The Beatles: Get Back is now available to stream on Disney+. Directed by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, the new documentary project is split into three parts and is compiled from more than 60 hours of unseen footage shot in January 1969 and more than 150 hours of unheard audio, all of which has been restored. If you love The Beatles, chances are you are going to really enjoy ALL of the eight hours. Full disclosure, I like The Beatles. I would be what you would call a casual fan. I get them WAY more than I get The Rolling Stones. But, that is another column for another time (maybe). However, I was riveted by this documentary. I was more intrigued by the process and dynamics of The Beatles, the people involved versus the hits themselves. Let’s breakdown the WHY they stopped being a performing band in August of 1966.
We as fans like to put stars up on a pedestal and imagine that they’re not susceptible to the same everyday workplace difficulties that we are. It’s really tempting to say “but they were the best band in the world and they made all this amazing music, surely they could have found a way to work it out, if only X person / event hadn’t screwed it all up!”
The Fifth Beatle was a thing. Brian Epstein’s death was the beginning of the end. After he died, the Beatles started managing themselves. Each member of the band was extremely talented and creative 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. 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. De facto Paul was in charge, which the others resented.
“Being in a band” is a young person’s game. Nobody knew, at that time, how to transition “being in a band” to “the Beatles Inc.” or “U2 Inc.” or “the Flaming Lips Inc.” or whatever. Youthful passion and ardor and hedonism and adventurousness wanes and what’s left is four dudes who want adult lives. Adult lives aren’t really compatible with subordinating long term personal needs (family, life-partner, health, stable sexuality) with short-term collective goals (sex, drugs, rock and roll) in particular as those personal needs grow and grow or involve other intimate relationships. Paul was trying to get them to make that leap but it didn’t work out. They were still thinking of themselves as do-or-die, joined-at-the-hip bandmates in solidarity and not dispassionate business partners.
I always imagine them as four brothers, and they were in a sense.
Paul, I’ve come to think, was in a really tough place, in between his love of the group and not wanting it to end, and on the other hand, given his development and stature as a hit songwriter, his very reasonably wanting to have final say on the arrangements of his own songs (and which of them to record, and how many rehearsals or takes were needed to get them the way he wanted them) without having to tiptoe around anybody else’s ego or listen to their complaints. 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. We know Paul was very distraught when the group ended and went through a period of substance abuse, but in the end, they did him a favor by freeing him to work the way he now wanted to…. and always has since then (for better or worse).
John was in love, he just got engaged, and he’s still only 28 at this point. 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. The candid, flower-pot mic convo was great and the kind of thing I am so glad was captured, where Paul and John are basically agreeing that they treated George poorly, and how they both sort of resent each other’s roles in the band. That part where John tells Paul that he’s basically scared to disagree with him and uses George as kind of a shield/trojan horse to deliver his disagreements was kind of stunning.
I understand George’s frustration at not getting more songs in and some historical context is helpful here. George had been in Woodstock hanging out with Dylan and The Band for several months prior to the Twickenham sessions. In Woodstock, he was surrounded by this songwriting collective—everyone writing and jamming together and creating music without worrying about who was bringing the idea to the table (to The Band’s later demise), which must’ve been amazing. On top of that, everywhere he went back then, George was treated like a BEATLE—except when he was around John and Paul, who treated him like a little brother. That said—the very polite argument between George and Paul in Part One is so painful to watch because they’re both right in their opinion but wrong in their approach to one another.
Ringo is the “normal” one who keeps the peace, rarely noticed, but when he speaks up or gets mad everyone notices. He was the most seasoned live musician at the beginning of the band, and for the previous three years, he’d found himself was stuck in a studio-only, where his contributions were essentially “play drums (sometimes) and eff off otherwise. Ringo just Ringo’s.
You’ve seen those scenes in biopics where a musician writes something famous and everybody stops what they’re doing and joins in, those always seemed fake. And then it happens a few times in this series and it’s amazing. Having spent entirely too much of my life writing and recording music, all of it — fights, resentments, blatant time wasting, messing around, having fun, collaborating, creating things out of thin air — is so painfully familiar. The Beatles are 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.
In a nutshell, Occam’s razor. A lot of their problems look like everyday workplace dysfunction; 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 other’s ISHT anymore. Fame is a mind eff, particularly at the “Beatles” level. There really was no person who could relate to that level of fame other than Elvis. It was a huge world of sycophants, accountants, lawyers, press, directors, hangers-on that they had to navigate themselves…without Epstein to shield them. The fact that they ended on the highest of high notes with Abbey Road is a testament to the raw talent they all possessed.