David Bianculli comments on the “you are there” documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. David repeats Disney’s white lie that the documentary is only six hours long. It’s almost eight.
I’ve read other reviews that say the second part drags a bit in the middle, but for me it’s the first part that becomes tedious and should have been kept to no more than two hours. There’s a discussion that goes on for much too long, about Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s inane idea of putting on a show in Tripoli. Music publisher Dick James showing up and talking to George is a curious surprise, because Harrison wrote “Only a Northern Song” as a dig against James.
Get Back makes it very apparent that Lindsay-Hogg actually underplayed the Beatles’ internal troubles in the Let It Be film. They were undergoing a full-blown existential crisis. George quits at the end of part 1, and at the opening of part 2 Paul genuinely appears to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He snaps out of it when he’s told that John is on the phone. It’s an amazing moment.
George’s abrupt departure is very revealing. They’re all clustered at one end of Twickenham Studio, where interior scenes of A Hard Day’s Night and HELP! had been filmed. They’re struggling to get in a groove, and then Paul and John manage to do it. Standing face to face, with their guitars pointing in the same direction because Paul is left-handed, they’re having a blast, and their spirits pick up. By contrast George is morose, having been cut out yet again. After enduring more than ten years of being in the shadow of Lennon-McCartney, he knows it’s never going to change, and he walks out.
Two difficult meetings, private and unseen, bring George back. The move to the Apple Building basement studio, made possible by the removal of the fraudulent Magic Alex, is much more conducive to the Beatles feeding off of each other in a positive way. This is helped immensely by the impromptu and upbeat presence of Billy Preston. Having met the Beatles shortly after Ringo was brought in, Preston is a reminder of the time the Beatles are trying to get back to, when they were a live band. John is so pleased that, in perhaps an unintended display of asserting his authority as leader, he makes Billy a Fifth Beatle.
Get Back confirms what I already knew from hearing many Beatles studio outtakes. Their strength is creativity, not musicianship. Lyrics are seen to be a struggle for all of them, even John, and George admits he’s been working on “Something” for six months. It’s no wonder George Martin had doubts about them at the start.
As revealed by Mark Lewisohn in Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, it wasn’t Martin’s idea to sign the Beatles, he was ordered to do it by his EMI bosses. (Extended Edition Vol. 2, starting at pg. 1179.) By pure happenstance, the head of EMI’s music publishing division heard the songs from the Decca demo session that John and Paul had written. He saw their potential not as recording artists, but as songwriters. (Extended Edition Vol. 2, starting at pg. 1107.)
Where the Beatles come together with the material that becomes the Spector-produced album Let It Be a year later, is with George Martin tactfully guiding the proceedings, without seeming to take over from engineer Glyn Johns. This is very nicely covered in Jason Kruppa’s outstanding “Producing the Beatles” podcast.
From the basement of the Apple Building to its roof, the unlikely transformation of what began as a dispirited and disorganized jam session into a tight and energetic live performance, is almost startling. The fact they were able to regroup to not only make that happen, but to finish up with Abbey Road, makes their inevitable breakup seem almost glorious.
