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SIDEBARS: |
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CONTINUED. . .
As for Ono, sure, she
might not be the single reason that The Beatles broke up.
Lennon, after all, was a Trilby waiting for a Svengali to
happen, his personality characteristically glomming on to the
next big outre thing. Ono was as outre a thing as he'd ever
found. (Remember how, when told of trepanning---a Medieval
“health” practice of drilling holes in the skull---he was
gung-ho to try it right away.) But the issue will always remain:
had Ono not imposed herself on the proceedings, presuming to
behave as if a vested member of the group, dictating their
business. . .that enormous complication and pressure would not
have existed.
As the New York Times
commentator, Hess, put it:
“And yet there is something
depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet,
inconspicuous lump of a person. Of course her appearance in the
studio is obtrusive."
Was the Harrison affair due, in part, to. . .an
affair?
Seems
George Harrison's separation from The Beatles Jan. 10, 1969
coincided with another separation---from his wife, Pattie.
Yes, it's time for
another installment of the George and Eric Show, that famed rock 'n'
roll sex-romp sitcom. . .
Seems that Eric Clapton
became disenchanted with a young French woman he had "dated" for a
couple of years. Why? Layla, of course---that is, Pattie Harrison---or
Clapton's crazy obsession with her. So he kicked out 20-year-old waif
Charlotte Martin, and naturally, she fled straight to Harrison's house,
Kinfauns.
Huh?
Pattie tells the story in
her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight:
She was always
flirtatious with George, but so were a lot of girls and he, of course,
loved it. Then she and Eric broke up — Eric told her to leave — and she
came to stay with us at Kinfauns. It was January 1, 1969, and George and
I had seen in the new year at Cilla Black’s house. … We arrived home in
good spirits but then everything went swiftly downhill. The French girl
didn’t seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to
George. Something was going on between them, and I questioned George. He
told me my imagination was running away with me, I was paranoid.
Exit Pattie, who
went to stay with friends.
This little marital
"hiccup," as George's second wife, Olivia, referred to George's
dalliances, went on for ten days. The day he quit The Beatles, he also
quit Charlotte Martin, and reconciled with Pattie. This
little background
has seldom been given ink.
Charlotte Martin and "Old Clapper" |
So it
seems reasonable to surmise that destabilizing forces in Harrison's
private life could have exacerbated destabilizing forces in his
professional life. It has already been made apparent from Jackson fully
contextualizing the on-camera confrontation with McCartney (played up,
out of context, by Lindsay-Hogg in "Let it Be") that this legendary
"I'll play whatever you want me to play" tiff was a relatively routine
"band argument." Not necessarily the "band-quake" that prompted George's
departure. As McCartney sang, many years later, in "Ballroom Dancing,"
But it wasn't always such a pretty sight / 'cause we used to fight
like cats and dogs. . .
After all, they kept
right on rehearsing---for another four days, before George's famed "See
you around the clubs" farewell. He would quit a second time, or at least
reaffirm the initial departure, at the Jan. 12 meeting at Ringo's
house---largely over Ono, it appears. George then went home to Liverpool
to stay with his parents, perhaps to get some counsel from his beloved
mother. . .certainly to put some distance on recent troubles.
Telling? It seems so. At
a second meeting at Ringo's home on the 15th, he rejoined the group on
the condition that sessions continue at Apple, and that the idea of a
live show was scrapped.
As for Charlotte Martin,
no worries. She took up with Jimmy Page.
EXCLUSIVE:
Yes, there was/is a setlist!
"To date, no (rooftop
concert) set list has ever been found," Rolling Stone
reported Jan. 29, 2016. And there has been nothing to contradict this
since---until now.
I have seen the setlist.
It is written in heavy pencil (grease pencil?) on Ringo Starr's hi-hat.
(See "My Brush with 'Get Back' History on page one.) I sat at his drum
kit, and there it was, plain as the nose on Ringo's face. (Or mine, to
be fair.) This was in 1997, when I interviewed Mark Hudson for Ringo's
"Vertical Man" album.
My notes are long gone,
but my memory is that the list was comprised only of the songs played on
the roof that Jan. 30, 1969. Why is this significant? Here's the big
reason:
In that Rolling
Stone piece, "Beatles’ Famous Rooftop Concert: 15 Things You
Didn’t Know," one such thing was that there were more instruments at the
ready during the concert---including a piano, microphone for an acoustic
guitar (for McCartney), lap steel guitar, , suggesting that the band was
ready to perform more songs.
"Were folky songs like
'Two of Us' originally in the mix?" the RS article, by one
Jordan Runtagh, asks. "Was McCartney going to try out some of his
piano-based ballads like 'Let It Be' and 'The Long and Winding Road'?
Could Lennon have used the lap-steel guitar as he did on 'For You Blue,'
giving Harrison his first (and only) solo vocal of the day?"
It's possible that
roadies were given general instructions to just bring whatever
instruments were already at hand in the studio. It's also possible that
someone in the band asked for the added instruments to preserve the
option of doing additional songs. It's possible that the very polite and
accommodating bobbies' gentle threat of arrest put a damper on the
proceedings, and cut things short. It's possible the setlist on the
hi-hat was provisional. And it's possible there were no plans to play
anything more than they did.
Strange no one has
apparently asked Paul or Ringo about it. Hint, hint.
Just How Many "Get Back/
Let it Be" Albums Were There?
Well, it depends on how
you count. Officially, they are:
*The first version of the
original "Get Back" album, produced by Johns, famously
rejected by The Beatles, now officially released on
the new "Let it Be" boxed set.
*The original boxed set
"Let it Be" album, finished by Spector, with the huge photo book of the
sessions inside, released in 1970.
*The original gatefold
"Let it Be" album, finished by Spector, released at the same time as the
original boxed set. (Same songs as in boxed set.)
*"The Beatles Anthology,
Vol. 3," disc two, which is largely comprised of alternate "Get Back/Let
it Be" songs, released in 1996.
*"Let it Be. . .Naked,"
McCartney's pet project to correct the mess made by Spector, released in
2003. No orchestras, new mixes.
*"Let it Be" remastered.
The original Spectorized album in improved sound quality, released 2009.
*Let it Be," remixed by
Giles Martin and Sam Okell, released in 2021.
And, if you want to
include unofficial albums:
*The original "Get Back"
bootleg on Lemon Records, leaked in September, 1969, consisting of
mostly earlier takes of the songs from the sessions. (Note: there were
several bootlegs at this time, with varying content, but this one was
the most complete.)
*There were
four attempts by Glyn Johns to compile a finished "Get Back" album.
All were rejected. The first and fourth passes were bootlegged in superb
quality in the mid-80's. The fourth includes the original version of "I
Me Mine" and "Across the Universe," neither of which are on the first.
There are other, lesser differences.
If you tally all
these up, you get. . .
Num-buh
NINE, num-buh
NINE, num-buh NINE. . .
(To see all album covers,
click here.)
The One That Got Away. . .
The biggest "one that got away" of the "Get Back/Let it Be"
sessions was certainly Harrison's "All Things Must Pass." In the end,
All Beatles Did Pass on it, for reasons unknown, but probably having to
do with Lennon's lack of enthusiasm. After all, he seldom even played on
Harrisongs, and in one instance, told poor George that his tunes were
all "daft."
“I don't know… I think it's all right,
you know," Lennon said of the song in the infamous Rolling Stone
interview in 1970. "Personally, at home, I wouldn't play that kind of
music, I don't want to hurt George's feelings, I don't know what to say
about it.”
And yet Lennon, for some
odd reason, played organ as the band learned "All Things Must Pass,"
rehearsed it, even tinkered with the background harmony vocal
arrangement. To listen to the brief sessions, one would not doubt that
the group had accepted it. In fact, later, when Lennon was improvising
words to the "Dig it" jam, he
sang the full list
of planned "Get Back" titles, including, yes, "All Things Must Pass."
Best guess: the epic song
was implicitly tabled, along with "She Came in Through the Bathroom"
window and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and never revived. So much for a
Beatles version?
No.
Thanks to Peter
Jackson, an excellent Beatles version of "All Things Must Pass" is
now entirely do-able. Really. Here's how:
As part of Jackson's
meticulous work on "The Beatles: Get Back," he had smart people
invent new Artificial Intelligence technology, in order to isolate
Beatles conversation from guitars. Seems all of them, but chiefly John
and George, would deliberately noodle around on their instruments in
order to keep the cameras---which recorded in mono---from picking up
their words. Jackson's investigative instincts kicked in.
“So a lot of our movie,"
he told Guitar.com, "or certainly some key parts of our movie, feature
private conversations that they tried to disguise or tried to cover up
at the time he was recording them. But we’ve been able to strip
those-those guitars away now, which is a little bit naughty!”
You see where this is going.
With this astonishing new AI, mono recordings can now be divided into
totally discrete individual parts. Translation: multi-track. It's a
minor miracle.
“And so then we can
take a mono track of them in Twickenham performing and we can say,
‘Just give us the vocal track,'" said Jackson. "And the machine learning
will render a vocal track only. So, you’ll see Ringo in the background
playing the drums, but you don’t hear the drums. Not one bit of drum
noise – just the vocals clean.
“So the big breakthrough
for us was actually not [restoring] the pictures, even though that’s
what you obviously look at, it was the sound. The way that we managed to
split off the mono recordings in the mouldable tracks.”
Ah, but what, you say, of
the fact that the run-throughs of "All Things Must Pass" featured guide
vocals from George---rough, sometimes out of time, words not finished?
Simple. On Feb. 25, 1969, Harrison's 26th birthday, he went to Abbey
Road and recorded splendid solo demos of "All Things Must Pass," "Old
Brown Shoe," and "Something." So. . .
Using the new AI, you
assemble the best possible backing track by The Beatles, complete with
the three-part harmony choruses, and mix in George's polished studio
demo (on which he accompanies himself on electric guitar.)
Voila! New Beatles song!
A fan has made a crude
argument for this, overlaying the studio demo on to one of the raw
mono takes. Listen
to it, and there is no doubt but that a Beatles version of "All
Things Must Pass" can be rescued---and a splendid version, at that.
Or should I say, should
have been rescued.
Why Giles Martin and Sam
Okell did not create this mix, and place the song in the running order
of the new "Let it Be," or, at minimum, a bonus track, is unfathomable.
(It does sound like they applied this technology to the Twickenham
selections on the outtakes discs, which lack the camera beeps of
bootlegs and sound much improved.)
As to the rest of the
music recorded by those mono cameras, imagination is the limit.
Extra! Extra!
Oh, wait, no extra! No extra!
The DVD of "The Beatles:
Get Back" features a whole lot of no extras. It's just the documentary,
not one extra minute.
Never mind the fact that
Peter Jackson edited the thing down to about eight hours from about
eighteen (and brilliantly.) Never mind the fact that songs are mostly
shown in excerpts, or telescoped into mini-versions. Never mind that the
Apple rooftop performance is still interrupted by interviews and
cutaways.
To ask why this is the
case, is to ask why people want to make money. And that is probably the
answer.
One supposes that
another DVD will eventually be forthcoming, perhaps "Get Back: The
Performances." Maybe Apple made that a condition of the deal with the
Disney devil: you put out the documentary only, and we will handle the
music.
In any event, a DVD with
full studio performances of the "Get Back" songs, as well as the entire
rooftop concert, uninterrupted by cutaways and interviews, is warranted.
It could be a double-DVD set, the first with rehearsals, the second with
finished renditions. It all amounts to the debut of the "new live
Beatles" of 1969, showing what might have been, had the group ever
toured again.
As to the rest of the
ten hours that Jackson cut, well, it is inarguable that this footage
is part of the most important record of The Beatles at work. Which
stands by itself as an argument for its eventual release.
---Rip Rense
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