FEATURE:
Two of Us
The Beatles’ Let It Be at Fifty-Five
_________
ON 8th May, 1970…
it will be fifty-five years since The Beatles released their final album, Let It Be. As we know, it was not the final album they recorded. Abbey Road was the last time they were in the studio together. It is a shame that this album was not their final-released. However, I think Let It Be is a lot stronger than people give it credit for. It turns fifty-five soon, so I wanted to celebrate that fact. Although there are not as many classic songs on this album as, say, Revolver (1966) or Abbey Road (1969), there are some prime Beatles cuts. Two of Us, The Long and Winding Road, Let It Be and Get Back. I’ve Got a Feeling too. Unlike other Beatles album, which were produced by George Martin, Let It Be was produced by Phil Spector (with some production by George Martin). Maybe Spector’s involvement gives it a black mark. Some songs ruined by awful strings and syrupy arrangements. However, there is a lot to love about Let It Be. I will end with some reviews for the 1970 album. We have had a couple of documentaries that take us inside the recording of Let It Be and the period around that. There was The Beatles: Get Back of 2021, and last year’s Let It Be. Paul McCartney was keen to have a documentary/film to reinspire the band. Although the documentaries show happiness and togetherness, there were periods of friction and fallout. George Harrison walking out. On 30 January, 1969, The Beatles played their famous rooftop gig at Apple Corps headquarters at 3 Savile Row, London. In April 1969, the lead single from Let It Be, Get Back, was released. I want to start off with some detail and information about Let It Be:
“Recorded: 4, 8 February 1968
2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 January 1969
30 April 1969
3, 4, 8 January 1970
1 April 1970
Producers: George Martin, Phil Spector
Engineers: Glyn Johns, Martin Benge, Ken Scott, Peter Bown, Phil McDonald, Jeff Jarratt
Released: 8 May 1970 (UK), 18 May 1970 (US)
Personnel
John Lennon: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, lap steel guitar, bass guitar, organ, whistling
Paul McCartney: vocals, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, piano, electric piano, Hammond organ, maracas, whistling
George Harrison: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, tambura, maracas
Ringo Starr: drums, percussion, svaramandal
George Martin: Hammond organ, shaker
Billy Preston: Hammond organ, electric piano
Linda McCartney: backing vocals
Uncredited: 18 violins, four violas, four cellos, harp, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitarists, tenor saxophone, 14 choristers
Tracklisting
‘Two Of Us’
‘Dig A Pony’
‘Across The Universe’
‘I Me Mine’
‘Dig It’
‘Let It Be’
‘Maggie Mae’
‘I’ve Got A Feeling’
‘One After 909’
‘The Long And Winding Road’
‘For You Blue’
‘Get Back’
The Beatles’ last album to be released, Let It Be was mostly recorded in early 1969, prior to Abbey Road. The music was produced by George Martin, and was then prepared for release in 1970 by Phil Spector.
Following the often fractious sessions for the White Album in the summer of 1968, Paul McCartney realised The Beatles were in danger of fragmenting further if they continued to work independently of each other. Since the death of Brian Epstein on 27 August 1967 he had worked hard to keep the group motivated, and towards the end of 1968 he hit upon the idea of filming a television special in front of an audience.
We started Let It Be in January 1969 at Twickenham Studios, under the working title Get Back. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was the director. The idea was that you’d see The Beatles rehearsing, jamming, getting their act together and then finally performing somewhere in a big end-of-show concert. We would show how the whole process worked. I remember I had an idea for the final scene which would be a massive tracking shot, forever and ever, and then we’d be in the concert.
The original idea was to go on an ocean liner and get away from the world; you would see us rehearsing and then you’d finally see the pay-off. But we ended up in Twickenham. I think it was a safer situation for the director and everybody. Nobody was that keen on going on an ocean liner anyway. It was getting a bit fraught between us at that point, because we’d been together a long time and cracks were beginning to appear.
Paul McCartney
Anthology
The effort was to be a continuation of the back-to-basics ethos the group had adopted since ‘Lady Madonna’ in February 1968. That single had marked a move away from The Beatles’ elaborate studio experimentation of 1966 and 1967, with a return to more straightforward rock and roll, and much of the White Album and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack had followed in a similar vein.
Reconvening in January 1969 at Twickenham Film Studios, The Beatles began work on what was initially known as the Get Back project: the concept was a chance for the group to get back to their roots, with perhaps a return to live performance for the first time since 29 August 1966.
In a nutshell, Paul wanted to make – it was time for another Beatle movie or something, and Paul wanted us to go on the road or do something. As usual, George and I were going, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do it, f**k,’ and all that. He set it up and there was all discussions about where to go and all that. I would just tag along and I had Yoko by then, I didn’t even give a s**t about anything. I was stoned all the time, too, on H etc. And I just didn’t give a s**t. And nobody did, you know. Anyway, it’s like in the movie where I go to do ‘Across The Universe’, Paul yawns and plays boogie, and I merely say, ‘Oh, anybody want to do a fast one?’
John Lennon, 1970
Lennon Remembers, Jann S Wenner”.
Once the recording and filming was complete, The Beatles realised they had little aptitude to sift through the hours of recordings for suitable songs.
That task was given to Glyn Johns, who prepared four different versions of an album, both titled Get Back, each of which were rejected by The Beatles.
We let Glyn John remix it and we didn’t want to know, we just left it to him and said, ‘Here, do it.’ It’s the first time since the first album we didn’t have anything to… we just said, ‘Do it.’ Glyn Johns did it, none of us could be bothered going in and Paul… nobody called each other about it. The tapes were left there, and we got an acetate each, and we’d call each other and say, ‘Well, what do you think? Oh, let it out.’ We were going to let it out with a really shitty condition, disgusted. And I wanted… I didn’t care, I thought it was good to go out to show people what had happened to us. Like this is where we’re at now, we couldn’t get – we can’t get it together and don’t play together anymore. Leave us alone. Glyn Johns did a terrible job on it, ’cause he’s got no idea, etc. Never mind. But he hasn’t, really. And so the bootleg version is what it was like. Paul was probably thinking, ‘Well, I’m not going to f*****g work on it.’ It was twenty-nine hours of tape, it was like a movie. I mean just so much tape. Ten, twenty takes of everything, because we’re rehearsing and taking everything. Nobody could face looking at it.
John Lennon, 1970
Lennon Remembers, Jann S Wenner
Johns had been approached by Paul McCartney in December 1968 to work on the Get Back recordings. He was present throughout the sessions, and afterwards began the mammoth task of compiling an album from the tapes.
I originally put together an album of rehearsals, with chat and jokes and bits of general conversation in between the tracks, which was the way I wanted Let It Be to be – breakdowns, false starts. Really the idea was that at the time, they were viewed as being the be-all-and-end-all, sort of up on a pedestal, beyond touch, just Gods, completely Gods, and what I witnessed going on at these rehearsals was that, in fact, they were hysterically funny, but very ordinary people in many ways, and they were capable of playing as a band, which everybody was beginning to wonder about at that point, because they hadn’t done so for some time – everything had been prepared in advance, everything had been overdubbed and everything, and they proved in that rehearsal that they could still sing and play at the same time, and they could make records without all those weird and wonderful sounds on them.
That became an obsession with me, and I got the bit between my teeth about it, and one night, I mixed a bunch of stuff that they didn’t even know I’d recorded half the time – I just whacked the recorder on for a lot of stuff that they did, and gave them an acetate the following morning of what I’d done, as a rough idea of what an album could be like, released as it was…
They came back and said they didn’t like it, or each individual bloke came in and said he didn’t like it, and that was the end of that.
Glyn Johns
The Record Producers
Johns’ first Get Back LP, intended more of a proof-of-concept than a release-ready album, was compiled in early 1969. Side one had ‘Get Back’, ‘Teddy Boy’, ‘Two Of Us’, ‘Dig A Pony’, and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, while side two featured ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘For You Blue’, ‘Get Back’, and ‘The Walk’.
A period of time went by and I went to America to work with Steve Miller, and when I came back, I got a call from John and Paul asking me to meet them at EMI, which I duly did. They pointed to a big pile of tapes in the corner, and said, ‘Remember that idea you had about putting together an album?’ and I said, ‘Yes’. They said, ‘Well, there are the tapes – go and do it’. So I was absolutely petrified – you can imagine. I was actually being asked to put together a Beatle album on my own. So I did – I went off and locked myself away for a week or so and pieced an album together out of these rehearsed tapes, which they then all liked, really liked. This was some months after the thing had actually been recorded, and we’d actually started work on Abbey Road about the same time.
Glyn Johns
The Record Producers
Johns returned to the session tapes on 10 March 1969 at Olympic Sound Studios in London. The Beatles themselves had little involvement, having begun work on Abbey Road. Johns mixed the session tapes at Olympic from 10-13 March 1969.
At that stage, side one of the Get Back album was to have contained ‘One After 909’, ‘Rocker’, ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘Dig A Pony’, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, and ‘Get Back’. Side two featured ‘For You Blue’, ‘Teddy Boy’, ‘Two Of Us’, ‘Maggie Mae’, ‘Dig It’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, and ‘Get Back’ (Reprise).
The Beatles were unhappy with Johns’ second Get Back album, so he created a third iteration with the same running order as before. Several of the songs were remixed, and Johns’ earlier version of ‘Get Back’ was replaced with the single mix, accompanied by introductory studio dialogue. Other studio chatter was changed, and more than a minute of ‘Dig It’ was excised.
Mixing and mastering sessions took place on 7, 9, and 28 May 1969.
For the Get Back project, it was The Beatles’ intention to recreate the cover of Please Please Me, showing how they had changed visually since 1963. On 13 May 1969 the group returned to EMI House in London’s Manchester Square, and at 6pm the same photographer, Angus McBean, photographed them as they resumed their poses.
The artwork was prepared for Glyn Johns’ Get Back album, which was to bear the strapline “with Don’t Let Me Down and 12 other songs”. However, the session photographs remained unused until the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 (the so-called Red and Blue albums) were released in 1973.
The Beatles rejected Johns’ first Get Back album, and new recording sessions for two Let It Be songs took place on 3 and 4 January 1970 – a year after the initial recordings were made”.
I am going to finish off with a couple of reviews about The Beatles’ Let It Be. I am starting out with a Pitchfork review of 2009. Even if some dismiss Let It Be as The Beatles’ worst album, it is an incredible piece of work. A lot of people focus on conflict or the breakdown of the band. Instead, there is a lot of great music on the album that you should concentrate on:
“As the 1960s wound down, so did the Beatles. The symmetry was perfect: youthful energy, optimism, and camaraderie had given over to cynicism, discord, and looking out for number one. As the decade's final year began, the White Album was still riding high on the charts and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack was days away from release. But the Beatles were in serious trouble. Nothing about being in the band was enjoyable or easy. The power vacuum left by the death of manager Brian Epstein a year and a half earlier had never been satisfactorily filled; Apple Corps, the multi-media company started by the band a year earlier, was bleeding money; and toughest of all, the once-Fab Four didn't generally enjoy being in the same room together. All were either married or close to it, closing in on 30, and tremendously weary of all they'd been through.
Paul McCartney, the most devoted of the gang to the notion of the Beatles (Ringo Starr called him the "Beatleaholic"), thought that the group needed a special project to bring it together. Another White Album-style scenario, with the songwriters in the band working alone in separate studios, enlisting each other to serve as a de facto backup band, was bound to fail. Too much good will and trust had been lost. They needed something big they could all submit to. Several ideas were proposed, most involving a return of some kind to live performance: perhaps a live album of new songs or a huge show in a remote place; maybe the band would charter an ocean liner and make an album on it. Ultimately, it was decided that the band would be filmed on a soundstage rehearsing for a show and developing material for a new album-- a document of the Beatles at work. The theme for the project would be back-to-basics, a return of the group as a performing unit, sans overdubs, emphasizing their inherent musicality. Working title: Get Back.
It was an awful idea. First, no one was sure exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Glyn Johns was there, a new presence behind the boards, but he never quite figured out if he was producing or just engineering. Regular producer George Martin was technically on board, but his participation was minimal. While Let It Be was initially meant to be a return to simplicity, Phil Spector's later involvement (he was brought in to "reproduce" the tracks, adding extra voices and instruments to thicken arrangements and remix the record, a decision made without McCartney's input) killed that angle.
Organizational chaos aside, the sessions were painful. We all know what it feels like to be around people we don't like for days on end; if reality television has taught us anything, it's that a camera crew in a room full of such people does nothing to ease tension. The time the Beatles spent recording and filming was described by all as supremely unpleasant, despite a later uptick when they'd returned to finish up at Abbey Road. And when they finished, no one really liked what they'd laid down on tape. So not surprisingly, the essential nature of Let It Be is that it feels incomplete and fragmented; it's a difficult album to peg because the Beatles were never sure themselves what they wanted it to be. So the best way to approach it is as a collection of songs by guys who still were churning out classics with some regularity. It may not succeed on the level of the Beatles' previous albums, but there's enough good material to make it a worthy entry in their canon.
Outside of the title track, there's little here that feels consequential to the Beatles' legacy. The easy acoustic shuffle of the John Lennon and Paul McCartney duet "Two of Us" has appeal, though, as do the prickly rhythmic drive of George Harrison's "For You Blue" and the bubbling Booker T-isms of McCartney's "Get Back". The swampy "I've Got a Feeling", possibly reflecting McCartney's recent interest in Canned Heat, is intriguing because it sounds so classic rock 70s. And Lennon's "Across the Universe", recorded during the White Album sessions and sounding like it was beamed in from somewhere else, has a certain ringing brilliance. For balance, there's "Dig a Pony" and the boogieing "One After 909", the latter actually written by Lennon and McCartney as kids in the fifties. Still, for plenty of good bands, the best of these would be career highlights.
Recorded without joy, set aside for months while a better album was assembled, and finally remixed in a way that enraged one of the band's principals, Let It Be finally saw release in May 1970. But by that point, the Beatles break-up had been official for several weeks. There's since been a live album, compilations, digitization, trolls through the archives, and an ocean of ink spilled about this little band that made it very big. And now there are these CD issues, done beautifully. But there never was a proper reunion, and we can assume that there will never be another Beatles”.
I am finishing off with a review from AllMusic. It must have been a strange time. Breaking up in 1970, there was this negativity from the press. Critics taking aim at the band. Many blaming Paul McCartney for the break-up of The Beatles. In years since, there has been reassessment and reframing of Let It Be. Films like The Beatles: Get Back helping to rewrite the narrative. If you have not heard the album in a while then do so now:
“The only Beatles album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews, there are few other rock records as controversial as Let It Be. First off, several facts need to be explained: although released in May 1970, this was not their final album, but largely recorded in early 1969, way before Abbey Road. Phil Spector was enlisted in early 1970 to do some post-production work, but did not work with the band as a unit, as George Martin and Glyn Johns had on the sessions themselves; Spector's work was limited to mixing and some overdubs. And, although his use of strings has generated much criticism, by and large he left the original performances to stand as is: only "The Long and Winding Road" and (to a lesser degree) "Across the Universe" and "I Me Mine" get the wall-of-sound layers of strings and female choruses. Although most of the album, then, has a live-in-the-studio feel, the main problem was that the material wasn't uniformly strong, and that the Beatles themselves were in fairly lousy moods due to inter-group tension. All that said, the album is on the whole underrated, even discounting the fact that a sub-standard Beatles record is better than almost any other group's best work. McCartney in particular offers several gems: the gospelish "Let It Be," which has some of his best lyrics; "Get Back," one of his hardest rockers; and the melodic "The Long and Winding Road," ruined by Spector's heavy-handed overdubs (the superior string-less, choir-less version was finally released on Anthology Vol. 3). The folky "Two of Us," with John and Paul harmonizing together, was also a highlight. Most of the rest of the material, by contrast, was going through the motions to some degree, although there are some good moments of straight hard rock in "I've Got a Feeling" and "Dig a Pony." As flawed and bumpy as it is, it's an album well worth having, as when the Beatles were in top form here, they were as good as ever”.
I am going to finish there. If some see Let It Be as the album that should have been released before Abbey Road and do not rate it highly or if you have more affection for it, there is no denying its historical importance. I really like the album, in spite of the production of Phil Spector. Two of Us among my favourite Beatles songs. On 8th May, it will be fifty-five year since it was released. An opportunity to spotlight the final-released album…
FROM the legendary band.