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Get Back, Part III
Nov. 30th, 2021 10:50 amRight at the start of Part 3, Peter Jackson gives his audience not one but two great feel-good-montages, Ringo coming in with the basics for "Octopussy's Garden" and George giving him feedback and helping him, and then Linda's little daughter Heather, who was one of the rare beams of sunshine in the original Let it Be movie already, charming the socks of both band and audience by dancing around in the recording studio, drumming with Ringo (while discovering they wear matching outfits), earnestly discussing why you don't eat kittens with John, making Paul throw her into the air, and after observing Yoko on the mike deciding to imitate her (causing John to delightedly say "Yoko!" and Yoko to smile).
In general, this is the most light hearted episode, aside from the inevitable reality subtext, i.e. many of these people are still dead, we know the band will collapse within the year, etc. Also, Peter Jackson, otherwise not exactly known for his subtlety, somehow restrains himself from adding sinister bass notes in the scene where John raves about Allen Klein and tells the rest of the gang how wonderful he is. ("He knows me as well as you do!" Which, btw, should be a compliment to official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, because Klein's preparation for that crucial first meeting with John that led to his off screen first meeting with the Beatles had been to read Davies' biography, published in the year before.) But he does give us the full scene. Also the scene the day after, when the Beatles met Klein off screen, and John is still in "wow, is he awesome!" mode while recording engineer Glyn Johns, bless, tries to insert a liiiiiittle note of caution by pointing out Allen Klein has this irritating habit with non-Beatles people in interrupting them mid sentence and talking about something else as he's not interested in what they have to say. Alas, they don't listen, and George just says that Klein "comes across as a con man, but one who's on our side for a change" (as opposed to all the other con men who weren't).
(Sidenote: no, I don't think Allen Klein singlehandedly destroyed the Beatles, and he definitely didn't intend to. He'd wanted them since when Brian Epstein was still alive and had even then tried to make contact, and he sure as hell wanted to keep the world's most popular band to make money from. I also think that even if Klein had not existed, there's no way the other three would have gone for Paul's alternate suggestion, his soon to be in-laws, Eastman & Eastman, as new managers, not because Lee Eastman, who'd go on to make a great deal of money for Paul McCartney for the next few decades, wasn't competent - his law firm specialized in musical properties -, but because short of never seeing Linda again, there's no way Paul could have made the other three believe the Eastmans wouldn't favor him. All this being said: in terms of sheer business, there's a reason why John, George and Ringo all ended up sueing Allen Klein themselves in the 70s. And in terms of 1969 human dynamics, Allen Klein made the fatal mistake of believing winning John over, but not Paul,was enough, and to use bullying tactics to make Paul cave.And thereby he, Klein, contributed - not caused, but contributed - to ending the golden goose he'd been after for years.)
Thankfully, though, Allen Klein, like Magic Alex, does not actually show up other than in discussion and as a photograph, and we can focus on the music being made getting into better and better shape. One thing all three parts make clear is how collaborative between all four (plus the recording engineers) everything was, from the first to the final stages of a song; here, for example, you get George after a run through Let it Be saying that the lead guitar and the piano essentially do the same thing and there should be a somewhat different arrangement, or Paul confessing that his initial idea for The Long and Winding Road had been as a Ray Charles song, and he can't figure out a way to get it out the way he hears it in his head, with pro and contra strings voices being raised long before the shade of Phil Spector will darken the Beatles' doorstep. And then we get to the grand climax: the Rooftop Concert. Which is perhaps the sequence most resembling Lindsay-Hogg's take in the Let it Be movie, though Jackson adds more material featuring the first two, then three policemen coming to the scene, including their names, which strikes me as something very typical for this entire three parter - everyone, bit players and celebrities alike, is treated as a human being, not a cardboard illustration. We also get roadie Mal Evans negotiating with the coppers, being amazingly diplomatic and wily.
(This is again poignant for rl reasons. If you want to be depressed, google how Mal Evans will die a few years later.)
It's striking that most of the people in the street interviewed by the three camera teams positioned down there are able to recognize the music they're hearing are the Beatles. Bear in mind these are (nearly) all new songs, so it's not like they would have recognized the tunes the way many of a current day audience would - but they can recognize the voices and the sound. That's how present in in the public mind they were, through the ages. While you get the occasional grumbler, most of the people interviewed, whether 70 or teenagers, all are enthusiastic. The old man asked after he praised their music and the guys themselves whether he'd let his daughter marry one of them gets point for best reply: "'Sure I would. They got money!"
And on the accessible roofs in the surrounding buildings, you can see more and more people getting up there to listen, just like the people down in the street. January cold or not, it must have been a magic half an hour. Though the cold made me flinch for all the women wearing 1960s miniskirts. BTW, I always liked the detail that Maureen, Ringo's wife, was present, because she'd started out as a fan in the Cavern, all the way back in Liverpool. So I felt she represented the fans who'd been there from the start and now were there at what would turn out their last ever public performance. She's also unabashedly rocking along with enthusiasm the few times the camera shows her. (That's why you can hear Paul say "Thanks, Mo" - for her applause - on the Let It Be album. When she died, he wrote the song Little Willow with a dedication to her children in her memory.)
Speaking of the wives, the three episode capture several tender moments for each couple, hand holding, embraces, kisses, and perhaps it's the way Jackson intersperses it but it always feels natural, not staged. Apropos another comment, I recalled that both Yoko and Linda in January 1969 were pregnant - Linda with future Mary McCartney the photographer, and Yoko with the child she'd lose in March.
Another constant feature is how physically comfortable the guys are with each other, though this comes more to the fore in the Apple studio than in the spacey Twickenham area. But there's a lot of arms around each other's shoulders - Ringo/Everyone else being the most common variation - and in last episode even an improvised dance. I don't mean this negates that there are also tensions, but it's basically the body language of people who know each other inside out and have lived in tiny spaces with each other. It's this along with the constant banter and goofing around - which sometimes is friendly and sometimes passive-aggressively, but basically two thirds of the dialogue with each other - that the various fictional takes on the Beatles I've seen and read rarely if ever capture.
(Telling exception: the tv movie Two of Us directed by, wait for it, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. That one also has very artificial passages - as when Paul and John occasionally exposition to each other, like John telling Paul his childhood trauma (dead mother, absent Dad), which, you know, Paul actually was familiar with) - but mostly the dialogue has that rl chit chat feeling of two thirds jokes, with and without hidden digs, and one third emotional rawness.)
Since there was one more day after the rooftop concert in which they recorded takes on he songs they didn't play on the rooftop, but the rooftop concert is the unbeatable climax, Peter Jackson, by now experienced n the problem of epilogues, does something very clever - he uses footage of that last day to run on split screen with the credits, which means you do watch the credits (which take some time, seeing as they have to cover both the 1969 original film crew and the 2021 team) without any of the impatience of, say, a MCU movie. The very last song Jackson uses is, of course, Let it Be, with the take used on the album. (I should add here that throughout the last two episodes, subtitles tell you when you're watching a take that ends up on the album.)
In conclusion: I still can't imagine how this feels for non-fans, but watching it was a tremendous experience for me, and I'm really glad the Hobbitmeister from New Zealand got his hands on those 60 plus hours of joy and heartbreak.
In general, this is the most light hearted episode, aside from the inevitable reality subtext, i.e. many of these people are still dead, we know the band will collapse within the year, etc. Also, Peter Jackson, otherwise not exactly known for his subtlety, somehow restrains himself from adding sinister bass notes in the scene where John raves about Allen Klein and tells the rest of the gang how wonderful he is. ("He knows me as well as you do!" Which, btw, should be a compliment to official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, because Klein's preparation for that crucial first meeting with John that led to his off screen first meeting with the Beatles had been to read Davies' biography, published in the year before.) But he does give us the full scene. Also the scene the day after, when the Beatles met Klein off screen, and John is still in "wow, is he awesome!" mode while recording engineer Glyn Johns, bless, tries to insert a liiiiiittle note of caution by pointing out Allen Klein has this irritating habit with non-Beatles people in interrupting them mid sentence and talking about something else as he's not interested in what they have to say. Alas, they don't listen, and George just says that Klein "comes across as a con man, but one who's on our side for a change" (as opposed to all the other con men who weren't).
(Sidenote: no, I don't think Allen Klein singlehandedly destroyed the Beatles, and he definitely didn't intend to. He'd wanted them since when Brian Epstein was still alive and had even then tried to make contact, and he sure as hell wanted to keep the world's most popular band to make money from. I also think that even if Klein had not existed, there's no way the other three would have gone for Paul's alternate suggestion, his soon to be in-laws, Eastman & Eastman, as new managers, not because Lee Eastman, who'd go on to make a great deal of money for Paul McCartney for the next few decades, wasn't competent - his law firm specialized in musical properties -, but because short of never seeing Linda again, there's no way Paul could have made the other three believe the Eastmans wouldn't favor him. All this being said: in terms of sheer business, there's a reason why John, George and Ringo all ended up sueing Allen Klein themselves in the 70s. And in terms of 1969 human dynamics, Allen Klein made the fatal mistake of believing winning John over, but not Paul,was enough, and to use bullying tactics to make Paul cave.And thereby he, Klein, contributed - not caused, but contributed - to ending the golden goose he'd been after for years.)
Thankfully, though, Allen Klein, like Magic Alex, does not actually show up other than in discussion and as a photograph, and we can focus on the music being made getting into better and better shape. One thing all three parts make clear is how collaborative between all four (plus the recording engineers) everything was, from the first to the final stages of a song; here, for example, you get George after a run through Let it Be saying that the lead guitar and the piano essentially do the same thing and there should be a somewhat different arrangement, or Paul confessing that his initial idea for The Long and Winding Road had been as a Ray Charles song, and he can't figure out a way to get it out the way he hears it in his head, with pro and contra strings voices being raised long before the shade of Phil Spector will darken the Beatles' doorstep. And then we get to the grand climax: the Rooftop Concert. Which is perhaps the sequence most resembling Lindsay-Hogg's take in the Let it Be movie, though Jackson adds more material featuring the first two, then three policemen coming to the scene, including their names, which strikes me as something very typical for this entire three parter - everyone, bit players and celebrities alike, is treated as a human being, not a cardboard illustration. We also get roadie Mal Evans negotiating with the coppers, being amazingly diplomatic and wily.
(This is again poignant for rl reasons. If you want to be depressed, google how Mal Evans will die a few years later.)
It's striking that most of the people in the street interviewed by the three camera teams positioned down there are able to recognize the music they're hearing are the Beatles. Bear in mind these are (nearly) all new songs, so it's not like they would have recognized the tunes the way many of a current day audience would - but they can recognize the voices and the sound. That's how present in in the public mind they were, through the ages. While you get the occasional grumbler, most of the people interviewed, whether 70 or teenagers, all are enthusiastic. The old man asked after he praised their music and the guys themselves whether he'd let his daughter marry one of them gets point for best reply: "'Sure I would. They got money!"
And on the accessible roofs in the surrounding buildings, you can see more and more people getting up there to listen, just like the people down in the street. January cold or not, it must have been a magic half an hour. Though the cold made me flinch for all the women wearing 1960s miniskirts. BTW, I always liked the detail that Maureen, Ringo's wife, was present, because she'd started out as a fan in the Cavern, all the way back in Liverpool. So I felt she represented the fans who'd been there from the start and now were there at what would turn out their last ever public performance. She's also unabashedly rocking along with enthusiasm the few times the camera shows her. (That's why you can hear Paul say "Thanks, Mo" - for her applause - on the Let It Be album. When she died, he wrote the song Little Willow with a dedication to her children in her memory.)
Speaking of the wives, the three episode capture several tender moments for each couple, hand holding, embraces, kisses, and perhaps it's the way Jackson intersperses it but it always feels natural, not staged. Apropos another comment, I recalled that both Yoko and Linda in January 1969 were pregnant - Linda with future Mary McCartney the photographer, and Yoko with the child she'd lose in March.
Another constant feature is how physically comfortable the guys are with each other, though this comes more to the fore in the Apple studio than in the spacey Twickenham area. But there's a lot of arms around each other's shoulders - Ringo/Everyone else being the most common variation - and in last episode even an improvised dance. I don't mean this negates that there are also tensions, but it's basically the body language of people who know each other inside out and have lived in tiny spaces with each other. It's this along with the constant banter and goofing around - which sometimes is friendly and sometimes passive-aggressively, but basically two thirds of the dialogue with each other - that the various fictional takes on the Beatles I've seen and read rarely if ever capture.
(Telling exception: the tv movie Two of Us directed by, wait for it, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. That one also has very artificial passages - as when Paul and John occasionally exposition to each other, like John telling Paul his childhood trauma (dead mother, absent Dad), which, you know, Paul actually was familiar with) - but mostly the dialogue has that rl chit chat feeling of two thirds jokes, with and without hidden digs, and one third emotional rawness.)
Since there was one more day after the rooftop concert in which they recorded takes on he songs they didn't play on the rooftop, but the rooftop concert is the unbeatable climax, Peter Jackson, by now experienced n the problem of epilogues, does something very clever - he uses footage of that last day to run on split screen with the credits, which means you do watch the credits (which take some time, seeing as they have to cover both the 1969 original film crew and the 2021 team) without any of the impatience of, say, a MCU movie. The very last song Jackson uses is, of course, Let it Be, with the take used on the album. (I should add here that throughout the last two episodes, subtitles tell you when you're watching a take that ends up on the album.)
In conclusion: I still can't imagine how this feels for non-fans, but watching it was a tremendous experience for me, and I'm really glad the Hobbitmeister from New Zealand got his hands on those 60 plus hours of joy and heartbreak.
