The Beatles' "Get Back" Documentary

Artist:  The Beatles

The Focus:  The GET BACK documentary

 BACKSTORY…..

BACKSTORY:

When I got the idea that became this blog, Music I Missed, writing about The Beatles was not going to be part of the story.  That’s because I didn’t miss anything to do with The Beatles.  They became the core of my fascination with music from the moment they exploded onto the scene and they remain at that core today.  All these years later, I still judge every rock artist by comparing them to The Beatles. 

And when Beatles aficionado Peter Jackson (the creative force behind the Lord of the Rings movies) announced he was doing a re-look at their seemingly turbulent final chapter, I was thrilled.  Beatles fans have long wondered about those last couple of years and, in particular, that rooftop concert and all that went with it.  Were the sessions really that fraught with hate for each other?  Was Yoko really some kind of evil force?  And if they all hated each other so much, why did they look so happy as they rocked their way through that rooftop concert?

And, sure enough, when I got into watching the doc Get Back (now streaming on Disney) a couple of weeks ago, I realized I couldn’t ignore it.  “You’re writing a rock music blog,” I told myself.  “And you’re going to ignore this huge moment in rock history?”

My Beatles story is more than a recounting of when I first heard a song by the band and what that meant to me.  It is more than their music.  As brilliant as their music was (and is) and as brilliant as they were as musicians and composers, their influence was more pervasive. 

They were a force who changed society. 

Think of other forces that have changed how we think, act, and behave.  Just off the top of my head…when humans figured out language…the invention of the wheel…the development of religion…the printing press…the industrial revolution…WWI and WWII…the civil rights movement in the ‘60s…feminism…Black Lives Matter…#MeToo…centuries of bold painters and fashion designers and architects and writers…radio…TV…digital media.  And so on and so on. 

I’d put The Beatles in with all of that and all of those people behind those forces. 

They rose just when their generation in the ‘60s was starting to rebel against the previous generation.  I was five years too young to truly join that revolution.  But I could feel it, even when I was seven years old and I first heard “From Me to You” and when I started thinking that long hair and those cool boots of The Beatles were so fantastically different from what my parents thought was acceptable. 

And that was at the core of The Beatles’ influence for me:  my parents detested them.  And when I first started pissing off my parents (Grade 3, when I got the strap from a nun because I disobeyed her orders not to run in the mud at recess at Blessed Trinity School), that coincided with these four, incredibly cool dudes from working class Liverpool doing “A Hard Day’s Night.” 

My parents were great parents.  Lovely people.  But every kid needs to stand up and say to figures of authority, “I’m not going to go along with EVERYthing you tell me to do.”  Parents, teachers, bosses, cops, priests, whoever’s decided they’re going to be lording it over you.  We each have to do this or else we’ll become human carpets who get walked on for the rest of our lives. 

In the ‘60s, The Beatles led this charge. 

Yes, of course, “rock” was brimming over with many artists.  But The Beatles were out in front. 

And when their years of making teenaged girls go crazy began to fade, they became this whole other thing:  superb, innovative musicians. 

I remember hearing Revolver and getting the sense that this was different Beatles music.  Those screaming bird sounds and wild drums on “Tomorrow Never Knows” still blow my mind.  And then Sgt. Pepper – a whole album based on one idea.  And then a bunch of scattered songs that seemed to have no album…”Penny Lane,” “I Am a Walrus”, “Revolution.”  And The White Album, which may be my favourite of all their work.  And then the rather ho-hum (or so I thought at the time) Let It Be album and, closing out the Beatles recorded output, the majestic Abbey Road.  Incredible work that everyone else followed. 

And then the Beatles era of active work ended.  As I turned 12 in 1970, there was this never-ending stream of news stories about law suits and who owned Apple and John-said-this-about-Paul and Paul-said-this-about-Yoko and some new business manager named Allen Klein and…it was over.  They went their separate ways. 

But I never let The Beatles go.  As I said earlier, I still hold them as THE litmus test for anyone else in rock. 

And there was always this mystery about their final years.  What DID happen? 

Jump forward to 2019.  We start to hear that Peter Jackson found all this footage of the final rehearsal sessions for what became the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums.  Hours of stuff.  And he began to get an idea that the war between the guys we’d heard about may not have been as awful as we were told.  He made a new doc, using all this footage. 

It was supposed to be released as a theatrical film.  Then the COVID pandemic came along and delayed it.  And then we began to hear that it was going to be a super-long doc.  Disney bought it for its new streaming channel.  And the buzz started. 

Man, I was SO excited. 

And I started watching it. 

What do I think of “Get Back”?  Read below. 

Reactions

Here’s the executive summary, in case you don’t want to read this long review. 

1.        If you’re a died-in-the-wool Beatles addict, you’ll love this. 

2.       If you’re a “Yeah, I like the Beatles’ music” type but don’t get over fussed about the inside story on bands, you probably won’t like this. 

3.       If you’re a filmmaker, you’ll like this. 

4.       If you prefer movies with a thick plot and lots of action that are less than two hours long, you won’t like this. 

5.       If you could care less about the Beatles and/or can’t understand why they get so much attention, you won’t like this. 

6.       If you are a psychology researcher interested in how people create, you’ll love this. 

7.       If you’re a business executive/manager/excel-spreadsheet-number-cruncher thingie who gets all broiled about why creatives seem to spend most of their time chatting, tossing rolled-up paper into the air and catching it, or staring at a blank screen, then you’ll see why we do that while we are creating.  Because here you have four of the most accomplished creative geniuses in the history of humanity spending most of their horsing around…and creating historic work. 

OK, now for the long story……….

In one sense, “Get Back” is a bona fide triumph. 

It is a brilliant work of documentary storytelling.  And it’s an important meditation about celebrity, hard work, genius, and creativity. 

The film’s importance is rooted in its subject – one of the great cultural and creative forces in the history of humanity.  Yes, a similar deep-dive, fly-on-the-wall documentary about any rock band could be done like this, but the reason this is noteworthy is that it’s a look at the mysterious genius of this band.  A group of working class guys from working class Liverpool who were remarkably productive and among history’s greatest creative innovators.  Their collective imagination never seemed to run dry. 

My main takeaway:  what you see over the six-plus hours of this documentary is The Beatles as human beings, not rock stars.  And I believe this is necessary.  Lennon himself spent many of his post-Beatles years decrying the celebrity life he had achieved.  When they were active, they were the most famous people in the world.  But that fame – and our adulation of them – meant we never got to see them at actual work.  All those songs, all those albums, all that innovation…how’d they do it?

Well, you see that in this documentary. 

And, if you’re interested in seeing that, you will love this. 

But if you’re not, you may well find this to be a bore. 

Full disclosure, even I was ready to bail, halfway through the first two-hour episode.  After an hour of seeing the guys mumbling, getting orders of toast and tea, smoking, and tuning their instruments, I thought, “Is this it?”    

About three-quarters of this film is of the band in a couple of recording/rehearsal studios working out songs.  I’m an experienced amateur (meaning, I don’t get paid) musician myself.  I’ve been in rehearsal studios doing the same thing.  If you’re not in the band, it’s boring to watch.  Even if you’re in the band, it gets boring. 

And even if it’s the almighty Beatles, watching a rehearsal is boring.  It would be like watching any professional do their work – a plumber installing a new sink, a nurse changing a dressing, an accountant figuring out a client’s income tax return, a writer writing.  Like you’d really want to watch that for entertainment. 

But I stuck with it.  Why?  Well, I knew that professional critics had gone ga-ga over it.  So, I was curious as to just why that would be.  And, as I said earlier, I’ve always had a fascination with how these creative pros did their work…and how any creative artist does it. 

I’m glad I kept watching. 

Because it isn’t just all the guys figuring out songs.  There’s actually a plot to it. 

In the late ‘60s, the band had decided to do a live performance that would be turned into a TV special.  The problem:  Ringo was to star in a movie and needed to be done with the music project by the end of January, 1969. 

So the plan was to get into a studio and work on a bunch of new songs, in preparation for the live show. 

The challenge:  none of them really had any fully thought-out new songs.  They’d spent a lot of time apart.  The glue that once held them was, apparently, loosening.  So they had about two or three weeks to CREATE and perfect 14 songs. 

That’s hard.  Even for the geniuses of rock music composition. 

Nonetheless, they set to work. 

And that’s the plot.  Can they pull this off? 

The cool thing – and the reason we have this documentary – is that it was decided the sessions would be filmed.  Michael Lindsay-Hogg, an American filmmaker who had done a Rolling Stones doc and British tv shows, was hired to oversee the proceedings. 

The first hour of the doc is the band, Lindsay-Hogg and a large support crew trying to get this thing going.  Included in that group are recording engineer Glyn Johns (who would become a recording legend), the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, and their road manager and guy-who-gets-shit-done, Mal Evans. 

And there’s Yoko Ono.  She’s in practically the entire film, usually sitting quietly next to her partner, John.  Linda McCartney is also there a lot, often with her little daughter, Heather.  And George brings along a couple of Hare Krishna friends, who sit quietly and meditate.  Later on, Ringo’s wife, Maureen, pops in occasionally. 

Despite the seemingly daunting challenge of creating 14 new songs in a few weeks, the Beatles seem unfazed by it all.  And that’s the reason for the boring nature of that first hour.  They’re professional creative artists.  So they do what you do:  They sit and tune their instruments, chat, complain about the studio, play old rockers (“Johnny B. Goode”, for example) drink some weird orange concoction that’s served up in wine goblets, are served tea, toast and marmalade and light one cigarette after another.  They smoked more than Humphrey Bogart did in Casablanca.   Lindsay-Hogg and others float ideas about this upcoming concert.  Should they rent a ship?  Should it be in the desert somewhere? 

“Seriously, I can’t watch seven hours of this nonsense,” I muttered.  “I don’t care if it’s The Beatles.  This is ridiculous.” 

But then…the magic happens. 

McCartney has a loose musical idea and some lyrics about a guy named Jo Jo.  The lyrics are grounded in a chorus where he sings, “Get back…get back…get back to where you once belong.”

John, George and Ringo start offering ideas on their parts on guitar and drums.  They discuss the lyrics.  Where is Jo Jo from?  Could it be Tucson?  “Is Tucson in Arizona?” John asks no one in particular. 

And with this process unfolding, I could see what I had heard about these guys.  This is how they came up that incredible song book.  A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, All My Loving, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Ticket to Ride, We Can Work It Out.  Someone offered a line, a riff, a beat, a verse.  Someone else countered with a note, another idea.  Back and forth.  Light a smoke, sip the tea, play some old Chuck Berry, make each other laugh.  As John and Paul trade off ideas about the Get Back lyrics, Mal Evans scribbles them down on paper, crossing out what he wrote as J+P change their minds. 

This is genius creativity on the job.  And you realize this is how they all did it – Chuck Berry, Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Shania Twain, George Jones, Robert Johnson.  It’s Van Gogh wandering around at night and seeing those stars.  Or Dickens, as I heard he did, sitting on a bench in downtown London, watching people and getting ideas for his characters. 

Fascinating. 

And it goes like this for the next many hours.  George introduces an idea for a song that would become “Something.”  Ringo ambles in one day with a piano pattern and lyrics about an octopus in a garden.  George walks over and gives Ringo an idea about the tune.  Paul sings a line that blossomed eventually into “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”  Paul also has a song called “I’ve Got a Feeling.”  John hears this and offers a counter lyric where he jokes, “Everybody had a wet dream.”  They all laugh and then he sees this could work.  So they build on that.  Paul has another song called “Let It Be” that he demonstrates to the band while playing the piano. 

But it’s not just the music.  There is personal stuff going on.  John and Paul – friends since early high school – still seem to be really enjoying each other’s company.  Ringo is a model of patience and good humour.  But George appears to be pissed off.  Perhaps years of being second fiddle to J+P has soured him?

Sure enough, he soon leaves the session and, we are led to believe, the band. 

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?” I thought. 

And then we hear J+P, in an audio-only segment, discussing this mammoth problem.  The conversation winds around to their own issues with each other.  It’s all quiet and rather dignified, but you can feel the tension. 

It feels creepy having this discussion.  But I couldn’t stop listening. 

Director Peter Jackson offers no voiceover narration.  He’s taken this ton of video footage and audio recordings and finessed it all into about six hours but he doesn’t hammer you over the head with a storyline.  He lets that unfold on its own.  Occasionally, he’ll put up a few words at the bottom of the screen, something like subtitles, indicating detail to guide you as to who’s who or where they are physically or that the rough of the song you are seeing actually what wound up on a final album.  

But that’s it.  And that’s the genius of Mr. Jackson is creating this film.  It’s a naturalistic approach.  And, if you give it a chance, it works. 

Eventually, they all abandon the grandiose plans for a live performance in some far flung place.  They settle on doing a live show on the roof of the very building they are rehearsing in:  the headquarters of their Apple company on chic Savile Row in London. 

You’ve probably seen some of that show.  It’s really the only live performance we have by The Beatles as grownups.  Dressed as they wanted to dress (not in the Pierre Cardin suits Brian Epstein had made them wear), looking like the hippies much of the older generation detested.  And they play this new set of songs without overdubs or technical wizardry.  It’s The Beatles as a rock band. 

And that final segment is absolutely stirring.  As the guys play, Jackson includes cutaways to the citizens about seven stories below, looking up and wondering just what is going on.  As news reporters tell them it’s The Beatles, the reactions are priceless.  From stuffy office types huffing and puffing about how the noise is disturbing their business operations to a surprising variety of people, young and old, saying how much they love The Beatles. 

And there is the reaction of the police.  They can’t figure out what to do.  Eventually, they go inside Apple Inc and…well, watch.  It’s hilarious and inspiring how The Beatles’ office crew handle the cops. 

Perhaps most importantly, Jackson’s direction gives us new thoughts on the band and just what happened during this period we all were led to believe was so full of hate. 

Aside from George’s momentary hissy fit early on, the guys all seem to have had a splendid time. 

And Yoko has received a really bad rap.  She simply sits there.  She’s beautiful and peaceful and John obviously adores her.  She chats in a friendly way with Linda.  Every so often, she sings some of her avant garde work.  Linda’s daughter sings along. 

John confirms himself to be hilarious.  I think we knew this, but, really, he could have been a great standup comedian.  He rarely stops talking and hamming it up for the camera (“Your hosts…The Bottles” is a frequent introduction he makes).  He sings their old songs, like “Help” in a variety of voices.  Paul often joins him in these comedy sessions. 

John’s also a much better guitarist than I had been led to believe.  That’s him playing lead parts on Get Back and gorgeous slide guitar on For You Blue. 

George Martin was the producer and was the one who really helped the band, early on, to shape their sound.  In this film, he still has that role but it’s clear that Paul has emerged as, essentially, the hands-on producer.  He’s good at it.  You get the feeling John feels as if Paul is his mum, telling him to behave, but you also get the feeling John is OK with that. 

Paul is also definitively handsome.  Matinee idol good looks.  I had never noticed that until this film. 

George does appear to be prickly at first.  Then, as he lets out of his creativity, he brightens up.  In fact, the emergence of George at this point in the Beatles story is important.  He was the lead guitarist of the greatest band in the history of rock.  And he was a superb guitarist.  But, by 1969, we were entering into the age of the lead guitarist.  Just think of the talent at that time:  Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and the best of all of them, Jimi Hendrix.  George was not that kind of lead guitarist.  The nature of the Beatles work didn’t allow for that kind of “axeman” guitarist.  In fact, George emerged as a talented composer.  We see that here, as he offers us “Something,” “Old Brown Shoe,” “I Me Mine,” and the terrific blueser, “For You Blue.”  And shortly after the breakup, he exploded onto the scene with the brilliant All Things Must Pass album, chock full of beautiful work that had been germinating in his mind. 

So pay attention to George here.  He’s not as centre stage as John and Paul.  He’s quiet, almost uncomfortably so.  But you can see a massive talent about to be born. 

And then there’s Ringo.  He always had this reputation as being the happy Beatle.  He even had a more negative rep of not being a great drummer.  This doc will reaffirm his positive vibe and it will crush the notion that he wasn’t talented on his kit.  Watch him here – as John, Paul and George work out how the guitars will sound and the vocal arrangements, Ringo goes about figuring out the drum patterns.  He’ll put a towel on his snare to muffle the sound.  He’ll experiment with moving from his high-hat (those two cymbals that sit on top of each other and are operated using a foot pedal) or his ride cymbal (the big one, usually on the right side of a kit).  He created brilliant patterns for so many Beatles songs – “In My Life,” “Ticket to Ride,” are two good example – and you can see that mind at work here.  He starts off just trying to provide a beat to the new songs.  And then he starts experimenting.  A professional drummer at work. 

Finally, there’s the Billy Preston factor. 

A few years after this session, I remember Billy launching a series of terrific Top 40 hits.  “Nothing from Nothing” and “Will It Go Round in Circles?” were huge successes.  But in 1969, he was one of the best session keyboard players in the business. 

He comes bounding into the sessions when things seem to be languishing.  What we learn (I never knew this) is that he and the guys were old friends, having met when the Beatles were in their apprenticeship days playing multiple shows a day in dive bars in Hamburg, Germany.  They met Billy when he was touring with Little Richard. 

Now, in 1969, he’s in London to record for sessions with another artist.  He has some free time and stops in to see his old pals.  They ask him to sit in on electric piano.  You can see the guys look at each other with a “Wow, Billy’s stuff is great” look.  “You’re in the band,” says John.  They laugh, but you can see he’s not kidding. 

Billy comes back the next day and they thank him for being there and he says, “Hey, I don’t have anything else to do.” 

That blew my mind.  To me, the chance to sit in with the Beatles is a mammoth moment.  But, to Billy, it’s a gig.  To the Beatles, it’s a gig, too.

And his work does have an immense, positive effect on the music.  Those touches from him on electric piano inject a groove into the Beatles that meld into their sound perfectly.  “Get Back” becomes a new song once Billy sets his bluesy electric piano to it. 

The recording engineer, Glyn Johns, is a trooper.  He never gets upset.  I knew going into this that Glyn (who Lennon constantly calls “Glynis,” in a typical Lennon teasing way) was one of the great recording geniuses of rock.  His particular genius was figuring out how to apply microphones to a drum kit.  He also would leave this session, move to LA and become a go-to producer.  Here, you get to that talent in action.  (And, as others have noted, Glyn is a real fashion plate.)

By the middle of the third two-hour episode, the band has decided to do that famous rooftop concert.  It’s splendid.  A beautiful climax to this wild and odd endeavour.  Watching them, clearly having the time of their lives, gave me goosebumps. 

I have to reiterate my main point – here, you see The Beatles as human beings.  No wild mobs of fans chasing them.  No Maple Leaf Gardens Beatlemania madness.  This is about professionals doing their job. 

Or was it even a job?  I think it’s important to note that, at this point, John, Paul, George and Ringo didn’t have to do this.  They were well on their way to being mega-wealthy.  In the film, you see them pull up to the studio in fancy cars and repair later to huge, stately mansions. 

So, this wasn’t for the money.  I think it’s a fair guess to say they were doing this because of what grabbed them when they were 12 years old, listening to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Fats Domino in their Liverpool bedrooms:  they loved rock and roll and they loved playing it. 

You can see the sincerity and passion on their faces as the film builds.  You can feel the energy get more intense as they pull those songs together, as they had done hundreds of times before.  And when they get up on that roof and start playing to an audience they can’t see down on the ground, you can see these geniuses having pure, unadulterated fun. 

It’s a glorious thing to see. 

It was for me. 

Then again, you may find Get Back to be a complete bore.