Just not necessarily in the way that much of the prerelease hype promised. Like everyone else alive (including, probably, Paul and Ringo), I know less about the Beatles than Lewisohn, and I found Get Back revealing in some respects too. Get Back provides an immeasurable contribution to our understanding of what made the Beatles so remarkable.” It’s nothing less than the Beatles education primer, ultimately instructive to me and anyone else who really wants to see and hear who they were and how they worked. “Even in this instance, where I’d listened to close-on 100 hours of the audio spools from the month, I knew that seeing the footage in Get Back was going to tell me a huge amount. “No one knows everything about anything,” he says via email. Lewisohn, a leading Beatleologist, is the author of a shelfful of books about the band, including The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and The Beatles: All These Years, an in-progress, three-volume, comprehensive chronicle that makes Jackson look like a dilettante. If there’s anyone in the world who wouldn’t have stood to learn a lot about the Beatles from Get Back, it’s Mark Lewisohn. What did Get Back teach us about the Beatles? So before we close the book on the Beatles-until their inevitable next revival-let’s consider five lingering questions prompted by Get Back. I’m left with some silly, inconsequential questions, such as: Should I be eating more toast? And: If the Beatles hadn’t voluntarily left the rooftop, would those beleaguered bobbies still be awkwardly waiting for them to stop playing? Or: Which was original documentarian Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s worst suggestion of a venue for a rock concert, an orphanage or a children’s hospital? But the docuseries stirs thoughts about some more substantial subjects, too. This is the world’s most celebrated band in one of its most momentous months, extracted from amber and brought back to life (in a nonthreatening way).Īnd so, instead of consigning Get Back to my towering pile of completed content, I keep turning it over in my mind. Get Back’s fidelity is deceptive-it took years of painstaking work with proprietary technology to make the decades drop away-yet it still seems miraculous that most of this footage sat almost unseen until now. Watching it is like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, except instead of snippets of text on brittle parchment, it’s crystal-clear audio and video that looks like it could’ve been captured last week.
YOU TUBE LET IT BE THE BEATLES ARCHIVE
In an era when most media is instantly accessible, popular IP is endlessly recycled, and virtually every archive has been picked clean-when every album from rock’s heyday, including Let It Be, has been reissued and remastered and adorned with demos and rarities as many times as Baby Boomers’ checkbooks will bear- Get Back is a rare rich and untapped treasure. I’m also still savoring Get Back because I’m worried that I’ll never see something quite like it again-not just about the Beatles but about anything. To trot out an overused expression, The Beatles: Get Back is a vibe, one that’s difficult to forget and impossible to replicate in real life. Spend enough time bathed in the incandescent creativity at the nexus of ’60s culture, and the present can’t help but seem drab by comparison.
Watching Get Back is a passable facsimile of sitting in a studio with an engaging group of friends who happen to be some of the best songwriters ever. The intimate nature of the three-act epic, which director Peter Jackson presents without the distancing effects of 50-years-later talking heads or narration, deepened my parasocial bond with a band that broke up long before I was born. Give it a few centuries for the fuss to die down.) (Note: I know some of you must be sick of hearing and reading about the Beatles by now.
When soon-to-be Beatles manager Brian Epstein watched the band perform for the first time in 1961, he was struck not just by their appearance and sound but by their sense of humor and “personal charm.” Even though the band was approaching the precipice when it made Let It Be, Get Back is bursting with Beatles allure. Their charisma and rapport can’t be separated from their recordings-the former influenced the latter-but their appealing (if partly performative) public personas have almost as much to do with their undimmed legend as with the music they made. Get Back’s got a hold on me partly because the Beatles, in addition to having many other virtues, were a really great hang.
Almost three weeks after the docuseries’ debut on Disney+, a piece of me is still stuck in 1969. I’ve had a hard time putting The Beatles: Get Back behind me, and not only because it’s eight hours long.