The Beatles Band • Page 27

It's just insane to see some of these absolutely iconic songs being born. Like John discussing the concert set design, while Paul is at the piano casually working out fucking Let It Be

 

Controversial opinion:

It’s hard to hear the greatness of some of the All Things Must Pass stuff in the demos. Fleshing them out with great musicians really made a lot of the magic emerge.

 

I am a huge fan of all four guys in the band, but I can't help but feeling like John Lennon and Paul McCartney were dicks to George Harrison and kinda treated him like shit. He spent a long time lending his talents to their songs and helping to make their songs better, and they didn't really return the favor. Or only returned the favor for two songs per album or whatever the quota they worked out was. That's why I loved to see the stuff with George Harrison helping Ringo work on his songs.

Your take paints Lennon / McCartney in a much better light than how I come away from all of this feeling about them and how they treated George. It doesn't come off to me like them not vibing with his songs. It comes off to me as them not giving his songs the time of day and not really respecting him as a songwriter. It looks to me like them basically treating George's songwriting talents as being on par with Ringo's when in fact he rivals both Lennon and McCartney - who each had the benefit of being in partnership with the other and had the other always helping him out and pushing him to be better.

(I don't mean to knock Ringo - as a drummer and musician I think he is criminally underrated and has unfairly been the butt of jokes for decades when he unquestionably brings a ton to the table. But I wouldn't put him up against John Lennon or Paul McCartney as a songwriter, while I absolutely would do that with George Harrison.)

I do realize that how I'm feeling takes all of the decades of hindsight and lore into account, whereas your take on it recognizes the fact that, at the end of the day, this was just four guys in their late 20's in a big room trying to hash out a bunch of songs in a short period of time.

 

Yeah I’ll give you that. They weren’t vibing with George’s songs because they didn’t even give them a fair shot. Paul was definitely trying to solely steer the ship. Even more than John was.

 

this is wild haha. the version of all things must pass he plays in front of the band while they're just like ho hum might be better than the studio version

 

This doc is unreal I can’t believe it exists

 

and as we know all things must pass >>>>>

 

I'm still trying to get through the first episode of this. I love this band, and this is pretty cool to see, but this feels *extremely* long.

I know I haven't finished it yet, but it's interesting that it seemed like this project sorta wanted to set the record straight and show that the Get Back/Let It Be album/project didn't kill The Beatles in big dramatic fashion, and it seems to show this album/project killing The Beatles in slow, drawn out, excruciatingly passive-aggressive fashion.

It was really cool to see Paul just start fiddling around on guitar and basically birth Get Back the song while Ringo slowly starts tapping his foot along and then jumps right in.

John and Yoko Ono's dancing while the other guys played I Me Mine came off as a real dick move to me, especially after he had shit all over the song when George first presented it and said something about it being too slow and how they're a rock & roll band, despite the fact that he had them all playing Across The Universe earlier on.

Yoko Ono sitting there doing crosswords while they're trying to write songs is extremely fucking weird and you can tell it's bothering Paul a ton. It's hard to tell if it bothers George because it seems like he's kinda thrown in the towel and is just there because it seems like he needs to be. It's not just Yoko Ono either - all of the random people milling around and staring at them while they're trying to work is really fucking weird, it's just that's she's the closest because she's basically attached to John's hip the whole time.

I did get a huge kick out of the long version of the infamous 'I'll do whatever pleases you' fight between George and Paul. It's not as much of a straight fight as it was kinda made to seem to be in the past, but I do think George is taking great pleasure in basically fucking with Paul while he tries to wrangle all of them into some type of functional unit all while trying not to appear like he's being bossy or come off in any was as controlling and/or rude for the cameras.

John seems so fucked up and out of it for so much of this, and it really made me sad to watch. Even though when he does seem to tune in and focus he acts like a prick a lot of the time, it's still sad to see.

Also, it's crazy how much watching this episode made me want to smack Michael Lindsay-Hogg and just scream "WE'RE NOT GOING TO FUCKING TRIPOLI !!!"

 

I haven't watched this yet but you'd have to have some borderline miraculous footage to convince me that LIB-era John and Paul weren't some of the biggest assholes of all time

doesn't mean they can't have some gracious moments or that the band was miserable 24/7 for the whole year, but they absolutely treated George like shit for a long long time

 

paul is the most annoying dude on the planet but he really is the closest to a genius out of the bunch of them

 

I really felt bad for Paul in the scenes after George leaves the band and they try to have a meeting that doesn't go well. I do think he's upset about George leaving the band, but I think it's also hitting him there that he and John have broken up, so-to-speak, as well. That's a huge relationship in his life that brought them all the way to the top of the world, and it's ending or is over, and it's all hitting him, and he has all these random strangers (or who could be considered, at best, the equivalent of like work acquaintances) milling around and a bunch of cameras pointing in his face as he's fighting back tears.

 

It's amazing that footage of Paul working out a song as incredible and now ubiquitous as Let It Be exists

Also for all the tension in this it's great that every other scene is them goofing off making jokes and playing covers

 

Paul is unbearable the first like, hour and a half, but by the end of episode two I'm sympathetic to him again. He's a real asshole the way he brushes off George constantly at Twickenham, but almost all of the rest of his bossiness comes off as just trying to keep the wheels turning at all. Flowerpot convo was an illuminating moment. He and Ringo are clearly more invested in being Beatles than the other two by the time we're seeing and you can tell the stress of the deadline is really getting to him.

Beyond the interpersonal relationship stuff it's too bad he was so dismissive of George, they were both at or near the peak of their musical powers at that point and it would have been amazing to hear them collaborate more. Get Back (song) feels like a hint of what could have been had Paul embraced that someone as good as John was right there in front of him and would have been willing to take his pulling away bandmate's place if offered.

Also pretty striking how some of this plays out like a legit fiction movie, Billy Preston's timely arrival and immediate good fit in particular. And Lindsay-Hogg got a great sliding shot on one of the Get Back takes with him that nearly made me forget for a second this isn't a reenactment but actually the real life events as it happened.

 

it just feels impossible that if john showed him while my guitar gently weeps, something, or i me mine that he’d be as dismissive as he is to george. it’s real big brother shitting on the kid brother energy.

 

This is the part I'm struggling so much to understand: you are Paul McCartney, and you are in this incredibly stressful and tense situation where you need to write and record 14 new Beatles songs by this insane deadline, your usual writing partner is strung out on drugs and seems to not really be there mentally even if he's dutifully showing up physically (for the most part), and you have 1969 George Harrison willing to hand you a bunch of his songs for the rest of the band to work on for the project, and you still just shit all over them and reject them.

The level of sheer and utter arrogance this would take is truly astounding, even for the person who is arguably the main creative/musical engine for the biggest band on the planet at that time. And he's doing it all while acting chipper and polite and trying to not come across like a dick to the cameras. It's so strange. I can't believe he wasn't able to pull his head out of his own ass and look at the situation objectively.

George Harrison acting aloof and like he doesn't care is so clearly an act from someone who is deeply hurt by the rejection from the other guys, Paul more actively but John as well in his more passive and passive-aggressive way. There's a short scene where George Harrison is showing them I believe I Me Mine, and John & Paul shit on it and reject it, and George says "I don't give a fuck" and then says something like he'll just use it for his musical or something. The 'I don't give a fuck' was so heartbreaking because he so clearly did give a fuck and he in fact still cared deeply but was just at the end of his rope.

It seems to me like he so clearly wanted to step into the John role and be a songwriting partner with Paul and Paul just had this mental hangup where he had already decided that George was a shit songwriter and all his songs were terrible. The deadline being like 9 days away is the kicker for me. Paul has this giant looming deadline and no songs - you'd think anyone willing to step in and help you would be like a godsend, nevermind George fucking Harrison.

 

To me, it seemed like Paul was trying to write and take it seriously, but John goofed off non stop, Ringo didn’t care what was going on, and George wanted to write too but wasn’t really heard by the others. And trying to write with Yoko, the director, and everyone else hovering must have been so distracting, which is probably why they just goofed off the majority of the time instead of actually focusing and writing together. That would have driven me crazy, at least.

 

All of the random people milling about is so crazy to see and must have been insanely distracting. I really feel like the documentary idea was so misguided. Or at the very least, they should have written some songs ahead of time, even if they sorta pretended to make the songs up while the cameras were rolling, like 'hey I just thought of this song idea'.

 

Haven’t had a chance to watch yet but it still got me revisiting a lot of stuff that I haven’t listened to in forever, and damn “Blue Jay Way” is a song I had completely memory-holed but once it started it immediately jumped up to one of my favorite Beatles songs. Can’t believe more people don’t take much note of it

 

pretty much perfect song

 

MMT is my favorite top to bottom Beatles record.

 

just finished. this was so great.

 

But was it so so SO great?

Spoiler alert: yes it was

 

Flying has always been a favorite of mine off MMT. I love that instrumental