Mrs. Orbert has been holding out on seeing Get Back. She's a pretty heavy Beatles fan, as am I, but she thought Let It Be (the movie) was boring, and "a bunch of guys pretending to get along because the cameras were rolling" or something very close to that. I asked her why she thought that. I thought Let It Be did a fine job of capturing the actual vibe. After a while, they forget the cameras are on and let it hang out. She said because everybody knows that they all hated each other by the end, and that they were just doing it for the money. I think I strained actual muscles throughout my body trying to find a polite way to tell her that she's out of her fucking mind if she thinks that that's the case. They were the greatest band in the world at the time and certainly didn't need the money. There's a slight chance that they were "just" doing it for the music, and their mutual love of music and love of playing together was enough to overcome their supposed mutual hatred of each other. But basically it just doesn't make sense. If it had truly reached the point where they all hated each other, the band would not agree to some crazy idea to sequester themselves in a room for weeks, write enough new songs from scratch to play a live concert, and do it.
Anyway, I finally asked her tonight if she wasn't interested at all, because I'd like to watch it and can just do it sometime when she's not around. She was up for it, on something like a trial basis. We watched the first hour tonight (Days 1-3). We'll probably watch it in one-hour chunks, or thereabouts.
I thought it was great, what I've seen so far. Actually watching the conception and development of songs that I know as finished products is strange but really cool. And the quality of the footage is incredible.
Look, I'm a die-hard Beatles fan, and this is sort of holy grail for me. I can't quite keep up with Portnoy and Morse with their "Beatles games", but I'm close enough for shouting.
So I've read into this and I've sort of been aware of the backdrop of "Get Back" (the original album) and "Let It Be" for a while. I've seen the original Let It Be numerous times, and in fact ripped a fair amount of the audio to my iPod.
I think black-and-white "They hated each other", "they did it for the money" is insufficient to explain the complicated dynamic of ANY band, let alone The Beatles, who, at the time, literally experienced something that no other humans - perhaps Elvis - experienced. I think we can't down play the nature of family; I know that I always LOVE my family but don't always LIKE them. I know that my family doesn't always do exactly what I want them to do when I want them to do it. I've read enough by guys like Mark Lewisohn (who has had almost unprecedented access to the raw materials of the Beatles catalogue over the years, including the raw Michael Lindsay-Hogg footage from Twickenham Studios. By most accounts, the acrimony and hate wasn't there. There was friction, there was that uncomfortableness of people working in close proximity but who have grown apart to a degree over the years. It's like plants, right? You can place the bulbs neatly at 3" intervals in a straight line, but as they grow, the stems and branches and leaves don't conform to that structure and some grow left, some grow right, some grow faster than others... but they are still plants.
In the footage I've seen, their joy at playing music - especially John, who is tough to read sometimes, and George, who can be a miserable f*** at times - is deep and strong. They really do shed a lot of the bullshit once the music starts, and that is to be expected. They may not be the best pure musicians in the world (though they are better than they get credit for, IMO) but they are battle-tested and at that time, only THEY knew what they had been through, only THEY had that internal language that people develop in their trials by fire.
McCartney is the only one that has ever shown any real affinity for the business side of things, or the money; but I well and truly believe that for him, the music is pure. He may be a pro at the promotion of that music, in being a fan for over 40 years I see little that indicates Paul sees his music as PRODUCT. That's not to say he doesn't like when people LIKE his music, but that's different to me than simply wanting a paycheck.
Topic: The Beatles Thread (Read 43468 times)
