![]() ”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. This sumptuous book also features many unseen high-resolution film frames from the same restored footage.The following is from LIFE’s new special tribute issue, Paul McCartney: Yesterday and Today, available at newsstands and online: Peter Jackson’s documentary film will reexamine the sessions using over 55 hours of unreleased original 16-millimetre footage filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969, now restored, and 120 hours of mostly unheard audio recordings. Russell and Linda Eastman (who married Paul McCartney two months later). The majority of the photographs are by two photographers who had special access to their sessions-Ethan A. It brings together enthralling transcripts of their candid conversations, edited by leading music writer John Harris, with hundreds of extraordinary images, most of them unpublished. ![]() THE BEATLES: GET BACK is the band’s own definitive book documenting those sessions. Simultaneously, they were exclusively photographed and their conversations recorded. These sessions, which generated the Let It Be album and film released in May 1970, represent the only time in The Beatles’ career that they were filmed at such length while in the studio creating music. And it is here that we have the privilege of witnessing their early drafts, the mistakes, the drift and digressions, the boredom, the excitement, joyous jamming and sudden breakthroughs that led to the work we now know and admire.” Legend now has it that these sessions were a grim time for a band falling apart, but, as acclaimed novelist Hanif Kureishi writes in his introduction to THE BEATLES: GET BACK, “In fact this was a productive time for them, when they created some of their best work. Over 21 days, first at Twickenham Film Studios and then at their own brand-new Apple Studios, with cameras and tape recorders documenting every day’s work, the band rehearse a huge number of songs, new and old, in preparation for what proves to be their final concert, which famously takes place on the rooftop of their own Apple Corps office building, bringing central London to a halt. The BEATLES (‘The White Album’) is still at number one in the charts, but the ever-prolific foursome regroup in London for a new project, initially titled Get Back. This intimate, riveting book invites us to travel back in time to January 1969, the beginning of The Beatles’ last year as a band. ![]() THE BEATLES: GET BACK will be a special and essential complement to director Peter Jackson’s “ THE BEATLES: GET BACK” feature documentary film, set for release exclusively on Disney+ Over Three Days, November 25, 26 and 27, 2021. The book’s texts are edited by John Harris from original conversations between John, Paul, George and Ringo spanning three weeks of recording, culminating in The Beatles’ historic final rooftop concert.
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