Sometimes - often - great work takes time, and inspiration won’t show face until the distractions in your periphery are sufficiently quieted. Really, Get Back is a show about process and compromise, and the mercurial nature of creativity and the value of an edifying work-life balance. When the band gives up on Twickenham and decamps to a new studio in the basement of the headquarters of their multimedia start-up, Apple Corps - another near disaster since the sound in the facility was so lacking that producer George Martin had to truck in instruments and concoct an eight-track recording rig using two four-tracks - American singer-songwriter and keyboard whiz Billy Preston is invited to the sessions in the interest of fleshing out compositions without relying on overdubs, adding a weighty, ruddy soulfulness to the recordings that offsets their classic-rock interests quite nicely. One day, while rehearsing the folk ballad “Two of Us,” Lennon suggests singing it like Stevie Wonder, admiring the American vocalist’s ease with tricky vocal runs. The Beatles reflect on the songs they grew up on as they work out ways to bridge a reverence for the music of the past with a burning desire to compete with their peers. Twickenham Studios is a wide-open space dotted with people mucking about in the background, staring as the band workshops new songs around old ideas. It’s immediately apparent that everyone’s mojo is off. Their solution was to push through it, to record a live album of new songs in front of a studio audience in the weeks before Starr filmed The Magic Christian alongside Peter Sellers inside the same facility. Following the difficult sessions that produced the band’s 1968 self-titled opus, the relative commercial failure of 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour film, the passing of longtime manager Brian Epstein the same year, and the lengthy blowback in the States from the interview in which Lennon said his band was “bigger than Jesus,” the Beatles had their guards up. Get Back finds the Beatles reckoning with the weight of being rock royalty. Some of this is true, but the footage tells a slightly different story: one of simple drift setting in between friends and of this last-ditch effort to fight back against the currents pushing the foursome in different directions. We’ve heard that Yoko Ono’s presence in the sessions created static, that McCartney could be a taskmaster when he wanted, that Lennon and McCartney’s egos marginalized Harrison’s contributions. We think we know the story of the period in which the lads drafted their final recordings, staged their final live show, and ultimately broke up. It is strange, then, that New Zealand–based director Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, a three-part, eight-hour Disney+ docuseries culled from the dozens of hours of footage and audio recorded as the band worked on the songs released in the 1970 film and album Let It Be, feels positively chock-full of fresh insights into the inner workings of one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time. Every inch of the legacy has been thoroughly considered, every strength and weakness detailed. The talent and adventurousness of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison are well documented, the subject of a nearly 60-year cottage industry of official and unofficial Beatle ephemera. The songs revolutionized pop music, taking inspiration from titans like Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, and influenced future generations of songwriters and instrumentalists, all the while enduring through musicals, films, television commercials, and archival rereleases. The story of the Beatles stretches out across a vast range of human experiences, touching on spirituality, politics, friendship, drugs, arrests, marriages, breakups, and even murder. Get Back turns a filmmaker loose in one of music’s most illustrious vaults and peers into a period that sometimes gets overlooked.
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