It’s a long and winding road through The Beatles: Get Back, director Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary series about the making of the band’s Let It Be album and concert film. Billed as an all-access look at the January 1969 recording sessions, the Disney+ series over-delivers. The nearly eight-hour project could have gotten its point across in half the time.
There’s a lot going on as Part 1 begins, yet the “action” unfolds at a crawl. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr gather to write and record 14 songs for a new album. A film crew will record the entire process for a new Beatles documentary (Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be, released in 1970). At the same time, the band is expected to create and agree upon a concept for a live television special. All of this is on a tight timeline, as Ringo is scheduled to begin work on The Magic Christian movie later in the month.
The band begins these projects on a cavernous soundstage at Twickenham studios outside of London. The acoustics are terrible, there’s no proper recording equipment and people are constantly streaming in and out of the “set.” The Beatles are wary of the many cameras and mics surrounding them. They’re moody, tired and not in control of the situation.
The haphazard set-up at Twickenham is astonishing because it’s THE BEATLES. At this point in their career, the Liverpudlian quartet had released a string of Number One albums, toured the planet, and their latest album, The Beatles (aka, the White Album), was at the top of U.S. and U.K. charts. Watching the events unfold, one wonders why a band of this status is even dealing with these circumstances. Snippets of conversations reveal they’re rudderless without Brian Epstein, their longtime manager who died two years earlier of an accidental drug overdose. “Mr. Epstein,” as the group reverently refers to, made decisions for them and held them together. As Paul McCartney remarks in 2016’s The Beatles: Eight Days a Week documentary, “He had a vision for us beyond the vision we had for ourselves. Brian kept us together as a team.” It’s no wonder they can’t concentrate on music-making when they’re also managing themselves and these unwieldy side projects.
Get Back picks up the pace in Part 2 when the band relocates to the Apple Corps studio. A frustrated Harrison had quit the sessions at Twickingham and agreed to return, in part, if the entire production changed locations. He and the other Beatles are more comfortable in this controlled environment. Keyboardist Billy Preston, who’d gotten to know the band in their Hamburg days, is invited to sit in on the sessions. Preston’s presence changes the sometimes tense dynamic and frees the Beatles to focus on other instruments. “He got on the electric piano, and straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room,” Harrison said in the 2000 Beatles Anthology book. “Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we’d created among ourselves.” Preston’s contributions are intrinsic to Let It Be, and he’s the only non-Beatles member credited on an original Beatles composition.
The Beatles: Get Back is the most recent in a trilogy of Beatles-sanctioned projects of the past five years: Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary, Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, covers their early career and punishing tour schedule through the mid-’60s; Hulu’s McCartney 3,2,1 deconstructs Beatles and Wings tunes though the eyes of the now-79-year-old McCartney. Eight Days a Week ends with sequences from the rooftop concert that’s the apex of Get Back. McCartney 3,2,1, released in July, also includes snippets of the Let It Be footage. That Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years and McCartney 3,2,1 both use video from the Let It Be sessions signals a calculated release of material, likely intended to introduce the band to new generations and capitalize on fans’ insatiable desire for “new” angles on the band.
Die-hard Beatles fans will relish Get Back: it’s like watching Picasso paint “Guernica” or the Taj Mahal being constructed. Now-familiar songs take shape from a few chords or a riff. Melodies and lyrics are worked out as the days pass. For the song “Get Back,” McCartney toys with several last names for “Sweet Loretta” before arriving on “Martin.” Similarly, “Jojo left his home” to go somewhere, but it’s in Part 2 of the doc that McCartney settles on “Tucson, Arizona” as Jojo’s destination. In Part 3, Harrison excitedly arrives to the studio with a new song he’d spent the night composing. He’s tired but says he followed Lennon’s songwriting advice to finish a tune while it’s fresh in mind. It ends up on the Let It Be album as “For You Blue.” These are the moments where Get Back excels: watching the band create, collaborate and support each other. They also workshop songs that would later appear on other albums and solo efforts like George Harrison’s magnificent 1970 album, All Things Must Pass. It’s a master class in songwriting.
The entirety of Get Back leads up to the band’s rooftop performance at Apple Corp’s London office—which wasn’t proposed to the band until weeks into the process—but there’s seven hours of noodling to get through first. For the casual viewer, this is where the doc stagnates. Jackson culls nearly 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio down to eight hours but as The Beatles sang on Yellow Submarine, “It’s all too much.” Too much repetition, too many takes of the same song, too much of them sitting around.
“You have to wade through a lot of nonsense. It’s Jackson’s responsibility to keep the action fluid instead of dragging on,” NPR television critic Eric Deggans told Ampersand. “It’s the filmmaker’s job to tell the more streamlined story than to make us sit through endless iterations of them fu**ing around in the studio and making jokes and getting behind the drums and all that. Take us to the moments that matter.”
There is so much darn everything in The Beatles: Get Back that the viewer turns to matters having nothing to do with the music. Paul cannot stop scratching his beard. George likes neckwear. They read articles about themselves aloud. They eat toast. They smoke a lot of cigarettes. (Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001.) They drink tea. Sometimes they wear suits, sometimes they’re in sweaters and sneakers or t-shirts and vests. They arrive at practice in Rolls Royces and wear enormous fur coats. They’re polite even when tensions are high. They don’t yell. They don’t make extravagant requests. The most unusual ask is from George who sends someone out to buy a bow tie. Ringo is a master of observation and rarely offers an opinion. Paul is a perfectionist in search of a “big idea” for their concert. When in a good mood, John rattles off witticisms and stream of consciousness lyrics, many of which are incorporated into the album.
The Let It Be documentary filmmakers, crew and band management are the other stars of The Beatles: Get Back. Producer George Martin cuts a dashing figure with his slicked back blonde hair, encyclopedic musical knowledge and no-nonsense demeanor. Documentarian Lindsay-Hogg covers nearly every conceivable angle of camera and microphone placement and is constantly reminding the band that his documentary needs a plot. Recording engineer Glyn Johns looks like a cross between Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) and dresses in the sometimes clownish fashion of the era. Red-headed roadie Kevin Harrington seems like a good kid, catering to all the band’s needs. Longtime road manager Mal Evans writes lyrics down as they’re formulated in real time and in Part 3, stalls two police officers intent on shutting down the rooftop recording.
In less than a month, The Beatles wrote and recorded an album, starred in their own concert film/documentary, and created classic rock staples like “Let It Be,” “Get Back,” and “Across the Universe.” Though Peter Jackson’s version of those events is over-indulgent, Beatles fans will “Dig It.”