GET BACK
1. Dig It
2. One After 909 (Live)
2. One After 909 (Live)
7. Maggie Mae
8. For You Blue
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Greetings, internet strangers! Today I present to you Get Back, the penultimate album recorded by the globetrotting rock band who I don't need to name! In essence, it's a revision of the group's partly studio, partly live Let It Be LP, which I argue was faultily assembled (more on that later) in such a way as to leave it lacking when compared to the other albums which the group recorded and assembled themselves. I've made the changes I have made so that the record can finally stand toe to toe (or as close to that as the quality of the songs will allow) with their many other highly (some might even say overly) influential albums.
I will start with the background. In essence, the band known as the Beatles was a tightly knit group of very close friends who had been making music together since they were teenagers (although it took them a hot minute to find the right drummer). By all accounts, they were as much of a unit as a band can possibly be; they had been playing gigs near-constantly for years, which meant they were performing together, writing songs together, practicing together, living together, hanging out together, eating meals together, jerking off together, and so on and so forther for many, many moons. This was the case up until 1966, when they got so sick of touring that they decided to stop forever, and simultaneously began using the studio as an instrument so couldn't replicate their music live very successfully anymore anyways. Not touring meant that they were no longer spending all that time together, so they naturally began to diverge in their interests and develop in slightly different directions as they grew older. At least they still had their trusty longtime manager, their figurative rudder literally named Brian Epstein, to steer them forward in the right direction, keep their public images peachy, and maintain general harmony within the group!
Their debut album Please Please Me (1963).
Wait... Oh no! He died the following year. Yikes. The band was ill-equipped to manage itself, and equally ill-equipped to find anyone better to do the job, yet successful enough as musicians that they thought they could pull anything off, so they started a hippy-dippy company and soon enough bankrupted it, hired an inventor who couldn't actually do anything useful, self-wrote, directed, and acted in an experimental film (it flopped hard), got spiritual and took a bunch of celebrities to an ashram in India before running away and making a bunch of vague accusations about their guru, and so on and so forth. Although it's never black and white and they still loved each other very much, the group began fracturing as a unit in the studio during the protracted sessions for their 1968 self-titled double album to the point where their baked beans-loving drummer Ringo Starr (who was really the soul of the group), as well as their longtime producer George Martin and chief engineer Geoff Emerick, all walked out of the sessions at various points. The gap in time between the completion of that album and the beginning of the sessions for this one was less than three months, and the various egos, tensions, and wounds within the quartet were far from being healed over by the tie they reentered the studio. On top of that, all of them were very emotionally immature (not to mention repressed), which didn't help them work anything out either.
They spent the entirety of January 1969 on this album despite being very rusty, but nonetheless rehearsed every day (with cameras rolling non-stop for a semi-conceptualized documentary that added a whole bunch of stress to the proceedings), and by the end of the month were laying down the master takes live-in-the-studio which this album would be built off. They even capped it off with their last-ever live performance, where they played on the roof of their studio/office until the pigs shut them down. Very little in this universe is black and white, and indeed there were both good times and bad. In terms of the former, musician Billy Preston, the best musician out of all of them (save for Paul McCartney at his very best on the bass) was brought into the fold and played the roof off on the roof with them. He brought that old good-time spirit back that the group was sorely missing by this point, and so very nearly got made a member of the band. In my opinion, had they decided to, it would have a) drastically improved the music, b) drastically improved the relations between the members, likely allowing them to exist for longer while also allowing more room for solo projects, and c) caused a massive racist backlash, although it may, in the long run, have been a net positive for racialized musicians in the music industry at large. But anyhow, Billy Preston is all over this album at least.
"Let It Be" single cover with some of the text and logos removed by me.
But, there were good times and bad. Lead guitarist George Harrison walked out and made his return conditional, rythm guitarist John Lennon was losing interest in the band while simultaniously deep in a herion-addicted co-dependant releationship with the absolutely inimitable multidisciplinary artist Yoko Ono (by far the best artist anywhere near the Beatles' circle, if you have good taste; jazz legend Ornett Coleman literally guested on her debut solo album in 1970, and she remains influential to this very day in both music and poetry, not to mention visual and performance art. In case you ever wrote her off, she wrote the lyrics to "Imagine." Check out her music from the 1980s if the avant garde scares you.), and bassist Paul McCartney was taking his spot as unofficial bandleader, not to mention producer and manager, all the while just being very domineering and not listening to what the others had to say (not that he was the only one doing so). If you want any more detail on the January sessions then just go and watch the Let It Be film (1970) and/or the Get Back documentary (2021) that show the making of the film (and a whole lot more), both of them culled from all the afformentioned camera footage.
It didn't take long for them to have wrapped up recording before human brains do what human brains do best and began warping memories of past events. The band collectively soured on the project to the extent where they didn't even want to put the album together, and so handed it off the a series of different people so they wouldn't have to compile it themselves. In hindsight, more so than any single other factor whatsoever, it was this decision not to put their own album together (as they had been doing with much love, care, and attention to detail for years at that point, to astounding critical acclaim) which decided the unsatisfactory fate of every official release of this material to come. How could they expect any person other than themselves to finish their own art exactly as they wanted? It doesn't actually make sense if one thinks about it. I wouldn't be making this post if they had put the album together themselves, or at the very least worked closely with those who they appointed as the compilers. But alas, they did what they did. Maybe hindsight is 20/20 after all...
Let It Be (1970)
Firstly they handed it off to Glyn Johns. He was their well-dressed sound engineer during those January sessions. The band dumped unto him the mountain of tapes, and just told him to put the darn record together, so he spent ages combing through all of them and picking out what he thought were the best performances, and then compiling those into an album. In some cases, he was on the money and chose the best take. In many cases, however, he was completely off and chose one that was, for whichever reason (such as an incomplete performance), the wrong one. McCartney was the only one who corrected him and pointed him towards the right version of one or two of his songs. George Harrison helped him add studio chatter between the tracks. A lot of studio chatter. Far too mch studio chatter. A single overdub, for the flubbed guitar solo on "Let It Be" was added on April 30, 1969, the same day where Lennon brought out a wacky and unfinished two-year-old song which vocals were added to. This number, "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)," would eventually become the B-side of the "Let It Be" a year down the line, but I included it on my expanded version of Magical Mystery Tour (1967) that's featured elsewhere on this blog.
Anyhow, between the dollops of chatter, the often-rickety performances, and mixes themselves (Glyn had not quite yet mastered the art), the album was finished. A cover photo was shot (the one I used, featured at the top of this post), a title was picked (Get Back), a single was released ("Get Back"/"Don't Let Me Down," the latter a better take than appeared on the album itself), and the first little bits of promotion began to hit the newsstands. But when the actual product was handed the the Beatles for approval, they all (rightly) rejected it, because it was very much not up to par with regards to the level of quality that they had become known for. It was more of a fly-on-the-wall experience than an actual finished album. It was an early mix.
Reissue cover for the "Get Back" single from 1989.
While Glyn had been holed up for months figuring out how to put the thing together, however, the quartet had recorded some new tracks. This had begun in February as they put a few finishing touches on the single version of "Don't Let Me Down," and it seems that they were thinking of adding a few more songs to the roster of those they had already finished. As time progressed, however, these new songs began to grow into their own seperate project. A few days after the "Get Back" single hit the shops (and topped the charts), they were already back in the studio recording their next one, "The Ballad Of John And Yoko"/"Old Brown Shoe," which will feature on a different assemblage of mine soon it come. This new album kept progressing (especially over the summer), and came to be their big, polished, carefully-crafted last hurrah Abbey Road (1969). The last time Johnny, Georgie, Richard, and Paul ever stood in a room together was during the final session for that project in August 1969. Lennon played a solo gig in Toronto at the start of the next month, and at a business meeting not long after announced he was leaving the group forever, but that he wanted it hush hush so the press didn't eat them alive. With that, the Beatles were no more. He then promptly mixed and edited two of their outtakes and prepared to release them as a solo single ("You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)"/"What's The New Mary Jane") until literally anybody found out about that, which they did, whereupon he was forced to scrap it. Maybe he left the group just so he could steal their songs? I wonder why nobody asked him that in interviews...
I've expressed it before and I'll express it again; there is nothing like the power of a contractual obligation to bend the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, and bring entities out of non-existence. While all these shennanigans has been going on, that heap of film footage from January had been in the cutting room, where people were busy assembling it into a piece of mass media. The exact form of mass media which it had come to take was a documentary film that was gonna be screamed in theatres, and the film contract stipulated that the band were on the hook for the soundtrack (yes, dear reader, this is the contractual obligation mentioned above!). So, with this new directive from high command, Glyn Johns spent months and months revising and reassembling Get Back into something releasable. Just kidding! He nixed one song that wouldn't be in the film, added a two-year-old track which would be ("Across The Universe," which was being put out, in a very different mix, on a charity compilation around the same time), removed a sliver of the studio chatter, flipped the stereo image on a few songs, put them in a slightly new order, and called it a day.
The album cover that's on all those T-shirts and stuff.
Sorry, I lied. He didn't actually call it a day, he called the Beatles. Now a threesome (I wonder if they'd ever had any of those), they re-entered the studio a few days after New Year's 1970 (the exact days that their buddy Jimi Hendrix recorded his last album live in New York, but that's neither here nor there) to make their final recordings. A rehearsal of George Harrison's number "I Me Mine" was slated for the movie, so they spent a day recording that one, and then returned the next day to add orchestral overdubs, a new guitar solo, and backing vocals to "Let It Be," which was now gonna be released as a single (with the orchestral parts, it must be noted, mixed relatively low). A few days after that, Harrison returned to the studio all by his lonesome and redid his vocal on his other song, "For You Blue" from January (the full live-in-the-studio take of which is shown in the Get Back doc for those curious). With those updates in place, Glyn submitted the album again for approval. This 1970 version didn't really fix the issues of the 1969 version, and it was once again nixed, and Glyn was booted out of the project. New hands were needed, because, again, the band finishing their own art was for some reason unthinkable.
A Spector was haunting Europe. For his most recent solo single (which was not a stolen Beatles song), Johnny had brought the massively influential girl-group producer Phil Spector (who was also a drugged up gun-obsessed madman who would eventually die in prison a convicted murderer) out of a self-imposed retirement (which he also forced his wife Ronnie, of the Ronettes, into against her wishes) after a song he worked hard on wasn't as big a hit as he'd hoped. Johnny then suggested to his bandmates that this twerp assemble Get Back, which they agreed to because, yet again, the very idea of them doing it themselves was as foreign to them as food spicing. If you, reader dearest, can recall, the original intention for Get Back was a stripped down album with as few overdubs as possible intended to show the band going back to their roots and recording songs together as they once had. So in order to achieve this, they brought in a pop producer with a signature style termed "the wall of sound," where he would have so many instruments added onto a song that the listener wouldn't be able to tell one from the other. What an excellent idea.
The inimitable Spector during his murder trial.
The Spector made a lot of decisions. To an extent, he took what Glyn Johns had done and refined it into commerciality without changing the fundamentals. What I mean to say is that he cut down on the studio chatter, but still included some on most of the songs (some, it must be noted, is far more than on any other of the group's albums), chose most of the right takes (though he still missed the mark on "The Long And Winding Road"), and even kept the jams "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae," though shortened them to interludes less than a minute long each. As well, he boosted the orchestration on "Let It Be" massively, and left off "Don't Let Me Down" because it's one of their best songs. Unlike Glyn though, he removed certain elements of the album, primarily a perfecly good guitar performance on "For You Blue," and the lovely coda that features on the single mix of "Get Back." He did all of this, but the album, in his eyes, was still not quite finished. On April 1 of all days (though it went into the early hours of April 2), the final ever Beatles session was held, where Ringo Starr added drum overdubs to "I Me Mine," "Across The Universe," and "The Long And Winding Road." Playing alongside Ringo were 18 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 acoustic guitarists, 1 harp, and 18 choral singers. Spector tried to get the 50 musicians to overdub a third song (when only two had been agreed to) without extra payment, but thankfully others twisted his arm until he agreed to compensate them for their work. Further mixes and edits of these songs were made later on April 2, after which the album was completed, and it was renamed Let It Be, the title of the documentary film to which it was technically the soundtrack.
Scheduling conflicts with Paul's McCartney (1970), his saddest solo debut, meant that Let It Be was released in early May, several weeks after the film's world premiere in the new York. In a press release for McCartney McCartney announced that he was parting ways creatively with his old chums. This public announcement started a media fiasco, and within days the entire white population of the United States of America were on their knees grovelling for a reunion, remaining in such painfully contorted positions until Mark David Chapman did Lennon a favour one decade later. They also started insulting each other through the medium of song, the interview, and any other way that they could get the word out. So much for "give peace a chance" I guess. All of this means that because it was only a few weeks after Pauline's departure announcement that the record-buying beings set their sensory organs upon the band's new documentary and musical album, the reception of it was shaped enourmously by this news. The documentary showed the band having lots of fun. It also showed one or two brief creative conflicts, and the tone could get a little bit sullen at times, because that's simply how the sessions were. Imbued with the context of their unitary demise however, many found it a horrid and miserable watch in which they could see the band fracturing before their very eyes. If only, if only.
The Beatles' self-titled double album from 1968, during the making of which
the band fractured considerably.
Needless to say, the album far outsold the film. Few if any of the music crickets saw it as being up to par with their earlier work as an entire piece, despite having a good few songs comparable to any they ever wrote. Phil's additions were criticised, because they really do exist in total opposition to the ethos of everything else on the album. But it's still the beetles. It still won a Grammy (because those awards aren't based on the quality of the art in the first place). It still topped both the singles and album charts. It still sold like hotcakes, and unlike the film, it has remained in print until the present hour.
But not all were satisfied, least of all Paul. He got his way not long after the millenium, and had the album reworked into a remix called Let It Be... Naked (a reference to Yoko's "if you become naked" from "Revolution 9," perhaps?). It removed all orchestration (even on "Let It Be," which includes a fabulous guitar solo from the following January 1969 take that fits the song better than all the other solos), all studio chatter, all jams, used all the right takes (except for the subsititution of an inferior live version of "Don't Let Me Down"), although all of the ambiance was removed from the rooftop performances and the song flow was still shoddy, if only slightly better than on the 1970 album. The movie was going to get rereleased around that time too, but little came of it. Just over a decade later, their lucrative business began their still-ongoing full-discography remix project, and with it both the single versions as well as the album itself were given wonderfully modern yet never revisionist mixes. It is from these, as well as Naked, that this edition of Get Back has been assembled.
The Hey Jude album from early 1970, which featured "Don't Let Me Down."
Stay tuned for something relating to it here on the blog.
In terms of piecing it together, I wanted to make it cohesive in a way that lets each song shine propely, while simultaneously getting the album to be more than the sum of its parts (the new mixes were in fact used for purposes of sonic cohesion), and it ended up as something of a middle ground between the various official versions of this album. With its opening fade-in, the 2021 mix of "Dig It" serves as introduction to the album, until Lennon's falsetto says "and now we'd like to do Hark The Angels Come," whereupon the loud opening guitars of "One After 909" comandeer the ears of the listener. With that begins the album's live portion with that song, "Dig A Pony," and "I've Got A Feeling," all recorded on the rooftop and all 2021 remixes because of their ambiance. I labeled them all "(Live)" because I wanted to make clear that this is a half live/half studio album since that's a central aspect of the record which is seldom highlighted. After these comes the 2021 remix of the single version of "Don't Let Me Down" (because this version of the song is the most emotionally effective), which in turn is followed by the 2015 remix of the single version of "Get Back" because the single version includes that wonderful coda not present elsewhere. Concluding side one is the little transitional addendum of "Maggie Mae," also a 2021 version, which is a traditional Liverpudlian folk song that the group never got around to recording a finished version of.
If somewhat loosly defined, this record has electric and acoustic halves, and with side two commences the latter. Naked mixes of each song on side two (barring the closer) are used because there is no orchestration nor studio chatter, and, in the case of "For You Blue," all of the instruments are present. I must admit that this version of "Across The Universe" is easily my favourite version of the song, as the unconcealed frailty to John's voice adds a deeply emotional dimension to what is perhaps his best lyric. It's made me cry a few times, it's very vunerable in a straight-from-the-subconscious sort of way. The sparseness of this version of "The Long And Winding Road" adds an emotional element that was before that missing as well, at least to my ears. Their final song "I Me Mine" that is fittingly about their bickering egos is from Naked too, and the album is closed out by the far-from-overblown single version of "Let It Be," featured in 2015 remix form. For a few final notes, I must admit that the cover art is not totally accurate because it says that there are 12 songs total, whereas there are in fact 13 here; count "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae" as one song I suppose! As well, I labelled the album as being from 1969 because, although overdubs were finished in 1970, it much moreso represents where the band were at, artistically-speaking, the year prior. So that's that, happy listening!
Across The Universe
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me
Jai guru deva, om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva, om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing
Through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe
Jai guru deva, om
Nothing's gonna change my world.
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