Beatles' Let It Be (33 1/3) (2 page)

My wife Jayne’s editing skills and saintly patience helped me endure the process of writing this book. For my son, Christopher: May you shine until tomorrow.

To my parents and my sister Gina: Thank you for your love and support.

For David Barker: Thanks for making this project happen and for being such a great editor. At Continuum I would also like to thank Gabriella Page-Fort and Carolyn Sawyer.

“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.”John Lennon

“Shine Until Tomorrow/Let It Be”

—Lennon/McCartney

Throughout the manuscript the name Abbey Road Studios is primarily used, although until late 1969 it was actually called EMI Studios. Also, the double album released by the Beatles in 1968 entitled
The Beatles
will be referred to as
The White Album.
The performances described during the initial filming and recording at Twickenham Film Studios and at Apple Studios represent fairly complete versions of songs performed by the Beatles and in no way reflect a complete list of all songs performed. Most of the quotes in the book are from interviews conducted by the author. The book contains several quotes that have been reproduced often over the years from members of the Beatles. Most of them were taken from
The Beatles Anthology.
Every effort has been made to identify the original source of all other quotes in the text. The selected bibliography at the end of the book includes quoted and informational sources.
However, due to space limitations, not every quote or piece of information is attributed to a specific source and date. Recording dates and the names of specific studio personnel were obtained primarily from Mark Lewisohn’s
The Beatles Recording Sessions.
No book on the Beatles’ recording sessions would be complete without referencing Lewisohn’s definitive and singular text.

There were many books that I read and re-read in order to conduct the research on this book. Naturally, Doug Sulpy’s
Get Back
was a primary source. In fact, it would be nearly impossible to write a book about this period in Beatles history without consulting his comprehensive tome.

On the morning of January 10, 2003, newspapers around the world carried a front-page article with a headline that seemed more fitting for a crime drama than for one of the most crucial chapters in the story of pop music’s most celebrated group. The news from London was that police had discovered more than 500 hours of tapes believed to be of the Beatles’ January 1969 filming and sessions from their notorious
Let It Be
period. The tapes were recovered in Amsterdam and had been missing since the early 1970s. Arrests were made in Amsterdam and London. The tapes were actually audiotapes used for the filming of the
Let It Be
movie. They provide a continuous aural diary of the group’s nearly month-long filming and sessions.

The treasure trove of unreleased material covers of dozens of various artists’ songs and the dialogue contained on the tapes offers an exhaustive and rare glimpse
inside the fractured sessions that critics and fans have pointed to as the beginning of the end of the greatest pop group in music history.

The “Get Back” sessions, as they were called, for all of their problems, were the bridge between the group’s
White Album
and its actual last album,
Abbey Road,
despite the fact that
Let It Be
was officially released to the public in 1970, long after
Abbey Road,
and was billed as the group’s swan-song.

During the sessions, the group would either finish writing and/or play for the first time many of the songs that would appear on
Abbey Road;
several that would appear on George Harrison’s first proper solo album,
All Things Must Pass;
and some that would appear on John Lennon’s
Imagine
and Paul McCartney’s
McCartney
and
Ram
albums.

The filming and the sessions yielded the most bootlegged recording period in history. While Bob Dylan’s concerts in London in 1966 may have resulted in the first major pop-rock bootleg, no recording project has gone on to have such a seemingly endless history.

It’s remarkable that the recording sessions actually began as rehearsals for a proposed return to live stage work, which in its earliest planning stage was possibly going to be a concert, staged over three nights, in December of 1968 at The Roundhouse in London. At that point, the group had not performed live since August
of 1966. The rehearsals and the sessions would yield the last live concert the group would ever give. The famous lunchtime rooftop concert would be the final image of the Beatles printed on the memories of many. In picking the greatest concerts of all time, the editors of
Rolling Stone
magazine chose that somewhat impromptu performance as the number one moment in live rock concert history.

Let It Be,
as already stated, was not the last album the group recorded. Yet, the music, the images from the film, the album jacket, and the booklet would comprise our last collective memory of the group. Ethan Russell’s photos provided the final enduring glimpse of the pop group that more than any other, changed, shaped and defined the 1960s. Oddly enough, the photos Russell shot that graced the
Hey Jude
album, taken at John Lennon’s home in Ascot on August 22, 1969, are actually from the last photo session the group would do.

Let It Be
is in many ways a more fitting ending to the 60s, although maybe not to the Beatles. Much like the 60s, it was incomplete, raw, disappointing, and marred by never really living up to the promise of its initial conception.
Abbey Road,
by contrast, was an idealized representation of the 60s. It was filled with beauty and pop art of the highest caliber, and left one with words to live by: “The Love You Take / Is Equal to the Love You Make.”
Abbey Road,
in its realized execution, was
more the kind of expression we had come to expect from the Beatles.
Let It Be
reflected the uncertainty and pain of the end of the 60s. Yet, against the backdrop of the waning decade, there were some of the best songs the group ever wrote or recorded: “Let It Be,” the hymn-like cousin of “Hey Jude”; “Get Back,” proof that the group could still rock; “Two of Us,” a sweet acoustic song of enduring friendship and, like “I’ve Got a Feeling,” a song that brought John and Paul close together musically. Even “Dig a Pony,” with its you-can-be-anything-you-want message, offered great hope, something the Beatles’ songs, whether by John, Paul, or George, often provided, which was a key reason why they resonated with so many people and continue to endure.

Let It Be
is the one Beatles album that appears to have no end. In many ways it is an incomplete work. Its incompleteness may be why some are so attracted to it—even Paul McCartney. Going back to it and wondering what it might have been gives us a chance to go back to a time ripe with possibilities. Is it revisionism? Is it nostalgia? What drives those who buy every bootleg of every moment of the filming and sessions for the album? Why does that period continue to be pored over, again and again?
Let It Be
was begun during the last year of the most tumultuous decade of the century. Perhaps too much has been made about how significant
it was because it signaled the end of the Beatles. First, it wasn’t the end, and second, the group had been breaking up for some time and was destined to break up,
Let It Be
or not.

As of this writing, with the trial concerning the stolen tapes unresolved, it is hard to say if and how the alleged tapes will impact the DVD of the film to be released at the end of 2004.

There is a sense of uncertainty when a book is complete or near completion. Questions can nag at an author. With this book, the questions are particularly numerous, and of a more complex nature. One would think it would be easy to chronicle such a short period of time and to lay out all the facts and the history. Even after interviewing nearly 30 people who were either directly or indirectly involved with
Let It Be,
and talking to several people with a refined knowledge of the Beatles, I still feel that the making of the album and its ramifications have only just begun to unravel. Even Doug Sulpy, in his mammoth scholarship on the subject, has primarily stuck to chronicling that cold January in 1969 in the fashion of a diary. Perhaps that is why his work has been so excellent. Sulpy has saved us all from the kind of armchair pop-psychology that leads to reader indifference. The album is like an iceberg, revealing only the tip of a massive physical presence. Looking closely at
Let It Be
is akin to conducting an archeological
dig. Examining all the artifacts of the period gives people a glimpse of another age and how that age became extinct. As much as the Beatles’ music continues to find new audiences and to thrill its old audience, the spirit and hope that was reflected in the group’s music has gradually eroded. A corrosive cynicism, and the dominance of forms of musical expression that put marketability and packaging first, has replaced the naive faith and pursuit of creative excellence exemplified by the Beatles.

“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”—Lawrence Durrell

The seeds that would eventually result in the
Let It Be
album were actually planted during the making of
The White Album
in the summer of 1968. The project didn’t start as a specific idea or a grand plan; rather, it began with the recording of a film clip for a song. That song was “Hey Jude,” which was scheduled to be the group’s next single and was not part of
The White Album.

As has been thoroughly documented, Paul began writing the song in his Aston Martin on his way to John Lennon’s Weybridge home to visit John’s five-year-old son Julian, sometime in June of 1968. John and his wife Cynthia were getting divorced and Paul was thinking
of how hard it was going to be for the little boy to have his parents split up. What began as “Hey Julian” turned into “Hey Jules” (or Jools) and eventually became “Hey Jude,” in part because it sounded better and also as a result of Paul’s recalling the name of the character Jud from the Broadway show
Oklahoma.
The lyrics “Take a sad song and make it better,” were Paul’s encouraging words for young Julian. While Paul was beginning to formulate the song in his head during the hour-long drive (he often thought of ideas while driving), he probably had no inclination he was creating what would go on to be one of the group’s greatest songs.

John actually helped Paul finish the song on July 26 at Paul’s house on Cavendish Ave. in St. John’s Wood. While Paul was running through the bare-bones structure of the song for John and came to the line “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” he explained to John that he would fix that bit later. John quickly told him he would not and in fact said it was the best line in the song. I heard Paul tell this story at a small roundtable of journalists in support of his 1989
Flowers in the Dirt
album and tour. His pride in relating the insight of his old writing partner was obvious.

The group began recording the song on July 29 at about 8:30 in the evening and continued until nearly four in the morning at Studio Two at Abbey Road, running through six takes with balance engineer Ken
Scott and tape operator John Henry Smith. The next evening they returned to Studio Two at around 7:30. Producer George Martin joined Scott and Smith for the session. After another 17 takes of the song, a tape reduction was made of takes 23, 24, and 25, and a stereo mix was taken from take 25. Martin took that mix with him at the end of the evening and came up with an orchestral score. During the evening’s recording and the rehearsals of the song, the Beatles were being filmed as part of a documentary film entitled
Music!
produced by the National Music Council of Great Britain. The few minutes of the sessions that were actually used in the film are primarily from take nine, and since George Harrison’s guitar work was nearly absent from the song, he is actually seen in the control room with Scott.

Ken Scott remembered the sessions for “Hey Jude” well: “On the first day they were running through it and learning it—trying to sort out the arrangement. The second day they got it very close. The film crew interfered with them getting the right take.” Scott recalled the film crew saying that they wouldn’t intrude and that: “You won’t even know we’re here,” which, according to Scott, couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

On the next day, the Beatles did something they hadn’t done since August of 1967: they ventured outside of Abbey Road to record at another studio. The group’s
first recording session outside of Abbey Road took place at Regent Sound Studio, on Tottenham Court Road in London, on February 9, 1967. The August 1967 session had taken place at Chappell Recording Studios on Maddox Street in Mayfair, west London. The occasion was to record “Your Mother Should Know.” On the last day of July 1968, however, something would happen at a studio that would figure prominently not only in Beatles recording history, but in the history of Apple Records and of pop music in general.

On July 31, the Beatles entered Trident Studios at 17 St. Anne’s Court in London. St. Anne’s Court, a convenient shortcut from Wardour Street to Dean Street in Soho, was actually a secluded alleyway. The studio, which was founded by Norman Sheffield and his younger brother Barry, had just opened that April. One of the first independent studios in London, Trident boasted an eight-track tape machine. While Abbey Road actually had a new 3M eight-track machine, it had yet to be tested and installed. The Beatles, always on the lookout for ways to expand the possibilities of recording, had booked the studio specifically because of its more advanced equipment.