To wit: The group initially turned over dozens of hours of recorded material to engineer Glyn Johns, tasking him with separating the wheat from the chaff and providing a mix suitable for release. The tumultuous aftermath of the Let It Be sessions is reflected in the byzantine miasma of versions of the album which emerged, and continue to emerge. All of this and more is covered in forensic detail on the new five-disc reissue of Let It Be with the (Super Deluxe) appendage, an accompaniment to Peter Jackson’s forthcoming six-hour re-imagining of the original documentary. Slowly the band began to find their way, and an LP began to take shape. The sessions eventually migrated to the more pacific setting of their own studio at Apple Headquarters.
Ringo couldn’t finish “Octopus’s Garden.” If the idea was to set aside grievances and establish a new esprit-de-corps, then the environment could scarcely have been less ideal. Paul complained about everyone’s level of preparation. George Harrison needled McCartney about his lack of spontaneity. The bickering that had become a feature of recent sessions reached new levels of hostility. The days at Twickenham were fraught and not particularly creative by their established standards. John Lennon, in particular, seemed to be shocked to learn that such a thing as 10 a.m. call time, disrupting the conventional evening-to-early-morning flow of their process.
The demands of the movie shoot required the band to convene at a 10 a.m. Sessions commenced at the Twickenham Studios soundstage in southwest London, a drafty and vibeless space, not at all like cozy Abbey Road, where nearly all their greatest recordings had taken place. It turned out to be the first time that they were not completely up to the challenge. Even without the trip to Africa, the brief was still unreasonable: Write and record a new album in front of rolling cameras and then get your live chops up to speed for a performance to be viewed by millions. They finally settled on the more practical but still strenuous plan of three weeks of filmed rehearsals and then a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row in London. Serious consideration was given to holding the concert in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia-not exactly what you’d call modest. The Beatles were simply too massive to do anything on a remotely small scale and soon enough, the project had morphed into a documentary that was to precede their first live performance in three years. It wasn’t a horrible idea, but it wasn’t quite feasible.
Put on notice by Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones’ roots-adjacent ’68 masterpiece Beggars Banquet, McCartney suggested they try their own hand at a stripped-down, informal approach, one that would reconnect them musically to one another and re-establish their working man’s band bona fides. Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ self-appointed problem-solver, saw in this trend an opportunity to address a creative issue while exploiting a commercial possibility. Following Bob Dylan’s self-conscious rejection of psychedelic pageantry John Wesley Harding and the magisterial traditionalism of the Band’s first two releases, the hip move was a return to basics. And yet, against what feels like common sense, the Beatles reconvened just 10 weeks later in January, intending to find some way to top themselves yet again.įor a rock band in 1969, “getting back” was all the vogue. The four-month sessions for the White Album had both tested relationships between the Fabs and emboldened each of them to pursue the possibilities of what might be accomplished alone. In 1967, their beloved longtime manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose, a casualty of Beatlemania’s ceaseless pressure cooker. They had legal issues and Apple-the utopian multimedia company they had recently founded-was quickly devolving into an untenable boondoggle. Their fame was such that even having begged off touring three years previous, they remained far too well-known to walk comfortably down any street. And by 1969, the Beatles were barely functional. The run between 1963’s Please Please Me and 1968’s The Beatles (known colloquially as the White Album) remains credulity-straining in both its breadth and brilliance. Since their early-’60s arrival as a mesmerizing foursome of Elvis and Everlys-inspired child savants, the Beatles had continuously and spectacularly leveled up: from chipper and prolific chart dominators in England to beloved Liverpool exports conquering America, to shaggy-haired counter-culture superstars lurking subversively in the pages of teenage glossies, to society-shifting psychedelic pioneers and avant-garde astronauts.