Yoko Ono and Get Back

 

In the 1971 Simon & Schuster edition of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit, she suggests that filmmakers might learn from vintage wine makers and produce films not to be seen for decades. Storage, she proposes, would become a primary endeavour of film-making. 

"Any film, any cheap film, if you put it underground for fifty years, becomes interesting," she told Scott Macdonald of Film Quarterly, in 1989, "You just take a shot of people walking, and that’s enough: the weight of history is so incredible.”

Peter Jackson’s new The Beatles: Get Back documentary puts this premise to the test. The Lord of the Rings director (not exactly known for his brevity) has produced a 468-minute documentary of the Beatles in the studio, rehearsing and recording in 1969. Using the footage Michael Lindsay-Hogg filmed for his 1970 documentary Let it Be - which had been in the vaults of Apple Corps for half a century - Jackson produced a lengthy three-part series which Disney+ released last month, on Thanksgiving. 

468 minutes is almost six times as long as the original film, and many reportedly found it difficult to get through the 80-minute runtime of Let It Be, at the time of its release. Lindsay-Hogg's film received poor contemporaneous reviews and was generally considered a miserable experience, even by the band members. 

John Lennon called it "hell making the film, Let It Be" and said that "even the biggest Beatle fan couldn't have sat through those six weeks of misery. It was the most miserable session on earth.” Ringo Starr said "My cut of the movie would have been very different." George Harrison described it as “painful”, “unhealthy and unhappy” and "the winter of discontent with The Beatles". McCartney rightly observed that he came across poorly in the film. 

Jackson's new series doesn't appear to whitewash the tensions of the time, but it also shows a great deal of unbridled joy. There is a shared language between the band members, and they spend a lot of time making each other laugh.1

"Does [McCartney] remember being in the Beatles,” Ben Lindbergh asked in The Ringer, earlier this year. “Or is he remembering remembering being in the Beatles? And how can he separate how it happened then from what he knows now?"

Michael Lindsay-Hogg also wonders if the power of cinema and the frailty of memory has skewed perception:

"If you haven’t seen the movie in a long time, and you may not have the best memory in the world, all that kind of gets mixed up in your brain about what it was like. Because when I saw it last, I’m thinking, “What is he talking about?” In fact, there’s great joy and connection and collaboration, and good times and jokes and affection in Let It Be. It ends with the concert on the roof, which is the first time they played together in public for three years, when they are magical." 

Peter Jackson has picked up on this premise, also, in his press interviews. “They weren’t breaking up when it was shot,” he reminds Kim Willis of USA Today.2 “But they do remember seeing Let It Be when they were breaking up, at a very stressful time of their lives. So their memories of the Get Back sessions are their memories of the movie rather than what happened.” 

This is a fascinating idea, that cinema becomes the final word, and our own memories cede to its power. 

Ono's notion of what fifty years would do to one's perception is also mirrored by McCartney in the film itself. Speaking with Ringo, Lindsay-Hogg and Linda Eastman about John's new dedication to Yoko, he presciently observes "It's going to be the most comical thing in 50 years time: the Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amp."3 

Let it Be had often been used by Beatle fans to justify blaming the band's demise on Ono.4 Her constant presence in the rehearsals was said to exacerbate existing tensions within the group and became a catalyst for their calling it quits. Entirely specious, the idea has been fully absorbed into the culture. 

In the extended footage Ono looks positively saintly. The couple were determined to be together at all times, so she accompanied Lennon "to work" and sat quietly reading or knitting during umpteenth run throughs of Don't Let Me Down and Two of Us. 

The notion that she broke their inner sanctum is undercut by the constant presence of others - from Peter Sellers stopping by, to George Harrison's Hare Krishna pals watching on, to all three of the other Beatle partners arriving at one time or other (Maureen Starkey, Patti Boyd Harrison and Linda Eastman McCartney). Jackson told 60 Minutes that he did not once see Ono try to impose her will on the others, in the almost 60 hours of footage he had to work through. 

Seeing her vindicated all these years later is quite satisfying. 

Ono is seen briefly performing with the band twice in the documentary, right after Harrison quits the group. In the first instance Ringo Starr thrashes about on the drums while Lennon plays a repeated riff on the guitar. McCartney, looking not unlike Lee Ranaldo or Thurston Moore in Sonic Youth, coaxes feedback from his amp. 

In the second, McCartney's partner Linda arrives with her young daughter Heather. Ono is singing with the group, this time also joined by keyboard player Billy Preston (whose presence brings a needed boost to the series, and the original sessions). 

Heather seems intrigued by Ono's vocalizations (see image above) and later on, when given the mic, she does something similar, herself. Lennon is delighted and immediately calls out to Yoko to take note. I was reminded of the way that Lennon kickstarted his career again a decade later, after the five-year break to raise their son Sean. He was visiting Bermuda and heard the B52's song Rock Lobster in a club. He immediately phoned Yoko and said "You won’t believe this, but I was in a disco and there was somebody doing your voice. This time, they’re ready for us!"

Another accepted truth in Beatles lore is that Lennon and McCartney failed to take the younger George Harrison seriously as a songwriter, and often ignored his material. Get Back, however, shows numerous attempts by the band to arrange his songs, and that it was Harrison himself who didn't wish to perform his own material live at the culminating performance. 

He introduces I Me Mine, For Your Blue, Old Brown Shoe, Something and All Things Must Pass to the band, all in a single month. The first two end up on the Let it Be album they were recording and Something (which has subsequently been called "the single greatest long song ever written") was saved for the Abbey Road record. Old Brown Shoe became a b-side. 

All Things Must Pass was passed on, allowing it to become the title track of Harrison's celebrated 3LP debut solo recording, two years later.5 It functions so much better in this later context, carrying an additional weight after the dissolution of the group. The opening line about ephemerality ("Sunrise doesn't last all morning/A cloudburst doesn't last all day") seems an ideal way to let go of the past, of being a Beatle, and get on with his solo career. 

Like the footage itself, the track accrued a richer, deeper meaning, a gravity, by delaying its release a few years. 

I imagine there was no appetite for a longer version of Let it Be at the time, but fifty years later the footage has become historical. It's of keen interest to Beatle fans and still somehow absorbing to the casual viewer. The long-form binge-documentary (as typified by last year's hit Tiger King) and reality television in general has conditioned us to become better flies on the wall, with a new patience and stronger appetite for cinéma vérité.

Jackson reportedly has an 18-hour cut and there was once a plan for a 2.5-hour theatrical version. I want both released. One to watch once, and the second to enjoy again every few years. 

1. Lennon's best joke in the series also illustrates a shared sense of humour with Ono and her conceptual exercises. When it turns out there isn't enough money for both the camera crew and the helicopter to shoot overhead footage of the finale performance, Lennon dryly proposes just getting the helicopter. 

2. The group went on to write and record their true swan song, the celebrated Abbey Road LP, which ended up being released prior to Let it Be. 

3. McCartney and Eastman were similarly inseparable, and spent all but one night together in their thirty year-long relationship. 

4. Racism and sexism were surely central factors in these fan fictions. It should have been clear to anyone that giving up performing live and the death of their manager Brian Epstein helped hasten the split much more than the fact that Lennon fell in love with Ono. 

5. Wonderwall Music was not only the first Harrison solo record, it was the first Beatles solo record. Released in 1968, by Apple Records, it was the instrumental soundtrack to Joe Massot's film Wonderwall. Harrison followed this up the next year with Electronic Sound. All Things Must Pass is his first solo record with vocals.