And in the End
Fifty years ago, the Beatles went through rock’s most famous and complicated breakup.
It’s a miserable Monday morning in January 1969, and the Beatles are trying to get back to where they once belonged. The Get Back project sounded like a perfect idea: just the four l ads and their i nstruments, ready to hit the studio, return to their roots, conjure up some great songs out of thin air. Just like they used to. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have booked a TV concert special for January 18th — their first live show in years. They’ll rehearse for a couple of weeks, eyeball to eyeball, summon up genius on the spur of the moment. They’ve done it many times before. They’ve never not done it.
The good news: Paul showed up today, and so did Ringo. So did the camera crew — these sessions are being filmed, so the Beatles can show a half-hour clip of rehearsal footage before their TV performance. So here they are on Monday morning, ready to dazzle the world with a blast of spontaneous Beatles brilliance. Or at least Paul and Ringo are. Hey, has anyone heard from John and Yoko? Or George?
With George, there’s a slight complication: He quit the band. On Friday, with the cameras rolling, he was trying to teach them a new song, “All Things Must Pass.” John, strung out on his new heroin habit, sneered at George with open contempt. George finally stormed out, muttering, “See you around the clubs.” John doesn’t take this seriously. “I think if George doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday, we ask Eric Clapton to play in it,” he says. “The point is, if George leaves, do we want to carry on the Beatles? I do. We should just get other members and carry on.”
But now it’s Monday and still no George. No John and Yoko. (No Clapton, for that matter.) Paul and Ringo kill time jamming on a current radio hit, “Build Me Up Buttercup.” But everyone gathers to discuss the crisis, complaining bitterly about Yoko’s constant presence. Surprisingly, the one who sticks up for her is Paul. He’s a sucker for a love story — he’s Paul McCartney, for God’s sake. But he also knows how much this romance means to his oldest, closest mate, his most troubled and cruel and impossible friend. “It’s not that bad,” he insists. “They want to stay together, those two. So it’s all right. Let the young lovers be together.”
Paul has to chuckle, thinking about how future generations will look back at this — the Beatles, the greatest of all rock & roll bands, the world’s most legendary creative team, falling apart over such a trivial spat. Even on a winter morning as gloomy as this one, Paul breaks into a laugh.
“It’s gonna be such an incredible sort of comical thing, like in 50 years’ time, you know. ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp!’ ”
Paul wasn’t wrong. Fifty years later, people still obsess over the end of the Beatles. It’s the world’s favorite story about how things fall apart. Like Fleetwood Mac on Rumours, the Beatles’ Let It Be has come to symbolize the whole concept of breaking up. The Beatles are the ultimate archetype of a team of friends working together, scheming together, making music together — and inevitably, tearing one another apart.
We all know how the story went: The TV special never happens. Instead, the Beatles play their famous goodbye concert on the roof of their Apple headquarters in London, until the cops shut them down. Later that year, they make one more masterpiece, Abbey Road, while the Get Back tapes gather dust. New business manager Allen Klein releases the Get Back footage as a feature film, retitled Let It Be, along with an album of the same name. The movie premieres in May 1970, a few weeks after Paul announces the Beatles’ split. All four refuse to show up for the premiere. Phil Spector doctors the tapes into a slapdash soundtrack. Soon, John writes a song called “God,” announcing, “I don’t believe in Beatles.” The four Beatles never set foot in the same room again.
The world has spent 50 years collecting the clichéd narratives: John and Paul were fighting, Paul and Yoko were fighting, John and Yoko became junkies, the moneymen came between them, the drugs came between them, the wives came between them, all things must pass, the dream is over.
But as with most Beatles stories, the truth is a lot more complicated when you look closely. In the end, it’s really a story about four friends trying to hold on to one another in dark and confusing times — searching for a way to shine on till tomorrow. Like everybody else, John, Paul, George, and Ringo witnessed the end of the Beatles with shock and disbelief, no idea how to apply the brakes. None of them really imagined this was the end.
How did they pour so much raw emotion into their songs, when they couldn’t communicate any other way? That’s always been the real mystery at the heart of the Beatles’ breakup. In their hour of darkness, how did they come together to create music that has always given people hope, in times of trouble? In 2020, that question has a new kind of resonance.
the beatles felt relief at the end of their rooftop concert. You can hear it in Paul’s voice when he says, “Thanks, Mo” — a shout-out to Ringo’s wife, Maureen, who was cheering them on, her fan-girl energy more badly needed than ever. They were sitting on 56 hours of film, 200 hours of audiotape, 21 days’ worth of chaos. But they couldn’t stomach the idea of going back through all that footage. As John admitted, “I couldn’t be bothered because it was such a tough one making it. We were really miserable then.”
The movie Let It Be became a cult rarity, only briefly available on video. I saw it at a midnight screening in a Boston theater in the Eighties, with a stoner crowd who booed every time Yoko was onscreen. The film looked grainy and cheap. The mood was ugly, both onscreen and in the audience. Spector’s mix felt like a clumsy coda to the Beatles’ epic run. Even though it was recorded more than a year before the split — with the triumph of Abbey Road in between — Let It Be seemed to document their crash, like some kind of rock & roll Zapruder film. It turned into the Beatles’ accidental tombstone. Let It Be dropped out of movie theaters fast and has barely been seen anywhere since 1970. Most fans only know the famous Anthology snippet of George and Paul arguing over a guitar part. Few films have been so analyzed and interpreted by people who’ve never seen it.
John and Yoko finally saw it in an empty movie theater in San Francisco in June 1970, along with Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner and his wife, Jane. The four of them bought their tickets at the door and sat unnoticed in the afternoon matinee. “Just bought tickets and went in,” Wenner recalled years later. “I don’t think anybody even really knew we were there. It was empty, afternoon, and during a weekday. So the four of us are sitting together in the middle of the theater, watching this thing about the breakup of the Beatles.” John couldn’t hide his tears. “I just remember walking out of the theater and all of us in a foursome huddle, hugging, and the sadness of the occasion.”
Peter Jackson, the director behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, boldly went into the Get Back vaults to find the rest of the story for a Disney documentary, due out next year. As he puts it, “Everything I thought I knew changed.” Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is not a remake of Let It Be — it will be a whole new film, showing that Paul and Ringo weren’t kidding when they said Let It Be showed only the negative side of the story.
Jackson’s Get Back footage promises to be full of warmth and camaraderie: John and Paul with acoustic guitars, busking “Two of Us,” when John breaks into “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” to crack up his mate. Paul leading an early romp on “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” with John shouting back at each line. (“Get a job, gob!”) The band having a bash at their 1965 oldie “Help!,”
“Everything I thought I knew changed,” says Peter Jackson, who dove into the Beatles’ film vaults. “‘Let It Be’ is known as a breakup film. But it’s not in the slightest.”
halfway treating it as a joke, but inevitably tapping into the song’s adult despair. You see them write songs that ended up on Abbey Road or solo albums — like when John and Paul whip up the Imagine classic “Gimme Some Truth.” The mischief on their faces, the eye contact, the collective electricity in the playing — there’s a lot more of the Beatles team spirit than you’d guess from the reputation.
When the surviving Beatles asked Jackson to get involved, he wasn’t sure he was up to the job. “As a longtime Beatles fan, I really wasn’t looking forward to it,” he says. “I thought, ‘If what we’ve seen is the stuff they allowed people to see, what are the other 55 hours going to be?’ When I went to Apple, my feet were heavy. I thought, ‘I should be excited, but I just dread what I’m about to see.’ ”
Like most fans, he associated Let It Be with sour times. “Even though Let It Be wasn’t filmed with the breakup in mind,” Jackson says — “it was filmed 14 months earlier — I can just imagine that if you were going to the cinema in May of 1970, and you just heard that the Beatles had broken up, then you’re obviously going to look at the movie through a particular filter. I think that has led to it being known as the breakup film. But it’s not really a breakup film in the slightest.”
Of course, Paul and Ringo have claimed they had plenty of laughs during the Get Back sessions, with only the arguments making the movie. Could they be right about Get Back — and the rest of us wrong? As reality-TV heels always complain, it’s all in the editing.
Giles Martin, who recently produced masterful anniversary editions of Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and the White Album, memorably tagged the band’s die-hard completist geeks as “the socks-and-sandals brigade.” Jackson admits he’s a proud member of that tribe. “I was buying bootlegs since the late Seventies. I got six of the Get Back session bootlegs on vinyl, like nine LPs’ worth in some box — and I still have the stuff.” But the boots didn’t prepare him for the story he found in the vaults. “Just me personally as a fan, looking at the 56 hours, I get a sense of a group that wants to do something different, but they’ve run out of places to go,” Jackson says. “They never wanted to repeat themselves — they didn’t want to make Sgt. Pepper 2. There’s even conversations we’ve got on film where they’re discussing, ‘Maybe if we went back and became the Cavern Club band again’ — becoming the lunchtime bender gang. Because they can’t play a stadium that’s bigger than Shea. They’ve done complex albums. They’ve done simple albums. You get the sense that they really don’t want to break up. That’s the overriding impression I get. They’re a forward-moving band, but they’ve run out of places to go.”
There’s a hilarious scene where director Michael Lindsay-Hogg first mentions the idea of turning the rehearsal footage into a movie. They all start arguing (of course) over whether it’ll work technically. It was shot for Sixties TV — the 16mm film got blown up to 35mm for movie screens — which is why Let It Be always looked so shabby. (Technically restored, the Get Back footage finally looks like the Beatles.) Paul argues the film will be too grainy for theaters. George just tosses his head: “If they don’t take it, they’re fucking fools!”
All four Beatles, at heart, shared that magnificent arrogance. In a way, that’s what helped keep them together, through all their ups and
downs. Without that level of arrogance, there’s no way an adventure as admirably daft as Get Back could happen in the first place.
When the beatles dazzled the world with Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper, they were on fire with collaborative energy. Sgt. Pepper was their last stand as four lads against the world, released just before original manager Brian Epstein died. Right up until Epstein’s death, they were four soulmates who wanted to spend their free time together, even when they weren’t working. “Most people don’t get across to us,” Lennon said in 1967, in Hunter Davies’ biography. “We never really communicated with other people. Now that we don’t meet strangers at all, there is no need for any communication. We understand each other. It doesn’t matter about the rest.” When they quit touring after Revolver, they tried taking a three-month break, but they missed each other too much. As John said, “I didn’t meet anyone else I liked.”
Epstein had been their biggest fan, their cheerleader. Nothing for the Beatles was ever the same. “We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away,” Paul said in the Get Back sessions. “That’s why all of us in turn have been sick of the group.”
The Get Back experiment — the crazy idea of a live show they were too rusty to play, the confidence that they could whip up great songs from scratch whenever the mood struck — came from their love of being Beatles together. They spent five stormy months making the White Album, but as the great 50th-anniversary edition showed, all that late-night madness and chaos produced their most astounding music, way more than they could fit on a double album.
By March 1969, all four were husbands; three were dads. All were trying to build an adult life, figuring out how the band might fit into it, but without any role models to show the way. George was hanging with Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, rock stars who treated him with the respect he craved from his bandmates.
In the spring of 1968, John and Paul had made a quick visit to New York to announce their new Apple Corps venture, dropping by The Tonight Show for an awkward chat with sportscaster and guest host Joe Garagiola and Hollywood diva Tallulah Bankhead, neither of whom knew a thing about them. (Garagiola tried to get them talking about cricket.) There’s a revealing moment when Garagiola asks, “The four of you, socially, are you that close?” John and Paul look at him like he’s from Mars. John snorts, “We’re close friends, you know.”
But within a couple of weeks, John had firebombed his life. He spent a hard day’s night with Yoko Ono, recording their ambient-noise collage Two Virgins, then consummating their affair at dawn. When the Beatles showed up for the White Album sessions, they were surprised to see Yoko at his side in the studio — after that, all access to John was through her. That first day,
she joined the band for a jam on “Revolution 1.” Although people called Yoko a visual artist, she was a musician first, a classically trained composer who collaborated with legends like John Cage, La Monte Young, and Ornette Coleman before hooking up with John. Yoko was not one to wait her turn before speaking her mind and had no interest in respecting or even noticing the Beatles’ boundaries. “Yoko was naive,” John told Rolling Stone. “She came in and she would expect to perform with them like you would with any other group.”
Two Virgins came out in November 1968 and remains the most infamously offensive album in history — not because of the songs (there aren’t any) but the cover, with John and Yoko’s full-frontal nudity. “It just seemed natural for us, if we made an album together, to be naked,” John told Rolling Stone. “Of course, I’ve never seen
me prick on an album or on a photo before.” Paul contributed liner notes: “When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience.”
On October 18th of that year, John and Yoko got busted by the Scotland Yard drug squad. Soon after getting arrested, Yoko suffered a miscarriage. The White Album came out to universal acclaim, but devastated by their lost pregnancy, the couple turned to heroin.
In all the turmoil of 1968, there was a moment of brightness: “Hey Jude,” a song Paul made up on a visit to John’s estranged wife and son, checking in on them after the painful split. He brought a red rose for Cynthia, a kind gesture she remembered the rest of her life. For five-year-old Julian, he brought a tune. “Hey Jude” became the Beatles’ biggest hit. They played it on the BBC, surrounded by fans around the piano, lifting the song into a better-better-better climax — their closest encounter with a live audience in years. Get Back was a self-conscious attempt to re-create the warmth of that moment, in the same TV studio with the same director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
But the sessions were tough from the start. For one thing, the cars came around to pick them up at the crack of dawn. None of the Beatles were morning people. George later fumed, “Have to get up at 8:00 and get into my guitar,” John and Yoko were zonked by narcotics. Instead
of Abbey Road, their own private clubhouse for around-the-clock artistic mayhem, they were stuck in Twickenham Film Studio, surrounded by strangers with cameras. There were plenty of laughs but also nasty fights. Paul shuddered, “I get the horrors every morning about 9:00, when I get my toast and tea.”
They showed up with great songs. On the first day, John brought “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Dig a Pony,” while George had “All Things Must Pass.” Paul worked John’s “Everybody Had a Hard Year” into his own “I’ve Got a Feeling.” “Get Back” began as a political statement, “Commonwealth Song,” defending Pakistani immigrants, a hot topic in England after racist politician Enoch
Powell’s anti-immigration crusade. (Paul had already addressed the controversy with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” an ode to West Indian-immigrant family life — the White Album’s most explicitly political song.) They later tried out songs that would evolve into their next album, Abbey Road: “Something,” “Her Majesty,” “Oh! Darling.”
But within a few days, Paul and George were sniping over a guitar part. Paul said, “I always hear myself annoying you.” George sneered, “I’ll play what you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”
As rock-star arguments go, this was fairly tame. But the cameras made it worse. The next day, George said, “I don’t want to do any of my songs on the show. Because they’ll turn out shitty. They’ll come out like a compromise.” He added, “Maybe we should get a divorce.” Paul muttered, “Well, I said that at the last meeting. It’s getting near it.”
The mood brightened as soon as they moved the sessions to Apple. They brought in keyboardist Billy Preston as a calming influence. (As they learned when Eric Clapton appeared on the White Album, they had an easier time minding their manners in front of a guest.) The first time Preston sat in, they jammed on “Don’t Let Me Down,” with John yelling in his mock-preacher voice, “I had a dream this afternoon!” After a Preston solo, he marveled, “I say ‘Take it,’ and he takes it! You’re giving us a lift, Bill!” George added, “We’ve been doing this for days, weeks, just choking.” John and George lobbied to enlist Preston as a full-time Beatle, but Paul shook his head. “It’s bad enough with four.”
The Beatles debated endlessly about how to bring this project in for a landing. They knew they wouldn’t be ready in time for the January 18th live show they’d planned. But where should they play these new songs? A cathedral? A hospital? An ocean liner? John scoffed, “I’m warming up to the idea of an asylum.” They realized the answer was right on top of them — up on the roof. The rooftop gig was their first live performance in more than two years, and their last. Nobody realized it would be so cold up there, which is why John and Ringo are wearing their ladies’ winter coats. Even the Beatles seem surprised by how great they sound in the final minute of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” [ Cont. on 74]