Peter Jackson lets his penchant for bloat infect the otherwise terrific The Beatles: Get Back
Disney Plus’ The Beatles: Get Back would make an impeccable six-hour docuseries—too bad there’s an additional two hours of it
TV Reviews The Beatles
As we’re informed via title cards at the beginning of each episode of The Beatles: Get Back, there was an abundance of material to work with to make this docuseries. Back in January 1969, more than 60 hours of video footage and over 150 hours of audio were recorded as part of a project to film the making of a new album and a planned TV special from the legendary band. To sift through that all and stitch it together in the most effective way would require a diligent master of editing. So why get the guy who turned The Hobbit into three bloated and wildly overstuffed films?
Peter Jackson might not have been the right person for the job. Watching Get Back, one gets the feeling he’s torn between serving two different audiences: the average viewer who wants a compelling narrative about a difficult and near-final chapter in the life of one of the all-time great bands, and Beatles aficionados who’d like nothing more than to spend as much time as possible with these musicians. He ends up decisively siding with the latter, which means anyone who isn’t a Beatles completist will presumably—at multiple points during this series—get bored.
The three episodes that make up this nearly eight-hour docuseries linger on the minutiae: endless rehearsals of the same songs; the copious downtime between takes, usually filled with goofy jokes, awkward conversations, and breezy renditions of covers; voluminous footage detailing technical issues. One could argue this is the point—to create a you-are-there verisimilitude, and linger in the space between events in order to bring to life the complicated dynamic between these four men (and the small army of people employed by them).
But while you certainly get plenty of time to understand the brotherly camaraderie and brittle tensions among the bandmates, it can occasionally be as draining and tiresome to sit around waiting for something to happen as it likely was for the guys themselves. For as jaw-dropping as it can be to see Paul McCartney, riffing while waiting for Lennon to arrive, suddenly come up with the framework for “Let It Be,” it can also be enervating when you’re five hours into the series and suddenly, rehearsals grind to a halt so a technical issue can be addressed.
Anyone who’s logged hours in a recording studio will likely relate to the ennui radiating off The Beatles at times—if nothing else, this film nails that feeling of hurry-up-and-wait listlessness. But those pitstops are still just pauses en route to one of the most memorable live performances in pop music history: the band playing live in public for the last time, on the roof of Apple Studios in London, while the police try (hilariously ineffectually) to shut it down. And to see how the group pivoted from the massive failure of the original TV-show plan to that famed bit of musical lore is nothing short of riveting.
Those looking for sources of the group’s eventual growing rift and eventual demise will find much to savor. McCartney and Harrison come across as the personalities most at odds with each other. (Lennon and McCartney certainly evince moments of each irritation with each other, too, though if a new interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg—the director who originally shot all this footage—is to be believed, Lennon’s lack of animus might be attributed to the beginning of his heroin use.)
McCartney’s perfectionism, and Harrison’s feelings of marginalization in the creative process, at first seem diplomatic enough, until you realize how awfully British they’re being. That politesse hides volcanic frustrations: When George responds to Paul’s worry that he’s annoying him with a simple, “You don’t annoy me anymore,” you can almost see the knife sliding in. And the sexist narrative of Yoko Ono breaking up the group is quickly dismantled; she’s by Lennon’s side throughout, but it quickly becomes apparent that these long-simmering fissures have little to do with the fact that, as McCartney spoofs it at one point, “Yoko sat on an amp.”
There’s a rough structure here: Set in the three-week period between the beginning of filming and that rooftop performance (a timeline which eventually stretches to a month), Get Back features a broad arc about the pressure of writing a new record in such a short time window, the crisis of Harrison briefly quitting the band, and the impending deadline of what to do about the live shows. (Lindsay-Hogg, a colorfully blue-blood raconteur who comes across like a young Orson Welles in disguise, keeps pushing for an outdoor amphitheater in… Libya.) But, come on—these are The Beatles. They dictate circumstances, not the other way around. It’s more interesting to view in hindsight, knowing things will change, and watching everyone around the band slowly catch up to that fact. (Sometimes very slowly; again, nearly every element—besides the songs themselves—gets talked to death.)
Unlike a lot of projects, here the interest is less in the how of specific camera shots or stylistic tics and more in the what happened—and how much is on film, style be damned. The big exception: a fascinating private conversation between McCartney and Lennon, immediately following Harrison’s temporary quitting the band, which was captured by a hidden mic in the flowerpot on the cafeteria table. Depicted via only the text of their chat, it includes moments like Paul insisting to John, “The thing is, you’re the boss; you’ve always been.” But the surfeit of material does mean that whenever something of interest happens, there’s usually a camera or mic there recording it.
For those who only know of the tumult that took place, everything else is a powerful reminder of the deep bonds between these men. For every moment of icy silence, there’s an equally open-hearted scene of laughter, as Lennon breaks the guys up with his off-the-cuff wit, or Ringo (true to reputation, an often-silent presence of easygoing assurance) vamps it up for a camera. But everyone has those elements, McCartney and Harrison included. Ultimately, this is as much about what it was like to be in The Beatles during their final era as it is about what came of these sessions. That’s an intoxicating stew of multilayered personalities and genius-level artists plying their trade in the most humdrum manner imaginable—with a bunch of hired help milling around. And, in the final episode, children lend a family-like atmosphere to the proceedings, which is charming for the first 10 minutes or so, before that montage gains bloat, too.
There’s a oddly cathartic sequence when, after moving from the cold and unpleasant soundstage they began shooting on into a comfy and intimate room at Apple, everyone just makes a squalling noise jam, and McCartney yells the text of a newspaper hit piece about the band’s transition from “boys next door” to “weirdies.” After it’s done, it feels like the group is trying to wash its hands of the drama, at least for the time being (even if McCartney’s own admittedly self-imposed frustrations keep bubbling up). By the end of the year, the band had broken up. But for this last, fascinating period, Get Back provides a rewarding look at artists still capable of making iconic music together, if also starting to suspect they’d rather do it independently of one another. It’s a terrific documentary portrait, but strangely, it might have benefitted from there being somewhat less of it.
342 Comments
I absolutely feel the conflict: as a hardcore Beatles fan, I cherished every second spent with them (though I’ve only finished Ep 1 so far), while the rest of my family watching with me clearly hit points of extreme disinterest. But for me, those special moments – Paul coming up with Let it Be or Get Back, George’s clear sense of marginalization, seeing Yoko’s actual presence in the “inner circle”, Ringo’s sweet asides…all of those are worth the down times.
I’m not a Beatles fan, but I found it captivating, and nothing felt like filler.
Yep. When they’re talking about the staging of the concert and suddenly we hear the opening chords of “Let It Be”, I got chills–for all we know, we’re seeing and listening to the first time anyone but Paul has heard that song.
If Paul quietly noodling “Let It Be” in the background of another conversation appeared in a fiction movie I would say it was contrived, which is the fun of archival footage. I really couldn’t believe what was happening.
All those scenes in biopics where a musician writes something famous and everybody stops what they’re doing and join in always seemed fake. And then it happens a few times in this movie and it’s amazing.
We weren’t- The Beatles had already recorded a version of Let it Be during the White Album sessions.The arrangement had quite settled in that version, but it’s a song Paul had been working on for awhile before the Let it Be sessions.
i am a very casual beatles fan, but i love a good studio documentary. i can’t wait to sit down with this.
I enjoyed Ep 1 and will (probably) watch the rest when I have time, but one thing the review doesn’t specifically highlight is that the doc is just the edited footage and nothing else. There are no talking heads, minimal archival footage, etc. If you’re not a diehard fan, it helps a lot to pause occasionally and at least hit the Wikipedia page for the different songs. You learn things like the fact that the rest of the band absolutely loathed Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and resented Paul for making them rehearse it so many times. That John accused Paul of staring at Yoko every time he sang, “Get back to where you once belonged.” That Paul later told George that he didn’t think his songs were very good. That the real Paul died in 1962 and was replaced with a cybernetic band leader. Etc. The context helps a lot.
The most emotionally striking part was about 15 minutes into Ep2, Paul coming to the realization that things were not going well and he had no clear plan of what to do about it. He stares out quietly for like three full minutes, and tears start to well up. Then he comes to, shakes his head, and walks away from the gathered group to briefly get some privacy.
Yeah – I noted that more than once they reference how lost they became following Brian Epstein’s death; seems to me they’re each trying to operate in a demanding situation with a hard deadline in different ways; Paul clearly is the “we need a plan and a strategy to deal with this” kind, while others have their own ways. And when you consider how freaking YOUNG they were at the time…
Another dynamic in play that kinda only really makes sense if you’ve been in a band: How musicians handle mistakes, issues, writing challenges has a TON to do with how practices go.
Some musicians are “stop a song that isn’t going well, talk about why something didn’t work, figure out where the issue was, and start again” types. Some musicians are “take it from the top” types when something crashes. And some musicians are “pick it up from just before it crashed and take it from there” types. The latter cases can usually get along and keep practices moving. Paul is/was (apparently) the first type. Ep 1 would have been shorter and/or an easier watch if Paul wasn’t stopping because a song didn’t sound right… and then initiate/sustain lengthy conversations about the song, the upcoming show, the need to get it together, the lack of material, etc. They seemingly needed another voice in the room to say “Can we just try it again? I think we’re close…”
Related/unrelated: There’s a reason why band practice is band practice and band meetings are band meetings. I cannot imagine the stress of just existing in The Beatles… Add in the various business figures and other parties discussing non-musical stuff at various times where they were trying to write, relax, vibe, etc. and that pressure goes through the roof. Can’t even imagine what this was like in real time.
I’m a big Beatles fan and loved this. It probably was a little baggy in the second episode at least, enough that even I was feeling it drag a bit. But probably Jackson hated leaving anything out at all. It’s an amazing document, and what Jackson and his team have done to clean up the images and the sound is incredible, enough that it all seems so fresh and alive. I’ll definitely forgive some bagginess for what Jackson has achieved here.
The cleaning up of the images and sound was pretty fantastic. Way better than the VHS dub of Let It Be I had.
I’ve only watched bits and pieces of this, but the sound quality really stuck out to me; really sounds like it was recorded just yesterday.
That’s because yesterday all their treble was so far away.
If you Google some interviews with Jackson about the restoration, it’s pretty neat. In principle, digitally tinkering with a recording is not ideal, but they were able to isolate different instruments from the original tape so that they could mix the songs and also mix the music down when it drowns out the conversation.
Episode two is fun because it starts with three Beatles and ends with five.
I loved how the entire atmosphere changed once Billy Preston joined them in studio – suddenly they were having fun, being creative again.
(I was a bit disappointed in Paul for shooting down the idea of making Preston a permanent member of the band – they may have lasted longer if that had happened…or maybe not, given Lennon’s junk habit)
I just started wondering how a Beatles with Dylan as a member would have sounded
Ha, the Beatles harmonizing with the raspy Dylan was more my concern! The songwriting would not be the problem.
He’s sung abit with Harrison, so we know how their voices worked together. (And from that you could also imagine how Dylan might have fit in with the Beatle harmonies.)
I got about halfway through the first episode last night, and I think it’s probably best viewed in smaller chunks over time rather than trying to power through one full episode a night for 3 nights in a row. As my wife put it, this is a vibes documentary rather than a narrative one, it just happens to be much, much longer than most vibes documentaries are. Also, it might go long stretches without something really meaningful happening, but when something does happen it is fascinating. The scene in episode 1 where George Harrison starts talking about how he feels that he’s really grown as a songwriter and really wants to contribute to the new album and is met with noncommittal, bordering on dismissive, “uh huhs” from Paul and John is painful to sit through and I can’t think of anything else like it in a music documentary aside from maybe that Metallica one where they do group therapy together.
I would just say uh-huh if he was pulling out My Sweet Lord and got to the Hari Krishna part.
Clearly you’ve never seen “Bros: After the Screaming Stops”.I should stress that this is real – not a mockumentary. Easily as funny as Spinal Tap.
One of the greatest music documentaries of all time. I still can’t believe they actually allowed it to be released.
…and then showcases one of his best songs—maybe his greatest, All Things Must Pass, and John and Paul dont give a shit. To think what could have been…
It occurred to me watching that episode that if John and Paul had been paying attention in that moment, the record likely would have been called “All Things Must Pass” when it was eventually released a year later (though not certain, because “Let It Be” had been a big hit for the band), and likely “Gimme Some Truth” might also have been in the running order.
And poor George remarks, “Yeah I dont give a fuck if we use it or not!” 🙁
They did 78 takes of “All Things Must Pass.” George decided he didn’t want to play it live on the roof – otherwise it probably would have been. Check out, “The Beatles didn’t reject All things must pass on YouTube.”Also, Patty Harrison left George on Saturday, January 4, 1969. They reconciled (you only see her once in the film whereas you see Yoko, Linda, and Mo more often (in that order)). The “fight” with Paul occurred on Monday and he left the band on Friday the 10th. Did John, Paul, and Ringo know that? Dunno. Might they treated him a little differently that week if they were aware of it? Maybe. Might George have been a littler extra prickly and adverse to criticism after his wife left him? Probably.
Thanks for this. Ill check it out.
Particularly because they shrugged it off while they were going through shit they wrote at 14 because they were struggling for new material. Incredibly frustrating to watch.
I actually have this idea in my head about rock bands and youth… youre young, passionate, energetic, love music and social in that youthful way. Adventurous. Start a band, tour, have fun. The Beatles, as we know, invented that shit. Then, all those passions fade, biology subsides, you gather responsibilities, you arent as into pop music as you once were and the younger kids are listening to new shit anyway. You run out of stuff to write about or at least keep you united or, in the Beatles case, youve already written a few masterpieces. So, you break up. The Beatles also invented that shit.So my theory is that what they failed to invent is transforming from youthful passion project centered on partying with your friends creating cool art into turning the whole thing into a calculated profession like, say, U2 has done. The Beatles couldnt quite make that jump although you see Paul trying in this film. At this point, everyone knows how its done and so not a problem for Dave Grohl to go from Nirvana (passion project centered on partying with your friends creating cool art) to Foo Fighters (a calculated profession). I guess the Beatles only had so many “firsts” they could achieve.
I’m with you. To watch him build up the courage to introduce “I Me Mine”, just to have Paul brush it off and John openly ridicule it because of the waltziness was very saddening. Such a beautiful song.
Unless it’s a Ken Burn doc about one huge subject a documentary shouldn’t be eight hours long. Like does anyone really need two seasons of Tiger King. One two hour episode is way more then enough.
Mark Cousins’ 15 hour A History of Film: An Odyssey says hello, you’re wrong on that.
A 15 hour film on a topic as big as movies is ok. I was just using Ken Burns as a example of long documentaries on one huge subject.
Every now and then I say stuff in Mark Cousins’ voice just to sound wistful and intellectual.
“Should I make a cup of tea? No…no…maybe…no…yes. The tea is important to me. And to all of us. It’s a universal need for tea. And a digestive biscuit.”
lmao, I do the same thing, but to calm myself
For the full effect, you need to say “dreams” at least once.
Frederick Wiseman would like a word with you.
On the other hand, I think in the interest of historic preservation, putting out virtually every bit of interesting footage was probably the right choice, especially when you have the tech and the budget to restore it. That doesn’t make it a tolerable watch for the non-hardcore set, but I don’t think turning it into something fundamentally different was the move. Ethically, I think this thing kinda had to be “as complete as possible, but tough to watch”.
Also, to edit it down into a cohesive 2 hour thing, you’d have to make more decisions about what to cut and what to show, which necessarily imposes a narrative. That’s what Let It Be was, and the whole concept of this project meant to be a response that debunks the narrative in that movie by showing a more complete picture.
Yeah, I think approaching it as a narrative documentary (for want of a better word) is fair but misses the mark. It’s an unbelievably skillful archival project – just the technical challenge of restoring and mixing antique film and magnetic tape alone would put off a lot of filmmakers. So would editing that volume of footage. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that the Beatles are so heavily documented that the world doesn’t need all of this material, but that also seems a bit churlish.
This whole critique is mystifying to me… Why would someone who isn’t relatively heavy into The Beatles already even be watching a doc about the beginning of the end of The Beatles? The Anthology series was one for the casuals. Get Back is one for the hardcore fans. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that distinction.
I don’t really see it as a documentary in any conventional sense though. If you love this music, this the fulfillment of a fantasy, to actually go back in time and sit with these guys while they made these recordings. I have Goddard’s One Plus One on DVD and I savor every second of that Stones studio footage; it’s always made me wish there was way more. It probably would be a good idea to release a more condensed two hour version of this, maybe even with your standard talking head interviews, kind of like when Rhino released Funhouse as a supercompletist box set with every take of every song, and also as a single remastered cd with the cream of the outtakes at the end. But this was a dream come true for me.
Charles Dickens knew what reading audiences loved – more. He was also paid to serialize. Soap Operas that debuted 60 years ago are still running. No, they aren’t documentaries, but they are stories so – yeah – garbage like Tiger King doesn’t need more air, but streaming services are proving that people will watch the shit out of anything interesting as long as it has plenty of drama (and drama is something built into reality itself).
Claude Lanzmann would like a word.
Maybe there should have been two edits, one a more conventional documentary with the most important bits and one sprawling for the completists and music historians to get lost in.
Or we can accept that not everything is for everyone, and a documentary about the beginning of the end of The Beatles isn’t and shouldn’t be intended for casual fans and/or those with short attention spans…
I personally really enjoyed the minutiae and seeing their process. But I think what I love about this is that it reveals just how normal these guys were. They were exceptionally talented, musically, but they’re also terrible communicators for most of these sessions. No one’s ever really at each other’s throat, as popular myth would have us belief, they’re just all somewhat irate and very human.
Allegedly, Jackson purposely wanted to avoid the more contentious moments so there has been some criticism that Yoko Ono comes off as far more silent than she actually was. She has without a doubt been treated unfairly over the years, but I think there were some choices made to remove some of the tension. Whether that was just Jackson’s artistic choice or if it was necessary to get all the stakeholders on board (for better or worse, Yoko Ono controls the Lennon estate. Olivia Harrison also had to sign off), I’m not sure. But I think you kind of need this and the other materials in tandem to truly get the full picture.
I am only partway through the 2nd episode, but I wish they showed the lead-up to the times when Yoko sings. Presumably, it was John’s idea, but I’d like to see everyone else’s face when that happens.
IDK if this is a spoiler, but Heather McCartney gets brought to the studio in episode 3 and also kind of runs around like a crazy person. Granted, she’s a child and Yoko Ono was not, but there were other noisy intrusions.
Part of the mythology is Paul hated Revolution 9, but hindsight has shown that Paul was not averse to going avant-garde.
You want to see a great reaction to Yoko’s singing check out the Youtube video with her and John playing with Chuck Berry. The look on Chuck’s face when she launches into one of her screech yodels is positively priceless.
“sings”
That’s something I hadn’t thought about, good point. I do find that things like Harrison quitting, which was always framed as this huge, epic blow-up between the Beatles, is almost equally the result of his own insecurities and is a much more subdued thing that really throws everyone for a loop. Even the “fight” between John and Paul that’s caught on the mic in the break room is just two old friends having a conversation. May be some judicious editing going on, but it’s still refreshingly human.
She apparently started to chime in with “suggestions” during the recording of “Abbey Road,” and that was a very bad idea. George screamed at her at one point…and I would, too, if I was a Beatle and she thought she was in any sort of position to actually get involved.
Totally agree, and I think it is fact that she was put in a position to give her opinion where it wasn’t requested or wanted. But I suspect John carries more of the blame there than many people like to accept.
Oh, yeah. He gets a ton of the blame. There was no reason why she had to be sitting there, except to possibly annoy Paul. He was a weird guy. A genius, but a very weird guy. It would make just as much sense if Yoko were working on some kind of art project and George showed up to start telling her how to improve it!
I agree that other materials would help, particularly the Two Junkies interview. The subtext of this series to me was that heroin broke up the Beatles. You had John barely participating the first few days, Art-and-drug dealer Robert Fraser popping in momentarily, John visibly high and coming down at various times, totally fucking up the bass on long and winding road, furiously emptying his pockets to Yoko as they left the rooftop, falling asleep as they listened to playback. And seemingly also having ADHD or coke at the same time. His using shifted the burden of leadership to Paul and totally unbalanced the group dynamic. Then his poor judgment brings in Allen Klein and his addiction worsens in Abbey Road.
I’m only halfway through the second ep but I imagined waaaaay more tension and finger pointing and Paul being a dick and Yoko being intrusive than what is going on here. For making it clear I’m very grateful. I can’t even be sad about it, it seems so reasonable. They just seem like extremely skilled artists who couldnt find a way to collaborate anymore and not the childish hedonists the narrative sometimes suggests.
Lots of the tensions actually shown in “Let It Be” are missing here. Jackson wanted his own version of reality, just as Lindsay-Hogg did. We’ll never have the full picture. (and please! We don’t need any more!)
Having spent entirely too much of my early 20s hanging out while my friends’ band was writing and recording music, all of it — fights, resentments, blatant time wasting, fucking around, having fun, collaborating, creating things out of thin air — was so painfully familiar. I thought they were actually better communicators than I had thought, they just fell back into bad habits really easily. And they’re not a bad hang when they’re getting along. I somehow both feel like this was too long and like I could easily hang out with them for 20 more hours.
A lot of their problems look like very everyday workplace disfunction; bad communication, people who are trying to do the same thing but approaching it in different ways, a lack of leadership, etc. And maybe more than anything else just the fact that they’ve been working together for quite a while and have reached that point where they don’t feel like putting up with each others shit anymore.
They had a ridiculous output of music for 7 years straight, multiple albums a year. This was around the time where bands transitioned to once every 3 or 4 years. They needed to decide that there’s a middle ground where they do solo projects then come back in 4 years like the Olympics
My breaking-point came in the second episode when Jackson interrupted the recording of ‘Dig a Pony’ for a 20-minute CGI chase sequence around Laketown.
Ringo and the gang going down a waterfall and river was a bit overdone but was fun I guess.
They should’ve died from that fall! Also Orlando Bloom being there seemed a bit fanservicey, especially since he was born 8 years later!
It was really too much fanservice to have Orlando Bloom appear as Mick Jagger and talk about painting things black.
Call me a softy, but I got chills when Ringo yelled, “The Eagles are coming!” That said, I’m not sure we needed the footage of them doing an impromptu performance of ‘Hotel California’.
Ringo carrying John up the stairs to the concert stage made me get all teary
Nah the part where Pete Best sacrificed his life to find off a small army of fangirls is the emotional highlight of the series.
“One does not simply walk into Penny Lane”
You’ll have my drum set, and my guitar that weeps!
“One does not simply get a ticket to ride into Mordor”
That’s the One Ringo to you!
Ugh, that was clearly just an idea he’d had for a scene in a computer game, only the games developers had stopped taking his calls so he put it in a film instead…
The Desolation of Ringo
Battle of Eleanor Fields
The Battle of The Five Beatles
Being for the benefit of Mr Frodo
For me it was when each of the Beatles stopped the narrative a moment to discuss their complicated relationships with their parents.
I was certainly surprised by the inclusion of Tom Bombadil.
Why did he insert Radagast the Brown into a Beatles documentary after removing him (wisely, IMO) from Lord of the Rings?
Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Tedious Recording Studio
And what were Legolas and Tauriel even doing there?
We should all applaud Andy Serkis’s mo cap work playing every Beatle and Yoko Ono with absolute no help from any animators.
Brian Epstien as Smaug was a little offputting. I’d have thought the CGI of him savagely editing the Beatles with his Breath of Flaming Relevance would have been a high point, but really? Bic lighter and a bundle of M80s?
I liked how they all jumped up and down on a bed for a few minutes after the band was dissolved…
Fuck you! …oh, I’m terribly sorry, nothign personal that just kind of triggered PTSD from a scene that until now I’d forgotten about for twenty years. Damnit, now I remember how much I hated that…
Found it boring & couldn’t get through the first episode. I’m only a casual fan at best though. Good for Beatle diehards I guess.
Is the rest of it out now? We watched part 1, it was boring, my wife doesn’t want to finish it. I will, but whoo, you’re watching a band rehearse. It’s boring.
Cool.
hey who doesn’t want 75 tries at “Get Back”?
Actually, when John sang a bit of it, I thought “He shoulda done this one!” for a sec.
Congrats on your opinion.
What do they say about those things?
Yes, it is all released. They’re writing songs in addition to rehearsing.
I watched part 2 today.
Yes, watching the genesis of great art that still stands the test of time 50+ years later is such a drag.
I don’t think I’d want to watch DaVinci paint for 8 hours.
Then don’t (theoretically). The same logic applies here.
I would eat beans with George Wendt.
INFECT??His penchant for bloat makes him PERFECT for this project.After completing all 8 lingering, meandering hours, I thought about how excited I was going to be for the next time I watch it.Best time capsule of the year… maybe of the 2000s so far.
Despite the long runtime there was still some cut material.
I think every minute was in there for a reason, and I loved the fuck out of all of them. But that’s just me.
You aren’t alone in your opinion. I feel the same way (and only wish my sister had lived to see this as she was a huge Beatle fan, albeit after they had already broken up)
I’m not a Beatles fan, but I really enjoyed watching this – the peak into the creative process of arguably two of the most important song writers of all time was captivating, especially moments like the initial idea behind “Get Back”.The general feel of them all knowing that this is all coming to an end is a constant throughout, they all seem to know it but are refusing to pull the trigger on it.
“keeps pushing for an outdoor amphitheater in… Libya”The rooftop concert is so engrained in Beatles lore as a brilliant bucking of expectations, but it’s not surprising the first thought was to something big and unmatched. In the pre-Gaddafi 60s, Tripoli was a cosmopolitan beach town and it’s hard to argue that this:wouldn’t have made a pretty epic show (before Floyd went to Pompeii, or the Dead to the Pyramids).
I kept thinking of Floyd at Pompeii and imagining the same couple producers as always suggesting an ancient amphitheater as their career go-to “big” idea. Stodgy Brits and their dreams of being Lawrence of Arabia.
Pfft. Stonehenge was right there.
It’s been done:
Favorite revelations:John (though perennially arriving one hour later than everyone) puts in a solid amount of work. Hey, he’s in love, he just got engaged, and he’s still only 28 at this point. Plus, all four seem committed to the project and none seem particularly stoned. There’s once or twice Ringo says he’s hung over, and one session where they drink moderately throughout but they never come off not having a work ethic. They’re working.Paul’s not a monster. He comes off as someone saying what he’s thinking aloud too much – and therefore dragging everyone else through his thought process. Like maybe too much monopolizing of conversations. John subtly shores up relations with George. Like maybe Paul has middle-child syndrome between older brother John & youngest George. While Ringo just Ringos.Fifth Beatle was a thing!
When John shows up in the same clothes two days in a row, with a joke about his “continuity clothes,” he 100% looks like a guy with a bad heroin addiction. Which just makes it that much more astonishing when he picks up a guitar and is in such perfect control of every sound. I wouldn’t say that I underrated John Lennon as a guitar player, but he makes it look really, truly effortless.
I counted three days…
At least he looks like a guy who partied all night and never went home.
John was a really skilled rhythm guitarist. It’s a big reason why Paul was allowed so much space for melodic flourishes on the bass.
Heroin use is something I happen to know a lot about. At no time in this film is anyone under the influence of heroin. There are several foolproof giveaways that are perfectly obvious, and I didn’t see any.
https://youtu.be/WOxnqwco7Cw This interview took place at Twickenham during filming
Definitely underrated. His slide on For You Blue, for example.
Yeah, Paul definitely comes off as that group leader on a project who decides he’s the point person, so he makes all the decisions without asking, so lost in his thoughts that he talks over everyone, then wonders why nobody else is contributing.
It was in the way people’s eyes go up and go unfocused when they’re thinking and trying to access different parts of their brains. Paul’s eyes are going everywhere when he’s trying to think through something – especially when trying to work through what venue or “event” is supposed to be the culmination of the month.
Paul reminds me a lot of Lars Ulrich in that way of overtaking every conversation and giving off the “every decision that gets made about the band has to go through me last” vibe. Lars couldn’t “write” music but he has a credit on 99.9% of Metallica songs because he could take the music that James, Kirk, Cliff, etc. wrote as parts and help arrange them into complete songs.
Metal who?
It is remarkable how the mood and productivity improve once Billy Preston shows up. The guy was much more than the “mediocre talent” hanging onto the Beatles coattails that Rolling Stone would have liked you to believe.
I wish the rooftop concert HAD MORE BILLY!
Billy coming into the fold was the most fascinating part to me. I’m with you, his presence just immediately brought more joy into the room. I don’t know how much instruction or artistic freedom he was given, but watching him wail on the Rhodes and jamming out with them was incredible.
That warm smile of “Holy shit, i’m jamming with The Beatles!” was so palpable.
Absolutely. Hell, John and Paul seemed so damned stoked just to be playing with HIM.
There are people who consider Billy Preston a mediocrity?Hold me back.
The RS hack who wrote up the original album review of “Let It Be” griped about the Beatles teaming up with “mediocrity” like Billy Preston.
RS has had no shortage of hacks writing crap over the years, that’s for sure.
Only finished part one so far but in particular the exchange / fight with George about the guitar and vocals for the bridge in Don’t Let Me Down shows that Paul had a very, very clear picture of how he wanted it to sound, he just had no ability to communicate it to the others (George in particular) without it sounding like a command. Also, he was wrong, and his ideas were wrong, and however they arrived at the final version with the contrapuntal bass, is great. Hopefully that’s in part two.
I feel like it makes a lot of sense that Paul became the leader when you look art the rest of the band. Ringo is quite chill and happy to go along with anything, John is obsessed with Yoko and heroin to the point where he’s pretty unreliable, and George is an amazing songwriter but always strikes me as a bit shy and not very forceful (whether that’s because he was constantly dealing with John and Paul’s egos, I don’t know). Paul kind of needed to take the reins or they would have never got it finished.
Counterpoint: At least in Ep1, Paul’s “taking the reins” seemed to involve a lot more talking about playing than playing… I recognize that that’s a distortion – in part due to the fact that we never see a full take of anything – but he spends a lot of “practice” time talking about how they need new material. That’s not writing or refining. It’s not problem solving. It’s just identifying an issue of which everyone else is already painfully aware.
“Lindsay-Hogg, a colorfully blue-blood raconteur who comes across like a young Orson Welles in disguise”
I don’t know if this is intended to be a sly refence to the long-standing rumor that he’s Welles’s biological son, but if not it’s an amusingly apt comparison. (If it is intentional, touché.)
Also, I will forever be grateful for this documentary for giving me the visual of him talking about wanting 2000 Arabian torches in the desert somewhere only to then get LITERALLY dragged onto the rooftop.
From what I understand – 5 minutes before they went on the roof they still weren’t sure they were going to do it. Until John said, “Let’s Go.”
Right, I know, but I mean when they go up to the roof to look at it and we get this image:
And his name is Hogg, fits because Orson was a Rubenesque man and had a pig named after him in US Acres
More like Porcine Welles, am I right?
This is a good joke and deserves recognition as such.
I’ve been listening to Let It Be since the mid ‘70’s and also had the outtakes bootleg “Sweet Apple Tracks”, and the audio from that boot mostly shows up in the doc. The most interesting thing from that disc was at the end of the
“commonwealth jam”, John starts singing “White power”. Not in support but to mock the idea.
Whiny bitch writes article. Guitar weeps.
Considering Jackson’s previous doc, the excellent They Shall Not Grow Old, wasn’t bloated in the least, and that he did a fantastic job condensing the preeminent fantasy trilogy into films, I think bloat is a strange criticism to hang on him. He can certainly get lost in his meticulousness, which is a fairer criticism, but even Hobbit was reportedly 3 movies because of the studio, not Jackson.
The main thing seems to be that Jackson is a total Beatlemaniac, and
he’s
made a series for other Beatlemaniacs, of which there are many millions
around the World. It’s not a dispassionate documentary. He loves these
people, and has surrounded himself with their music his entire life. It
was always going to be a deeper dive than if he didn’t have as much
invested in the topic.
I do think that he wanted to clean up all of the footage so he was probably working with all of it and when you have all of it, it can be easy to get lost in it. Whether it was the studio or Jackson, it felt like someone needed to be there to say “Maybe we trim this.”
King Kong was also bloated AF
“Peter, are you sure you don’t want to remove the cringey, stereotyped Pacific islanders?”“No, but I do want to add more chases.”“Fair enough.”
Well that’s what he gets for eating all those people instead of his usual plants and fruits diet.
I’m going to take the L and say I 100 % forgot about King Kong. Def bloated. But Jackson’s pre-LOTR work isn’t so it evens out.
I think that might go towards PeterBread’s point that when Jackson deep-dives into something he truly loves, he dives deep — IIRC King Kong is one of his all-time favourite films.
This review is spot on, though. I enjoyed Ep 1 (all I’ve seen so far), but I had to break it up over three nights, and this is very much a doc made by and for Beatlemaniacs.(Also, LOTR had plenty of bloat, especially the director’s cuts.)
My wife, a casual fan at best, is riveted by every moment. So yeah, bloat is in the eye of the beholder?
I am through the first episode. Pretty damn good, as it is what I actually wanted to see: The Beatles’ working on songs. The process from rawness, through some riffing, “oh, I’ll figure out some lyrics, but let’s get the music down,” call-and-response (or simply mocking) that are dropped, deciding whether it’s fast or slow, hard or soft, etc., before they settled on perfection.
Peter Jackson is such a hack.
Can’t wait to see some of your great works, Killa!
How dare you insult the mastermind behind Braindead and Bad Taste.
2/10.
I’m not even through the first episode yet, but I think it’s kind of fascinating. And I’m not a huge Beatles fan, either. I respect their work more than I love it. But it’s also really fascinating about what this documentary says about Jackson’s trajectory as a filmmaker. When I heard about They Shall Not Grow Old and then this Beatles doc, I thought that maybe he had given up. He wasn’t interested in making new movies with his unique stamp. He just wanted to ticker around in the editing room. But, man, was I wrong. Both They Shall Not Grow Old and Get Back are as auteurist as anything he’s done, chiefly they showcase an obsession with how new technology can push filmmaking forward. I’m glad that we didn’t just get a three part, three hour documentary, and instead Jackson just did his thing.I also kind of wonder how much Disney knew about the final form of this documentary. Did they know that Jackson was going to drop a Frederick-Wiseman-sized behemoth on them?
I figure Disney execs knew that Beatles’ completionists would want more footage, not less. And streaming services are already desperate for content. Disney brass are probably happy if people just watch the first episode (which is movie-length anyway), nevermind the rest.
I’m pretty sure Jackson said in an interview that the original deal was a 2.5 hour theatrical release, but Covid nixed that plan and they decided just to go all-in with the change in format.
That’s pretty interesting. In some ways, this documentary is what streaming is for: a director doing whatever he wants with his chosen format for an audience of true believers. I would much rather have many more projects like Get Back than Red Notice.
More content that really didn’t cost any more, why wouldn’t Disney agree to a long running time?
The original was 2.5, but after Jackson got it down to 6 he said he couldn’t bear to cut any more since whatever didn’t make it in would go back in a vault for 50 years. (There’s an interview with Variety or someone.)
one gets the feeling he’s torn between serving two different audiences: the average viewer who wants a compelling narrative about a difficult and near-final chapter in the life of one of the all-time great bands, and Beatles aficionados who’d like nothing more than to spend as much time as possible with these musicians If you’re the former, watch the original documentary Let It Be. If you’re the latter, then this is the doc for you. I’m a lifelong Beatles fan, and this was everything I wanted and hoped for. I didn’t want it to end.
I know we like to blame men for everything bad but the bulk of beatles fans were girls and they loathed Yoko and Linda.
I think this would have benefited from two edits – much like Mark Lewisohn’s book(s). While I’m more than happy to watch all 3 episodes, my wife will not countenance more than, say, 2 hours of this kind of thing.Fortunately I have some excess annual leave that needs to be used up before the end of the year, so I think I may be signing up to Disney+ for one month and spending a full day with four lads who shook the world.
Yep, I’m halfway done, and enjoying it a lot (I’m not a fanboy, but I appreciate their music, and love music and music/recording technology). That said, I only watch it when the rest of the family isn’t around… they won’t enjoy it at all. You almost need 3 versions… the 1.5 hour version (for everyone), the 8 hour version (for people like me), and the 60/150 hour version (for the super fans).
Getting the skinny version probably doesn’t happen, but I’d love if they could give an extended cut at some point. Assuming all the footage was mastered, this shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe more final day stuff?
The 20 things I learned about, The Beatles while watching the first episode of Get Back on Disney+1. They smoke a lot and I mean a lot!2. Ringo is cool and laid back and doesn’t say much unless he thinks it’s important.3. Paul McCartney always takes charge. The other members follow his lead. He is the leader of The Beatles4. Paul McCartney writes most of the songs and he materializes them out of the air. It’s incredible to watch the birth of classic songs like, Get Back, The Long and Winding Road and Let It be, be created in real time.5. Credit to George Harrison who does the same thing, but seems to get blown off by the rest of the band.6. John Lennon is good at helping Paul write lyrics.7. John and Paul have a strong bond.8. George feels left out and seems a little resentful towards John and Paul’s close relationship.9. Yoko Ono is a stage 5 clinger.10. George and Paul disagree and argue over songs.11. John mocks Paul’s songs by singing them in a whinny voice. It comes off as if he’s jealous of Paul’s ability to quickly write good songs.12. Paul talks behind John’s back and jokes about Yoko Ono.13. George quits the band because Yoko Ono sits on his amplifier, but really he was just tired of the whole situation and that was the last straw. Later the rest of the band convinces him to return.14. Ringo is always early to rehearsal and John and Yoko are always late.15. John loves to joke around. He often acts very silly to make everyone laugh.16. Everything you heard about Yoko Ono is true. She’s like set dressing that’s always in your face. She’s a pest. You get the feeling no one wants her there expect John.17. There’s a never heard before heard audio from a hidden mic that recorded a conversation between John and Paul at lunch discussing George quitting the band. The audio is played over a picture of the inside of a café. It feels like you shouldn’t be hearing it. It’s nosy and it was meant to be private.18. At the time The Beatles hadn’t performed live in front of an audience in 3 years and they were planning one last epic performance in front of a thousands that would air on TV.19. Paul and Ringo both play on the same piano and it’s awesome.20. George Harrison gets an electric shock from a microphone.
Prove me wrong
I always imagine them as 4 brothers, and they were in a sense. And Ringo is the “normal” one who keeps the peace, rarely noticed, but when he speaks up or gets mad everyone notices.Hard to watch George smoking considering what happened to him 20 years ago today. I blame John more than Yoko, Yoko is definitely annoying but I have a feeling she doesn’t really know better, especially not being as musically experienced as them. She’s just a weird person who doesn’t get (or believe in) boundaries. John was just nasty and would crap on everyone else’s work long after this takes place. Some of it is the drugs, some of it is his own ego and insecurities. I gather that John was a much better lyricist than Paul, but Paul was a musical polymath and could do anything he set his mind to. Sometimes he ventured into corny ideas and John helped bring him down to earth, but John also was a bit more boxed in than Paul musically.
There’s a documentary on Hulu that’s just McCartney and Rick Rubin listening to the original tracks from a bunch of his songs, and based on that I’d agree with the point about him being a musical Polymath. I don’t understand most of what they’re saying, but they really get into the nuts and bolts about why the songs work as well as they do. Paul calls it something like “finding the notes that like each other” (I can’t remember his exact wording), but he seems to have an innate sense of how to bring different sounds and inspirations together that is beyond my comprehension… all I know is it sounds great when he’s done.
I love that documentary and it gave me a greater appreciation for Paul’s post-Beatles work. I think I always gave his producers credit for the hugeness of some of his Beatles songs, but I didn’t realize he came up with a lot of that grandiose instrumentation on the post-Beatles stuff on his own accord. He really learned a lot from George Martin.
One of my favorite Paul stories is how he had the melody to Yesterday all figured out, but for the lyrics he just had “Scrambled Eggs”. Also applicable for David St. Hubbins’ underrated piano masterpiece Lick My Love Pump
Goddamn you, Chomsky — Nigel wrote that!
Ah, yes. I didn’t want to type that into my work google
John was burned out from too much LSD at this point and maybe heroin. But up until Sgt Pepper, they were equals with John being the better lyricist and Paul the better melodist. But here it’s mostly Paul who wants the music to continue while John was heavily distracted and George resentful.
It seems like a lot of George’s resentment has shifted into apathy. Paul wants it, George is giving up. That diary entry was great. Also see the Scorsese film.
Yoko had also miscarried around a month earlier (at around the six month mark), so John was also distracted by the grief from that.
I think it was less that Yoko was a clinger and more that John wanted her there right next to him every second. She could have been sitting next to the Hare Krishna in the corner if John didn’t make a place for her right next to him.I doubt I’d want to go to work with my husband every day, even if he was a Beatle. She didn’t seem too thrilled to be there if she was reading the paper and the mail half the time.
That was my takeaway with Ono as well. She visibly does not want to be there – looking incredibly bored while everyone else bickers, looking at the mail and trying to keep herself entertained. – but it seems like John just wanted her around constantly and she obliged. And who the hell knows his motivations – it might be some sort of weird mind game.
Maybe he thought constant togetherness would help him avoid the problems of his first marriage? Maybe his mental issues made him think he needed constant support? Who knows.
Yep, sometimes silence and a dead pan facial expression says it all.
Yoko herself in the past has talked about how John basically refused to let her out of his sight if he could help it.
Yerp – there was a really great You’re Wrong About episode on this. Basically he was emotionally abusive and incredibly controlling, and couldn’t handle the idea that she had any life or autonomy without him so wanted to “keep an eye on her” while he was working.https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883952-yoko-ono-broke-up-the-beatles
That tracks with what I’ve heard, I just wasn’t confident enough to extensively reference something I read literally years ago.
Maybe, but it is telling how Paul & Ringo don’t need their girlfriends sitting right next to them almost 24/7
She was, and still is, a clingy, no-talent twit. And for some unknown reason, John needed that in his life.
I can’t prove anything, but I think #4 is probably very wrong. There’s even a point in Ep 1, right after George quits, when someone remarks that it must be hard for George that John and Paul are a songwriting team. And someone else chimes in that they don’t write together *anymore*. Also, most of Paul’s stuff was not made up on the spot. Let It Be already existed before these sessions, for example. That scene of Get Back coming into existence was pure magic, though.
Oh, would also add a 21 (or maybe replace your 20):21. Brian Epstein’s death was the beginning of the end. He was dad. After he died, the Beatles started managing themselves. This mean that de facto Paul was in charge, which the others resented. Perhaps it was fated to end anyway, but having someone to mediate between the personalities might have kept things going for longer (and with less friction).
I agree.
22. Billy Preston is also musical genius as he comes in and just plays songs he’s never heard before.
Ringo steals the movie Also, if I were another member of the Beatles I’d be pretty annoyed with John in that he makes everyone else have to deal with Yoko just sitting there knitting while they’re trying to work
I thought Ringo came off too cool for school but I like that about him.
Thank you for that time saving post.
Of the 213 officially originally released Beatles songs, John wrote 92, while Paul wrote 72. Now some of those, particularly the 45 original songs released on albums and singles between 1963 and 1964, were co-written, but I’m going basically by who sings lead. There are well known stories about John helping Paul write “We Can Work It Out” and Paul writing the chorus to “In My life”, while both “Yesterday” and “Across the Universe” arrived fully formed. Then there’s a song like “With a Little Help From My Friends” which was literally thrown together with suggestions from everyone in the room.Certainly, by the time of the Get Back sessions, Lennon’s contributions have slowed to a trickle, and throwaways like “Dig It” shouldn’t even count as songs. Paul has more songs on this album, yes, and they are better songs mostly, sure, but overall John wrote more.
There’s three Lennon songs on the album:One After 909 was written years before.Across The Universe had already been released and that version was remixed.Dig a Pony was a new song.IOW, Lennon was hardly writing at all.
Also “Everybody Had A Hard Year” was a fragment he didn’t know what to do with which was fashioned into the third verse of “I’ve Got A Feeling,” and “Dig It” which again isn’t really a song. So maybe 3 and a half songs for the album. Let’s not forget “Don’t Let Me Down” – the B-Side to “Get Back” and probably his best song from the project. But yeah, just a trickle compared to 1968. I mean, he was a doing a lot of heroin.
You’re the first I’ve seen still saying Yoko broke them up after watching this. Everyone else I’ve seen says what the review says: it’s a myth debunked by this.
It’s also a little weird that people are all like “god, how annoying that she was sitting there while they were trying to work,” and meanwhile there are constantly people everywhere, and the band spends a lot of time dicking around and having afternoon drinks. But yes, things obviously would have done much better if that one person hadn’t been around.
The other members of the band don’t even seem to notice her; of all the random annoyances they deal with she seems like the very least of their concerns. Personally I’m already sick of hearing it from the guy who wants them to play the concert in Libya and it doesn’t even affect me, he’s gotta be way higher up the annoyance scale than she is.
and perhaps she was of much help when George left… sure, many would say that the srhieking session was another Yoko weirdness, but I think it shows that the release they show in the documentary was much, much needed (and probably a good substitute to going and punching someone)…
I share an office with my friend. If he brought his wife every day, and she wasn’t intrusive or anything but just sat there a foot away from him all day, that would be weird. Not necessarily bad, but weird.
The documentary has Paul saying, “Well, they just love each other and want to be together, and you can’t fault them for that.” He specifically poo-poos the idea that Yoko broke them up. But I think it’s not out-of-bounds to call a spade a spade: it probably was annoying that she was always there.During the Abbey Road sessions later that year, John and Yoko were in a car accident, and Yoko was under doctor’s orders to stay in bed. So John INSTALLED A BED IN THE STUDIO. Again, it’s not exactly bad, but it crosses some nebulous boundary and it was probably weird and annoying.
I guess people feel the need to point to a specific cause when bad things happen, but blaming it all on Yoko Ono is pretty ridiculous. My understanding is that there were a variety of factors, the root causes were probably unavoidable. They were each extremely talented and creative people on their own and it’s very difficult to keep a group like that working together effectively. Brian Epstein managed to keep things together for a long time but without that leadership I don’t see how they wouldn’t have broken up. You can see in the documentary that Paul is trying to step into that void but moving from a peer to a leader rarely works even if you’re talking about a more normal work environment, it’s no surprise that he ends up pissing everyone off while getting annoyed that nobody else is taking shit as seriously as he is.
“My understanding is that there were a variety of factors, the root causes were probably unavoidable.”
At no point do I say Yoko Ono broke up the band. I’ll give you this, my opinions on her stem more by how I personally feel about her.
Apologies, I took the broke up the band inference from: “Everything you heard about Yoko Ono is true.”
Then you should have left your opinion of her out of your “recap” if you’re basing it on your feelings and not what we actually see in the special. She’s just sitting there and getting ignored.
Yeah, Paul literally jokes in the film about how “in 50 years people will be blaming Yoko for breaking us up because she sat on an amp”
I’ve only watched the first episode, but I kept getting the impression that Ringo was annoyed when George tried to get his songs in.
21. Sounds like you watched the movie.
The scene when Paul first comes up with Get Back is really remarkable.
Graham Nash On The Beatles – YouTube
The Beatles live or recorded are awesome. John was the leader. Who else could get George and Ringo to go along with him to Allen Klein. Paul saw Klein for what he was, a snake in the grass, a criminal. John’s drug use didn’t help. I believe Jackson somewhat whitewashed the Yoko stage 5 clinger thing.
16. Everything you heard about Yoko Ono is true. She’s like set dressing that’s always in your face. She’s a pest. You get the feeling no one wants her there expect John.I’d argue that the Peter Jackson cut puts to rest the myth that “Yoko broke up the Beatles” – if anything, it was the lack of a strong-willed manager like Brian Epstein combined with a general disrespect for George Harrison’s songwriting that were the driving factors.
(And yes, I found Yoko’s ‘singing’ to be obnoxious, so this isn’t an “in defense of Yoko” post, but more a rebuttal of point #16)
Re 12
Paul was being very dismissive of the idea that in 50 years people would be blaming her for breaking up the Beatles because she sat on an amplifier one time. I don’t think he made fun of her or put her down at all. Honestly, I was surprised how everyone seemed to get on so well – how John and Paul seemed really disappointed that they had hurt George, and were each blaming only themselves.
When I watched him just pulling Get Back out of nowhere I actually started to cry. I found it so very moving, it just blew me away.
You’ve misinterpreted things on point #13 Paul makes joking reference to “Yoko sitting on an amp” being potentially blamed for the Beatles breaking up in part two but George’s exit in part one is because of the dynamics between he, Paul and John while rehearsing. He does not leave because of Yoko.
Ringo doesn’t say much because he doesn’t have much to add beyond the odd, yet genius, malapropism.This documentary makes it super clear that he just plays the drums and is smart enough to realize what his place in the band really is and his distinct lack of ego (except for that one time he quit the band) likely helped the band stay together as long as they did.
Episode 2 Paul confides that he really has no problem with Yoko, and no one suggests at any point that her presence is unwelcome. If we believe the editing at least.
#16 – Yes, the clinging wife just doesn’t understand. 😡
22. Billy Preston is also musical genius as he comes in and just plays songs he’s never heard before.
How would anyone prove you wrong about things you learned about The Beatles. What are you in, fifth grade?
There’s a reason why your comments are pending. You’re an ass! lol
John wanted Yoko there. All she did was sit and keep her mouth shut. Paul has said multiple times over the years that the cracks in the band were always there and had nothing to do with Yoko. The narrative that she was a pest who had anything to do with the breakup (other than being the new focus of John’s attention) is and always has been misogynistic horseshit propagated mainly by white dudes with an overblown sense of ownership over a band that they had nothing to do with.That kind of treatment of Yoko had already started in the press at that time, and Paul’s line about Yoko sitting on an amp is clearly a (very prescient, well-observed) joke about how all the dudes I mentioned above would probably blame Yoko for something that wasn’t her fault, despite all the existing problems between the actual members of the band, which were more complicated and less salacious, and thus largely ignored compared to “Yoko is a screaming harpie who broke up my favorite band.”
At one point I thought there was gonna be a secret audio recording of The Beatles going to the bathroom. This is too much, Peter Jackson!
well John did kick off the meeting with the band for the project with an audiotape of him and Yoko having sex (not included in the show)
Jackson is saving that for the Chuck Berry documentary.
This is an interesting thing to review — it’s definitely in the realm of a B as something to watch: it’s definitely a lot, it drags to a crawl at points, and it’s best watched in the background while doing something else. But more than most documentaries, this thing isn’t meant to be a piece of entertainment, it’s meant to be a historical document that can be used as a primary source. I don’t know if a primary source can really be said to be bloated!
It’s essentially as unfiltered by editorial biases as documentary filmmaking can get — cutting down 60 hours of raw footage into 8 hours is such a wild return on investment, especially considering how much of that 60 hours would be silent downtime or further rehearsals. It’s just virtually everything notable during filmed during that three week period. In that frame, cutting it down to make it a tighter watch would make it fundamentally a different thing. It’d be easier to watch, but the completeness of the picture is ultra-interesting and valuable in its own right.
That’s how I saw it. It’s kind like a baseball game in that you just put it on in the background and then perk up when something exciting happens. I’ve also found that it’s really hard to stop when you put it on because it just has an incredible vibe to it.
Yeah I know hating on Yoko is “sexist” now, but it’s not hard to see how Yoko’s sudden inclusion in the inner circle (flipping through magazines, occasionally screaming) might raise a few eyebrows.
Look, not to be overly-picky, but the Paul improvisation while waiting for John was Get Back, not Let it Be. That was the standout moment of the series for me so far (through episode 2), and it really was great watching that go from inception to single with all the workshopping and light-bulb moments in between. I hadn’t really appreciated Get Back as much as other songs, and now I’ve listened to it a dozen times in the past 3 days. I had soured on McCartney at times, but now seeing him write a top hit on a 4-string bass while killing time….genius level.
Paul jamming Get Back into existence from thin air was both breathtaking and a moment we would never see in a music biopic, which would have done something likeJOHN: The Beaatles are in a doldrooms. We’ve goot to get back to where we once belonged.PAUL: Eh wot did you say lad?(Cut to BAND playing “Get Back” exactly like on the record.)On the other hand, if a biopic showed the creation of Octopus’s Garden exactly as it happened, it would have been dismissed as unrealistically precious.
The genesis of “Octopus’s Garden” and the family fun-time jam that erupts in its aftermath is one of the most joyful moments I’ve seen on film, easily my favorite 15 minutes of this film, and such a stark contrast to the manic, addled jam at the end of episode 1 after George quits.
I liked seeing George help Ringo with the song.
“This place is a mess! It looks like some multi-armed creature has been trying to dig up the floor! Like … like some sort of Octopus’s Garden!”“Eh wot did you say lad?”
The “Get Back” scene reminded me of the scene in the Sound City documentary where Paul starts fooling around on this weird 4-string electric slide guitar thing, and comes up with a riff, and then Grohl starts playing along and so does Novoselic, and very quickly Paul comes up with the verse to “Cut Me Some Slack,” which sounds like a Beatles b-side that Nirvana might’ve covered. That song is great!
if nothing else I hope that this documentary gets people to see that Paul is a true musical genius, a Mozart.
Eh… a Mendelsohn, let’s say. Let’s not go overboard!Actually, the best analogy would probably be Schubert (an amazing talent as a young songwriter).
John wasn’t around for the Get back “strumming” scene. As he strums, George and Ringo pick up and start playing along. It is, indeed, Let it Be he’s noodling on the piano whilst John discusses set designs. It was a very specific edit by Jackson to present it like that.
Hopefully PJ takes these lessons to heart for when he starts work on the Rutles documentary.
Fortunately for the documentarian, the Rutles filmed over 900 hours of rehearsal footage. Unfortunately, the Rutles rarely attended their own rehearsals.
Finally we can learn more about the 5th Rutle, whose name escapes me!
Leppo!
This felt like another example of a successful filmmaker that no one wanted to say no to. It was great. I enjoyed so much of it, but it was just a little bit too long. On the one hand, seeing Paul interact with Linda and her daughter was lovely and sweet. But then we had to watch Heather continue to run around the studio for slightly longer than it was endearing or cute. We got to hear Paul and John’s secretly recorded lunch chat about George, but then had to spend a ton of time with them not doing much of anything.For me, the real highlights were watching them actually write. I think it was Part 3 where Ringo is playing Octopus’s Garden on the piano and George is trying to help him resolve it. Or George talking to John about not knowing what word to use in Something. Those are the places where hindsight is most exciting. If everything around it had been tighter all the better.The concert portion was excellent because of the editing choices. We just needed those types of choices elsewhere
Heather had more lines than Linda and Yoko combined, I think, and that was too many.
At first I was like, aww it’s nice to see Dad Paul even before he was officially her dad and the moment when she’s just straight up screaming and John off camera goes “Yoko?” priceless. After that, we needed an editor.
The craziest bit, that no-one seems to have mentioned – and it’s almost verging on self-parody – they REPEAT the scenes of the wee girl dancing around, IN A FLASHBACK SEQUENCE (the colours slightly desaturated and a little vignette around the corner of the frame) as they listen to the tapes the following day. It’s an unintentionally hilarious choice. Your documentary is eight hours long and you thought we needed to see some of it twice.
And props to Peter Jackson for having the time and inclination to restore the material. That is a good thing archivally if nothing else.Great filmmaking? Maybe not.
Lindsay-Hogg, a colorfully blue-blood raconteur who comes across like a young Orson Welles in disguise…Funny you should say that: (from the Wikipedia article on Lindsay-Hogg):“When Michael Lindsay-Hogg was 16, his mother reluctantly divulged that there had been pervasive rumours that his father was Orson Welles, and she denied them—but in such detail that he was left confused and dubious.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lindsay-Hogg
confused and dubiousThe AV Club
Eight hours of fan service. Even my passionate Beatle-loving coworker was bored.
I could have watched much more of this, personally. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would want it to be, it’s sort of a gallery installation that they would have headphones set up with that places you very specifically into that place and time. Not for everybody it would seem, but dang it’s for me.
I heard about this on the radio last week, was going to watch it over the weekend but kept putting it off because its so long.
Hey, Alex, you epitomize everything wrong with this shit site.Go fuck yourself up the ass with a rusty metal can, you utter clueless cunt.
Maybe the Beatles were always overrated and taking a few more chunks off this long dead carcass and trying to make a watchable series was always gonna turn out this way.
*swims past*
This comment has big “Principle Skinner insisting to himself it’s the children who are wrong” energy.
Found the hipster, everyone!
There have always been two camps (at least) when it comes to Get Back material: the ones who are already pointing to their huge stack of bootleg CDs while talking about the things Jackson left out, and the ones who look the first person’s stack, ask “How many CDs that is again?”, then rubbing their temples and shaking their heads when they get the answer.I was in for the whole thing, and was pleased with the results, but they could plausibly come up with a parallel “theatrical” edit that trimmed it to just the highlights for a more casual viewer. The attempt wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, as long as we get to have both.Meanwhile, Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone is talking about fantasy 18-hour edits this morning, and I can’t decide if there’s a streak of sadism or masochism in that impulse.
“How many CDs that is again?”83. It’s called “A/B Road.”
8-9 hours of “Breakfast with the Beatles” where 10 minutes can be spent on the genius sound of Paul dropping his guitar.
I will say that amphitheater in Libya looks awesome tho it was a ridiculously inane and impractical suggestion. Especially after like the 50th time it was proposed lol
What impressed me is just how great it looks. It looks like it was done two weeks ago, not 50 years ago. And the “you are there”aspect is fantastic. The thing that really stood out to me is the obvious frustration of George Harrison, who really seemed upset that his songs have been getting the short end of the stick. It really sheds some new light that maybe even Paul McCartney might revisit and watch as to why they broke up, as he barely ever mentioned any problems with George in interviews. You get the real sense Paul and John considered themselves the creative team and maybe did not recognize that George had grown into someone who could write great songs too.
My wife summarized it really well: “Episode 1 was cool seeing the process and then George Harrison said he’s quitting the band because Yoko was giving a ton of comments” “Oh cool, did anything else happen?” “No.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if when the Blu-Ray comes out (prob in time for Xmas), there will be 2 versions of this doc. available. The full version (as seen on Disney+), and an edited down version, to maybe 3 hours or so.It was originally intended to be a film released to theaters, but was canceled due to the pandemic, so it’s possible that there is already a shorter edited version available.
was never a beatles guy but i’m finding this extremely watchable. would be great to have on during a party or something.
For those who aren’t Beatles fanatics, I’d suggest starting half-way through the second episode, right around the time that Billy Preston joins them. All the bad vibes go out the window and they get down to business, and then the third episode is nearly complete gold.I”m a Beatles fan, I loved eery second and can’t wait to watch it again.
Random thoughts:1. I don’t think a non-Beatle fan could watch this. I find it slow in places, but I’m enjoying it overall about halfway through.
2. I had no idea that George had written All Things Must Pass or John had written Gimme Some Truth by this time. I’d like to imagine them on Let It Be after removing 2 of the weaker tracks.3. I don’t generally like beards, but Paul was super cute with his.
4. I wish we could have a full version of them covering “I Shall Be Released.”5. It seems like the least feminist thing possible to sit around all day at your husband’s job. I guess they weren’t that revolutionary.
Please, there’s no universe where “All Things Must Pass” is a better song than “Maggie Mae.”
I’m not really a Beatles fan per se and I’m enjoying it very much just as a study of the creative process.
Something that stood out for me was what Jackson did so well in They Shall Not Grow Old, making the last seem like today. The Beatles could be four guys from 2021 hanging out, their clothes, their hair, the way they talk is very contemporary. The ones that stand out as from another age are the people on the streets of London in ep 3. Either Gor Blimey Gov types of posh upper class twits. The director of the original doc, Michale Lindsay-Hogg is also a bit of a posh oddity. Some of his statements were daft and the Beatles were clearly in their best behaviour as you thought they might tell him to F off a few times! Yoko just say there – although when she burst into wailing it was… startling! I found George a bit passive aggressive at times and yes, Paul was pretty bossy at times but probably not much more aggro than most bands where everyone is creative. I found hanging out with the guys just wonderful and so vital and alive – all the more tragic John and George died too young
Perhaps my favorite moment from the whole thing: Michael Lindsay-Hogg pitches Paul and Ringo on some other crazy idea for the special, and after some silence Ringo turns to George Martin and says, “I just farted. I wasn’t going to say anything but then I thought I should tell you.” And it’s the end of the conversation.
The Beatles are clearly an industry plant worthy of The Linda Lindas, but perhaps I’ve said too much?
If I have one gripe (and it’s a very minor one), it’s that I would rather he had skipped all the split screen during the rooftop sequence at the end. I really don’t care what people on the street thought about the Beatles or what was happening; history had made their opinions irrelevant. I would’ve much preferred a focus on the actual performance, minus the chatter.Otherwise, this was amazing, and I would gladly watch another 8 hours without hesitation.
I made it halfway through before I couldn’t take it any more.
I’ll save people some time if they don’t want to watch it:John is definitely dopey and high and even a bit timid. Probably heroin.Yoko is sitting there next to the 4 Beatles as they rehearse all of the frickin’ time and it’s super weird to see people just tolerate it.
Paul is the only one driving the sessions forward and if you look at the finished album 80% of the songs that matter are Paul’s. But he gets bossy and you can feel the way George is under-appreciated by him.
George quits, then comes back. He doesn’t really know what to do and, if anyone, he benefits the most from going solo.
Ringo is happy to be there and pretty chill.
I think the lasting impression that I came away with was how much Paul wanted John’s input and approval and vice versa. They really are pals and they respect each other as equals. They don’t feel that way about George and Ringo who they seem to think of as their little brother and hired hand, respectively.
Watching the Beatles screw around, make dumb jokes, and play snippets of their songs and lots of other people’s songs sounds like it would be fun, but not for hour after hour after hour.
Props to Peter Jackson and his team who did an amazing job restoring the footage. The clarity is amazing. Just wish he had cut 30% of the random bits and tightened this up a whole lot. It could have been amazing.
I think this whole perpetuates the myth of Let It Be/ The Get Back sessions as “the end” when it wasn’t. They made Abbey Road after those sessions fell apart. Then Lennon gave the tapes for the abandoned album to Phil Spector. These sessions are the penultimate Beatles recording period but because Let It Be came out as a Spector addled afterthought, everyone thinks of it as the final record when it is certainly not. That’s only been bothering me for 30 years.
In the Anthology I think it’s Ringo who says that after the problems with Get Back, they all implicitly knew they only had one album left in them as a band, and as a result the making of Abbey Road was a genuinely enjoyable experience.
As a musician who, unlike that McCartney fellow who just wakes up with Yesterday (well, the melody) in his head and who follows the Paul Westerberg example of just going in the basement and forcing yourself to write, watching McCartney specifically work and figure out songs is incredible.
In Sound City, Dave Grohl laughs after Paul writes “Cut Me Some Slack” and he says, “I wish it was always that easy.” Paul’s response? “It is!”
Some folks just have that knack and others labor at it I guess.
The Get Back is an obvious example, but it was equally great during Don’t Let Me Down when Paul tells John that the “I’m in love for the first time” bit serves better as a middle-8/bridge, instead of as a verse. John just accepts it immediately and shifts the song. It was such a great example of how those two helped edit each other’s work far after they’d stopped writing together.
“Writing together” comes in many, many forms…
Everybody talks about all the inter-band conflicts but my main take away was how how over being the Beatles were to them. They were the biggest band in the universe and came out with Sgt Peppers just two years before, what else did they have to do? The sessions felt less like a band enjoying being with each other and playing their music but more like work. Like they were just doing the album because they didn’t know what else they were supposed to do. A lot of the sniping, I felt, was because none of them really wanted to be there.
Indeed, the candid talk amongst Lindsay-Hogg, George Martin, Mal Evans et al said a lot of things that the 4 band members could not.
I’m a Beatles fan. Not a huge, super-fan, but my parents were Beatles fans and my dad looked a lot like George and was 10 years younger than George. So I grew up listening to the Beatles and developed my own appreciation for them. It’s fascinating to think they were ~25-28 at this time and they recorded all their output in only 8 years!So… I was ready to watch a long doc full of minutiae. I think it would be good for them to put together a 2-1/2 hour cut for people that aren’t big fans of the Beatles or the creative process in general. It would be less intimidating and it might spark that interest for some!But for anyone that gave up before Billy Preston shows up (about halfway through the 2nd episode), the atmosphere completely changes. Part 1 in Twickenham is hard to watch, they’re all frustrated, *I* felt frustrated watching them, but that’s just what it was. It’s interesting to see that, then the change when they move to Apple studios where a lot of the frustration starts to ebb away, then when Billy Preston walks in and it’s like *BANG*! You see them make progress on those songs they were slogging through for so long.
I don’t have an answer on how to pair 150 hours of audio with 60 hours of film, but surely there was a better option than endlessly reversing/ AI-tinkering-with/ re-using shots (particularly reaction shots) with no regard for continuity. The abandonment of continuity – *Ringo is there* – *cut away* – *Ringo is gone, but the empty drum kit still roars* – was too much of a distraction for me during large swaths of the series. Perhaps leaving much of the audio of questionable import on the cutting room floor would have yielded a more fruitful ratio, and a more compelling presentation. The end result feels needlessly bloated and a bit sloppy.
In particular, when it comes to this doc humanizing the Beatles, you can see for yourself that they’re still in their 20s w/ their thinking. Musical genius aside, they’re young men w/ life experiences, sure but still a lack of understanding in relationships that only comes w/ age & shifting perspective. My appreciation for all of them evened out from this doc; no martyrs, no monsters, just fallible people fumbling their way through life as many of us do (but w/ loads more money & sometimes heroin).
PJ turning George into comic relief and having him fart and drink and belch and fall of of horses is really a bridge too far!
Ringo always had bird shit in his mustache.
Plus Glyn Johns wasn’t even at the battle of Helm’s Deep, what’s up with that?
I mean, I think this should be for the diehard fans. What non-Beatles fan or even casual fan would want to watch this for more than 90-120 minutes anyway?As a big Beatles fan (but not necessarily a superfan; certainly couldn’t name you every song on Let It Be), I absolutely adored this. Sure, it sometimes gets a bit long winded, like when they run through endless jams or keep playing Don’t Let Me Down, but there’s just so much incredible footage. Paul making up Get Back on the spot, first glimpses at Jealous Guy and All Things Must Pass, the guys just hanging out cracking jokes and bantering, the final rooftop performance.I probably could have watched at least four more hours of this and enjoyed every second of it.
My main ‘revelation’ from watching this is actually realising just how young they were through old. Ringo is the old man of the group and he’s only 28. George is writing Something and All Things Must Pass, and he’s only 25. Paul is taking up the slack and becoming the leader and he’s still only 26. It’s just insane how incredibly talented and impossibly young they were all were.
I saw this boomer wank session show up on Disney+ and was like “Nope”. I doubt this doc tells us anything new that the other thousand docs about your parents/grandparents favorite overrated band.
GET OFF MY LAWN!
This has been said elsewhere, but seeing Paul come up with Get Back out of the blue was nuts. I am a mild Beatles song (hadn’t ever listened to Abbey Road or Let it Be before), but I was hooked all the way through.
OK, Millennial.
Late Gen X but my point stands
Oh shit, I used to LOVE your Pitchfork articles!
Found the millennial everyone!
The millenial?
Hi there ScottyEnn, welcome to 2021. Things suck, but at least no one bitches about millenials anymore. Here’s your “how to hate Zoomers” pamphlet.
Actually Gen X. Had to put up with Beatles wanking for over 40 years.
Who’s your favorite band, little boy?
I’m Gen X, and yes, I did learn a number of new things about the Beatles.
I find it hard to quantify a “favorite band”. I like a lot of music styles and artistsJust thinking off the top of my head. I’d say bands or artists I enjoy a lot are Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Beastie Boys, Beck, Daft Punk, Iron Maiden. I don’t hate the Beatles. I just think they are overrated and tired of hearing boomers tell is they are “the best band ever”
David Bowie and Black Sabbath were definitely inspired/influenced by the Beatles, so be glad they existed.
I’m sorry that you had to be reminded of The Beatles’ existence while you were racing to jerk off to the latest episode of Hawkeye.
If this isn’t a masterclass in trolling for outrage replies I feel sad that you don’t like The Beatles.
…but you ARE a boomer…
It was rather alarming when the Sumatran rat-monkey got loose at Twickenham.
Along with a robust viewing experience, I appreciate the film’s effect of making me go listen to a lot of their respective solo efforts again (and some for the first time).
I personally enjoyed the first episode but there were some parts where it just cut too much too often. It was very distracting and felt like I was watching old school 1990s-2000s MTV.
I thought the edit did a good job of showing how extraordinarily tedious and brain mushifying the entertainment business is about getting any project done. Showing the entire rooftop concert was cool though.
Why are they so bad at playing together? Did they normally record their albums by layering the instruments together and then putting on the vocals? They don’t sound like a group that’s been playing with one another for over a decade.
Yeah, their last concert was 3 years prior in San Francisco. Even from ‘63 on, most of their concerts were evidently garbage. They didn’t have modern PA systems and couldn’t hear each other. One of their entire sets was only 16 minutes long because they’d just race through all the songs to get off stage. I think they all went on record saying that they were tightest as an actual band in the early years, aka Hamburg or the Cavern.
I read somewhere that they hadn’t really played together as a band since ‘66 as Sgt Peppers was mainly a studio thing and the White Album mostly solo stuff.
Yeah by the time of the White Album they would do a basic backing track as a full band (though often John would be absent if it wasn’t his song) and then the writer of the song would work away at it, adding layers of instruments.
Except, they all got together in a little cubby hole to record John’s “Yer Blues” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and they liked the feeling of those so they thought they’d try it again with the Get Back sessions. But writing , rehearsing and performing 14 new songs that way evidently was too much.
For Abbey Road it seems like they recorded all of the songs together but through overdubs Paul completely replaced virtually every instrument on every one of his songs, and Ringo went back and re-did any drum parts he thought were off, and George rethought all of his solos, so there’s very little of the original band recordings in there by the end.
They hadn’t played live together, or recorded songs off the floor in ~3 years at that point. This was well established at the beginning.
Here’s a thing: Band practice is important!
On the one hand, we have a group of people widely considered to be geniuses to varying degrees… so we expect them to shit magic, stop for coffee, come back, and shit more magic before lunch!On the other hand, the tightest band you’ll ever be in or experience – regardless of the level of talent involved – practices 2-3 times at minimum per week. If they stop for a week or two, there will be a drop off – one that roughly corresponds with that talent level thing and what the individuals do between practice. (That’s literally just “rust” and it’ll probably be gone after two weeks back in the routine.) If they stop for more than two weeks, they’ll probably sound like microwaved eggs for a few practices.
Put that in the context of The Beatles: They don’t actually shit magic. And by the time of this doc, they probably weren’t having what we think of as “band practice” with any regularity because why would they? So “rust” was very, very real for them… Then throw in the third hand: The biggest band in the world was trying to write, learn, and perfect an album’s worth of new material in two weeks. That would be a tall order if everyone in the room came in with 3-5 songs fully demoed. They came in with almost nothing!
I sat through the entire thing. My wife who had been the consummate Beatles fan tracking down imports etc saw all of the 2nd and 3rd parts.After we finished, we brought in our daughter to watch the last part of part 3 from the start of the concert onward, that seems to be good piece for casual fans.
The Yoko-as-devil trope always seemed rooted in sexism and racism to me. But I’m having second thoughts after watching eight hours of her feigned indifference as she flipped through magazines while the Beatles were kicking out the jams. It’s weird. It’s rude. It’s kind of obnoxious.
I liked “This is Spinal Tap” better.
Given the choice between casual fans and Beatles completists, I’d rather a documentary be made to satisfy the latter not the former.Casual fans can fuck off.
Forget Orson Welles, Lindsay-Hogg also comes across as overbearing and often damn-near insufferable. He’s so convinced of that fucking torch-lit concert in front of a bunch of “Arabs,” he simply will not let it go. I think one of the more telling moments in the whole thing is when Lennon silently listens to Lindsay-Hogg going on about the show, and Lennon looks like he’s sliding into deep loathing.
Votes have been tallied.Results are in:People love the bloat.
So is it true that if you play ‘Get Back’ in reverse it says, “They’ve taken Paul to Isengard”?
The original Let it Be movie mad me sad and the rooftop scene felt like the end of the Beatles. As this documentary showed the seeds of Abbey Road which the recorded after the GetBack sessions. It’s amazing how good they were until the end. I really felt for George because he had always been overshadowed by Lennon/McCartney, but his songs really show how good he was.
Ive enjoyed watching this and admittedly am a huge Beatles fan. I like Jackson’s straightforward reconstruction of the chronology of the sessions very much. Lots of good comments and threads here too. The one Id like to add is to imagine the context of the larger conceit of the original project — staging a performance of some kind. This context is one that pre-dates Woodstock (and Altamont) and follows closely the original Isle of Wight and Monterey festivals. Rock shows were in their infancy and no one had really figured them out the way that we came to know them just a few years after. The Beatles famously gave up on performing because everything about the performance (venue, audience, musicianship, sound reproduction, pre-determined tour schedules) was awful. By the time we get to these Get Back sessions, they all (except George) grudgingly admit that they should get back on stage, but none of them are fully into it — even Paul admits his apprehension at one point. And all of those rotten things about touring and live performance hadn’t yet become secondhand to every band going.
The process of staging a good show at that time belonged to other bands — Id suggest the Who at this point were outstanding, as were the Motown bands and perhaps the San Fransisco scene bands. It looked like the Beatles were realizing that to do a live show meant rethinking their whole interest in the enterprise — is it about the spectacle of it (like Lindsey-Hogg wanted with his torches and Roman amphitheatres) or is it about performing high quality live music to an audience not comprised of 12 year olds? Clearly just doing the next LP was losing its appeal — as great as Abbey Road is, none of the Beatles talked about it as reverently as the critics or fans. The couple of years head start the Beatles had as a band maybe put them in this spot — they innovated so much in terms of studio artistry, moving pop music into the critical realm, etc., but consistently good live rock shows came just after.
This is a great observation. They were *just* on the edge of the arena era — The Who, Zep, etc figuring out massive PAs/stageshows and all that. Hell, Harrison himself helped define it with Concert for Bangladesh just a year or so later. And of course Paul most successfully adapted to it pretty quickly. But yeah, they were still very stuck in the studio mindset, with only a few years of shitty touring/crappy stage tech to immediately recall. Fitting that the rooftop gig is more akin to a Cavern or Hamburg show than the circus of a Shea.
Sexist? Please! Yoko absolutely was wrongfully accused of breaking up the Beatles, but that’s not a gender wars thing. That’s an individual personality thing. I’ve never heard a female Beatles fan, other than Helen Hunt, not rag on Yoko.
It should have been one 90-minute episode. Then, in a few years, if the public demanded it, it could have been expanded and rereleased and “Get Back – Taylor’s 10 Hour Version”).Seriously, it it way too long, but OTOH, I would have liked to hear the completed versions of the songs as the were finished recording them. Cut out the needless noodling of cover songs and the never-ending hard-sell of the desert amphitheater (and Yoko’s toast. Always with the toast).
Reading the comments below, I’m surprised. Does anyone really still believe at this point that Yoko “broke up the Beatles”? She was a benign influence throughout those sessions. It was probably more disruptive bringing the annoying children into the room than it was bringing her.
Tea. Toast. Cigarettes.
Glossed over is the moment Paul McCartney gets into music publishing and buys catalogs of music to gain royalties which made him millions. He was, in fact, the smartest of the group. (Fiction: He never owned the rights to Happy Birthday no matter what Facebook says.)
So ironic how you write a bloated, spoiler-packed review of Get Back, while complaining about Get Back being bloated by Jackson.
But you did get to use the word “verisimilitude.”
This doesn’t have anything to do with The Beatles series, but I wanted to say this nonetheless. Peter Jackson does make long movies, but it kinda bothers me that the author is acting like he was solely responsible for what happened with The Hobbit trilogy. They set out to make a two part film, which I think could’ve been done very well.The first major problem was that he was brought onto the project very, very late and not given the additional time that it would’ve taken to make two movies at the level of storytelling quality that we saw in the original LotR trilogy. With the LotR trilogy, he and his team were able to take years for pre-production. With The Hobbit duology, I’m fairly certain he was brought on right around or just under 2 years away from the release date of the first film. Absolute insanity for a duology of that scope. They were under such ridiculous time crunch that they were writing the script during production, and they literally ran out of script to film one day and had to halt production, leading to the studio deciding they’d make it a trilogy to essentially buy them some time to figure out how they were going to wrap up the story.So studio practices that are wildly ignorant of reality paired with some of Peter Jackson’s existing affinity for long movies is how we got the intensely bloated, narratively haphazard Hobbit trilogy. I really feel bad for Peter Jackson with how everything went down, because he was robbed of a chance to do justice to a franchise that he had poured so much of himself into.
My main takeaway from this doc is…I’ve been in many, many unsuccessful bands and I never realized how much in common my bands had with the Beatles! We did everything they did except write legendary songs.The waiting…oh the waiting for band members to show up. Or not show up. Or show up 2 hours late. For studio techs to set up mics. I’ve had to deal with managers and weirdo hanger-onners and it was nice to see that the Beatles had to deal with the same riff raff I did.I tell you, if I had a Paul McCartney in any of my bands, I would’ve been huge! Huge I say!
As someone who was not around at the time of the Beatles but is a big fan of Peter Jackson I was very annoyed as soon as they announced that this wasn’t going to be one film but a three part two hour documentary. Here comes the Peter Jackson bloat again.I enjoyed part one and thought it was very similar to The Fellowship of the Ring with the mystical and helpful George leaving the band at the end of Part One, I was satisfied.But there’s not enough narrative here for three parts maybe two 3 hour documentaries but not 3. As soon as I saw the 3 hour mark on part two I’m like crap.I get that if you just want a regular two hour documentary watch Ron Howard’s Beatles Eight Days a Week it’s fantastic, but C’mon. 2 hours could have been cut.And to Alex McLevy; I’m a feminist and I went into this thing with an open mind. I believe Paul when he said on Howard Stern that John Lennon broke up the Beatles, but to act like there’s nothing there to me is ridiculous. I understand the nobility of Sir Peter Jackson to correct a lot of the sexist fueled arguments about Yoko. But to see her sit there in the middle and add nothing then wail like a Witch from Left 4 Dead (no exaggeration if you’ve played the game) even if she was tolerated and welcomed by Paul and jammed with Ringo you see George doesn’t approve (he misses it, as Paul says).I would say the Doc makes it John’s responsibility and he looks a bit like a coward having Yoko speak for him a lot, but it’s not like there’s nothing there.
I loved every second and I would watch 8 hours more. The biggest reveal for me was what a prince Ringo was. When he made the comment about loving to watch Paul play. How great to feel that way after what they have all been through- bullshit and drama and unparalleled fame. To still find joy and recognize something beautiful right in front of you. It seems like John was for whatever reason unavailable. Yoko was his fault. George was sick of their shit and Paul was the only one producing. And that British people (then, at least) have the loveliest arguments. I wonder if anyone could find even three consecutive hours of the Gallagher brothers to start from. Maybe in 30 years someone will find footage of a 45 minute fistfight between Liam and Noel.
I will say it was interesting to realize that Paul who started as “the cute Beatle” grew a beautiful beard and morphed into “the hot Beatle”. That may have been frustrating for the rest them.