Sunday, March 22, 2020

Early to Middle 1970

And now, back to the story of the Beatles' breakup.
Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr - John Lennon wasn't around - spent the first weekend of 1970 working to complete the Let It Be album, at that point still to be called Get Back, holding their last two recording sessions together for 24 years.  On Monday, January 5, Glyn Johns, who had complied a Get Back album (above) in the spring of 1969 that the Beatles had rejected, had another go at it.  The second Get Back album would feature re-edits and remixes of the songs intended for the first Get Back album, and two new songs were added - the newly recorded "I Me Mine" from the Beatles' January 3, 1970 session and a remixed version of "Across the Universe," a song that had just been released a month earlier on comedian Spike Milligan's World Wildlife Fund charity album.  (Due to its preponderance of British recording artists unfamiliar to Americans, that album, No One's Gonna Change Our World - cleverly titled after a variation of the key lyric in "Across the Universe" - was not released in America, though it did include the Bee Gees and the Hollies, as well as Cliff Richard, who would not find success in America until the mid-seventies.)  Both songs were included because rough cuts of the documentary film on the making of the album showed the Beatles playing both songs during the rehearsals before the proper Get Back recording sessions commenced ("Across the Universe" had actually been recorded eleven months before the Get Back sessions). If the songs were to be featured in the movie, they had to be on the LP as well.
This second Get Back album, like the first one, would remain unreleased.  The Beatles couldn't decide whether or not they liked it, and John Lennon balked at the idea of Johns getting a producer's credit, even though he was more involved with the project than George Martin had been.  The album was put on ice once again, and George took advantage of the lull by re-recording his lead vocal on his song "For You Blue" on January 8.  (For those keeping track, this was the third Beatles recording session of 1970 and the first to involve only one Beatle.)  The practice of overdubbing and re-recording had been ruled out at the start of the Get Back project, but it was a necessity to complete the record, the tapes having been so poorly recorded.  Several overdubs, all for the song "Let It Be," had already been recorded up to that point.  But as far as John Lennon was concerned, he would have been happy to let the album go it as it was.
"We let Glyn Johns remix it, we didn't want to know," Lennon later said.  "We just left it to him and said, 'Here, do it.' It's the first time since the first album that we didn't have anything to do with it. None of us could be bothered going in. Everybody was probably thinking, 'Well, I'm not going to work on it.' Nobody could face looking at it . . . I thought it would be great to go out - the [crappy] version - because it would break the Beatles. It would break the myth: 'That's us, with no trousers on and no glossy paint over the cover and no sort of hope. This is what we are like with our trousers off, so would you please end the game now.'"
As of January 1970, the Beatles hadn't officially broken up, and there was an outside chance that they might return to the recording studio, but with John, Paul, and Ringo Starr all working on solo records in one form or another, the prognosis for the group's continuation into the seventies was anything but good.  John, for one, was eager to get his new song "Instant Karma!" out after writing it upon his return from a vacation in Denmark (which caused him to miss the January 3-4, 1970 Beatles sessions), and the Plastic Ono Band concept he'd created was the perfect vehicle for his song about the need to help one another and to get our acts together.  The fact that he wrote this song even as he was separating from Paul, George and Ringo was ironic.
In fact, John cut his new song on the day he wrote it.  He wrote "Instant Karma!" on the morning of January 27, 1970, booked the studio that afternoon, and had the record mixed and finished that night.  It was to be his third single with the Plastic Ono Band, the lineup of which was John, Yoko, and whoever happened to be in the room at the time - this time consisting of of Klaus Voorman on bass, Alan White on drums, George Harrison on guitar and piano, Billy Preston on organ and Beatles assistant Mal Evans on chimes and handclaps.  But there was a new face in the room.  Rather than get George Martin or himself to produce it, John ended up making the record with, at George Harrison's recommendation, the aid of American record producer Phil Spector, who had always wanted to work with the Beatles and hadn't had a hit in half a decade.  The session went so well that John and George thought that Spector might be the one who could make an album out of the Get Back/Let It Be tapes after Glyn Johns, in their view, had come up short.
Indeed, Spector's use of echo and reverberation, as well as the brightness he got out of Lennon's piano and the cold-fish smack of White's drums, was well-received, and the critics' favorable response reportedly got him the job to make what became Let It Be.  But what most likely sealed the deal for Spector was "Instant Karma!"'s chart performance - it reached number three on the Billboard singles chart in America, becoming the first solo Beatle single to go gold there, and it reached number five in Britain, its chart success in the U.K. no doubt helped by John's presentation of the song on the British pop show "Top Of the Pops" (as seen below).  Its happy-go-lucky melody and positive message certainly helped at a time when negativity was running high.  And its success likely convinced John further that he didn't need to believe in Beatles any more.
Meanwhile, "Let It Be," a McCartney power ballad about Paul's late mother, was mixed by George Martin and released as a single on March 6 in Britain and on March 11 in America.  (It was backed with - of all things - John's comedy track "You Know My Name [Look Up the Number].")  From all appearances, the group was still together, but by this point it was mostly a mirage.  Paul was diligently putting together his debut solo album in secret, playing all of the instruments himself. Ringo had spent the fall of 1969 recording tracks for his debut solo album Sentimental Journey, a collection of pre-rock pop standards that Ringo's mother loved to sing at the local pub with her friends, and he completed the record in March, releasing it at the end of the month in Britain and releasing it in America in late April. (As a rocker who put an album of standards, Ringo turned out to be ahead of his time.)  "Let It Be" inevitably reached number one in America and made it to number two in Britain.  (It was the Beatles' last single in their home country.)  Because "Get Back" had already been out for a year, it was thus decided that "Let It Be" should be the title song of the album and film.  Having gotten the job to bring the album to fruition, Phil Spector entered EMI Studios at Abbey Road on Monday, March 23, 1970 to begin the daunting task.
To be continued . . .

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