Get Back

I have to say I’ve been a bit taken aback by the new Beatles documentary “Get Back”. It’s such an intimate look that conveys the feeling of being in the room with the boys joking around and making music together. It covers a few week’s period that they are tasked to come up with enough music to stage a concert and make a live album.

The first few days are painful as the task seems so daunting and their anxieties bubble up in various ways to include George Harrison actually leaving town for a few days with no guarantees he’ll be back. They get a bit short with each other under the pressure, yet music starts to trickle out.

There’s Paul strumming out a rhythm on his bass that sounds like he’s playing a guitar and with some slight of hand the ear suddenly picks up in his mumbles the beginnings of the song “Get Back”. It’s like when you’re a kid at a carnival and the guy walks up to you and pulls a gold coin from behind your ear and you are like “where did that come from?!” At first George and Ringo seem uninterested in Paul’s noodling but as they begin to pick up on what he’s doing with it and the refrain pops into existence they are bobbing their heads and singing along, “get back, get back…”

And Yoko, God bless her misunderstood soul, is quiet and unobtrusive throughout until the moment she is allowed to have some fun with the boys in a manic impromptu jam, smiles all around. She exchanges pleasantries with Linda McCartney and stays out of the way. Where is her meddling? Where is her command of John? It’s all missing in what has become standard Beatles lore; that she broke them up; that she was insufferable.

And speaking of John, he is so much more passive than I thought he’d be. Sure he loosens up as the sessions move on to more productive days and he is a constant jokester, but he is not as overbearing and potentially caustic as I supposed he would be, especially when it comes to forging the new songs with Paul. He is almost demure.   I subsequently learned he was using opiates at the time which could explain this phenomenon in part.

And Anya is watching much of it with me. She once mistook John for me in the video for "Watching the Wheels" when she was about 3 years old. Now that she is 10 she points out that I really did look like John when I was in my 20’s, but adds that his being goofy and jigging around in the documentary shows that I ACT like him as well. It was a surreal moment for us both because it was undeniable. I just wish I had his musical genius as well.

I have not seen the 3rd installment, but another magical moment comes in the 2nd part when their old friend Billy Preston shows up and they rope him into sticking around to play the electric piano so John can be free to go back to guitar and sing. They start grooving with “Don’t Let Me Down” and when Billy slides in with some soulful piano licks Paul’s face pops up from his bass to give Billy a look of surprise and wonder. He realizes in that moment that Billy’s playing just made the song ten times better! Later in conversation with Paul, John is so impressed he wants to make Billy the fifth Beatle and not just a paid session musician.

Another surprising moment is when John is singing a song fragment he has come up with that is listed as “Road to Marrakesh/Child of Nature” in the subtitles, but it is the exact tune of his later song “Jealous Guy” that shows up on a solo album after he has left the Beatles. I loved watching them hash and rehash music in this way as a creative outpouring that later finds a final form that we recognize.

The whole process played out in this documentary reminds me of the process I go through when writing stories or poems where at the git-go the ideas are poorly formed and the page is too white and too empty of words. There is the temptation to give up or become irritable with the process, but if you just continue to plow through and accumulate some things a flow starts to develop and drudgery turns into delight as inspiration strikes in surprising ways. It is a testament to the creativity of the human spirit.



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