Let It Be

Part 1 - Background and Production

Apart from Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles' final film, Let It Be (or Get Back as it was first called) is undoubtedly the most neglected movie in their canon. Although revered by hardcore fans, the film received scant critical attention in its day and has since been largely ignored by film critics and historians. The reasons for its relative obscurity in film history are not difficult to fathom. The film was not released until months after it was shot, and this, compounded by poor reviews and Lennon’s derogatory comments about the recording of the film’s music (‘It was the most miserable session on earth’1), has done little for its reputation. Critical reassessment has been hampered by its subsequent lack of exposure: the British Film Institute does not hold a copy, the film has not been shown on network TV for over two decades, and it is the only Beatles movie to have bypassed an official British video release. Needless to say, it has still yet to be released on DVD, despite the CD release of the new ‘Naked’ edition of the music, tantalisingly coupled with a bonus disc of studio banter and musical snippets. Yet while few would claim Let It Be as the Beatles’ finest moment, if one cares to scratch its rusty surface, it becomes evident that the movie offers considerable interest to film historian and Beatles scholar alike.

The historical development of the Let It Be movie is nothing if not unconventional, not least because it evolved from far humbler origins, as a short television documentary film initially intended to detail the Beatles’ rehearsals for a separate and more elaborate television special which never came into fruition. To understand the genesis of the film, one has to return to 1968 and the awkward and disagreeable atmosphere which pervaded the recording sessions for The Beatles. The lack of collaboration and increasing reliance on studio technology (and quite possibly evolving personal differences) had convinced McCartney (by now the prime mover in the Beatles’ projects) that the flagging group needed to unite and energize itself by returning to their rock and roll roots, producing songs which, bereft of the studio trickery of old, could be performed live. With this in mind, McCartney proposed that the Beatles should work towards putting together a live performance of new material; not a live tour (none of the group could face returning to the rigours of the stadium circuit), but a recorded ‘one-off’ live performance of new songs which could then be broadcast worldwide as a television special and released as an album. The underlying concept of making a film of a live performance was not new to the Beatles, who had already invested in a concert film for television, The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965). Although not accompanied by an album, this 48-minute document of the group’s most celebrated, record-breaking American concert (a co-production between Subafilms, NEMS and Ed Sullivan productions) had attracted huge interest when shown in Britain in 1966 and in America almost a year later. But where would this new live performance take place? In the spirit of underground ‘happenings’, suggestions were made for suitably ‘far-out’ locations, but no single venue could be decided by the increasingly individually minded Beatles. One of the first suggestions, which originated from Apple Films’ chief Denis O'Dell, was that the group should play at a disused flour mill near the Thames, but this idea was eventually rejected. Another of O’Dell’s ideas was for the group to play on board an ocean liner, but this was vetoed for practical reasons. By far the most interesting idea was that the group should play in a Roman amphitheatre in North Africa. As chance would have it, O’Dell had seen an Italian opera company performing Orestes in Tripoli, and came up with the fascinating idea of getting the Beatles to perform a live set in front of an Arab audience. As O’Dell recalls, ‘It was a wonderful, open-air amphitheatre, right by the sea, with the most incredible acoustic sound ... John flipped. He thought it would be incredible ... but you could never get all four of them to agree.’2

Getting agreement on film projects was something that had been difficult with the Beatles for some time. As O'Dell remembers, ‘What I wanted to do dearly, and more than anything else, was a major feature film with the Beatles.’3 In 1968, O’Dell had hit upon an intriguing idea for a third Beatles feature film, that they should make a filmed version of the Tolkein classic, Lord of the Rings, for which he attempted to secure the rights and the services of a major director. One possibility was David Lean, who found the idea fascinating but was unavailable.4 He also approached Stanley Kubrick. According to O’Dell, Kubrick had never read the work. As he remembers it, ‘I sent the books round to be read by him. He read them, and his daughter berated him for not ever having read them.’5 Meanwhile he managed to get the Beatles interested whilst on their trip to visit the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India. ‘John was really excited about doing the music for it,’6 and the group began to earmark parts for themselves. However, having read the books and met with both Lennon and McCartney over lunch at MGM studios, Kubrick maintained that he felt the film was unmakeable, and eventually the project fell through.7

When, in late 1968, it was finally agreed to begin rehearsals for the live performance television special (to be shot at an unspecified location), O'Dell suggested that the preparations should be filmed for a separate half-hour television documentary showing the Beatles at work. ‘I thought it would be an awful waste not to put everything on film.’8 With this in mind, it was decided that Twickenham film studios would provide an ideal location for the rehearsals and Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who had worked on several Beatles promos) was hired, to document the sessions by impassively capturing the Beatles ‘au nature!’. There were to be few concessions to classical documentary techniques, the idea being that merely showing the Beatles rehearsing and interacting would hold the audience's interest and provide insight into the group’s relationships and activities. Lindsay-Hogg explained later: ‘I didn’t want to make a straight documentary. I figured if we just showed them working, we'd learn quite a bit about them.’9 In keeping with this premise, ‘staged’ visual concessions would be kept to a minimum (a few coloured lights to provide ambience) and the rehearsals would be shot in their totality, complete with the talking, rapping and humorous banter which went on between songs. This approach, whilst in keeping with the rawness and honesty of the musical material, was also partly reflective of certain other trends in the pop documentary. While the desire to document the creative process had been exploited by their friends the Rolling Stones in Godard’s One Plus One: Sympathy for the Devil (1968), the film was perhaps also partly inspired by the direct cinema of independent American documentarists such as Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, whose Don’t Look Back (1966) and Monterey Pop (1968) had fundamentally focused upon impassively capturing the intimate ‘backstage’ moments of public personalities.

Filming (on 16mm), began at Twickenham studios, on the first day of rehearsals 2 January 1969. However, the sessions got off to a terrible start, with the Beatles struggling desperately to find a new musical direction. As the filmtrack bootlegs testify, the group spent most of the first week in a largely directionless flux and, although some of the work was productive, the majority of the sessions were characterized by tired reworkings of old, discarded originals (‘One After 909’), perfunctory covers of their old rock and roll favourites (‘Hi Heel Sneakers’, ‘Memphis Tennessee’) and uninspired jamming. Even when a member of the group brought in some new material, the Beatles seemed unable to approach it as a cohesive unit, and when Harrison, Starr and McCartney tackled the aptly titled ‘I Me Mine’, the apathetic and preoccupied Lennon was more interested in waltzing around the studios with the ever-present Yoko than contributing his musical presence.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that the sessions got off to such a poor start. The Beatles had long since abandoned their live performances in favour of the studio, and they were inevitably going to be rusty when it came to ensemble work. Moreover, the strain of endlessly producing new material had to catch up with them eventually; the accomplished but sprawling White Album had eaten up twenty-five of Lennon and McCartney's most recent compositions, and now, just eleven weeks after those sessions were complete, they found themselves struggling to match up to the tough goal they had set themselves. This problem was compounded by the fact that neither the filming schedule nor the oppressive atmosphere of Twickenham were conducive to the spirit of improvisation that the situation demanded. The early morning starts were deeply oppressive for a band that for years had worked mainly at nights, and the cold enormity of the Twickenham sound stage was a far cry from the relative intimacy of Abbey Road.

After a week of bickering, boredom and apathy, George Harrison snapped. Following an argument with McCartney he quit the stage and, with a non-committal parting shot of ‘See you round the clubs’,10 he returned to his bungalow in Esher. As Harrison recently recalled, ‘I thought I’m quite capable of being relatively happy on my own and I’m not able to be happy in this situation... I’m getting out of here.’11 The Beatles were fragmenting at an alarming rate.

Harrison's disappearance inevitably created something of a dilemma :or the film-makers. However, Denis O'Dell wisely recognized the importance of ‘keeping the remains of [the project] together’,12 and instructed Lindsay-Hogg to spend the next few days on close-shots of McCartney, Lennon and Starr which could later be edited into the film. Accordingly, in the days following Harrison's departure, the remaining members of the group returned to Twickenham and went about their business in much the same fashion as when Starr had ‘left’ during the White Album sessions, with the cameras still rolling. But when, on 15 January, Harrison returned to the fold, he did so on condition that the live concert should be axed and that the Beatles should instead make an album of the songs which they had been working on in the newly built recording studio at their Apple headquarters. Mark Lewisohn claims: ‘It was at this point, and this point only, that the footage shot at Twickenham for a ‘Beatles at Work’ television production turned instead into the start of a feature film idea, to be called - like the album they’d now be making - Get Back\u Useful though these insights are, they do not explain the reasoning behind the idea to elevate the status of the initially low-key, by-product project by turning it into a full-length documentary feature film (for television, or possibly theatrical exhibition) which was now intended to chart the group’s progression from rough rehearsal to polished recording rather than live performance. However, there are a number of possible artistic and economic factors which can be identified to account for the switch.

The Beatles may have felt that, since the idea for the live concert had been jettisoned, they should instead appease their audience with something more substantial than a thirty-minute television documentary. There was certainly no particular reason for not making the film. After all, because of its minimalist aesthetic, the film’s production would require little, if any, additional commitment from the fragmenting group. All they had to do was turn up at the Apple studios where the cameras would capture them doing what they did best -producing albums. Moreover, since there was no essential difference between rehearsing new songs for an album or for a live concert, the footage shot at Twickenham could and would still be included. Not only that, producing the film through Apple (Denis O'Dell and Neil Aspinall would helm the production and the Beatles would retain the role of executive producers14) meant that they had ultimate control of the film’s style and content. Moreover, they still owed, or possibly felt they owed, United Artists a final film. Yellow Submarine had been rejected by UA on the grounds that their contract required films starring the group rather than cartoon representations of them; and since, by 1969, it appeared increasingly evident that the group would be either unprepared or unable to agree upon a project in which they would have to act, elevating the status of the short television documentary into something more substantial was a possible way of satisfying all parties. However, although they later accepted the film and blew it up for theatrical release, no negotiations took place between Apple and UA during the film shooting, suggesting that appeasing the US major was not, at this point in the proceedings, part of the equation.15

Although the group had given in to Harrison's demand to abandon live performance, there was a kind of compromise; the album would still be recorded with a quasi-live’ aesthetic and the new Beatles album and film would employ, as the working title implied, a ‘back to basics’ approach. There would be none of the high-tech studio trickery so prevalent since Revolver, the recordings would not be overdubbed at all, any mistakes would remain intact, and the emphasis would be on resummoning the rock and roll spirit of their formative years. As Philip Norman so succinctly put it, ‘It was as if, to rediscover themselves as musicians, they were putting themselves through the kind of endurance test that Hamburg used to be; seeking to re-activate those old, tight sinews with music that stretched back to their collective birth.’16 However, relationships were still strained. Working on the principle that people behave better in company, Harrison drafted in another musician, the soul singer and pianist Billy Preston, to help relieve the tension and provide inspiration for the tired Beatles. According to Harrison, when Preston was brought in there was a ‘one hundred per cent improvement’17 in the strained atmosphere.

However, despite the seductiveness of its alluring premise, and Harrison's subtle attempt to temper the hostilities, both shooting and recording were initially hampered by practical problems. The Beatles had planned to restart the project on Monday 20 January in the basement studio newly constructed for the group by the Greek electronics ‘expert’, ‘magic’ Alexis Mardas of Apple's electronic division. Having impressed Lennon with a number of his ideas and prototypes for various products, Mardas had convinced the Beatles that the recording equipment at Abbey Road was antiquated and that he could construct a state-of-the-art studio which would far outclass the technology of Abbey Road by providing seventy-two track recording. Although the studio was due to be ready for the group’s use on this day, it became patently apparent upon their arrival that Mardas' bizarre designs were unable to live up to their inventor's claims, and filming and recording were delayed by two days while the ever reliable George Martin negotiated the use of mobile recording equipment from Abbey Road. When the necessary technology did arrive, the sessions were infinitely more enjoyable and productive than they had been at Twickenham and, while it would be inaccurate to suggest that they were totally successful in harnessing the group’s true live potential, the group refined and recorded a number of new and inspired songs (including Harrison's ‘For You Blue’ and McCartney's wonderful ‘Get Back’). However, progress was still somewhat slow, and sessions would often take a similar manifestation as they had at Twickenham, with productivity giving way to impromptu jamming and mainly insipid covers.

This was of little help to Lindsay-Hogg. Despite having shot hours of fascinating, if sombre footage of the Beatles jamming and recording (interspersed with all the extra-musical footage of the group clowning around, arguing, telling jokes, and soberly discussing their future plans between songs), the director's material still lacked an adequate resolution or suitably professional musical ‘climax’. Indeed, despite having shot a total of three weeks’ rehearsal/recording footage, the film still lacked enough suitably polished or completed performances and, since Beatles albums had been known to take months to complete, the idea of merely continuing in the same vein seemed both impractical and inadequate for all parties.

Out of this frustration, on 26 January came the suggestion that the group should play an impromptu live performance on the rooftop of Apple's Savile Row headquarters, to be filmed by Lindsay-Hogg as the climax of the movie. Harrison was apparently still hesitant about the idea but eventually gave in to pressure from the others, and on 30 January 1969 the Beatles played spirited versions of Get Back, ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, ‘Dig a Pony’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘One After 909’ to the cameras and the bewildered crowd of office workers who were milling around Savile Row in their lunch hour. The concert ‘happening’ was a triumph. After three weeks of apathy, indecision and slow progress, the Beatles had finally managed to rekindle their ability to generate the excitement of their spellbinding live performances, and once again they proved that when they put their personal and artistic differences behind them, they were consummate ensemble players. Along with their musical rebirth came the return of their acerbic wit. As the police finally made it through the Apple offices and onto the roof to break up the noisy party, Lennon, perhaps sensing that the concert would be their final live performance, ironically remarked, ’I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition!’

However, the rooftop performance was not, as has been frequently documented, the end of the Get Back shoot. Perhaps realizing that they still needed more polished numbers for a commercial film release (be it for television or cinema), they completed shooting the following day at the Apple basement studio, with note-perfect live performances of the finished versions of ‘Let It Be’, The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Two of Us’.

Although shooting for the film was completed in January 1969, it would be May 1970 before it was released, largely because of delays in the preparation of the accompanying album. With the recording sessions complete, neither George Martin nor the Beatles could bring themselves to begin painfully trawling through the hours of tapes and attempting to edit and mix them into a listenable soundtrack album. Although two songs from the Get Back recording sessions were released in single form soon after their recording ("Get Back’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ were issued as a highly successful single in April 1969 complete with promotional clips culled from the film), the Beatles' flagging interest was compounded by two other important factors.

Firstly, by the end of April 1969 the Beatles were already busy recording what was to become their final collaboration, the Abbey Road album. Secondly, by mid to late 1969 and the completion of Abbey Road, they were even closer to what would become their final split. Although it is not for this book to discuss the non-filmic aspects of the group's affairs in detail, it is worth noting that Apple was by now in a state of financial and administrative turmoil, there were severe disagreements over the employment of Allen Klein as manager, and the Beatles’ artistic differences were becoming even more pronounced. Lennon had become obsessed with collaborating artistically with Yoko Ono, with whom he produced another collection of sound collages (Unfinished Music 2: Life with the Lions), and a series of short avant-garde films such as Smile (1968), Apotheosis (1969) and Legs (1970).

He married her in March 1969. McCartney had also become interested in solo projects, as had Harrison, who, possibly frustrated by his small song allowance on Beatles albums, was fast emerging from the shadow of Lennon and McCartney as a major songwriter in his own right. His contributions to the Beatles’ Abbey Road, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Something’, were arguably the most memorable tracks on the album, the latter song gaining a single release, becoming an evergreen standard and being described by Frank Sinatra as ‘the greatest love song of the past fifty years’.18 Starr, meanwhile, was keen to develop his acting talents. In September 1969, Lennon privately told the others that he wanted a divorce’,19 and, although it would be 10 April 1970 before McCartney publicly announced that the Beatles were effectively over, the group were practically finished as a functioning, creative unit at this point, with harmonious musical collaboration all but dissolving into complex business disagreements and bitter feuds. Indeed, it has been alleged in several places that the reason the break was not announced in September was because Klein was in the process of sensitive renegotiations of the Beatles' recording contract with EMI and did not want to upset the applecart.20

However, although the fragmenting Beatles were busy with other projects and distractions in the months following the sessions, work on the album did not completely stop. In March 1969, the group's then engineer, Glyn Johns, had been given the difficult task of mixing the album, but Lennon, Harrison and Allen Klein were reportedly unhappy with the mix and in early 1970, shortly after the release of the Abbey Road album, they commissioned American producer Phil Spector to perform a salvage job on the tapes. Spector carried out his task by adding treacly strings and melodramatic heavenly choirs to the original recordings, undermining the entire raison d’etre of the ‘live’ aesthetic and increasing (if it was possible) the bitter artistic rifts between the group. While Lennon later praised Spector's work and maintained that he ‘was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something out of it’,21 McCartney was particularly annoyed to hear his haunting ‘Long and Winding Road’ ballad stripped of its stark simplicity and dressed up in an ocean of cliched sentimental strings.

Eventually, however, Spector's version of the album was released, along with the film (minus Spector’s polish), in May 1970, sixteen months after work had begun on the project and just weeks after news of the group’s demise. The film, now significantly retitled Let It Be, received a world premiere in New York on 13 May. Unsurprisingly, none of the Beatles attended.

 

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008