THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
GLYN JOHNS and GILES MARTIN reflect on Let It Be, the album, and its 52-year struggle to become the best version of itself. “There’s a sense all the way through of The Beatles sounding uncertain,” hears DANNY ECCLESTON.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE BEATLES’ STINT AT Apple Studios in January 1969, as they bumbled agreeably through versions of new songs and rock’n’roll favourites, inching to some kind of conclusion on a project that was never more than half-conceived, engineer-producer Glyn Johns had a bright idea.
“I decided one day that what they were doing was fascinating,” Johns tells MOJO today. “Not just because of the music, but the way they were interacting with each other, and I was a fly on the wall. I thought, Fuck me, how fortunate am I to be in the room watching the four most famous people in the world and how wonderful it would be to show that on a record?”
Johns left 3 Savile Row that evening with the tapes of the day’s work. On the way home, he stopped off at Olympic studios in Barnes and ensconced himself in the mix room.
“So I knocked out a rough mix of what I thought the idea should be, with false starts and conversation around the songs, then the following day I had four acetates cut, gave them to each member of the band.”
This was, in a sense, the very first incarnation of Let It Be – fated to be considered The Last Beatles Album. Arguably, it was also the truest to what had been Paul McCartney’s agenda from the start: that the project would catapult The Beatles back to where they once belonged, eyeball-to-eyeball, rediscovering the genius for instant collaboration that had palled since their retirement as a live group and the solo missions that had characterised the White Album sessions. Johns, too, had high hopes for it. “They all came back the next day,” he says, “and said, to a man, ‘Fuck off.’ They hated it.”
IT WAS NOT THE FIRST, NOR WOULD IT BE THE LAST obstacle placed between the music The Beatles made in January 1969 and the world. From the start, Johns was a witness to the fruitless debates surrounding the live concert that distracted the group in Twickenham, including the aborted plan to sail a prepacked audience to Libya (“Sounded a bit extravagant to me”).
Johns was also present for the spat that led to Harrison’s walkout. “We all – and I’m pretty sure it was me who instigated this – got out of the room when it kicked off,” he recalls. “Because it was none of our fucking business frankly.” Yet he remains in the camp that plays down the incident’s role in The Beatles’ eventual split. “That was absolute bollocks,” he insists. “Four blokes who work together had a disagreement. The only thing that made it unusual is that it was The Beatles.”
Even the group’s subsequent move into Apple’s basement studio following peacemaking meetings with Harrison was fraught, as the recording setup designed by Apple Electronics tech guru ‘Magic Alex’ Mardas was exposed for the farrago it was.
“I remember going to check it out with George one evening
when we’d finished at Twickenham,” says Johns, “and realising that Alex had done his marvellous thing of tricking everyone into thinking he knew what he was doing. He was such an unbelievable fraud. The console he built looked like something out of Buck Rogers. It was just laughable. It was 8-track, right. And he thought, ‘8-track… we need 8 speakers!’ And they were all the size of a ham sandwich. George got really pissed off that I was being so critical, I think because he’d instigated the whole thing.”
Once Apple Studios had been refitted, under George Martin’s direction, with equipment from Abbey Road, The Beatles began actual recording, but when the cameras left on January 31, with Ringo set to start filming The Magic Christian, it was still unclear what they had apart from a handful of arguably ‘final’ takes taped on the roof and in the basement of 3 Savile Row plus hours of work-in-progress. Meanwhile, as editing of Michael LindsayHogg’s documentary entered a period of extended political wrangling, work was already starting in Olympic on material destined for Abbey Road.
“Then there was a pause,” says
Johns. “Months later I get a call from Paul saying, ‘Meet John and me at Abbey Road.’ I walk in and there’s this pile of 2-inch tapes and they say, ‘You remember that idea you had? Well we’ve changed our minds and we want you to do it.’ So I said, When do we start and they said, ‘We’re not gonna be there – it’s your idea; you go and do it.’ And I remember suddenly thinking, Hang on a minute…”
But Johns’s Get Back did not see the light of day in mid1969. Neither did Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film. In July, Johns saw a screening of the latter which Allen Klein, The Beatles’ manager since May 8, had flown in for. “Klein got up at the end and said, ‘This is absolutely not right,’” Johns recalls. “‘I only want to see The Beatles, not anyone else.’”
The following January, with Lennon already ‘divorced’ from the group, Johns prepared another version of what they were now calling Let It Be – after the single marked for release – this time with a version of Lennon’s White Album offcut Across The Universe (with re-recorded vocal), and a version of Harrison’s I Me Mine cut at Abbey Road on January 3 with Ringo and Paul, in situ. But the Let It Be that met the world on May 8, 1970, was not Johns’s Mk II either; it now came with production and orchestrations by Phil Spector – in favour after his work on Lennon’s solo single, Instant Karma!, recorded on January 27. Spector’s intervention was most marked on the ‘new’ tracks and McCartney’s ballads, Let It Be and The Long And Winding Road. Johns’s take on Spector’s production has not mellowed over time: “terrible”; “disgusting”. Reviewers at the time were no more enamoured, Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn calling attention to The Long And Winding Road’s “ex
“GET BACK IS LIKE DATE NIGHT. THE BEATLES ARE TRYING TO BRING SOME SPICE BACK INTO THEIR MARRIAGE.” GILES MARTIN
travaganza of oppressive mush”. Meanwhile, what might have been interpreted as knockabout or improvisational from an active group, showing a less formal side, perhaps, of the godhead, was coloured by the knowledge – widespread at last – of the group’s demise. The Beatles were gone and they’d left us with Dig It. Cheers.
ON OCTOBER 13, 2021, 52 YEARS AND CHANGE after he submitted Get Back Mk I, Johns’s vision for the album will finally have an official release, in deluxe formats of a Let It Be reissue package that includes a remix of the originallyreleased album by Giles Martin, plus two discs of outtakes and eavesdroppings. It won’t be the first the world has heard of it – there were bootlegs in circulation from at least the middle of 1969.
“I went to San Francisco and I took with me, at George [Harrison]’s request, a copy of the album. He wanted me to play a song to [producer] Denny Cordell, for Joe Cocker. I lent this acetate to Denny for 24 hours and during that period it must have got bootlegged. I can’t believe it was Denny but somehow it got out.” In 2021, Johns’s version remains a bracing listen. Not only is it
audio verité – these are by no means the slickest takes from the sessions – but there’s a real-time feel: if you were told it was a randomly selected, unedited 40 minutes of studio time, you’d be tempted to believe it. It also bears underlining that this is not Let It
Be... Naked by another name. The 2003 de-Spectorfication of Let It Be put together by Abbey Road house hands Allan Rouse, Paul Hicks and Guy Massey, and championed by McCartney, jettisoned Phil Spector’s over-arrangements and pieced together supposedly ideal versions of the songs from multiple sources.
Into this mêlée of versions of Let It Be, all jostling to be considered ‘the one’, steps Giles Martin, son of George – reprising the approach he has applied to Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles (AKA The White
Album) and Abbey Road. When Martin began work on his new mix, he knew he was entering a more than usually controversial realm, with the Spector mixes having historically represented everything wrong about The Beatles’ stepchild album, not least for Paul McCartney.
“The first thing I discussed with Paul was that it doesn’t really make any sense not to respect the original record, with the Phil Spector productions, and he agreed,” Martin tells MOJO. “He did ask me if I could take the harp down at the end of The Long And Winding Road. But that’s very difficult to do because it’s on the same track as the strings.”
Martin found Spector’s Wall Of Sound hard to repoint without undermining its foundations. “There’s a kind of lo-fi honky compression to it,” says Martin. “And if you don’t respect that you can easily end up somewhere too schmaltzy, too easy listening. It needs some of that grit in it.” In the end, Martin and colleague Sam Okell found themselves trying to more thoroughly integrate what, in the 1970 version, felt bolted-on or slathered over.
“Ultimately,” says Martin, “the approach to Let It Be is to make it fit together better. Because its creation was so fragmented. As a team, we could approach it in one mind and at one moment. We didn’t have a lot of politics to worry about. Or the film to worry about. We just wanted Across The Universe and Dig A Pony to sound more like they belonged on the same record.”
DO MARTIN’S OR JOHNS’S VERSIONS MAKE US FEEL differently about Let It Be? Certainly, both emphasise the aspect of the project – its invitation to intimacy – that’s most appealing. In Martin’s mix of Two Of Us, John and Paul are divisible, but only just – two creators reliving a story of their past comradeship. Paying attention to an album you might not have focused on in a while brings self-revelations: this writer did not remember loving Dig A Pony, with George’s exquisite guitar solo, this much.
Meanwhile, the studio chat on Johns’s version and Martin’s outtake discs are windows on the Fabs and their process, especially the moment Harrison brings in Something, destined for Abbey Road but still to find the perfect end to the “…attracts me like…” line. He and John start bouncing around some options. “Attracts me like a cauliflower?” volunteers Lennon. “Pomegranate,” tries Harrison. Giles Martin, having immersed in all the takes and the attendant
“I WAS ENORMOUSLY IMPRESSED WITH THE RESPECT THEY HAD FOR EACH OTHER. THE SPEED THEY PICKED UP ON MATERIAL.” GLYN JOHNS
chat, feels there is a broad sense of George being locked out of the Paul and John love-in (“At one point he actually says, ‘I don’t want any of my bloody songs to be played on this thing. They’ll be ruined.’”), but here is a moment where creative camaraderie is restored. It’s very much what Johns – who really was there – remembers.
“Overall, I was enormously impressed with the way they communicated with each other,” says Johns. “The respect they had for each other. The speed they picked up on material that was being offered. And Billy Preston – stunning, and great for them to have there.”
Martin agrees that Preston – recruited by Harrison and brought into the studio from January 22 to the end – made all the difference to Let It Be. “Get Back is like date night,” he says. “The Beatles are trying to bring some spice back into their marriage.”
And Billy is what – the fluffer? “Apart from being a brilliant musician, Billy is what the project needed all along – an audience. Before Billy comes they didn’t have anyone to perform to. Because, normally, they were performing for my dad.”
The absence of George Martin, The Beatles’ producer since June 1962, was the first thing Glyn Johns noted on arrival at Twickenham on January 2: “Within an hour I was being asked how they should start a song. I was a bit, ‘Fuuucking hell!’” In Jackson’s Get Back films, Johns is unignorable in his Austin Powers threads (“I was obviously going through a circus period!” he laughs) but the lack of Martin’s oversight on Let It Be was a key influence on its more freeform – some would say ill-disciplined – ambience.
“My dad was a blueprint man, always was,” says
Giles Martin. “The biggest argument we ever had was over the measurement of Pimms. He told me once that during Let It Be he said, ‘John, your guitar’s out of tune.’ And John said, ‘We don’t want any of your production shit on this record.’”
ULTIMATELY, IT MAKES PERfect sense that the most indelible minutes that emerged from the Let It Be process – sounds or images or both – are the 40-odd The Beatles spend on the roof of 3 Savile Row. After all, it is the live show, after a fashion, that the whole thing was designed to work towards. There is suddenly adrenaline and focus, and a set of killer performances. You can hear one – the first rooftop take of Don’t Let Me Down – on the Deluxe and Super Deluxe versions of the upcoming reissue; it’s arguably the best thing The Beatles did in the whole of January ’69. Viewers of Peter Jackson’s Get Back films will have the benefit of new Giles Martin sound mixes of the whole set; a Rooftop CD or LP might emerge at a later date. “There’s a sense all through Let It Be,” says Martin, “of The Beatles sounding uncertain: ‘Are we recording or rehearsing?’ Even at Apple that’s the case. Until you get to the rooftop. When you’re on the rooftop there’s no doubt – this is a performance. The rooftop is more like a Beatles recording than any of the studio recordings. It’s more aggressive.” It also sounds amazing.
“And that’s a credit to Glyn. I’m not sure, if we recorded a band on the roof here at Abbey Road with all the equipment we have, whether we’d do as good a recording.”
On audio from the day of the rooftop recording, Michael Lindsay-Hogg can be heard saying: “On Glyn’s head rests an £8,000 operation.” No pressure?
“I didn’t feel it. At all,” says Johns. “I knew they were going to be great. I just had to put a microphone in front of them. Piece of cake!”
Is it arguable that two songs played on the rooftop – Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down; the constituents of that April 1969 single – were worth the whole month’s work, maybe even the subsequent grief? “Yeah!” says Glyn Johns, his eyes lighting up. And then he grins: “Definitely worth 8,000 quid…”