Paul mccartney get back6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Fans who’ve seen the fly-on-the-wall footage of the band writing and recording live takes of 14 songs in 22 days – which includes a painful exchange in which Paul McCartney and George Harrison bicker about Harrison’s guitar playing – “naturally assume” they’re viewing the band’s demise. “It’s forever tainted by the fact The Beatles were breaking up when it came out,” Jackson says of the original 1970 movie. That’s the promising premise behind director Peter Jackson’s new six-hour documentary “ The Beatles: Get Back” ( streaming Thursday, Friday and Saturday on Disney+), which revises the narrative around “Let It Be,” a gloomy behind-the-scenes film about the album of the same name that arrived in theaters after the band revealed its split. What if everything you thought you knew about The Beatles’ breakup was wrong? Then he turns back to the microphone-he in a sportcoat beside John in a fur-and, beaming completely, he keeps right on singing.Watch Video: 'The Beatles: Get Back' to air on Disney+ in time for Thanksgiving When Paul catches sight of the officers he gives the most impish “Whoo!” and swivels his hips a little extra. The Beatles are in the middle of a cracking version of Don’t Let Me Down. “It’s lovely,” Harrison says.Ībout 34 minutes into the rooftop concert, with onlookers peering from neighboring buildings, two bobbies step out onto the roof behind the band, concerned about the noise and the gathering of people stalling traffic on the street below. ![]() When they play the finished song straight, strumming gently opposite one another, a new fragment of the firmament is in place. ![]() At one point he and Lennon goof through a rendition of Two of Us pretending to be ventriloquists. He bounces happily, if purposefully, through the melodies. You might say that McCartney is all business, so long as it is understood that a big part of that business-then, as now, as always-is joy. (Seven weeks later they’ll be Linda and Heather McCartney.) Linda snaps some photos, and Heather crawls about pretending to be a tiger, but they stay, with few exceptions, outside the workspace. McCartney is also visited in the studio by his love, Linda Eastman, and her six-year-old daughter Heather. She knits, sorts mail, casts silent looks and slips Lennon a half-stick of chewing gum. She spends much of her time sitting beside him within the band’s circle. Ono’s seamless intimacy with Lennon is ever present in Get Back. Later, with Harrison back, the Beatles are at the end of a harmonious, brilliant, long day of song-making, when Yoko Ono, appendant to John Lennon throughout, asks McCartney of the next day’s planned rehearsal: “Will it be all day then?” McCartney answers: “Who knows, Yoko?” Whatever it takes to get the songs right, is what he means, however long it takes to get them down. ”You always get annoyed,” McCartney says to Harrison “I’m trying to help, you know.” This is in the first part of the film before Harrison quits the band. McCartney suggests drum parts to Ringo Starr, guitar parts to George Harrison. ![]() “I’m trying to talk to you about this arrangement.” “Can you just stop playing for a minute, John?” he says. The first to move out of the clowning through old blues tunes that might flavor the start of a morning’s jam, and into the project at hand. Even among the other worker Beatles, his persistence stands out. For McCartney in particular the temperament and genius are tied tightly to his commitment. Get Back shapes and illuminates known notions of the band in their final stage, capturing each Beatle’s distinct temperament and genius. “Tomorrow, John,” you half expect McCartney to suggest, “let’s make the mountains and the seas.” If the Creation metaphor seems overwrought, go listen to Let It Be. A producer and one of the Beatles may be talking about a scheduling detail when you realize that in the background Paul McCartney, on the piano, is noodling out the melody and words to Let It Be in real time. Even stretches of the mundane or tedious-not another take of Don’t Let Me Down-are shot through by lightning. The nearly eight-hour film deploys previously unseen footage, more than a half-century old, to chronicle three weeks of the Beatles writing and recording songs, and preparing for what would be the band’s final live performance, an unannounced 42-minute concert on the roof of Apple Studios. Watching Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, Get Back, feels a bit like having a window seat to the creation of the earth. The following is from LIFE’s new special tribute issue, Paul McCartney: Yesterday and Today, available at newsstands and online: ![]()
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