Post by New York City on Feb 16, 2006 12:38:48 GMT 1
Around lunchtime on January 30, 1969, a din erupted in the sky above London’s staid garment district. Gray-suited businessmen, their expressions ranging from amused curiosity to disgust, gathered alongside miniskirted teenagers to stare up at the roof of the Georgian building at 3 Savile Row. As camera crews swirled around, whispered conjecture solidified into confirmed fact: The Beatles, who hadn’t performed live since August 1966, were playing an unannounced concert on their office roof. Crowds gathered on scaffolding, behind windows, and on neighboring rooftops to watch the four men who had revolutionized pop culture play again. But what only the pessimistic among them could have guessed—what the Beatles themselves could not yet even decide for sure—was that this was to be their last public performance ever.
The idea for a live gig had come about after their acrimonious sessions recording The Beatles (popularly known as the White Album), in 1968. The group whose cohesive energy had created Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a year earlier was now devolving into the sum of its parts: four musicians who played like session men, not collaborators, on one another’s tracks. Paul McCartney, almost addicted to live performance, suggested that a concert might help the group reconnect. When plans for three shows at the Roundhouse in London in December 1968 fell by the wayside, Paul, as usual, took charge. He planned a concert for mid-January and arranged for a camera crew to document their rehearsals.
He had taken over de facto leadership of the group as far back as the drug-overdose death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967. As John Lennon withdrew into drugs and the arms of his new girlfriend, the conceptual artist Yoko Ono, it fell to Paul, willingly or grudgingly, to give the band direction. And so, at the start of the new year, he wrangled the other three into beginning rehearsals for a live album of new material, with all the imperiousness of a 26-year-old with the world at his feet trying desperately to keep together a band whose other members had become paralyzingly apathetic about its fate.
By 1969 Paul was the only one excited about being a Beatle. For the rest the band was beginning to feel like a prison. John hated having to curb his avant-garde impulses to fit the Beatle mold, and George Harrison, whose songwriting had matured tremendously over the past few years, was tired of being treated as a junior member beside the wildly successful Lennon-McCartney partnership. As John later said, “[Paul] wanted us to go on the road or do something. And as usual George and I were going, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do it.’ . . . I just didn’t give a shit.” Ringo Starr, with a wife and children at home and a burgeoning movie career, was happy to turn up or not. But none was yet quite emotionally ready to call it quits.
So on January 2, 1969, the four gathered at the Twickenham soundstage, where in another life, nearly five years before, they had filmed their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. Each seemed optimistic at first. George later said, “I thought, ‘Okay, it’s the New Year, and we have a new approach to recording.’” Since the group had quit touring, in 1966, their studio mastery had become legendary, but they had fallen out of shape for live performance. Here was a chance to “Get Back,” literally, to their rock roots, without the crutch and veil of studio wizardry. But roused from their usual night-owl recording schedule by the film crew and uncomfortable with the even smaller than usual degree of privacy allowed by the cameras, they started bickering.
On January 6, when George wearied of Paul telling him how to play, they had a fight that would be immortalized in the resulting film. “I always hear myself—annoying you,” Paul said. “Look, I’m not trying to get you. I’m just saying, ‘Look, lads—the band—shall we do it like this?’” George retorted, “Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”
This incident has been almost universally blamed for George’s quitting the band four days later, but the taped evidence implies that it was John, not Paul, who angered George in the hours leading up to his resignation. Thanks to the 200-plus hours of film and soundtrack recorded by the American director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, January 1969 is the most documented month of the Beatles’ career, and, as illustrated by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt in Get Back: the Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster, the tapes dispel some long-held misconceptions and provide fascinating insight into the Beatles’ states of mind.
Most striking is the four’s almost total lack of real communication. As Sulpy and Schweighardt observe, “It’s not that relations between them are strained—it’s as if there are no relations between them.” Swallowed by heroin addiction, John was remote and inert. Whenever anyone tried to start a serious discussion with him, he joked, or let Yoko speak as his proxy, or simply ignored the inquiry altogether. (For a long time it was fashionable, even cliché, to blame the Beatles’ breakup on Yoko Ono. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and she has been acquitted as but a representation of John’s quest for independence. As the tapes reveal, while not guilty in the first degree she is not completely innocent either. It wasn’t just that she seemed grafted to John’s side in a way that drove a wedge between him and the other three, but also that she combatively participated in group decisions, often in lieu of a sullen, silent John.) Finally fed up, following an argument with John, George quit on January 10. At a band meeting on January 15, the others persuaded him to come back at least to finish the album; the group also decided to abandon Twickenham for the cozier atmosphere of the studio in their offices on Savile Row.
They were much happier in their new digs, but there remained the problem of where and for whom to put on the live show. They wanted to do something new and special, but what? In countless circuitous, maddeningly indecisive conversations during their rehearsals, the four floated as possible locations a torchlit amphitheater in Saudi Arabia, an ocean liner, the houses of Parliament, a children’s hospital, and an airport where they would serenade arriving Biafran refugees. But Ringo refused to leave the country, and George feared reviving the nightmarish circus of their mid-sixties tours. Paul suggested trespassing somewhere, presciently enthusing about how filmic it would be for the concert to be broken up by the police. Yoko suggested they play for 20,000 empty seats. John commented, “I’m warming to the idea of an asylum.” The show, originally fixed for January 15 and then 20, got pushed back after George quit. By the time the band had its first rehearsal, with less than two weeks before Ringo was set to begin filming in the Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian, they had decided to perform live for cameras rather than an audience. The rooftop finally won out the day before the concert, because, as George explained, “it was simpler than going anywhere else.”
And so, on a windy, gray day at the end of January, the Beatles lugged their instruments and amplifiers up five floors to play among the tarpaper and chimneys of Savile Row. It was cold enough that Ringo borrowed his wife’s red plastic raincoat and John Yoko’s fur, and by the time they launched into their first number, “Get Back,” their noses were growing red. But the cold, like the bitterness of the preceding weeks, ceased to matter once the music started. In that moment, Paul was proved right: Playing together united them. As long as they had known one another, no matter what else was going wrong between and around them, the music would redeem them. Even at the height of their acrimony at Twickenham, they could still share a joyful laugh over a favorite oldie.
Now their weeks of rehearsals paid off. They breezed through multiple versions of “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “The One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony,” joined by the keyboardist Billy Preston. Paul, obviously thrilled to be playing live again, sang with renewed passion, and John, George, and Ringo contributed enthusiastic performances. After eight or nine songs, it began to filter up from their roadie, Mal Evans, that the police were in the street below, threatening to shut down the show. “We said, ‘We’re not stopping,’” Paul explained later. “He said, ‘The police are going to arrest you.’. . . ‘Great! That’s an end: Beatles Busted in Rooftop Gig.’” Ringo had similar hopes: “I wanted the cops to drag me off . . . kicking the cymbals and everything.” But alas, as Paul recounted, their exciting finale was not to be. “In the end the policeman, Number 503 of the Greater Westminster Council, made his way round the back. ‘You have to stop!’ We said, ‘Make him pull us off! This is a demo, man!’ I think they pulled the plug, and that was the end of the film.”
So they descended the stairs back down to the pettiness and grind of their regular lives. The next day they headed into the studio to record three songs that weren’t appropriate for the roof—the piano-heavy “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” and the acoustic “Two of Us”—and then promptly shelved the whole project. The documentary and album release dates were pushed back, first because no one was satisfied with the audio mixes and then to convert the 16-mm film to theatrical, rather than television, quality. By the time both came out, in May 1970, the Beatles had reconvened one last time to record their most accomplished studio album, Abbey Road, and then had broken up for good. When the film, Let It Be, finally hit theaters, Paul later said, “we got the break-up of the Beatles instead of what we really wanted.”
When the world beyond London’s garment district finally got to see the Beatles’ last concert, it was with the knowledge, unshared by the original, live audience, that it was the band’s swan song. On Abbey Road Paul had sung grandly about “the end,” but it was John’s closing words on the roof that made the more fitting epitaph for the group that had struggled out of working-class Liverpool to rewrite pop history: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”
—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.
The idea for a live gig had come about after their acrimonious sessions recording The Beatles (popularly known as the White Album), in 1968. The group whose cohesive energy had created Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a year earlier was now devolving into the sum of its parts: four musicians who played like session men, not collaborators, on one another’s tracks. Paul McCartney, almost addicted to live performance, suggested that a concert might help the group reconnect. When plans for three shows at the Roundhouse in London in December 1968 fell by the wayside, Paul, as usual, took charge. He planned a concert for mid-January and arranged for a camera crew to document their rehearsals.
He had taken over de facto leadership of the group as far back as the drug-overdose death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967. As John Lennon withdrew into drugs and the arms of his new girlfriend, the conceptual artist Yoko Ono, it fell to Paul, willingly or grudgingly, to give the band direction. And so, at the start of the new year, he wrangled the other three into beginning rehearsals for a live album of new material, with all the imperiousness of a 26-year-old with the world at his feet trying desperately to keep together a band whose other members had become paralyzingly apathetic about its fate.
By 1969 Paul was the only one excited about being a Beatle. For the rest the band was beginning to feel like a prison. John hated having to curb his avant-garde impulses to fit the Beatle mold, and George Harrison, whose songwriting had matured tremendously over the past few years, was tired of being treated as a junior member beside the wildly successful Lennon-McCartney partnership. As John later said, “[Paul] wanted us to go on the road or do something. And as usual George and I were going, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do it.’ . . . I just didn’t give a shit.” Ringo Starr, with a wife and children at home and a burgeoning movie career, was happy to turn up or not. But none was yet quite emotionally ready to call it quits.
So on January 2, 1969, the four gathered at the Twickenham soundstage, where in another life, nearly five years before, they had filmed their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. Each seemed optimistic at first. George later said, “I thought, ‘Okay, it’s the New Year, and we have a new approach to recording.’” Since the group had quit touring, in 1966, their studio mastery had become legendary, but they had fallen out of shape for live performance. Here was a chance to “Get Back,” literally, to their rock roots, without the crutch and veil of studio wizardry. But roused from their usual night-owl recording schedule by the film crew and uncomfortable with the even smaller than usual degree of privacy allowed by the cameras, they started bickering.
On January 6, when George wearied of Paul telling him how to play, they had a fight that would be immortalized in the resulting film. “I always hear myself—annoying you,” Paul said. “Look, I’m not trying to get you. I’m just saying, ‘Look, lads—the band—shall we do it like this?’” George retorted, “Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”
This incident has been almost universally blamed for George’s quitting the band four days later, but the taped evidence implies that it was John, not Paul, who angered George in the hours leading up to his resignation. Thanks to the 200-plus hours of film and soundtrack recorded by the American director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, January 1969 is the most documented month of the Beatles’ career, and, as illustrated by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt in Get Back: the Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster, the tapes dispel some long-held misconceptions and provide fascinating insight into the Beatles’ states of mind.
Most striking is the four’s almost total lack of real communication. As Sulpy and Schweighardt observe, “It’s not that relations between them are strained—it’s as if there are no relations between them.” Swallowed by heroin addiction, John was remote and inert. Whenever anyone tried to start a serious discussion with him, he joked, or let Yoko speak as his proxy, or simply ignored the inquiry altogether. (For a long time it was fashionable, even cliché, to blame the Beatles’ breakup on Yoko Ono. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and she has been acquitted as but a representation of John’s quest for independence. As the tapes reveal, while not guilty in the first degree she is not completely innocent either. It wasn’t just that she seemed grafted to John’s side in a way that drove a wedge between him and the other three, but also that she combatively participated in group decisions, often in lieu of a sullen, silent John.) Finally fed up, following an argument with John, George quit on January 10. At a band meeting on January 15, the others persuaded him to come back at least to finish the album; the group also decided to abandon Twickenham for the cozier atmosphere of the studio in their offices on Savile Row.
They were much happier in their new digs, but there remained the problem of where and for whom to put on the live show. They wanted to do something new and special, but what? In countless circuitous, maddeningly indecisive conversations during their rehearsals, the four floated as possible locations a torchlit amphitheater in Saudi Arabia, an ocean liner, the houses of Parliament, a children’s hospital, and an airport where they would serenade arriving Biafran refugees. But Ringo refused to leave the country, and George feared reviving the nightmarish circus of their mid-sixties tours. Paul suggested trespassing somewhere, presciently enthusing about how filmic it would be for the concert to be broken up by the police. Yoko suggested they play for 20,000 empty seats. John commented, “I’m warming to the idea of an asylum.” The show, originally fixed for January 15 and then 20, got pushed back after George quit. By the time the band had its first rehearsal, with less than two weeks before Ringo was set to begin filming in the Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian, they had decided to perform live for cameras rather than an audience. The rooftop finally won out the day before the concert, because, as George explained, “it was simpler than going anywhere else.”
And so, on a windy, gray day at the end of January, the Beatles lugged their instruments and amplifiers up five floors to play among the tarpaper and chimneys of Savile Row. It was cold enough that Ringo borrowed his wife’s red plastic raincoat and John Yoko’s fur, and by the time they launched into their first number, “Get Back,” their noses were growing red. But the cold, like the bitterness of the preceding weeks, ceased to matter once the music started. In that moment, Paul was proved right: Playing together united them. As long as they had known one another, no matter what else was going wrong between and around them, the music would redeem them. Even at the height of their acrimony at Twickenham, they could still share a joyful laugh over a favorite oldie.
Now their weeks of rehearsals paid off. They breezed through multiple versions of “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “The One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony,” joined by the keyboardist Billy Preston. Paul, obviously thrilled to be playing live again, sang with renewed passion, and John, George, and Ringo contributed enthusiastic performances. After eight or nine songs, it began to filter up from their roadie, Mal Evans, that the police were in the street below, threatening to shut down the show. “We said, ‘We’re not stopping,’” Paul explained later. “He said, ‘The police are going to arrest you.’. . . ‘Great! That’s an end: Beatles Busted in Rooftop Gig.’” Ringo had similar hopes: “I wanted the cops to drag me off . . . kicking the cymbals and everything.” But alas, as Paul recounted, their exciting finale was not to be. “In the end the policeman, Number 503 of the Greater Westminster Council, made his way round the back. ‘You have to stop!’ We said, ‘Make him pull us off! This is a demo, man!’ I think they pulled the plug, and that was the end of the film.”
So they descended the stairs back down to the pettiness and grind of their regular lives. The next day they headed into the studio to record three songs that weren’t appropriate for the roof—the piano-heavy “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” and the acoustic “Two of Us”—and then promptly shelved the whole project. The documentary and album release dates were pushed back, first because no one was satisfied with the audio mixes and then to convert the 16-mm film to theatrical, rather than television, quality. By the time both came out, in May 1970, the Beatles had reconvened one last time to record their most accomplished studio album, Abbey Road, and then had broken up for good. When the film, Let It Be, finally hit theaters, Paul later said, “we got the break-up of the Beatles instead of what we really wanted.”
When the world beyond London’s garment district finally got to see the Beatles’ last concert, it was with the knowledge, unshared by the original, live audience, that it was the band’s swan song. On Abbey Road Paul had sung grandly about “the end,” but it was John’s closing words on the roof that made the more fitting epitaph for the group that had struggled out of working-class Liverpool to rewrite pop history: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”
—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.
