'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.)

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 . . .

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.