I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

What no one's discussed enough: George Martin's virtual absence. It's no accident that, besides the band's relief it was all about to end, Abbey Road emerged so polished and coherent because he produced them for the first time since 1967.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, November 29, 2021 8:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Iirc they had to cajole Martin into being involved and his major demand was that the project was going to be approached with some professionalism because he had hated how the Let it Be sessions had gone

It restates for those who needed it what an incredible drummer Ringo is

otm

I watched two "Get Back" clips and was singularly unimpressed. Paul strumming something a bit rock'n'roll that turns into one of the more derivative of their late songs, and lots of commentary like "OMG and then Ringo claps a bit!" and "John sits down and immediately joins in!" (come on, it's two-chord blues).

This is just the unfortunate outcome of the band's more or less least interesting album happening to be its most thoroughly documented. One of the best Beatles bits I've heard, for example, is found on one of the White Album session tapes, where Paul is struggling to finish "Obla-Di" (which no one particularly wants him to finish) and John apparently saunters down from shooting up (or whatever he was doing) and kind of lazily walks over to the piano and goes "it should just start like *this*" and plays the introduction for the first time. It's both a weirder part than people give it credit for and also perfect for the song. That's the sort of a-ha! I wish was in higher supply in this, but you work with what you got, I guess.

People are right that it's fascinating to watch a band - any band, but particularly this band, work on music together - but of course this is *not* how bands generally work on music together. On a soundstage, with cameras, with no material, etc.

Also, I'm *positive* there may actually *be* more surprises, but Beatles Inc. nixed it. Paul and Yoko (and Ringo, et al.) had to sign off on all of this, and the chances that after decades of vilification Paul and Yoko didn't take the opportunity to reshape the narrative is somewhere around zero.

Everybody talks about the Beatles growing beards and mustaches, but no one talks about the man-furs. It's like the band (and peers) were turning into cavemen.

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/084e2607-583f-47fc-9b4d-b6f7bea4048f_1.fe94990c0dbbbf62c0b7dc09c98b5f1a.jpeg?odnHeight=612&odnWidth=612&odnBg=FFFFFF

It's fascinating to me the continued fascination with Yoko as a distraction when John shows up completely fucked up and barely verbal at points

George's collection of winter boots became my new distraction.

xpost Yoko is *clearly* a distraction, just one of many.

I imagine he was slightly distressed at the state his old friends were in: "You used to go toe-to-toe with *Little Richard* every night! What the hell happened to you guys?!"

i found preston to be kind of a cipher in this tbh. other than when he's jamming with john on 'i want you', does he say more than 10 words in the whole thing? hes suddenly thrust into a situation with insanely awkward & weird vibes, so not shocking that would just try to melt into the background & let the piano do the talking. still found myself frequently wondering what he made of everything, but found him kind of hard to read.

The vibes were really bad at the Twickenham studio - I really felt like once they returned to Saville Row everything was much better, even before Billy Preston.

George will eventually produce Preston's That's the Way God Planned It later in 1969, I should mention.

he even gives him "All Things Must Pass" and "My Sweet Lord" too, even though the doc revealed (to me, anyway) that he'd already decided to quit giving away songs and do his own clear-the-decks solo album

preston is clearly a heroically easygoing & goodnatured soul. if i came in and singlehandedly saved the worlds richest & most successful band, and then saw the way they staged the rooftop concert to almost completely hide me except for a few brief accidental glimpses, i'd have told those lads they could get back onto deez nuts

He doesn't have to say anything, just look at his smile. How would you feel if John Lennon anointed you the 5th Beatle in 1969?

Johnny Echols just shared a photo of band he was in early on that he was calling a proto Love and had Billy preston in before he went onto his own thing. Didn't have Arthur in yet. Photo was from 63.
Struck me taht certain people just seem to get around and play with a lot of people. Like. That somebody should justy incidentally cross paths with significant players like that cool enough.

Great thread, it's fascinating reading everyone's interpretations. I'm about 3/4 into part 1 and loving it so far.

The Last Dance which was mentioned up thread is an interesting comparison point to this.

Key difference between this and Last Dance I feel is that MJ is an asshole who knows he's an asshole, and it's riveting watching him unapologetically play that up as someone who's been largely absent from the public eye since his retirement.

McCartney in Get Back is an asshole (or maybe just behaving like one - at least that's been my takeaway so far) whose subsequent 50 years of public persona is him positioning himself as Mr Cuddly Christmastime and doing the talk show and festivals circuit, so the cognitive dissonance between that image of him and seeing him in full-on passive aggressive negging mode to George is what's riveting.

When they did "Shake, Rattle & Roll," I realized, oh right, Billy played on Sam Cooke's version...when he was 16.

Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be, so it was weird to see them working on unfinished Abbey Road songs throughout

I knew the chronology, but the gap in between when this documentary was filmed and when the album was released over a year later is much bigger in my mind now – "Get Back" existed only as a single for that whole time!

(Also had the thought when Paul refers to their previous album as The Beatles (and not the White Album) that hey, Sharon Tate is still alive in Hollywood right now.)

It was certainly a very odd feeling after 8 hours of intense immersion in 1969 to be back in 2021 with its “future is on hold for covid” atmosphere.

The "Hey Jude" clip made me a little nervous!

and then saw the way they staged the rooftop concert to almost completely hide me except for a few brief accidental glimpses, i'd have told those lads they could get back onto deez nuts

To be fair, they managed to not get George in most of the shots either. Seems like the wrong lenses or angles or camera locations (may have been somewhat hampered on that front to be fair) and aspect ratio, not to mention the visual noise of all the people wandering around, often across the camera shot.

The rooftop show is such a compromised mess — perfectly fitting for the whole project.

Counterpoint: I think the first several hours are a dull and depressing slog on purpose. Whether it's an intentional narrative choice or just the result of how things actually played out, it's very Peter Jackson: you need to go through an ordeal to get a triumph. No ordeal, no triumph.

Alfred and emsworth have it right: This is an epic of which Billy Preston is the hero.

god it is worth trudging through the first 3.5 hours just to feel the full measure of relief and joy when billy preston shows up

So to comments like this:

It's amazing that a band this kind of aimless and burnt out, as depicted in this, could immediately turn around and make Abbey Road. The whole artificial, distracting context of these sessions, from the hare krishna to Yoko to the cameras and the soundstage to the rushed deadlines, they're just needlessly kneecapping themselves.

That is exactly the point of having the warholianly dull first episode. They WERE aimless and burnt out. Tired, squabbling, disengaged. That was accurate. And they were also fucking brilliant musicians who made indelibly great music, once they remembered how to do so. That is also accurate.

Midway through ep 2 you see John waking up and getting down to business. And of course the miraculous, serendipitous arrival of Billy.

I know Paul is annoying but you can kinda see what drove him to be that way: no one else was bringing any creative energy so he must have felt he needed to step it up just to fill the vacuum of George's absence and John's apathy. No one else is driving the bus so he has to take the wheel.

Ringo, of course, is always there and always solid. Staunch, stalwart Ringo. But Ringo was not going to fucking write "Don't Let Me Down" or "I've Got a Feeling," he couldn't even have written "Octopus's Garden" or whatev.

tl;dr: the boring shit sets you up for the catharsis - if you don't want to see it just skip to the concert

Whether it's an intentional narrative choice or just the result of how things actually played out, it's very Peter Jackson: you need to go through an ordeal to get a triumph. No ordeal, no triumph.

The rooftop concert is Mt. Doom.

Bungalo Bilbo

Michael Lindsay-Hogg is Gollum.

After about four or five nights doing Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he said ‘Alright, we’re gonna do Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. He went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said ‘This is it! Come on!’ He was really aggravated. That was the version they ended up using.

That was my aforementioned anecdote. I think it's in the/an Emerick book.

yeah apparently he said to everyone that he was HIGHER THAN GOD

God is the concept by which we measure our lame.

I know there was tons of editing, and it was even disorienting especially in the beginning for me, but despite that I'm really enjoying the casual atmosphere as it is such a relief from how everything else nowadays is post-reality show/clickbait/youtuber storytelling, where the only way events can unfold is via BIG moments and subsequent REACTIONS and REDEMPTIONS and MIND-BLOWING. For example to have George quit for not extremely apparent reasons, and then for the rest of them to react in a relatively matter-of-fact disbelief and caution, with casual resolutions etc. It's just refreshing.

And yet the compressed and exaggerated reality-clickbait-social-media filtration system surrounds the discussion of this doc (of course it can't be fully escaped), where for example the birth of "Get Back" is presented through that lens as "composed in 2 minutes out of thin air while waiting for John Lennon" on places such as reddit. In reality the rough melody materialized as naturally as any song might, but the special thing here is we get to see it happen from scratch on camera. Then there is a cut and Ringo is at the drums suddenly and they're jamming through the hook. It's cool enough to see the beginning of a classic song come to life, do we really need to lie to squeeze more OMG AMAZING NO WAY out of it to maximize clicks and shares? I don't know where I'm going with this I guess I just wanted to rant about how everything these days is edited to hold the attention of an audience of presumed toddlers and it is nice to see some mythologized band drama playing out from behind the curtain and everyone is acting pretty human throughout.

^^ great post

Another segment of Stephen Colbert's interview with Peter Jackson aired last night and they talked about the effect of watching them try to write songs that we already know, like John suggesting that George just sing "Something in the way she moves, attracts me like a cauliflower" until he can come up with something better. And it's like duh! "no other lover!" it almost sounds like cauliflower and makes perfect sense. c'mon George, it's right there! but then he tries a bunch of other words instead so you don't get the payoff. Still, the interaction between the viewer's knowledge of what eventually happens with what is happening onscreen is key to enjoying it.

OTM x 2 about "Get Back."

Of course as a nerd I love seeing shit like "Jojo Jackson left his home in Arizona" gradually shifting to "Jojo left his home in Northern Arizona" then to the now-familiar "Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona." Because nothing was inevitable, nothing was inscribed in stone, nothing just emerged fully formed.

Like, if instead it'd been "Flagstaff, Arizona," that's what we would think of as the iconic finished lyric. (Because wtf does Paul McCartney actually know about Arizona? Just TV and movie westerns apparently.)

And maybe in some alternate universe they weren't satisfied with that line and instead kept changing it, and got to "Jojo Belly caught a fever in Pomona," well, then in that universe THAT's the iconic finished lyric.

Contingent history, butterfly effect blah blah blah

(Because wtf does Paul McCartney actually know about Arizona? Just TV and movie westerns apparently.)

Linda attended the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1962. It's all a rich tapestry.

i like how John plays with it too

Sweet Loretta Fat
Thought she was a cleaner
but she was a frying pan

Damn, Tarfumes, I had no idea. I bow to your superior nerdery there

the "Get Back" moment is great, but of course it's just an above average melody over some basic blues chords at that point. To me, the magic comes from McCartney's obsessive arranging once the initial pieces are established. He is super focused on getting all the parts just right and goes over them again and again refining along the way. He even mentions Sgt. Pepper as he's doing this, and indeed, a major reason why that album was so successful is that they spent months getting every little tiny detail just right, taking good songs and then making every last instrumental piece exactly right without ever being too much or cluttering up the overall track. In fact, he seems hyper aware of the fact that each part needs to leave plenty of space for every other part. Scaling things back to make space for everything is a skill that many lesser bands completely lack.

(Because wtf does Paul McCartney actually know about Arizona? Just TV and movie westerns apparently.)

Fortunately twenty years later on "Press" he compensated with his deep knowledge of Oklahoma.

Alfred

The rooftop concert is Mt. Doom.

Ah! Just realized that John's bandaged finger in ep. 2 is foreshadowing!

Paul is Frodo John is Sam George is Gandalf Ringo is. . . Gollum

The bit when Yoko was asking about some classical music sheets, I said "hey, Chappels music shop isn't far from there" but George Martin was "oh, any decent music shop.."

Then someone onscreen must have heard me and said "yeah like Chappels"

You do feel like you're in the room

Billy = Eagles

Xpost

Well, yeah.

(#onethread)

hahaha Billy Eagles is excellent

let it be as good vs bad album has been touched upon in other posts already, but i have to say i agree that it's the beatles at their most derivative after their earlier years. to me, it makes sense, though. they were rushed to record and in band practice you see them play standards and traditional songs all the time. it just stuck and was the easiest thing to do. but i get the feeling they were phoning it in

in the last few days, i've re-listened to let it be naked and original a few times. i know the original's initial release got a lot of negative press because it sounded so derivative, but its overproduction was also considered a weakness. i think its specter/"overproduced" sound actually helps the songs by a huge margin

listening to to naked, you really hear a lot more of the standards mccartney was trying to go for because the sound is so sparse, which is weird because mccartney was the one that pushed for a more stripped down sound. to my ear, it honestly doesn't work if you're playing songs based on standards, unless you want to play standards

but let it be is not my favourite

like others have said, a making of revolver would probably be a million times more interesting musically, but maybe people love all the gossip and drama of let it be instead

I haven't seen any revisionist takes on LIB in any incarnation. The consensus gathers 'round "Two of Us" and "I've Got a Feeling," maybe the title track?

i'm not sure i would call it revisionist, but it seems to get less negative reviews nowadays. i feel like it's also an album that has seeped into pop culture the most, but i don't keep a pulse on that to really say

Evan's post upthread is supremely OTM

"derivative"

I am trying really hard to see that as pejorative when the music is, um, good?

Like, most of pop music is derivative - that is, it comes from somewhere (jazz, blues, R&B, etc.). Pretty much all music is derived.

20th-century rock music wears its influences on its sleeve, as it should.

12-note scale, 4/4 time, four-piece instrumentation mostly, guitars and drums and voices, Western harmonies? Ugh. How derivative.

yeah great post evan.

two of us is one of the few keepers from the LP for me, but after hearing it apprx 97 times in the doc i feel like i dont need to hear it again for a few years

Two of Us, Pony, Universe, Let It Be, Feeling, Get Back all amazing songs. Sure there's filler but even Revolver and Rubber Soul have filler

the other thing is all of those amazing songs I could hear a million times over and over

agree re: Evan's post, particularly the second graf (tho the first one is otm, too). that scene where he finds his way to the beginning of "Get Back" is cool, for sure. but the reaction to it as if we're seeing some sort of once-in-a-lifetime magic is a bit over the top, i think. to me, it just looked like a very familiar process of playing some chords and trying out melodies - how most rock songs come to life. it just happened to turn out to be "Get Back" ... the big difference is that Paul did that hundreds of times.

of course, you can't really say that out loud because it sounds like you think Paul McCartney writing "Get Back" is no big deal or something. it's obviously a big deal, and it was cool, but it wasn't like unearthing some never-before-seen artifact.

i actually thought hearing him plunk around with "Let It Be" while John and MLH were discussing plastic set pieces was more interesting.