{"id":231831,"date":"2021-11-28T12:50:08","date_gmt":"2021-11-28T17:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/25yearslatersite.com\/?p=231831"},"modified":"2023-01-27T20:41:47","modified_gmt":"2023-01-28T01:41:47","slug":"from-let-it-be-to-the-beatles-get-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tvobsessive.com\/2021\/11\/28\/from-let-it-be-to-the-beatles-get-back\/","title":{"rendered":"From Let It Be to The Beatles: Get Back"},"content":{"rendered":"
More than fifty years after their breakup, The Beatles can still entice and enthrall. Peter Jackson’s new documentary project, a minor miracle of restorative editing, proves just that, presenting the foursome in a new, full light, with a richness of detail literally never seen before. His three-part series The Beatles: Get Back<\/em> resuscitates the vexed legacy of the troubled sessions for the Get Back<\/em> album that never happened\u2014at least until its later, post-breakup release as Let It Be<\/em>\u2014and shows the group’s prickly, productive creative process at work with a sense of joie de vivre<\/em> that few at the time, or since, knew existed.<\/p>\n Let It Be<\/em>\u2014the original U.S. vinyl release back in May 1970\u2014was the first album I ever purchased with my own allowance money. And boy did I treasure it, from its mega hits to its offbeat gems to its witty banter and even its perplexing song snippets. A ten-year-old kid in a North Dakota farmhouse bedroom, did I know the band was already broken up, the album rejected by the foursome, its contents only grudgingly released after its reportedly acrimonious sessions? No, and I hardly would have cared, for the music itself was plenty for me; a mix of the earthy, jovial, crotchety, and heartfelt, Let It Be<\/em> helped me to understand friendship, patience, charity, even acrimony.<\/p>\n \u201cTwo of Us\u201d and \u201cI Got a Feeling\u201d featured old friends John and Paul singing together in ways that moved from the casual to the exuberant, acoustic to electric, in simply-but-energetically performed folk and rock. McCartney\u2019s signature ballads were moving, memorable, and timeless, even if \u201cThe Long and Winding Road\u201d bordered on the mawkish with notorious overproducer Phil Spector\u2019s orchestras, choirs, and harps. Lennon is less present on Let It Be<\/em>, his \u201cAcross the Universe\u201d pure poetry and \u201cDig a Pony\u201d an enigma.<\/p>\n Harrison\u2019s contributions are, in comparison to those that would show up on Abbey Road <\/em>and All Things Must Pass<\/em>, little more than filler, but \u201cFor You Blue\u201d and \u201cI Me Mine\u201d are both pleasurable blues and rock workouts, the latter of them perhaps a dig-and-diss at his bandmate. The rockers \u201cGet Back\u201d and \u201cOne after 909\u201d are both delights of old-school rockabilly shuffle with energetic accompaniment from keyboardist Billy Preston.<\/p>\n As the years passed and I completed my collection of Beatles LPs (and singles, and EPs, and anthologies and rereleases, not to mention their films and dozens of books), I confess I never fully embraced the conventional wisdom of Let It Be<\/em>\u2019s vexed reputation as a miserable footnote<\/a> to their otherwise-impressive canon, its having been outshone by the glossy, proper Abbey Road<\/em><\/a>, nor even the contentious battles over its production and release. I still loved its unfussiness, its mistakes, its false starts and ellipses, and many of its songs\u2014as much as or more than anything in their history.<\/p>\n But no other Beatles album suffered the kind of scrutiny Let It Be<\/em> did, perhaps because its making was recorded on film from start to finish. One goal of the sessions was to document, for a television special, the Beatles’ songwriting and performance processes, so the group trudged into the drafty set at Twickenham Film Studios each morning for a fortnight. With nine cameras and more microphones, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had known the group since having directed their performance videos for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” in 1966, shot some 60 hours\u2019 worth of footage and recorded another 150 hours of unsynchronized audio.<\/p>\n The resultant 80-minute documentary film of the sessions, featuring less than two percent of what had been shot for the project, was reviewed so poorly that no one, it seemed, wanted to suffer through the group\u2019s breakup again. Let It Be<\/em> never received so much as a remastering for home video in the decades to follow. What few knew, even after McCartney remixed and rereleased his Let It Be\u2026Naked<\/em> version (sans<\/em> the infamous Spector choir-and-orchestra overdubs) in 2003, is that Lindsay-Hogg\u2019s audio and video footage remained undisturbed in the basement archives at Apple Studios for decades.<\/p>\nThe Let It Be<\/em> Album<\/h2>\n
Let It Be<\/em>: The Film<\/h2>\n
The Beatles: Get Back<\/em><\/h2>\n