A Virtual Beatlemaniac Group Hug
Can you get enough of Get Back — the three-part Beatles documentary released, finally and thankfully, on Thanksgiving? No? Well, you should come over some time. I’ll show you my Beatles original sheet music, Beatles shrine and Beatles record collection, all still quite playable. I’ll play you the Beatles song I’m learning so I can present it to a friend when she turns 64 next Tuesday. (If you don’t know what song, I revoke my invitation.)
Peter Jackson and his crew have cleaned up and gleaned from 60 hours of footage of the four lads (which they really were at the time) struggling to keep it together and develop and learn 14 new songs for an event over whose details they debate and change roughly 37 times over the three weeks in January 1969 the filming took place, six hours of Beatlemaniac bliss. The clarity! The formerly fuzzy four seem as though they’re in the room with you. You can almost smell the smoke from their Gitanes, make out the brand name on George’s pics, and hear Yoko sigh to herself as the band trudges through take 83 of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
“What is there about the Beatles that we still needed to know?” asked my stepdaughter, because she doesn’t understand that we must know every damned thing, and then we need to discuss it, dissect it and turn it all around in our heads and bounce it off each other until we’ve wrung every drop of magic from the tapestry of something I’m too exhausted from writing this sentence to name.
We care so much about the Beatles because their story forms a perfect ten-year arc that seems to have demanded that things happen exactly as they did. It is about friendship, and democracy, and excess, and hubris and ego — and love, of course — and all things having to pass me by, making me cry, baby, cry. It’s a story with all the emotions and we can’t let it be, not just yet.
I used to love John the best, and I still do, but I’m 18 years older than he ever was and I lately feel as though he probably didn’t reach maturity. In the doc series he’s often changing the subject from what needs to be discussed to his off-topic witticisms, so when he speaks from the heart — as he does in a surreptitiously recorded conversation with Paul during a lunch break — it’s riveting. And when he seems to complete a three-Beatle group hug to the tune of departed George’s “Isn’t it a Pity,” it’s utterly heart-rending.
I came around to Paul a long time ago when I realized, unlike the friends lost in a divorce, I didn’t have to take a side. When I watch Get Back, my heart breaks for him, because out of the four, he’s the Beatles fan. He’s the one who has the most to lose because he’s the one who cares the most, the one who sees this as a livelihood. He knows with this band he’s caught the proverbial lightning in the legendary bottle. Everything had to happen exactly the way it did for the Beatles to become what they became.
Aside from the timeless music, I think our collective attachment to the Beatles has to do with the recognition of the magic and importance of timing. Each of us, I hope, has experienced “the zone,” that fleeting period when things are effortless and easy, when success is a given. The Beatles are the embodiment of that experience. They sustained it not for an afternoon, a week or a month, but for ten years. They were so entrenched in the zone that after a while they didn’t know what it was they were in. They released so many albums in rapid succession their genius eventually seemed prosaic to them. In January of 1969, only a few months after the release of the “White Album,” that they thought that they had to culminate their rehearsals with a concert seems ludicrous now. Get Back is the Beatles at work. I can think of few things more compelling.
Could they have found a way to stay together? Maybe if they’d just taken a breath in 1969 instead of diving right back into the studio….
But then we wouldn’t have this documentary. Which is a treasure. For which I’m thankful on this Thanksgiving weekend.
I realize suddenly, to my horror, I haven’t mentioned Ringo. I fuckin’ love Ringo.
