative. I’d watch 29 minutes of this stuff, but maybe that’s why my filmmaking career never got off the ground.

Intent aside, however, it’s still an inauthentic experience. Only with this understanding can we even try to parse anything.

How scattered is the Get Back edit? Here’s a look at me and my notes.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway at the outset (and yes, more than 800 words into this post, this is only the outset): The work Peter Jackson’s crew performed to clean up the audio of the lunchroom tape is nothing short of remarkable. Listen to 10 seconds of the bootleg tapes and then 10 seconds of the audio in Get Back; the technological advances are staggering.

Michael — who later misremembered the recording as capturing George’s departure of the Beatles days earlier — considered the tape unusable, writing in his 2011 autobiography Luck & Circumstance:

My bug had only picked up the sounds of cutlery banging on china plates, obscuring what the muffled voices had said.

At times, the Get Back AI is a little too good, and the voices can sound almost processed and nearly garbled. Listen to the televised sequence on headphones, you’ll hear what I mean.

The chyron subtitles aren’t completely accurate, either. This could be a case of my ears vs. their ears, and my eyes vs. their claims. But, I think my eyes and ears are pretty OK.

A great example comes more than 2 1/2 minutes into the Get Back scene. In a complaint about Paul’s unwillingness accept criticism, so to speak, John  — per the subtitles — sort of mockingly says “I’m Paul McCartney” in a soundbite that took me completely by surprise when I first saw it. That’s because it’s not in the tapes.

Instead, I think John clearly says “four in a bar,” as in the rhythm. That absolutely fits the context that line was originally in, with John saying he and George would just surrender to Paul’s musical decisions to finish a song. (We’ll get to that plotline later.)

Here’s that line on the Nagra tapes in its original context:

And the “four in the bar” line, slowed down a tick:

It seems clear he does not say “I’m Paul McCartney.”

In other words: We have to proceed with genuine caution consuming this sequence.

—

Paul was drinking Dos Equis, and John enjoyed a glass of wine. While this has long been called the lunchroom tape, we don’t actually hear anyone dining; the clatter of cutlery is from the staff working in the cafeteria. They may not have been recorded having a feast, but plenty was eating away at the Beatles.

We don’t know what John and Yoko were doing at home besides leaving their phone off the hook, but Paul — especially — and Ringo had already spent hours speaking relatively candidly about the group’s inner relationships, not only in the context of George’s departure, but quite deeply regarding the Lennon-McCartney partnership. The day must have completely exhausted and gutted Paul even beyond the depictions we now can see in Get Back.

This is a dramatic oversimplification, but the 29-minute conversation covers several overarching and highly overlapping points, including:

  • John and Paul’s relationship with and treatment of George, and the latter’s future as a Beatle
  • The concept of being a Beatle – and also an independent individual (and tangentially, a solo musician)
  • Leadership – and bossiness
  • The Beatles’ working relationship – as in, how they made music

The conversation is scattered – like any other normal discussion between actual humans under stress and a little bit of influence. They weave in and out of each of these broad points. This isn’t a meeting with a printed agenda and action items.

John and Paul are at the center of this dialogue, but across the discussion, Linda, Yoko and Ringo participate. Mal’s engagement comes across as a servant only. If Neil is there, he’s quiet. Only the impenetrability of the tapes makes his presence a question, but he was at Twickenham prior to the lunch and part of the day’s earlier discussions, so it would make sense the ultimate insider would join any important conversation.

It can’t be repeated enough, though: Paul and John are just two of the people in this conversation. To not mention Ringo most specifically as a party to this discussion is to sideline and discount one-quarter of the Beatles, a self-proclaimed democracy of four. Much as this conversation presented John and Paul at their most unfiltered, the presence of  Linda and Yoko doubtless clouds a bit of their candor. Still, they speak in a fashion that we hardly hear through the duration of the month otherwise — especially John, who displays little in the way of wit and humor but plenty of self-refection and doubt.

But it has to be repeated: The portrayal of this discussion as a one-on-one conversation between only John and Paul is a very unfortunate failing of the excellent Get Back.

—

We’ve established John, Paul and Ringo are all there …

So where’s George?

His absence isn’t the only thing that makes this conversation interesting, but it jump-starts the discussion, and like an odor, it permeates the meeting. The Beatles’ problems ran deeper than George’s resignation, but without it, would this lunch have even been recorded?

Given how the tapes begin, we can establish this is close to the start of the conversation.

“It’s a festering wound,” John said of what he thought George must have been feeling, early in the discussion—as documented on the Nagras and edited into Get Back. “And yesterday (at the meeting at Ringo’s house), we allowed it to go even deeper. But we didn’t give him any bandages.”

John blamed the indifference on Beatle egos. He said he tried to “smother” his ego at the two meetings he had with George over the previous weekend – the first meeting really more an ambush. John used the same phrase – smothering his ego — to describe how he made it possible to “carry on” working with Paul. We’ll get back to that dynamic later.

On multiple occasions on the tapes — not in Get Back, since it’s not acknowledged that she’s even there — Yoko not only steers the conversation to ask about George but also remarks the ease of which they can bring George back. But …

“Do I want him back, Paul? I’m just asking, do I want it back, whatever it is, enough?”

John’s indecision of how he wanted to approach his and the band’s near-term future overlapped an admission that George had “been on such a good ride.”  But at the same time, he said – agreeing with something Paul had previously remarked – that George was “some other part.”

I mentioned this in a previous post: George was viewed as an other. Though never explicitly described as such, it was clear George was both musically and socially separate from John and Paul. (And this was said without an apparent realization he was temporarily estranged from his wife.) Further, the rough-edged John blamed his own management style on his upbringing, saying he knew he’s treated people “this way” since primary school.

Get Back doesn’t pull in this part of the conversation. Instead, it implies George’s absence was a direct result of Paul’s – and to a lesser extent, John’s – in-studio musical enforcement. Not necessarily “musical differences,” but exhaustion from day-to-day life as the implied Beatles session guitarist.

That may have been the case, but there’s a lot more to it.

Get Back follows up less than a minute into the sequence with this exchange, which actually happens in Minute 27 of the original tapes:

Paul: The thing is, that’s what I was trying to say to George, you know. Whereas, previously I would have said, “Take it there, with diddle-derddl-diddler-der.” But I was trying, last week, to say, “Now take it there, anything you like. Put whatever you …”

John: You see, the point is now, we both do that to George this time, and because of the buildup to it.

Paul may not have given instructions to play a guitar part verbatim, but there were several moments where he was very specific with how he wanted something to sound. It was enough that it drove George to tell Paul whatever it was that would please him, he’d do it, after all.

Was that enough to drive George out of the band, though? The Get Back portrayal of the lunchroom tapes implies his absence is the final statement of this intimate discussion, and not only is it John and Paul’s decision if George should even be a part of the band, but that this could well be the end of the Beatles as we know it, for now.

John: If we want him, if we do want him, I can go along with that because the policy has kept us together.

Paul: Well, I don’t know, you know. See I’m just assuming he’s coming back.

John: Well do you want …

Paul:  If he isn’t, then he isn’t, then it’s a new problem. And probably when we’re all very old, we’ll all agree with each other and we’ll all sing together.

The last bit of conversation on the Get Back portrayal is a … complicated edit job, pulling in lines from various moments in the first half of the Nagras.

There’s more to the above quotes — in their original context — and I’ll get to that. This post is only “Pt. 1” after all.

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