Rewriting the NARRATIVE
For 50 years, the fixed narrative had the Beatles’ “Let it Be” recording session as a miserable experience with a band where members were sick of each other, sick of their work and in the process of breaking up.
The nearly 8-hour, Peter Jackson-produced documentary culled from film and recording outtakes of those sessions instead reveal a selfaware band with a rare connection and work ethic that still knew how to have fun — yet was also in the process of breaking up.
The “Get Back” series is now available to watch on Disney+.
Produced by a Beatlemaniac for fellow Beatlemaniacs, it can be an exhausting experience for those not in the club. But the club is pretty big. Beyond the treats it offers fans, “Get Back” is a fly-on-the-wall look at the creative process of a band still popular a half-century after it ceased existence.
Jackson, the Academy Award-winning maker of the “Lord of the Rings” series, was discussing another project with the Beatles when he inquired about what happened to all the outtakes of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 “Let it Be” film.
Nearly 60 hours of film taken over
three weeks existed, mostly unseen, and the band had been considering what to do with it. Jackson took that material, as well as 150 hours of audio recordings, and spent four years building a story.
He approached with the fear that it might be a depressing slog.
Lindsay-Hogg’s film is viewed as a chronicle of the band’s demise —
unfairly, in Jackson’s view — because it was released shortly after the break-up was announced. Individual Beatles reinforced the notion with negative comments about the experience, where they had given themselves a tight deadline to write and record new material in preparation
“The next thing we’re going to do after the December run is a full US tour in February and March playing ‘The Upsides’ and ‘Suburbia’ in full every night.” — Dan “Soupy” Campbell
happens everywhere but if you were from here, I was with it … from chaotic mathy hardcore to sugary pop-punk. Now, one of the hardest parts of playing music for a living for me is not over-analyzing.
When I listen to music close to our genre, it’s hard for me to step outside of it and just enjoy it, because I find myself thinking about what I would do differently or what ideas I could glean from it. It almost becomes work. So, instead, I find myself listening to more hip-hop and singer/songwriter stuff.
Recently, it’s been a lot of John Moreland, Christian Lee Hutson, Baby Keem, Meek Mill and Phoebe Bridges. Also, that MUNA single, “Silk Chiffon,” on loop because it’s my son’s favorite song.
What was it like putting together “The Upsides/ Suburbia” box set, and what types of decisions went into it?
It was honestly a really helpful project for me. I was putting it together in the middle of the pandemic and desperately needed something to keep myself occupied. We knew the standard stuff was going to go in the records themselves — the b-sides, etc. — but I really wanted to do some stuff to make this a very cool project for fans of those records.
For the audio side, there were two concepts. One was to find everything from the making of those albums. We wanted to give fans an opportunity to listen to them being built, brick-by-brick.
We went back and found all sorts of demos of the songs in various stages of completion. We didn’t just want to release the demos that sounded good, we were interested in releasing the songs in disarray, so we included everything from competent, semi-complete basement demos to voice notes recorded in trailers and on kitchen floors.
The other thing we wanted to do was to write songs in the style of those records again. We went back and found pieces of unfinished demos from those records and then worked with the producers of the two albums, Steve Evetts and Vince Ratti, to turn them into full new songs in the spirit of the era.
On the art side, we wanted to create new art that paid homage to what we did back then. We enlisted the help of Mitch Wojcik and James Heimer who worked on the original art and worked with them to find ideas that blended the two records together.
What’s next for you after your current tour?
The next thing we’re going to do after the December run is a full US tour in February and March playing “The Upsides” and “Suburbia” in full every night. It’s all booked but it’s not officially announced yet because we’re still waiting on some important info from the venues but it will be soon.
We’re planning to release a new album sometime next year as well but vinyl production timelines are difficult to parse right now so we don’t have any sort of definitive date. Either way, we’re really excited for all of it after so much time off.