Peter Jackson's docuseries titled The Beatles - Get Back on Disney+ it's a time machine. Jackson is the New Zealand artist who created the trilogy of Lord of the Rings and then installed in Wellington (New Zealand) one of the largest laboratories computer graphics and artificial intelligence of the world.
In the eight hours of period footage, many previously unseen, restored and skillfully and patiently put together by Jackson in Get Back, there are plenty of insights into the Fab Four's personalities, work, and art. That the Beatles are an epochal phenomenon is now a truism. The Liverpool Boys are more than a band, they are case studies included in the curricula of business schools.
Apple Records derived its name, as Paul McCartney reminds us, from Magritte's paintings depicting a green apple in unlikely situations. Apple, in turn, owes its name to the Beatles record company, a myth for the founders. “My business model is the Beatles” Steve Jobs used to say.
JANUARY 1969
The moment of the Beatles documenting Peter Jackson and reworking him with intelligence and philological accuracy is particular. It's January 1969: the year begins with the idea of putting on a live concert and a very high profile television special (14 new songs, and a concert in a very special place like, for example, the House of Lords) and ends up with something wonderfully lower profile, but brilliant.
The impromptu and unauthorized lunchtime performance on a rooftop in central London (the Apple Record terrace, Saville Road) abruptly interrupted by the bobbies for disturbing the peace.
An act that reminds the world of the majesty, spontaneity and brilliance of the band. “I hope we passed the audition,” Lennon says at the end of the show.
This period had already been the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 film vérité by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; the film soundtrack was also the Beatles' last studio LP. That film has been looked upon as the sad document of the band's collapse, and recollections of the four Beatles seem to corroborate this sentiment. Lennon described the sessions documented in Get Back as "hell", and Harrison called them the group's "winter of discontent".
Peter Jackson's work changes this univocal perspective a bit and sheds a new light on this whole affair. The New Zealand director had access to nearly 60 hours of unedited footage owned by Apple Corps, the Beatles company, without a specific mandate, Jackson said: he was simply asked to restore the raw footage and put it together, respecting the intent documentary of the project.
GET BACK, THE NEW
In fact Get Back it gives us something we didn't have about the Beatles before. It's eight hours of pure creation. And this creative state doesn't really feel like the Beatles' swan song, but rather the testimony of a band at its maximum degree of maturity and also of camaraderie. We see the Beatles teasing each other, joking, miming posh accents and performing skits that look like something out of a “Monty Python” episode.
There are certainly moments of tension such as when Harrison abandons rehearsals fed up with being a supporting actor and the group goes into crisis, one perceives the nervousness and tension in the tones and gestures of those present (there is also the omnipresent Yoko Ono, considered by many the architect of the breakup of the group).
In a note to the re-release of the album Let It Be, McCartney writes that the original film, ie Let It Be, "was pretty sad because it showed the breakup of the band, but the new film highlights the camaraderie and love that the four of us had for each other."
One then wonders, also in the light of McCartney's words and the events that actually led to the separation, if the band was joyful and creatively fruitful, or fed up with each other's human and artistic company. The answer could be: both. But let's leave this doubt to the lovers of the history of the Beatles and to the fans who continue to wonder, without resigning themselves, about the reasons for the division of the group. In Get Back you can also look for something else.
And finding even more makes Jackson's series special. In what sense?
JACKSON'S SALT
Jackson has not only collated and edited an immense unpublished archival material. Rather, as Jere Hester writes in the “New York Times”, Jackson, without forcing his intention to remain in cinéma vérité, did something different and better: “he stitched hours and hours of raw footage into his own deep creative texture and multidimensional".
Jackson's is, in the final analysis, the analytical representation of a creative-collaborative process that crystallizes a precise method: starting with an intuition, letting Paul put down two notes while waiting for John to arrive, continuing with improvisations of George and Ringo; … the Session it goes on for hours, in the meantime John has arrived, and ends with a spell.
All this under the immense pressure of the outside world that expects the moon from each new album of the band already shaken by disagreements and by different life perspectives that would soon divide them forever.
CREATIVITY LESSONS
Jackson's film contains some valuable lessons in creative behavior that Jere Hester was able to extrapolate in a nice article in the "New York Times" entitled 'Improvise It, Man.' How to Make Magic Like the Beatles. We summarize some of them with the help of Hester, also author of a book on the Beatles and their profound connoisseur.
Repeat and try and if it doesn't work try again
The tests to refine the lyrics of the piece Don't let me down, for example, and finding the right musical arrangements are endless, exhausting and backbreaking (they look like "Rocky" meetings). It's this repeating and repeating that gives the band the confidence to take the show to the roof. As they climb up Paul says, "The best part of us – always has been and always will be – is when we corner ourselves and try, try, try." Up there, they then give it their all for 42 minutes, until the bobbies put an end to the performance of the century.
WORK HARD, INDEED VERY HARD
The group is punctual, disciplined, focused and focused during rehearsals in an effort to find the right words and play the right harmony. Despite the beer and wine, there is what we would today call (perhaps with a compromised term) an immense "professionalism". Other than good boys from Liverpool! They look like a Lagunari commando.
“Wandering aimlessly is very unswinging,” McCartney says. “Very, very old-fashioned,” he repeats. Paul is the Jiminy Cricket of the group and also his workaholic.
THINK BIG
At the beginning of the film McCartney tries to convince the group to compose 17 new pieces in 14 days to present them in a television special. The proposal creates tension and Harrison goes into crisis and leaves the scene (to then return). Thinking big breaks the back, but it's fruitful. He opens up new creative and real possibilities and if he associates himself with freewheeling – the Beatles, for example, fabled looking for an unconventional place to hold the concert – he sows the seeds of the fruit to come. For the live concert, the roof terrace of the Apple Record building in Savile Row, in the heart of London, will then be chosen (where it will be held on January 30, 1969). The entire concert is documented in Jackson's film.
MIXING STRUCTURING AND IMPROVISATION
When McCartney gets angry at the head of the band and tries to bring it into line, Lennon and Harrison get irritated, not so much for reasons of power as because Paul infringes a way of working made up of spontaneous and shared improvisations, without prevarication. When McCartney abandons the role of class monitor, which comes naturally to him, he relaxes and the music takes shape through the jam session to which everyone contributes. From there comes the backbone of the piece.
WHEN THE GAME GET TOUGH, TEAM UP
Even as they debate each other in the hazy Twickenham studio before Harrison leaves, the Beatles huddle together as if they were back on the small stage at the Cavern Club of Liverpool, where they played together before achieving success.
The longtime friends, members of the world's most famous band, barely speak to each other but play, sing and "riff" on each other's ideas. Among the many cases: I've Got a Feeling, the last true Lennon-McCartney composition. As John Lennon later said, "All we have is us." Very difficult to be us. A great goal, easy to lose.
CHANGE THE SCENARIO HELPS
After Harrison returns to the band (and the idea of taking Eric Clapton in for him is abandoned) and the TV special project is shelved, the four Liverpool boys reunite in the cramped basement of Apple Records, and there they begin to improvise, they joke, they melt and the music flows effortlessly.
“You two work so well together,” record producer George Martin tells Harrison. “Do you see yourself, do you see yourself? It's really happening!"
ENTER FRESH BLOOD
The arrival of keyboardist Billy Preston improves the atmosphere and unites the group. The creative spirit enlivened by Preston radiates beyond the band — to Yoko Ono's impromptu vocals and Linda Eastman capturing sessions in snaps. Everyone puts their own creative stamp on it. Ringo switches from drums to piano to write Octopus's Garden.
John Lennon invites Preston to become a Beatle, and George asks to extend the invitation to Bob Dylan. McCartney throws it on humor: "It's bad enough being four."
MORAL
Nothing lasts forever outside of art, he tells us get-back. The Beatles didn't want to finish everything they had built together. But they were determined to change the state of affairs to move forward. And Jackson shows us the agony of these four boys, not yet thirty, who want to grow without distancing each other not only on a creative level.
When George leaves and it is not known if he will return, Paul dreams of a future reunion of four friends (at the bar?) and John more ambitiously says: "When we are all very old, we will agree again and sing together again".
It didn't happen. But thanks to Jackson's beautiful work, we get to see the band play together again and go to the source of the inspiration that made the Beatles the greatest pop culture creative force of all time.
It's not an easy vision of Get Back, nor are the films of Andy Warhol or the experimental cinema of New York that fed the imagination of the Valvet Underground (excellent film by Todd Haynes on Apple Tv+). But if you play in a band Get Back it's royal jelly.
