A friend of mine, a screenwriter in New York, believes Get Back has a catalytic effect on anyone who does creative work. Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together.
This is strange, in a way, since the series does not present an obviously alluring portrait of creative collaboration. Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on. As we watch them hack away at the same songs over and over again, we can start to feel a little dispirited too. And yet somewhere on this seemingly aimless journey, an alchemy takes place. (...)
Watching extraordinary people do ordinary things is also just oddly gripping. I loved witnessing the workaday mundanity of The Beatles’ creative life. Turning up for work - for the most part - every day, at an agreed time: Morning Paul. Morning George. Taking an hour for lunch, popping out for meetings. Sticking up your kid’s drawing by your workstation. Confessing to hangovers. Discussing TV from the night before. Fart jokes. Happy hour at the end of an afternoon. Coats on: Bye then. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.
Immersed in all this banality, a funny thing happens to the viewer. As we get into the rhythm of the Beatles’ daily lives, we start to inhabit their world. Since we live through their aimless wandering, we share in the moments of laughter, tenderness and joy that emerge from it with a special intensity. When they get up on that roof at the end of the final episode we feel exhilarated, joyful, and almost as thrilled as they look. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable.
Let’s remind ourselves about how unwise, or if you prefer, insane, the Twickenham project was. The Beatles had only just finished a double album, the White Album (that was its nickname - I love hearing the Beatles call it “The Beatles”). It was a huge project and they had plenty of arguments in the making of it. Fortunately, it sold boatloads - their most commercially successful album to date. Paul and John have new girlfriends they’re very serious about. George is with Patti and hanging out with Dylan, Ringo has two young kids. In other words, they had every excuse, and every reason, to take six months or a year off. But no. In September, they enjoy making a promo for Hey Jude in front of a live audience, which rekindles their interest in performing, and they come up with a vague plan to do a TV special in the new year.
The initial idea was to perform songs from the White Album. That makes sense: using a show to perform songs from the album they just made is what ANY NORMAL BAND WOULD DO. But no. John and Paul get together before Christmas and decide they have to create a whole album’s worth of new songs, learn to play those while being filmed, and then perform them. That would be hard enough to achieve in three to six months. But because Ringo has to make a film they end up trying to cram all of this - writing, learning, rehearsing, show-planning - into three weeks. And they choose to do it all in an aircraft hangar.
The Beatles’ allergy to repetition, their relentless instinct to seek out the new rather than repackage the old, is here taken to such an extreme that it puts them in an absurd position. As a group, they were terrible at making non-musical decisions. They were much better at saying what they didn’t want to do than at making sensible plans for what they did want to do. So they ended up in this trap. As we watch the four Beatles try to escape from it, we are moved, because we see, for the first time, quite what a fragile creative entity they always were, and how hard they worked to stay together.
Nearly every Beatles album was perfect or close to it, a succession of immaculate conceptions. The Beach Boys, perhaps their closest artistic rivals, made some jewels, some stinkers, and some just-OK albums. That was typical, even for the best artists. There was something mysterious and implacable about The Beatles’ ability to keep a high standard at a high volume of output. It baffled their peers. Brian Wilson said of them, “They never did anything clumsy. (...)
Let It Be, the album that eventually emerged from the Get Back sessions, and the last new Beatles album to be released, has always been the closest thing to a glitch in this long run of jewels. Unfinished by the group, it is messy, uneven and incoherent by their standards, even though it contains a few songs that would be enough to turn most bands into legends by themselves. Today, Let It Be exists in various iterations, none of them definitive. One effect of Jackson’s Get Back is to find, or restore, a purpose to this loose strand from The Beatles’ recording career, by letting us in on a secret: they didn’t know what they were doing.
At one point in Get Back, during the endless discussion about why they’re all here, George Harrison reminds the others that The Beatles have never really made plans: “The things that have worked out best for us haven’t really been planned any more than this has. It’s just… like, you go into something and it does it by itself. Whatever it’s gonna be, it becomes that.” I think this represents a profound truth about The Beatles. They moved through the world in a dream, and the world became their dream.
by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian | Read more:
Image: Get Back
[ed. Thinking of re-watching this, but more closely this time instead of in big gulps.]
