#392 - The Beatles - Let It Be (1970)

MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:

Released on May 8th of 1970 on Apple Records and produced by Phil Spector this is the twelfth and final studio album from the Liverpool, England Rock, Pop group who are literally the most influential band in recorded history.

The history of The Beatles who were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr is so easily available and well known that we should just get to today’s record.

By 1966 after playing together for about five years and most of it touring non-stop in between records and movies and T.V. The Beatles quit playing live and essentially became a studio band or project.

As you’ll remember from the George Harrison “All Things Must Pass” with Peter Asher episode after their hands-on manager Brian Epstein died in 1967 they went a couple of years without anyone but themselves or their long-time producer George Martin being in control.

This led to conflict between members and no real system of resolution.

And after their stressful, fractured, and often separately recorded 1968 self-titled, two-record, release known as “The White Album” on their new Apple Records label they were noticeably over their heads and fraying apart.

Everyone was either married or in relationships and had other pursuits including now signing and producing projects for Apple.

So in the beginning of 1969 John Lennon proposed that Rolling Stones’ manager, the dubious Allen Klein (who Lennon had already hired as his personal manager) also take over the complicated affairs of The Beatles’ career and Apple Records.

Despite Paul unsuccessfully lobbying for them to use his soon to be father-in-law the other Beatles outnumbered him and Klein was chosen although a skeptical and resentful Paul never actually signed the contract.

With that out of the way the ever-buoyant Paul proposed that they return to playing live to recapture some of the Rock and Roll energy of being a working band that they had lost in their studio excursions.

They were opposed to touring but he convinced them to be filmed rehearsing and recording a new album at London’s Twickenham Film Studios by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for a television documentary to accompany a live concert broadcast in front of an audience at a venue they’d decide on later.

The filmmakers were told to start recording every day when The Beatles showed up and shoot everything like a fly-on-the-wall until the last Beatle left.

The plan was to watch them bond as a band again as they wrote and developed songs that could be played live at this upcoming concert without all the studio-adornment of the previous few years.

Now technically George Martin would be producing the recording of the live show but as the rehearsals were only recorded by the film and sound crew engineer Glyn Johns was there the whole time with Martin popping in each day for a bit.

And with the cold setting of Twickenham, the long hours of constant filming, and an uncompromising schedule what was often captured instead was a band under a microscope, butting heads over musical directions, and slowly drifting apart.

Now George had just spent some time in upstate New York playing and hanging out with Bob Dylan and The Band and his songs on “The White Album” were so highly praised that he went into this project with hopes of finally being more of an equal with Paul and John.

But early on his songs were being put aside again and Paul would often revert back to telling George what to play.

And adding to the tension was John having his soon-to-be-wife Yoko Ono constantly by his side in the studio as she had been on the previous record. They were also both addicted to heroin so besides John not being motivated enough to bring much material to the sessions he also acted erratically and was prone to fights, often with George.

In fact during the rehearsal portion George Harrison got so fed up that he walked out with the intention of quitting the band.
Lennon half-jokingly proposed that if George didn’t return in a few days he would be replaced by his friend Eric Clapton.

After leaving, Harrison went to a Ray Charles concert where their old friend, the black, American, keyboardist, and singer/songwriter Billy Preston was playing organ.
George told the band he agreed to return if they ditched the concert concept and just recorded the songs at their new Apple Records studio.
And George invited Billy to come sit in with them hoping his professional musicianship and congenial personality would soothe their conflicts.
The band agreed and George returned with Billy who would play organ and electric piano.

George also signed Billy to Apple Records where he would produce his first couple albums around their schedule.

Now what they didn’t know at the time was that they were working on songs that would eventually be used on John’s, Paul’s, and George’s post-Beatles solo albums as well as on “Abbey Road.”

With the pressure to play the concert removed, the sessions with Billy loosened up and in the renewed spirit of those good vibes they even decided to be filmed playing an impromptu live set on the rooftop of their Apple Corps building.

They played nine takes of five songs and after forty-two minutes they were shut down by the police.

It would be the last time The Beatles ever played live together.

The filmmakers left to edit all the footage they had and Paul’s experiment had concluded less than successfully with only one single released so far for the song “Get Back.”

However only three weeks later The Beatles (including Billy Preston in a limited capacity) reconvened with George Martin to record what would become their eleventh studio album, “Abbey Road.”
Unlike the shambles of the recent sessions Martin’s strict conditions were that it would be as disciplined and open to experimentation as their earlier studio collaborations.

Lennon would quietly quit six days before “Abbey Road”’s release in the Fall of 1969 leaving the remaining Beatles to finish some work on the previous “Get Back” sessions with George Martin for the movie’s soundtrack at Allen Klein’s insistence.

The band’s break-up seemed inevitable but still wasn’t formally announced due to business entanglements.

By the end of that year Paul was confused, broken-hearted, and depressed at John’s leaving and fearful for his future so he disappeared for several months to his farm in Scotland with his family to nurse a sort of nervous breakdown while also secretly recording his first solo album.

With Paul finally abandoning what was essentially his project and the remaining Beatles uninterested in revisiting the unpleasant experience, they let engineer Glyn Johns mix and assemble the “Get Back” album soundtrack from the studio recordings and the live rooftop performance.

But after a couple test pressings over a year the band were still unhappy with the results so John decided to give the whole mess to the talented but notoriously controlling American producer Phil Spector with whom he had recently recorded.
Working independently, Spector overhauled many of the songs, occasionally adding his own orchestrations and choirs, and chopped together some of the banter and outtakes to make it appear live and more fun.

As Lennon later said, "Phil was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it, and he made something of it."

Still in the band’s state the title “Get Back” seemed inappropriately optimistic so it was decided that the album would instead be named after the more resigned song, “Let It Be.”

In the interim both test acetates of Glyn Johns’ versions of “Get Back” got bootlegged and became widely available including immediately being played on American radio.

The George Martin-produced single of “Let It Be” came out and was another number one in anticipation of the record and movie.

The other three Beatles thought Phil Spector did a great job with what he was given but when Paul heard Spector’s overwrought production work on what was intended to be a stripped down album he retaliated by intentionally putting out his first solo album a month earlier than and in conflict with the scheduled release of the “Let It Be” album.

He also gave ambiguous interviews that seemed to express the end of the group.

By the time the album was released concurrently with the theatrical film The Beatles had already been officially broken up for a month.

The movie was presented without a narrative which made it even more sad knowing that one was witnessing the confirmed disintegration of The Beatles.

The soundtrack record tried to give a more positive spin by describing it on the back cover as a “...new phase Beatles album.”

The critics were dismissive. Even Phil Spector’s heroic attempt to produce a cohesive album from what he was given was attacked as so many people had already heard the more raw and sincere bootlegged original versions of many of the songs.

But like most Beatles albums it still went to number one almost all over the world and had the most initial sales of any record at the time with 3.7 million advanced copies.

They even won an Oscar for “Best Original Song Score” and a Grammy for “Best Original Score.”

Years later the movie came out on home video for a short time but was then discontinued for decades.
However Peter Jackson from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy has been working on a new re-edited version that is set to come out next year followed by a remastered version of the album.