'Let It Be' - The Release

May 1970 marked the final rituals of Beatlemania with the release of the group's last project.  On May 8, the album Let It Be was released in the United Kingdom, with its release in the United States coming ten days after.  The British edition came with a book of pictures of the January 1969 sessions from photographer Ethan Russell, "The Beatles Get Back," which was deleted in November 1970; in the U.S., fans only got an inner sleeve with a sampling of Russell's photos. In between the album's U.K. and U.S. release dates, "The Long and Winding Road" was issued as a single in America on May 11, followed by the Let It Be documentary movie receiving its world premiere on May 13 in . . . New York, a clear indicator of how important the U.S. had become to the group's success.   The film would have its British premiere in London a week after.

And as far as America was concerned, the dying embers of the Beatles couldn't have come at a more appropriate time.  May 1970 was also the month of the Kent State massacre in Ohio, which was followed shortly thereafter by the "hard hat riot" of Manhattan construction workers beating up anti-war demonstrators.  A new decade had arrived, and it had driven a stake in the heart of peace and love.  And Let It Be provided little comfort. 

The documentary movie, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was not a huge box-office success.  It's an interesting film, showing the Beatles going through the creative process and performing their songs live, and there are moments of genuine inspiration from their low-key performances of their lighter numbers to their flat-out rocking show on the Apple rooftop, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono waltzing together.  But there are also moments of sluggish playing, dull conversations, and the occasional argument, such as Paul McCartney lecturing a frustrated George Harrison on how to play a solo as Ringo Starr looks on.  The movie is also rather grainy, having been enlarged from 16-millimeter to 35-millimeter film so it could be shown in theaters, rather than on television as originally planned (it became the third movie the Beatles owed United Artists).  It's also rather short, somewhat mercifully so - though it's 82 minutes in length, fans found the movie to seem longer, and not in a good way.  It was hard for anyone to imagine how Lindsay-Hogg had filmed a month's worth of Beatles rehearsals and recording sessions, yet this was the best footage he could come up with.  In fact, it wasn't, as I will explain here . . . but Lindsay-Hogg's choice of material to lay out the narrative for the Get Back/Let It Be project didn't do anyone any favors.

The bad feeling the Beatles couldn't hide (oh, no) was evident in one scene where Paul, with his back to the camera, tells John how the Beatles have to overcome their nervousness over performing as a live unit again in order to shake off the discontent they've been feeling.  John listens politely but he obviously isn't buying Paul's diagnosis of the situation or the cure for the ennui the group is experiencing.

Commercially, the Let It Be LP was a success - after all, it was a Beatles record - but reactions to it devolved into controversy. 

The liner notes on the back cover were almost self-parody: "This is a new-phase BEATLES album . . . essential to the content of the film, LET IT BE was that they performed live for many of the tracks; in comes the warmth and freshness of a live performance; as reproduced for disc by Phil Spector."

In fact, fans found little warmth or freshness to be had, and many listeners believed that Spector's remixes - I'm just talking about the remixes of the songs he didn't overdub - were the sonic equivalent of warmed-over leftovers.  And they were especially peeved about the Spector's overdubs.  The pop press was especially disdainful, with Rolling Stone's John Mendelson praising the Beatles' music but declaring that Spector had managed to "turn several of the rough gems on the best Beatle album in ages into costume jewelry."  Time magazine punningly dubbed it "the specter of the Beatles," while over in merrie olde England,  Alan Smith of New Musical Express called it "a cardboard tombstone" and a "sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop music."  Other verdicts included "the black album" and "the wrong goodbye."

The Beatles' inner circle included its own detractors.  George Martin was mortified when he heard Spector's work, and Glyn Johns, denied the opportunity to have one of his two albums made from the Get Back/Let It Be tapes commercially released, was especially vicious in his assessment (pouring "nothing but scorn and vitriol" on the record, as Beatles author Mark Lewisohn noted).  But Paul McCartney continued to spit the most out of the tent.  Not just about "The Long and Winding Road" and Spector's overall "wall of sound approach," but about the whole package, calling the liner notes "blatant hype" and complaining about photographer Ethan Russell's monograph book for inflating the British LP's retail price by 33 percent.  (He might very well have been bothered by the fact that the book was a limited-edition gimmick to make the fans in Britain buy it before it got deleted.  If you wanted it, you could go and get it, but you had to hurry because it was going to go fast.)  But Spector's overall production techniques remained his biggest issue.

I've already reviewed Let It Be on this blog, so I won't repeat my assessment here.  (Just go to this link to read my original review.)  But I have to confess something; for all of the flaws with Spector's approach, he made a more presentable album than Glyn Johns did.  I have Johns' first attempt at making an album from the Get Back/Let It Be tapes as a bootleg - indeed, that record has circulated as a bootleg for as long as it has existed - and it's rather ragged, sounding somewhat exhausted.  I have to agree with Mark Lewisohn that, had either of Johns' two Get Back albums been issued, most of the critics might have reacted with greater hostility.  (Mendelson, who in fact had heard one of the Glyn Johns compilations before Spector's came out, would have been an exception.)

Spector doesn't get off the hook entirely.  It should be stressed again and again that he should have least made the album consistent and not tried to juxtapose the rough edges of Let It Be (the false starts and all that) with high-gloss touches.  But on balance, he did a decent job with it. And John Lennon certainly agreed.  "He worked like a pig on it," Lennon later said.  "I mean, he'd always wanted to work with the Beatles, and he was given the sh----est load of badly recorded sh-- and with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something out of it." Though, Lennon darned Spector with faint praise: "It wasn't fantastic, but when I heard it, I didn’t puke."

But Paul McCartney would continue to be indisposed by the mere thought of the album, and when he met Michael Lindsay-Hogg by chance on an airline flight in the early 2000s, they discussed reworking the Let It Be movie for a new home-video release and putting out a new companion LP for it.  Although the movie was not re-released,  Paul successfully got Abbey Road technicians Paul Hicks, Guy Massey, and Allan Rouse to concoct what many Beatles fans consider to be the definitive audio document of the Get Back/Let It Be sessions: 2003's Let It Be . . . Naked, which I reviewed in August 2015.  It was the intimate studio record Paul had always wanted, and even Ringo had to admit it was better than what Spector had come up with.  (Though, in all fairness, twenty-first-century technology that no one could have envisioned in 1970 was most likely what made Let It Be . . . Naked possible in the first place.)  

As for the movie . . . not only is it being restored for release for its fiftieth anniversary, but there will be a new movie culled from more than 55 hours of unreleased film and audio from the January 1969 sessions, to be called Get Back, from New Zealandic director Peter Jackson.  It will show the Beatles in a different light than the original Let It Be movie; instead of showing them breaking up, it will show the more lighthearted, laid-back moments of the Get Back/Let It Be sessions where they enjoyed themselves and got along as well as they did in the early days of Beatlemania.  I can't wait to see it. :-) 

On May 20, 1970, fifty years ago today (and, like today, a Wednesday), the Let It Be movie had its British premiere in London.  Thrice before, Beatles fans had gathered for a London premiere of a Beatles movie to catch a glimpse of the fabulous foursome themselves, and this night was no different.  What was different was that none of the Beatles showed up for this premiere.   It seems appropriate that George Harrison and Phil Spector (above), who oversaw the end of the Beatles era in an EMI Abbey Road control room two months earlier, would enter Abbey Road that same day to oversee the beginning of a new era - by beginning work on George's first studio album since the official breakup of the Beatles.

All things must pass away. 

The end.

*

"I didn't leave the Beatles.  The Beatles have left the Beatles - but no one wants to be the one to say the party's over." - Paul McCartney

(Below: A clip of the Beatles with Billy Preston performing "The Long And Winding Road," the Beatles' last American number-one single.)