Whoever you are, you'll have a view about The Beatles, even if it's despising them as irrelevant old Scousers, but I can't believe that there's too many people who'll fall into that latter category and this album is a good entry point to the Beatles catalogue as it captures them warts and all in the last throes of a desperate life struggle.
But while 'Let It Be' was the final Beatles album released before they split up, it was actually made before 1969's 'Abbey Road'.
It was conceived as a documentary type exercise and a film of the making of this album was made. Now that is a fascinating piece of work capturing once firm friends bickering amongst themselves and their coterie of hangers on as they gradually imploded.
Apparently, McCartney was well up for seeing this project as a return to the roots of the band, a relaunch and certainly some of the stuff here (like 'One After 909') are rawer in feel than anything the Fab Four had worked on for a LOOOONG time.
As everyone knows, the live set the group played on the roof was the high point of the film and that probably goes likewise for the album, where they're
comfortably rough on stuff like the killer song 'Get Back'.
I always find 'Let It Be' very difficult to take as an album, and I prefer to think of it like the film as a document of a particularly difficult time for the band, showing them in petty arguments and bickering. It's somehow better to see it as a rounded whole in that way than to appreciate this album as just a collection of songs. If you do take it as just another album, it's a melancholic effort, some great songs, but ultimately it feels soulless and empty, despite Macca's attempts to get all spiritual on us.
Lennon had clearly ceased considering himself as a Beatle and was merely functioning on autopilot, almost as a session muso, removed from the centre stage and content to let Macca hold the reins. Harrison was starting to urge for a bigger part and Ringo was just Ringo.
Macca tried very hard to keep things together but was soon off tending sheep with Linda and making some pretty naff albums in his early solo days.
It's all very, very sad...
Track listing Two Of Us Dig A Pony Across The Universe I Me Mine Dig It Let It Be Maggie Mae I've Got A Feeling One After 909 The Long and Winding Road For You Blue Get Back
Billy Preston was featured on keyboards on this album, Phil Spector was brought in on production duties.
As said, this was supposed to be the project that relaunched them as a band, and it captures them rehearsing and trying out new songs and the live show was meant to be the climax, but unfortunately the startling film captures them disintegrating.
The website - http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ms538596/lib.html – is a mine of useful info including the following quotes – Paul: "The original idea was, you'd see the Beatles rehearsing, jamming, making stuff up, gettin' their act together and then finally we'd perform somewhere as the big end of show concert kind of thing. And Michael Lindsay-Hogg was gonna direct it..." George: "I thought, 'Ok, you know, well, it's a new year, we've got a new approach,' but it soon became apparent that it wasn't anything new, it was just going to be painful again..." Ringo: "I mean, you know, the days were long and it could get boring, you know, and Twickenham just wasn't really conducive to any great atmosphere...you were just in a big barn..." George: "I'd just spent like the last six months producing an album of this fellow, Jackie Lomax, and hanging out with Bob Dylan and The Band at Woodstock and having a great time. And for me to come back into the winter of discontent with the Beatles in Twickenham was very unhealthy and unhappy..." John: "It was just dreadful, dreadful feeling. And being filmed all the time, you know, like that. I just wanted them to go away. And we'd be there at 8 in the morning. You couldn't make music at 8 in the morning or 10 or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you, and coloured lights...." George: "As everybody knows, we never had much privacy, and, you know, this thing that was happening was they were filming us rehearsing. There was a bit of a row going on between Paul and I. You can see it, where he's saying, 'Well don't play this,' or something and I'm saying, 'Well you know I'll play what you want or I won't play if you don't want it, you know, just make up your mind.'" That kind of stuff was going on. And they were filming us, recording us having a row, you know, it was like, terrible really...I thought, 'I'm quite capable of being relatively happy on my own, and I'm not able to be happy in this situation, you know, I'm gettin' out of here...'" John: "The whole pressure of it finally got to us. So, instead of, like people do when they're together, they start picking on each other. You know, it was like, 'It's because of you, you got the tambourine wrong that my whole life is a misery.' You know, it became petty. But the manifestations were on each other 'cause we were the only ones we had..."
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I suppose I'm one of the few of mu generation that was never much of a big beatles fan. Prefer more rockier stuff - but Let it Be, Get Back, Hey Jude and a few others are still classics.
May 3rd, 2001
(Dec 17th, 2001)
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