Multi-part many hours of the Beatles recording and prepping for a final show + set of songs.
George just left the band, and Yoko caterwauling into the mic afterwards was the perfect "Here's what happened to the Beatles" moment.
Beatles - Get Back
Beatles - Get Back
It's not me, it's someone else.
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thibodeaux
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Beatles - Get Back
I enjoyed this. Watched it with the wife. She kept saying, "they're just fucking around! Why don't they actually do some work?"
I had to explain that this is absolutely how every band rehearsal goes (sometimes including the rage-quitting and GF-coddling).
The interweb's reaction to this was a bit overblown, but I did see an interesting take. There's a point during this where Paul is fucking around on the piano, essentially working out "Let It Be" by trial and error. Meanwhile, everybody else in the studio is doing their own fucking around (shooting or smoking shit). NOBODY seems to notice that Paul has just extruded another mega-hit. Why is that?
Because this was *business as usual*. That's just what Paul did. He does it another time in this very doc, banging out "Get Back" (which hilariously to me started as an anti-Enoch-Powell-Rivers-of-Blood protest song) just by strumming a note over and over and humming a melody until it comes together.
It's pretty fair to say that by this point the band was running on Paul. It's actually touching at one point, where both George and even John had peaced-out, Paul starts crying a little bit. I think he knew it was really over, even though it turned out the band had one more pretty damn good album in them
Another interesting observation came from George. He mentioned to somebody on camera about his struggles to get his songs on the albums. Paraphrasing here: he said the reason John and Paul's songs were better was because they had been doing it since they were teenagers and had already written all their bad songs. There's something to that, but notice that the album that came out of this film project (titled Let It Be) contains a recording of one of the earliest known Lennon/McCartney songs. It's not a bad song at all!
It's also interesting this movie contains not just one but TWO "Fifth Beatles." Billy Preston shows up like a genie summoned from a bottle, literally run-time-minutes after the band say "Man, it would be great if we had a dedicated keyboard player." Perhaps this is Jackson's editing, who knows. But of course, true Beatles afficionadoes know that Sir George Martin was an indispensible ingredient to the Beatles phenomenon. Not only does he manage not to lose his mind at these lads fucking around all day, he knows that if he just keeps the tapes rolling for long enough the magic will happen. In the saddest ironic turn, he was NOT credited as producer of the Let It Be album!
So, while I have never been and am still not a Beatles Maniac, I respect them quite a bit, and this doc maybe even increased that a bit.
Of course, Yoko was a terrible mistake, there's no question.
I had to explain that this is absolutely how every band rehearsal goes (sometimes including the rage-quitting and GF-coddling).
The interweb's reaction to this was a bit overblown, but I did see an interesting take. There's a point during this where Paul is fucking around on the piano, essentially working out "Let It Be" by trial and error. Meanwhile, everybody else in the studio is doing their own fucking around (shooting or smoking shit). NOBODY seems to notice that Paul has just extruded another mega-hit. Why is that?
Because this was *business as usual*. That's just what Paul did. He does it another time in this very doc, banging out "Get Back" (which hilariously to me started as an anti-Enoch-Powell-Rivers-of-Blood protest song) just by strumming a note over and over and humming a melody until it comes together.
It's pretty fair to say that by this point the band was running on Paul. It's actually touching at one point, where both George and even John had peaced-out, Paul starts crying a little bit. I think he knew it was really over, even though it turned out the band had one more pretty damn good album in them
Another interesting observation came from George. He mentioned to somebody on camera about his struggles to get his songs on the albums. Paraphrasing here: he said the reason John and Paul's songs were better was because they had been doing it since they were teenagers and had already written all their bad songs. There's something to that, but notice that the album that came out of this film project (titled Let It Be) contains a recording of one of the earliest known Lennon/McCartney songs. It's not a bad song at all!
It's also interesting this movie contains not just one but TWO "Fifth Beatles." Billy Preston shows up like a genie summoned from a bottle, literally run-time-minutes after the band say "Man, it would be great if we had a dedicated keyboard player." Perhaps this is Jackson's editing, who knows. But of course, true Beatles afficionadoes know that Sir George Martin was an indispensible ingredient to the Beatles phenomenon. Not only does he manage not to lose his mind at these lads fucking around all day, he knows that if he just keeps the tapes rolling for long enough the magic will happen. In the saddest ironic turn, he was NOT credited as producer of the Let It Be album!
So, while I have never been and am still not a Beatles Maniac, I respect them quite a bit, and this doc maybe even increased that a bit.
Of course, Yoko was a terrible mistake, there's no question.