I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

So I’m 90 minutes into this thing and Ringo’s grandfather has just bought a hat

(Jk, shout out to Mark Lewisohn)

I don’t totally follow the exact issue behind the Paul-George dispute; they seem to be communicating a lot non-verbally. I only get that Paul has had it up to here with the others not taking any initiative when they’re all on a tight deadline. But I love seeing the whole texture of the moment here: what people are eating and drinking, the shoes they’re wearing, their complexions on any given day. And it just seems like so 1960s that they would give themselves only two weeks to do this whole project lacking even a solid plan. Truly, everything happened faster in those days.

It seems like there was plenty of time for Linda Eastman, Yoko, and the Krishna dude spectating from the back of the room to form a side project of some kind.

So I’m 90 minutes into this thing and Ringo’s grandfather has just bought a hat

(Jk, shout out to Mark Lewisohn)

xxxp "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is truly the pits. I wasn't a fan of the Abbey Road track but man, the Get Back version is fucking abysmal. Hearing the whistling Paul put them all through, and doing that 50,000,000 fucking times...at Twickenham AND Savile Row...I'm surprised John and Ringo didn't walk out mid-session with George.

The anarchaic jam where Yoko replaces George is awesome, especially with Ringo's snarky fake DJ announcement dropped in there.

Yeah, the 468-minute series is probably for fanatics only. I think it's great for getting the footage out there, but I really hope the shorter theatrical version is both better and made available.

my lord this is boring as fuck so far

even my Beatle obsessed folks are only kinda half-tuned into it.

hearing the genesis of a song is often cool, but sometimes too much of seeing how the sausage is made spoils the sausage.

hopefully it picks up.

ok now that they're arguing it's getting better

The funny thing is, I saw the original film twice in a theater as a kid — the town I grew up in had an insanely great movie house where I got to see all the Beatles movies multiple times, The Producers, Monterey Pop, Plan 9 From Outer Space, a bunch of others — and I wasn’t even slightly bored by it. I’m sure a lot of it was the novelty of seeing the Beatles on film making a record, but I found it completely fascinating. But this new thing, I dunno, I hope it will pick up in the next two episodes.

Hearing the whistling Paul put them all through, and doing that 50,000,000 fucking times...at Twickenham AND Savile Row...I'm surprised John and Ringo didn't walk out mid-session with George.

Ian MacDonald basically said in Revolution In The Head that nothing more clearly illustrated why they broke up than the fact that Paul was trying to get everyone enthusiastic about the Get Back project and then ran them through endless takes of this utterly shitty song. And poor Mal Evans had to drag an anvil around for it.

i love “maxwell’s” but yeah even in the let it be film the atmosphere is “what is this horseshit we’re playing all goddamn day”

and mom has turned it off, lol

they would give themselves only two weeks to do this whole project

...just six weeks after the White Album came out!

Maybe everyone will get tired of this new film soon and go back to the 1970 cut. Maybe there was a good reason that cut was mostly bad vibes and hostility, and this new film will be the 2021 equivalent of Let It Be... Naked.

God - Paul is kind of unbearable all the way through - even at the end of this episode saying “getting in your bloody bags! ” to John and Yoko.

John deals with him throughout by ignoring him or making with a steely comment, and possibly being heavily stoned.

Are they still even humoring the idea of re-releasing the original Let It Be film? I just assumed this entire project was a way for the surviving Beatles estates to rewrite the narrative with a more favorable, positive bent.

Paul’s got a lot of melodies in his head and the other guys are like, what.

What I’m picking up on is the contradiction between the idea of “let’s be a band again” and the idiosyncratic songs that Paul and George are bringing to the band. Like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is a neat melody if a bizarre lyric, but in no way is it a *Beatles* song. “All Things Must Pass” I would argue is not a Beatles song either. All of George’s stuff sounds more like solo material to me.

MLH, just a bubbling font of totally laughable and terrible ideas, half expecting him to come up with Monkey Tennis or Inner City Sumo.

One thing that cannot be underestimated is the enervating power of how noodling pointlessly on your instrument has a way of dividing one's attention, especially in this oddly low-energy environment and, as a result, slowing any exchange of views down to an absolute crawl. I've known several musicians that are barely able to take in anything when in that state.

I think that’s a good point and it kind of explains why Paul is dominating the proceedings here. He can play anything, He’s in this abstract world of melody while George and John are trying to translate everything to guitar

I have decided to process this is like natural history: we don't really have to root for or against subduction, orogeny, volcanos, seafloor spreading, sedimentaction, etc. They are simply... things that happened.

The Beatles are a thing that happened.

You can (if you want) be a partisan for one or more of those fellows. Have a favorite, decide on a villain. Whatever. But that can make it so that you read/watch/listen in a tribal way. John vs Paul, Paul vs George, Red Sox vs Yankees.

Personally I find it better to just watch from an "okay, that happened" perspective rather than be a stan for any specific Beatle.

Are they still even humoring the idea of re-releasing the original Let It Be film? I just assumed this entire project was a way for the surviving Beatles estates to rewrite the narrative with a more favorable, positive bent.

It was announced that the original film would be released on Blu-ray next year. No date has been announced though.

And yes, Peter Jackson hyped it up as showing reality was different than the myth, but he probably had some inflated idea of the myth because there are no real surprises here. It's all been circulating for close to 20 years now (albeit mostly in audio form only), so it was difficult to see how revelatory this series could be.

Strangely, as Jackson was making this series, the one true revelation about the Beatles' final year came from Lewisohn himself. He found out that the Beatles recorded a crucial meeting at Apple following Abbey Road's release - Ringo couldn't make it so the other three had the meeting taped so he could listen to it, and this is stated at the very start. Tensions are still there, but it's clear that there is no plan to break up - they actually discuss the future, as if they were going to continue for the foreseeable future with more albums (not just Let It Be), etc. My favorite part is when John passively aggressively tells Paul that they let him put "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on Abbey Road even though the rest of them thought it was shit.

I've had it up to here with the Beatles and their abstract world of melody

I wish Geir were here to kick your ass

^^Backward message hidden in "Polythene Pam".

It was announced that the original film would be released on Blu-ray next year. No date has been announced though.

haaaa

hah

Michael Lindsay-Hogg has one of those obsolete accents. Absolutely no one talks like that anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAbYn5Vpmow

^#OneThread

idk

pvmic but i quite like it so far
not for insight or anything but like, just to see the extended scenes of how they interacted in like, boring moments together

and this is v corny but honestly, memories are fallible & spongey & blur so just having the additional footage and Paul or Ringo seeing it now, seeing their old friends John & George alive … just purely in terms of that

this to me has more in common w jacksons WW1 documentary- he’s not trying to add to the canon of scholarly work, but to shade in the human moments. these 4 megastars are also 4 old friends who have a patter that’s decades old, it’s lovely to just see all that floating about

i think that’s what he intended by not making the doc *specifically* music-focused
he’s a fan, i mean he’s not ~anti music~ but i think it’s fine that he is open about being interested in the history of their friendship & that shorthand clearly on display here

also: michael lindsay hogg is a complete & utter prannet lol

sorry that was all very scattered fragments

its just put together so sloppily and un-interestingly. might as well just release raw tapes.

Ok nm I love it cuz Beatles

i swear i could happily sit through the 80 hour version at this point, like me just in my living room for two weeks immersed in some kind of Beatles secondlife lol

but honestly i just love it

also their skin looks amazing, living on cigarettes & coffee & dry rolls & kleig lights

Dennis O'Dell isn't much better than MLH. They did seem to have an unerring talent for attracting the most useless advisers post-Epstein. Perhaps should have gone with Prince Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, like the Stones.

VG - You're probably enjoying it more than they did at the time.

At least the tedium made the contrast all the more effective for the post-George jam with Yoko. That was great. I do suspect Paul temporarily lost his wits that day - swinging from the scaffolding etc.

I know it was necessary up to a point as the cameras were not filming the whole time, unlike the Nagra recorders but I found that after an hour the forcing of sync to unrelated pictures was getting a bit jarring.

I was a little taken aback at how dgaf the whole Twickenham setup was. They just plonked down a knackered drum riser and organised the instruments in a random fashion, crappy wooden stools, middling quality equipment, no guitar stands, no music stands, big awkward-looking Fender bass amp when an Ampeg Portaflex or similar would have been fine, bits of detritus lying around at the rear of the set, no ashtrays/tables etc:

I mean it was a pretty fucking shit setup for all of MLH's constant "but you're the Beatles, you *owe* it to the people, 2000 Arabs!!"

Glyn Johns!? Who knew he was such a good co-arranger!? Shoulda had a writing credit too.

Stunned by this; just baffled and dazzled and tearful throughout. Too many highlights. Sure there’s the odd rambling bit which could be trimmed but I’m in the ‘would cheerfully watch a twenty hour version’ camp. I can’t be rational, it’s just all incredible to me. *That bit* at the end of part one.. fuck. How has this all been sat in a vault for all those years?? Ah well, I’m glad it’s all out there now.

Of all the songs of George's the one that makes Paul most interested is..."Old Brown Shoe."

Which...fine! I love "Old Brown Shoe"!

Dennis O'Dell isn't much better than MLH. They did seem to have an unerring talent for attracting the most useless advisers post-Epstein.

In the beginning, Epstein believed in them when absolutely no one else in any kind of business/managerial capacity did. Once they were established, even (or, arguably, especially) the most capable and well-meaning business associates (apart from Neil Aspinall) were exploitative. There was simply no way to determine who had their best interests at heart, if in fact anyone in the music business actually did.

Glyn Johns!? Who knew he was such a good co-arranger!?

Indeed they did. Glyn chopped “Baba O’Riley” down from Pete Townshend’s nine-minute demo, in addition to a number of other arranging choices (making “Love Ain’t For Keeping” acoustic, slowing down “Pure and Easy”).

Man, no one's going to tell me MLH *isn't* Orson Welles kid.

George Martin's a spectral presence here.

I'm hoping (doubting) that the bit where Glyn raves about the newly-released Led Zeppelin debut was filmed ("...and a kid called John Bonham on drums, he's really unbelievable.")

I get where veg is coming from. I wouldn't sit through 80 hours of Nagra tapes again, but that was obvious from the start so I kept chopping out bits and pieces I'd like to play again and wound up burning a bunch of reference discs. (Four CD-R's were for Twickenham.) When the box set came out, I played these for the first time in a long time and it's great background listening if you're working from home. If you love the band, it is pretty awesome to be immersed in them. All four of them are naturally hilarious and entertaining. When the 12+ hour version comes out on Blu-ray, I'll probably get it, but I doubt I'll be able to call it a fully-realized work. It really is let the cameras roll and we'll watch for the next __ hours, but to be fair, I'd rather do that than waste another Sunday watching football games.

If you love the band, it is pretty awesome to be immersed in them. All four of them are naturally hilarious and entertaining.

I do love then, but tbh the banter was getting a bit tired by the second episode. Eg “Your hosts this evening, the Rolling Stones”

Yeah, that wasn't one of the moments I kept from the Nagra tapes either.

I feel like some of the best stuff had no chance of getting on air. As mentioned the "listen fuck face!" bit got cut out, as were the Enoch Powell parodies. Paul's got other stuff that I can see him censoring like the fake-German version of Let It Be that evokes the Nazis where he swaps out "Mother Mary comes to me" with a line that ends with "Master Breed."

LMAO

George is the whiniest bitch so far!

he reminds me of me, he gets light criticism and instead of seeing it as an opportunity to improve, he just wilts

You both have great beard game tho

reminds me of me, he gets light criticism and instead of seeing it as an opportunity to improve, he just wilts

― Cool Im An Situation (Neanderthal), Friday, November 26, 2021 2:31 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So would we all against McCarntneyism

George had just come from hanging out in Woodstock with the Band (who, it should be noted, ultimately inspired the whole “get back” to one’s “roots” thing that the Beatles and just about every other UK band jumped on at the time) where he was listened to and respected. Then he comes back to Paul shrugging off “All Things Must Pass” and shooting down pretty much all of George’s ideas.

It’s hard to take someone seriously when they’re constantly pushing “Maxwell’s”: “we have to do your crap song, but I’m the one who needs to improve?”

Exactly

He made the same complaint in the Anthology doc.