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

this definitely picked up as it went on. we're at the rooftop concert now except I put Slayer on thru my bluetooth headsets while my mom continued watching, so it appears that the Beatles are playing "Angel of Death" and it's quite awesome

Back to our Star Club roots, mangg!

I'm about halfway through it all.

Just have to say, Magic Alex's bass invention!

There's definitely a pantomime element at play here too.

About halfway through the whole thing. One thing that delighted me was all the John Lennon. And John Lennon being happy and cutting up, and all of them getting along a lot better than an armchair fan like myself might have known. He was a lot less dour than I expected to see. Also it looks like the Beatles or their estates made a pointed effort to tap dance around the drug references. But I guess they were quite aware the cameras were on them, too. Still, no cocaine boogers like The Last Waltz or anyone seriously on the nod so far. Except Ringo once but I think he was just bored. Paul always just seems jacked up.

Paul was still pretty into uppers iirc

I like how Paul & John lapsed into stupid accents so readily when singing across from each other, they cracked me up numerous times

They bonded with George Martin over him working on Goons records, didn't they?

disney said they weren't planning on a physical release

the whole point of this for disney is to drive subscriptions, so they have to say this. if they’d said they were planning on a physical release that would have instantly dented their new subs numbers. they will have done the research on how likely beatles fans are to buy a dvd (probably very likely) but they’ll wait until this isn’t attracting new subscribers. it’s not like they really need the money. what they need is the ongoing commitment implied by a subscription.

never a Beatles fan but i've warmed to them a bit as i've aged and do like George and some John solo stuff. was going to eventually check it out but my daughter has developed fairly recently to a big rock/pop music fan esp some older stuff which is a big surprise so she actually prompted the whole fam to watch ep.1. Yeah, a lot of dull stuff but i dug it sort of but my wife was very turned off so the young beatles fan is watching the remaining episodes solo. i'll probably dip back in eventually to finish it off, even as a lukewarm observer there is enough there to keep me interested. i dig stoned John sort of flashing in and out depending on the day and what he's on.

Still slogging pleasantly through part one, but Lindsay-Hogg is reminding me so much of the psychiatrist in "Some Kind of Monster." I keep waiting for John and Paul to turn to this annoying, pushy cigar-puffing twit and tell him to shut the fuck up. I guess they (and George) kind of do, in their own way.

(Paul=Lars, John=James, Ringo/George=Kirk)

man that dave grohl thread delivers

I somehow missed the Anthony Kiedis one! It does beg the question: would there even be a Chili Peppers without the Beatles? Who can say?

all thats missing in that thread is key context about the 60s. what was going on in britain & america back then? was it a peaceful normal time? if only Moby could shed some light

and that's how Bruce married the operator

needs Thurston Moore sitting in front of a wall of vinyl talking about how Yoko simply being there was art in itself

"Yoko's presence was a radical step toward the Beatles evolution toward peace and lightness. Also I Want You on Abbey Road basically invented black metal"

"In a way her being there in the room and playing nothing is a precursor to John Cage"

(I love Yoko and think she's gotten a raw deal over the years, glad this movie helps clear it all up.)

it was wild hearing john do an early version of jealous guy with totally different words

given how nervous they are about the amount of new material they've got it seems a little strange that all these songs that wound up on abbey road weren't deemed ready or whatever? they play them a lot!

oh also i want to shout out to linda's just totally groovy, man, way of talking. it's utterly extinct now and so completely specific to this era, a kind of jaded, 'whatever' loucheness to it. i love it. even people who talked like that THEN don't talk like that NOW, at all

needs Thurston Moore sitting in front of a wall of vinyl talking about how Yoko simply being there was art in itself

― Standard Liege & Lief (Master of Treacle

make it happen

Just watched Part 1. The comparison to The Last Dance is hilarious, which makes George roughly Dennis Rodman.

Some favourite bits:

Paul: We need some songs, lads.
George: I just wrote these fully arranged songs last night.
John & Paul: Fuck it, let's play Chuck Berry.

The boys meet at "Ringo's house" (shot of vast manicured country estate).

Some half-assed 30-second jam: "SUZY PARKER Lennon/McCartney"

i think my favorite part was in part 2 when, in between songs, george randomly asks if someone can go out and buy him a bowtie. and then after like an hour of the film has gone by and i'd forgotten about it, someone comes in and hand george a bowtie, which he then proceeds to put on under his shirt around his bare neck, like an insane person. and then the other beatles immediately start ripping on him about his bowtie.

Oh my gerd, Josh in Chicago, you have completely nailed it and I want to see an alternate-universe Beatles "Some Kind of Monster" style documentary with Bob Rock in it

Like:

RINGO: I just feel like you're disreSPECTing me, bro

PAUL: Maybe that's because you haven't properly worked through your daddy issues, Ringo. I mean, we've all been a little disconnected since Mr. Epstein died.

GEORGE: (glowers wordlessly)

JOHN: You wanna talk about daddy issues? 'Cause I've got - hyuk, hyuk - the mother of all daddy issues. It's right here in me trousers, like

PAUL: John, can you please just be serious for once?

JOHN: I'm serious like a motherfucker. Here. Feel me trousers, Paulie me boy

BOB ROCK: Okay, fellas, get it out of your system, great, but can we please just focus on this track for a minute?

JOHN: Hey Bob, can we please just focus on your stupid hairdo for a minute?

EXPENSIVE CONSULTANT: Okay, I'm hearing a lot of anger in the room. Let's process that for a minute.

"ok everyone, pencils down, what lyrics have you got?"

"jojo was a man whose lifestyle determined his deathstyle"

John always being late/absent while Paul frets is totally James leaving Lars in the lurch to go bear hunting in Russia. All "Get Back" needs is a full sequence where they're auditioning new guitarists.

given how nervous they are about the amount of new material they've got it seems a little strange that all these songs that wound up on abbey road weren't deemed ready or whatever? they play them a lot!

I suspect they had begun feeling possessive about their own songs, already with an eye/ear toward solo stuff. Certainly John had already started down that route (which Yoko enabled/excused), and George (as demonstrated in the doc) for sure recognizes the Beatles will not be a reliable outlet for his music. And Paul in the doc plays a bit of "Another Day," which of course he sits on for a bit and completes with Linda.

Paul telling George "that chord is passé" = Lars telling Kirk "the idea of the guitar solo as we have known it is maybe a little outdated"

"Back Seat of My Car" too xpost

dinnerboat: yeah, and the subsequent "if you don't put in a guitar solo it sounds dated... to RIGHT NOW" crosstalk is uber-classic.

Transposed to Sgt. Pepper Beatledom you could get something like "what if we decided NOT to put a flugelhorn here, would that date it as being from the time when bands just randomly decided not to add flugelhorn?"

the thing is, that chord WAS passé - if it’s the same one george starts adding the first couple of times he played it. it might have had a 9th added or something? sort of generically psychedelic. paul was right, he was just a total dick about it

The comparison to The Last Dance is hilarious, which makes George roughly Dennis Rodman.

"Mr. Lacey" (About a mischievous conceptual artist, also in Jeff Nuttal's Bomb Culture, I think, and also think he did the bumpkin Rod The Mod casually-flapdancing on the clothesline in video for Herbie H.'s "Rockit")

& to tie it all together: he also played george harrison's gardener in help!

"jojo was a man whose lifestyle determined his deathstyle"

lol

I'm paraphrasing for effect, but loved Paul going through the rough list of song titles.

PM: "Let's see, 'Get Back to Where You Once Belonged,' 'I Dig a Pony,' 'Long and Winding Road,' 'Sunrise,' 'She Came In Through the Bathroom Window"...

JL: "'Sunrise'? What the fuck is 'Sunrise'? Did I learn a song that I've never heard of? 'Sunrise'????

PM: "Oh, well, ya know..."

GH: "IT'S CALLED 'ALL THINGS MUST PASS.' HOLY SHIT, YOU TWO."

lol

EXPENSIVE CONSULTANT: "Okay, I'm hearing some hostility here, especially from Lars. Can we unpack that?"

the "metallica is the past, echobrain is the future" scene, only instead of echobrain its magic alex playing his giant bass with the revolving neck

xp pplains

that exchange was so on the nose about how they had shelved george as a one-song-per-side man.

Certainly John had already started down that route (which Yoko enabled/excused)

yoko strikes again

and i've got no right to take my place in the human race!

http://pixmeme.com/ww/UserImages/c835c98a-e595-447c-bc80-221a1626329a.png

Goddamit.

https://i.imgur.com/4WqMdk4.png

LU: "We need a fifth member, James. Someone who can do fills."

JH: "Hmmmmmm.... Think I know just the guy."

https://i.imgur.com/PxJUTiM.jpg

I think John Wesley Harding deserves a lot of credit for the back to roots thing, that predates Big Pink and Sweethearts of the Rodeo or I think anything else mentioned

True, it came out at the end of 1967, but Dylan (and the Band)'s "Basement Tapes" from earlier that year were already circulating by then via his own management and publisher.

Ok it's so stupid and frustrating that these dudes didn't film a sick show at a small club for fans. The Cavern Club finale is such an obvious perfect ending for a movie and if would have been such a perfect document. Fuckin idiots man!

This is an immensely entertaining thread.

xpost otm! i dont think i ever realized just how the rooftop “show” was purely for film footage since they played like 4 songs and three of them twice lol

Or MLH could have remembered Chiswick House from his Paperback Writer film days and they could have played there among the statues.

Or, you know, Libya, a place close to the heart of the Beatles and their fans.

they could've followed it up with a show at the halls of montezuma and really nailed down the marine demographic

I was in many rehearsal rooms over 30 years with different groups of three or four other white guys, and the abiding impression I had of most of those times was that each group of players fucked around too much, played too many songs listlessly, or started to play tunes they couldn't fully remember, or "hey, wouldn't it be a goof if we played this bad song badly, ha ha ha" and otherwise sounded so bad that I thought that we shouldn't play in front of anyone ever, and who the fuck are we to waste anyone's time, having the gall to believe anyone should pay attention to us when we suck so fucking bad… and watching this movie makes me remember that even the most famous rock and roll band that ever was behaved the same way and indeed sucked really bad in the overwhelming majority of the footage Jackson has edited.

Ok it's so stupid and frustrating that these dudes didn't film a sick show at a small club for fans. The Cavern Club finale is such an obvious perfect ending for a movie and if would have been such a perfect document. Fuckin idiots man!

veronica moser wildly otm there

but then they nailed down the material and didn't suck and fuckin ripped shit up at the rooftop and were like the best band ive ever seen so shrug emoji