The Beatles: Get Back (2021)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Beatles: Get Back (2021) – P. Jackson

Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Beatles’ music was all around me – even though the band had been long broken up.  My dad owned the red double album and my sister and I memorized every word.  Classic rock radio played the hits from the blue double album anyway. Over the years, I heard all of their most famous works.  Recently, the library gave me The Beatles: All the Songs by Margotin and Guesdon (which I checked out when it was already “out of circulation”) and my stepfather gifted me four Beatles CDs (I already had Revolver) since he streams everything now.  Let It Be wasn’t among them – in fact, I never had much time for that one and I never watched the original movie (Let It Be, 1970) directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that included footage from the making of the album (and which incidentally reinforced the narrative that Yoko Ono had broken up the band by driving a wedge between John Lennon and the others). So, when I had the opportunity to watch Peter Jackson’s three-part (468 min) mini-series drawn from the 60 hours of footage shot by Lindsay-Hogg, it came as something of a revelation. Here were the Beatles, around age 28 in January 1969, sitting, first in Twickenham film studios and then in their own Apple building studio, seemingly making up songs on the spot.  We see the gestation of Get Back and its final recording. Other songs seem to have been made up at home and brought in for workshopping with the others. It’s an occasionally tense (George quits the band!) but mostly relaxed affair, with a lot of goofing around by John and Paul. They play their own past hits with ridiculous voices or slow tempos. They work on songs that would later feature on Abbey Road or on solo albums (All Things Must Pass, and a fragment that became Jealous Guy). There are some intense jams involving John, Paul, and Yoko (with her unique vocal style), suggesting that the reported ill will between these three was over-stated by the earlier film. This is not to say that The Beatles weren’t nearing the end of their time as a group – they recorded Abbey Road about six months later and then broke up for good about six months after that when Paul objected to Phil Spector’s production techniques on the Let It Be album. It had been originally conceptualised with a back-to-basics approach, no overdubs or studio trickery, in effect the four Beatles (plus Billy Preston who happens into the studio at just the right time to add electric piano and ease some tensions) playing live again. And to top it all off, after much debate, they finally do end up giving a 42 minute concert on the rooftop of the Apple building (some songs played twice) and a few of these songs, recorded live, ended up on the album. Listening to it now is a much richer experience having seen the genesis of the songs and the working process of the band. Peter Jackson’s presentation of the material, with each day crossed off on a calendar as it passes, including plenty of full-length performances, extended “candid” conversations, some drama, some nonsense, and masterfully edited snippets, is explicitly noted to have been designed to be true to the actual events and everyone involved (Paul and Ringo are executive producers). A must see, if you’ve ever loved the Fab Four.