By 1969, the dream was ending. Since their early-’60s arrival as a mesmerizing foursome of Elvis and Everlys-inspired child savants, the Beatles had continuously and spectacularly leveled up: from chipper and prolific chart dominators in England to beloved Liverpool exports conquering America, to shaggy-haired counter-culture superstars lurking subversively in the pages of teenage glossies, to society-shifting psychedelic pioneers and avant-garde astronauts. All of it seemed ordained by magic. The run between 1963’s Please Please Me and 1968’s The Beatles (known colloquially as the White Album) remains credulity-straining in both its breadth and brilliance. But all things must pass. And by 1969, the Beatles were barely functional.
The problem was basically everything. Their fame was such that even having begged off touring three years previous, they remained far too well-known to walk comfortably down any street. They had legal issues and Apple—the utopian multimedia company they had recently founded—was quickly devolving into an untenable boondoggle. In 1967, their beloved longtime manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose, a casualty of Beatlemania’s ceaseless pressure cooker. The four-month sessions for the White Album had both tested relationships between the Fabs and emboldened each of them to pursue the possibilities of what might be accomplished alone. And yet, against what feels like common sense, the Beatles reconvened just 10 weeks later in January, intending to find some way to top themselves yet again.
For a rock band in 1969, “getting back” was all the vogue. Following Bob Dylan’s self-conscious rejection of psychedelic pageantry John Wesley Harding and the magisterial traditionalism of the Band’s first two releases, the hip move was a return to basics. Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ self-appointed problem-solver, saw in this trend an opportunity to address a creative issue while exploiting a commercial possibility. Put on notice by Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones’ roots-adjacent ’68 masterpiece Beggars Banquet, McCartney suggested they try their own hand at a stripped-down, informal approach, one that would reconnect them musically to one another and re-establish their working man’s band bona fides.
It wasn’t a horrible idea, but it wasn’t quite feasible. The Beatles were simply too massive to do anything on a remotely small scale and soon enough, the project had morphed into a documentary that was to precede their first live performance in three years. Serious consideration was given to holding the concert in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia—not exactly what you’d call modest. They finally settled on the more practical but still strenuous plan of three weeks of filmed rehearsals and then a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row in London. Even without the trip to Africa, the brief was still unreasonable: Write and record a new album in front of rolling cameras and then get your live chops up to speed for a performance to be viewed by millions. It turned out to be the first time that they were not completely up to the challenge.
Sessions commenced at the Twickenham Studios soundstage in southwest London, a drafty and vibeless space, not at all like cozy Abbey Road, where nearly all their greatest recordings had taken place. The demands of the movie shoot required the band to convene at a 10 a.m. call time, disrupting the conventional evening-to-early-morning flow of their process. Lateness was a persistent issue. John Lennon, in particular, seemed to be shocked to learn that such a thing as 10 a.m. even existed.
The days at Twickenham were fraught and not particularly creative by their established standards. The bickering that had become a feature of recent sessions reached new levels of hostility. George Harrison needled McCartney about his lack of spontaneity. Paul complained about everyone’s level of preparation. Ringo couldn’t finish “Octopus’s Garden.” If the idea was to set aside grievances and establish a new esprit-de-corps, then the environment could scarcely have been less ideal. The sessions eventually migrated to the more pacific setting of their own studio at Apple Headquarters. Slowly the band began to find their way, and an LP began to take shape. All of this and more is covered in forensic detail on the new five-disc reissue of Let It Be with the (Super Deluxe) appendage, an accompaniment to Peter Jackson’s forthcoming six-hour re-imagining of the original documentary.
The tumultuous aftermath of the Let It Be sessions is reflected in the byzantine miasma of versions of the album which emerged, and continue to emerge. To wit: The group initially turned over dozens of hours of recorded material to engineer Glyn Johns, tasking him with separating the wheat from the chaff and providing a mix suitable for release. The results were deemed unsatisfactory by Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, who outvoted McCartney and turned the tapes over to Phil Spector to remix. Spector gave many of the songs the maximalist treatment for which he was renowned. McCartney hated it, but that was the version that was first released to the public in 1970. McCartney eventually won the argument, in a sense, shepherding to market the de-Spectorized Let It Be… Naked edition in 2003. This is where things more or less stood until the new box set, which now includes a third mix of the LP, helmed by George Martin’s son Giles, and a separate disc restoring the 1969 Glyn Johns mix that the band initially rejected. Make of it what you will, but the very notion that no one can seemingly figure out what Let It Be should sound like to this day is important for understanding just how confused the band was in the moment. Constant tinkering of this sort with Revolver or Rubber Soul would be tantamount to a desecration.
The new Giles Martin mix makes for an interesting hybrid of the original Phil Spector and Let It Be… Naked versions. Notably, Martin makes the decision to restore Spector’s heavily orchestral treatment of “The Long and Winding Road,” and the edit seems like the correct one: It’s a track that always worked better as show tune camp than a philosophical cudgel. Other changes like the aggressively close-mic’d mix of “Across the Universe” provide no improvement over the raft of existing versions. The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been.
The original Glyn Johns mixes are certainly rough and ready, so much so that you can understand the group’s nervousness about releasing them. Parts of it, like “Medley,” sound like a rag-tag forerunner to Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Lennon-produced freakout Pussy Cats. An early take of “Teddy Boy,” which would later surface on McCartney’s self-titled 1970 solo debut comes across as anarchic and stoned as Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes. Johns clearly had a weirder idea in mind for what Let It Be might have been, and his original mixes make a persuasive case for his vision. Distracted, exhausted, and locked in contretemps by the time they finally issued the LP, the Beatles had seemingly forgotten what they were even trying to do in the first place.
Plagued by uncertainty, they delayed the release of the album and opted instead to start an entirely different one, recording Abbey Road in February 1969, only three weeks after sessions for Let It Be concluded. The culminating rooftop concert was a fraught bit of business. As sound and lighting preparations were being made for the afternoon of January 30th, the band wasn’t even certain they would go through with it. George was in a mood and Ringo was having trouble seeing why it all mattered. Finally, John Lennon, asserting himself as bandleader for perhaps the final time, had the last word: “Oh fuck—let’s do it.” They plowed through 42 minutes of takes until the cops showed up and issued a noise ordinance. It was slapdash and strangely perfect. The first rooftop performance of “Don’t Let Me Down,” included on disc two of the new box set, ranks on a short list of the best things the band ever recorded.
So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away. There’s a moving take on Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” which would become the title track of his classic solo debut, after it had been deemed unworthy of being on a Beatles release. No wonder he was frustrated. Paul walks us through the soon-to-be Abbey Road standards “Oh! Darling” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” while John previews the stand-up routine polemic “Gimme Some Truth,” which wouldn’t emerge until 1971’s Imagine LP. Even Ringo painfully efforts his way through a touchingly tentative “Octopus’s Garden.”
In the years that followed, the Beatles would splinter viscerally while never quite being able to quit one another. Ringo played on All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s epochal solo debut, Plastic Ono Band. Paul and John nurtured a public animus that provided a tissue-thin veneer over what was plainly the hurt feelings of two estranged siblings. The finely-rendered Abbey Road LP allowed the group to put the dream of the Beatles to bed with a fan-service-worthy flourish. Let It Be was just before all that, when the emotions and the tunes were too raw to gloss over.
Buy: Rough Trade
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