The Beatles Get Back

It was fifty years ago this month that the Beatles embarked on their ill-fated Get Back project, from which the Let It Be album emerged.  Originally Paul McCartney's effort to rejuvenate the group and to get his bandmates to rediscover the joys of playing live, it instead accelerated the group's disbandment.

After the White Album sessions proved that the Beatles were growing apart, as they were always fighting over what would be recorded, Paul suggested that the group return to live performance and to basic rock and roll and acoustic music by staging a concert comprised of new songs that would be aired globally on live TV.  The concert would be recorded and the resulting LP - to be called Get Back - would be released as a followup to the White Album. 

So, on January 2, 1969, the Beatles assembled at Twickenham Film Studios on London to rehearse new songs as well as some old ones for the show.  Paul had arranged for Michael Lindsay-Hogg - fresh from having filmed the Rolling Stones' own ill-fated TV special, "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" - to film the rehearsals for a TV documentary about the concert.  The group then set about choosing songs for the concert.  

There never was a concert, of course.  John Lennon was so stoned on heroin at the time that it could be argued that playing interfered with his drug taking.  George Harrison, tired of not being taken seriously by John and sick of being pestered by Paul, quit the group eight days into the rehearsals, never having been in favor of a live show in the first place.  He returned a few days later on the condition that they scrap the concert idea.  The other Beatles agreed, and Paul - now the leader of the group in the wake of John's withdrawal and Brian Epstein's death - quickly adapted by suggesting that they record their new songs, along with some possible covers, live in the studio - with no overdubbing - with Lindsay-Hogg's cameras documenting that as well.  The film footage from the Twickenham rehearsals and recording sessions would later become the third movie they owed United Artists, after A Hard Day's Night and Help!; Yellow Submarine didn't count because of their minimal involvement in it.  The group quickly repaired to their new studio - Apple Studio, in the West End of London, built by Apple Corps' electronic "expert" Alexis "Magic Alex" Mardas - but it turned out that the studio itself needed repairing.

It was on this day fifty years ago, January 22, 1969, that the Beatles began recording songs for what became Let It Be.  They had actually planned to start two days earlier, but the studio Mardas had built with them was totally amateurish.  The mixing board was haphazardly built and put together with bits of wood and metal, and it only produced hiss and hum.  (It was later sold for scrap for five pounds, or about twelve American dollars.)  To makes matters worse, Mardas had forgotten to put soundproofing on the walls, which meant that the hum from the heating vents could be heard on recordings.  So the group had to borrow from EMI a mixing board and soundproofing material, along with other equipment, in order to make a proper record.  George Martin was still producing the Beatles, but he'd become passive as the Beatles gained more control over their output.  The great engineer and producer Glyn Johns - fresh from having co-produced Family's second album - was on board as an engineer for the Get Back project and more or less assumed a production role.  And joining the group to provide a fifth instrument was Billy Preston on keyboards.  The Beatles had known Preston since 1962, when he was Little Richard's organist and they got to meet Little Richard in Liverpool during one of his European tours.  George Harrison saw Preston perform with Ray Charles in London in early 1969 and met up with him, inviting him to come down to the Apple studio at Savile Row.

For the next ten days, the Beatles and Billy Preston played several new songs and a few rock and roll covers, jammed a bit, and continued rehearsing songs, taping everything.  (The rehearsals at Twickenham were recorded for the film soundtrack but not for disc, though those recordings have been the source of several bootleg albums.) Preston's enthusiasm and Johns' professionalism helped moved the project along, as did the adulation of their crew's resident fan - tape operator Alan Parsons, who would later be the engineer for Pink Floyd and for the Hollies and would become a recording artist himself with his group, the Alan Parsons Project.  Thanks to Preston's input, they came up with the perfect rendition of the intended title song - "Get Back" - with a keyboard solo that Preston always took credit for.

Eventually, though, Paul got his show - an outdoor performance on the rooftop of the Apple building, on January 30, 1969.  The Beatles thought it would be a blast to play some of their new songs for the pedestrian crowds on the avenues and streets of the West End.  Those lucky enough to see the show from adjacent rooftops and office buildings appreciated the show, and so did passersby at the ground level who could at least hear the music. ("Nice to have something for free in this country, isn't it?" one man told one of Lindsay-Hogg's film crews.)  The Beatles managed to tape the bulk of what became the Let It Be album in both this performance and in a studio performance of their quieter numbers a day later.  (The album and movie were eventually renamed Let It Be, after Paul's ballad about his mother, because by the time both were ready for release in the spring of 1970, the song "Get Back" had been on release for a year and so was inappropriate to be used as the theme of a "new" Beatles project.)  

The great irony of the Beatles' efforts is that the movie and the record depicted a band whose members had grown apart form each other and were ready to move on, even as they tried to get into the music.  Despite Preston, Johns and Parsons egging them on, the Beatles later admitted that, for them, the Get Back/Let It Be project was, as John later recalled them, "the most miserable session on earth."  The Beatles would have to violate their no-overdubbing rule to make the tapes sound better.  It took so long to make a presentable album out of the tapes that Glyn Johns failed twice in his efforts to make a Get Back album, and finally Phil Spector was brought in to make Let It Be shortly thereafter.

For a moment, though, on that cold, windy roof, the Beatles found their groove.  After the rooftop concert - cut short, incredibly enough, by policemen sent to end the show after complaints from people in neighboring office buildings - an audiotape caught the Beatles and George Martin taking pride in the performance, with the group discussing possible shows for the future.  It would have been something, seeing and hearing the Beatles play live again in places like Earl's Court in London or Madison Square Garden in New York after a long hiatus from the concert stage.  But it was a mirage.  For all of their efforts to regain the magic of the old days, the Beatles never would get back to where they once belonged.