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What We Learned from the Beatles Documentary Get Back

Thursday January 13, 2022. 11:00 PM , from Sweetwater inSync
For fellow Beatles fanatics, it’s hard not to go into Peter
Jackson’s Get Back without a certain degree of expectation. The last
half century of Beatles mythos and worldbuilding has raised John, Paul, George,
and Ringo to the untouchable status of cultural revolutionaries and master
songwriters, but that level is so unattainable that they’ve become difficult to
relate to as fellow musicians. How could John Lennon possibly understand the
struggles of your average songwriter? There’s a moment in the first episode of Get
Back that reinforces this lofty status: While the boys are waiting for (the
perpetually late) John to arrive, Paul sits hunched over a stool, vamping
between two chords. Ringo and George occasionally yawn. As Paul improvises
melodies over his simple progression, he suddenly catches on to something —
George and Ringo at once become animated; Paul’s melody becomes increasingly
defined; he starts adding words; George and Ringo join in with Paul’s refrain
of “get back!”; and you come to this realization: Paul has effortlessly
transformed a simple throwaway vamp into the documentary’s titular track within
the span of just a few minutes.

For those of us who have read the books, seen the docs, and watched the interviews, this moment delivers great awe but little surprise. Paul often tells the tale of how the melody to “Yesterday” — the most covered song of all time — came to him prewritten in a dream. These sorts of stories are why we love and respect the Beatles, but, as musicians, it makes them difficult to connect with. For those of us that aren’t blessed with divine inspiration in our songwriting, music is hard. It can feel disheartening to compare yourself to the four lads, not one of whom had reached the age of 30 when the sessions were recorded. However, the greatest lesson we learn from Get Back is this: those moments of inspiration are most certainly not the norm. Get Back reveals a side of the Beatles that is not always flattering but that is intensely humanizing and relatable — especially for musicians.

It Don’t Come Easy

Over the 21 days that Get Back takes place, songs start, fizzle, improve, and get thrown away. While we’re accustomed to seeing the Beatles at their best, the messy songwriting process in Get Back is remarkably familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a rock band. A far cry from Paul’s inspired muses, “Don’t Let Me Down” is consistently refined, broken down, and altered throughout the recording session. Bad ideas are pitched. Good ideas are met with resistance. The heated argument that occurs in the first episode between Paul and George is over their inability to get “Two of Us” right — a track that ultimately winds up completely different from the rocker it begins life as. George admits that his masterpiece “Something” has been on the back burner for six months because he can’t manage to think of the right lyrics. By the end of Get Back, it becomes abundantly clear that, although we’re seeing a picture of some of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century in action, they struggled just like the rest of us. Sure, their ultimate results may be slightly better than our own, but it’s quite a bit easier to connect with a songwriter like John when you realize that he has difficulty finding chords, messes up solos, and faces the same musical roadblocks that we all do.

Time Well Spent

Writing, recording, rehearsing, practicing — it can be hard work. Unless you’re a studio musician getting paid by the hour, you’re probably familiar with how band sessions can often be, well, not quite as productive as we’d like. If you have even a passing fascination with the Beatles, then their wit and humor in Get Back are to be expected, but what’s surprising is how much time they dedicate to straight-up goofing off. At least one entire half of the film is filled with joke covers, real covers, dancing, noisy freak-outs, and an inordinate amount of the boys’ signature humor. Paul laments that “when we do come together to play, we all just sort of talk about the past... remember the days we used to rock?” — a rather pointed notion that veteran musicians will surely understand. Everyone, even the Beatles, loves to reminisce about the glory days. The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership is often depicted as a nonstop hit-writing machine that lived and breathed music; but, as it turns out, just like anyone else, they need time (and a lot of it!) to blow off steam and to recharge.

The Patience of a Starr

Poor, poor Ringo — a book could be written on his patience
and affability. It would be difficult to find a drummer that doesn’t empathize at
least somewhat with Ringo’s role in the Get Back sessions; as John,
Paul, and George work out the fundamentals of their tunes, Ringo is ever present
behind his kit, almost always silent, waiting for his turn to play. Every
drummer that I’ve spoken to about Get Back has mentioned how they’ve
felt Ringo’s pain... or at least his boredom, and many have mentioned that
it’s validating to see the drummer of the most famous band of all time
encounter the same problems that they do at every practice. When he’s not at
his set, Ringo is by far the most endearing of the four lads — an egoless
jokester who simply wants everyone to get along. When he does get to play,
Ringo’s drumming is rock solid. Plenty of songs are stopped midway through when
John needs help with a chord or when George has an idea, but Ringo is always on
point, ready to be the glue that holds them all together. A year previously,
Ringo had left the group, unsatisfied with his drumming and, in his own words,
feeling like an outsider. After watching Get Back, it’s not hard to see
why. While it makes Ringo’s experiences relatable for drummers, it’s also a
sharp reminder to give our drummers the respect that they deserve!

The Lessons We Learned

Get Back is a fascinating document of the Beatles in one of their most difficult periods, and it certainly dispels some classic Beatles myths (both good and bad). It’s not about taking the boys down a peg or damning their flaws — it’s about showing how the world’s most acclaimed band was just four musicians who, despite their immense talent and now-unreachable status, took part in the same musical processes that we all do. Much of the Beatles’ video footage is highly controlled and curated; films like A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and even many documentaries often serve to reinforce our idea of what the Beatles are supposed to be like. While the reality is often at least inspired by the truth, it’s incredibly humanizing to see the Beatles in the same everyday situations that musicians of all calibers face. Whether or not it was Peter Jackson’s intention, Get Back is ultimately a celebration of the trials and joys of making music with others. It’s an image that peels away 50-plus years of sheen that has been built up by books, documentaries, and movies to reveal a more relatable version of the Beatles that is, in the words of the sessions’ original director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “a movie about smokers, nose pickers, and nail biters.” “Well,” says Paul, “we are rather uncouth.”

The Beatles: Get Back | Official Trailer | Disney+
https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/what-we-learned-from-the-beatles-documentary-get-back/
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