I just finished watching the three part 'documentary' GET BACK as remastered and brilliantly edited by Peter Jackson. Old Pete likes to do things in three parts and it works well for him.
The material he used was nearly a hundred hours of film footage and 150 hours of audio recording from the LET IT BE film exercise and he deconstructed, edited and reconstructed it over four years to create a great piece of work.
I never watched the original LET IT BE film and, by all accounts it was dire and, although using actual footage and recordings never managed to capture the spirit of the LET IT BE project.
It does take a bit of perseverance to get into this series - The Old Girl gave up half way through Part One. There's a lot of silly dialogue (multi-conversations), disjointed singing and playing and the whole thing seems a bit chaotic.
A lot of this was perhaps due to them talking and planning the pending album and concert in the cavernous Twickenham film studio where they were obviously uncomfortable. When they moved to their newly set-up Apple studio things improved considerably.
Even at Twickenham though, halfway through Part One (after The Old Girl gave up on it) something magic happened. The fragments of lyrics, chords and ideas for various songs - sometimes all jumbled together - started to take shape and a hint at the songs that came out on the LET IT BE and ABBEY ROAD albums emerged.
These guys were filmed creating their songs (of course they each would have worked on them individually, at home, overnight) in a pressure cooker environment having set themselves a deadline of 3 or 4 weeks from start to finish. The creative process was very interesting.
Some outtakes for me were:
- The obvious chemistry between Lennon and McCartney as a creative duo.
- The wit and vitality of Lennon as he was seen to be enjoying himself and only closed down when that fucking nut Yoko Ono was close.
- The brilliance of McCartney who had a reasonably clear vision of the songs before they developed and the direction of the albums, the film and the concert they were to go in even though these all developed organically.
- The lack of self-confidence of Harrison who seemed overwhelmed by Lennon and McCartney's creativity and who at times didn't seem to want to be there.
- The lack of contribution by Ringo other than his obvious musical intuition and ability to create the essential rhythms.
- The brilliance of Billy Preston whose contribution - unrehearsed and impromptu was pivotal in gelling a couple of the songs that were stalled - sort of like a catalyst in the same way he did later for The Rolling Stones.
I particularly liked how the rooftop concert was a late idea put forward by one of the production team after other more prosaic concepts were abandoned and the delight that McCartney showed when the idea was first put to him. Lennon also embraced the idea but Harrison was initially against it. Ringo I think didn't care either way. This to me underscored the project which was groundbreaking and the great way that, organically (again - I'm sounding like Robert and his bloody Socrates) the songs, the albums, the rooftop concert and the film 50 years later took shape. Early in Part One, one of them, McCartney or Lennon prophetically mused what people 50 years in the future would think of the project and how would they look. It was certainly groundbreaking and a brave thing to do made all the better by the fact that it wasn't contrived as these things would more cynically be done today. The vitality was captured well on film - and I'm sure that Jackson had a lot to do with this in his selection, editing and remastering.
This is a great bit of musical and cultural history packaged up by a home-grown master.
