#rewatching get back

[yeoman-lawyer]

and now, your hosts for this evening…

[get-back-homeward]

Anyone interested in comparing Get Back vs the Nagra reels (audio of the sessions) day by day this month?

I’m starting with January 2, 1969 tapes today. There’s 96 clips, but each one ranges from 4 seconds to 11 minutes in runtime.

I’m listening primarily to see whether the overall tenor of the day matches with the way Peter Jackson’s editing captures it. But I’m also curious about any worthwhile details missing from Get Back (especially those days @amoralto never got to) that may shed light on the group dynamics at this time.

I’m planning to post my findings by day, even if I only get through a handful. But as much as I may try to avoid them, I have my own biases, as we all do. So it’d be neat to compare across several listeners and see where consensus lies.

[get-back-homeward]

i keep being struck by the labyrinths in the beatles history. specifically john and paul rituals.

i mean, you take the 1968 NYC trip with their matching white sports coat jackets. that’s just one snapshot in time.

but then you add that the first synchronized band outfit the quarrymen ever did (november 1957) was a result of paul joining and convincing john to wear matching white sports coats. so then you understand in the absolute clusterfuck that is the 1968 nyc trip somehow they decided to harken back to that moment, where they started, first became a team, and wear matching white sports coats to announce their company to america. everything that goes wrong on that trip aside. without that history its completely missed as an active dialogue.

the labyrinths are the language they have for their layers of history. john saying let’s wear white sports coats in 1968 doesn’t mean a random color of unity. its speaking to that shared history. a color paul favored because of the 1957 british cover of an american country song about a white sport coat, which he wears to the woolton fete and later that year convinces john to adopt for the band.

but then after the nyc trip, he wears it with yoko. like the yellow submarine premiere. and its this very loud bullhorn to paul. i’ve replaced you. what are you going to do about it.

there’s also echoes from the 1957 cover that started it all:

now you've changed your mind it seems someone else will hold my dreams

the labyrinths are most often played out through their shared history of songs, which become their own kind of language.

like paul playing twenty flight rock during get back sessions (jan 23, 1969, the day after Billy Preston gives them that much needed lift and they start really kicking again), harkening back to the song that impressed john at the 1957 fete. he doesn’t remember the chords or the words as well as he used to. but its the language of a dusty memory. a delicate remember when. it still matters to me. does it matter to you?

like john jumping into a line of elvis’s it’s now or never in the fall 1968 live special is its own language to paul. the song is elvis’s first after returning from the army, when john always thought he sold out. its not him just playing an elvis song, it’s playing *that* elvis song as a dig. like saying this is the swan song. but it’s also a challenge: unless you do something. in many ways, get back can be seen as an answer to that challenge.

but it doesn’t end there either. because the last elvis song before he returns from the army is 1958 now and then (a fool such as i). in 1978, john writes his own now and then for paul.

these labyrinths are what makes watching get back so impossible. you feel like you’re missing an entire book because you probably are. of the layers and layers of history they have between them by 1969, we know very little.

[get-back-homeward]

Let’s go back to the start...

The first frame of Get Back suggests the editorial decisions within maintain historical accuracy.

So have we talked about the choices for the next three frames?

This sequence implies John and Paul first meet in 1956, when John is 16 and Paul is 14. However, the publicly provided story of their first meeting is the July 6, 1957 Woolton fete, where John is still 16 (his Oct 9 birthday is 3 months away) but Paul is 15 (having just had a birthday June 18). The picture of the Quarrymen is taken at the 1957 fete.

Bob Harris on BBC Radio 2 reconstructs this day on its 50th anniversary: The Day John Met Paul. It’s an hour-long show of recollections of family and friends who were there at the time. A really great listen.

The story goes that Ivan, their mutual friend, invites Paul to listen to the Quarrymen at the fete and meet John. They meet in the church hall after the band’s first set, Paul helping to tune John’s guitar and then playing a few numbers that impress everyone. John asks about some chords and Paul writes them out for him.

Afterward, John asks Pete Shotten about inviting Paul and enlists him to pass on the invite. This is Pete’s personal recollection, btw. In 1980, John recalls asking Paul directly, right after he finished playing (RKO, Dec 8 interview). One of many conflicts that result in the day being recalled several decades later by different people who were present. Do you believe the recollections of friends and observers? Or John and Paul themselves?

You could may be argue that the 1956 frame is meant to be linked with the second John-as-16 frame to describe when John started the Quarrymen (about November 1956). But then the third frame is still a problem.

By describing Paul as a “14 year old” when John invites him to join the band, Get Back suggests that they not only met before the fete but had already spoken and shared enough about music for John to invite Paul directly, unbeknownst to his bandmates. How can that be right?

But the flip side, with all living participants as producers, how could it possible be wrong? Surely such a blatant error in the first few seconds would be caught by one of them. Right? Someone should know how old Paul was when he met John, especially Paul himself. Right? Not to mention the hundreds of people credited to have been involved in the making of this from Apple archivists to film QCers.

In Tune In, Lewisohn includes Paul’s publicly shared recollection of seeing John around town before the fete:

Paul also realized he’d seen John Lennon before. “I saw him a few times before I met him—‘Oh he’s that feller, the Ted who gets on the bus.’ You notice who’s hip … I wouldn’t look at him too hard [on the bus] in case he hit me.”

The implication being that John was too intimidating for Paul to have ever attempted to talk with before Ivan introduced them. For all the rough and tumble talk about Liverpool at this point, this note hits a bit strange to me. Especially considering how brash Paul is by most accounts in showing off in the church hall at the fete: he launches into Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock upside down on someone else’s guitar, then moves onto piano for some other numbers, something by Elvis and Be-Bop-A-Lula, before finishing with his full-out Little Richard impression (Long Tall Sally). Sure, he had one friend in the room. But even still, it’s brash.

The anniversary radio show includes a clip from Mike talking about how firm the age lines were for kids in Liverpool at the time. I guess that could have played a factor, though Paul already broke that by befriending George.

It’s worth noting that there’s a history of John and Paul retroactively pushing the idea that John had this intimidating Ted identity at this time instead of one adopted later. John later recalls that the fete was the day he fought with Aunt Mimi over wearing his Ted clothes for the first time, which the fete pictures seem to dispute outright. Just an example of the problem with applying stories decades after fame without assuming a filter.

I also wonder about how Paul first sees John on the bus. Paul meets George on the bus too and the two strike up a conversation about music and guitars. John has no case for his guitar when he first starts playing, just slinging it around his neck on the bus. Meaning Paul easily may have seen him on the bus with a guitar in his hand and known they shared a common interest. John’s friends also mention his prank antics on the bus at this time that disrupted all riders, so he might have just been hard to miss because he’s loud and annoying. 🤷‍♀️Regardless, once Paul moves to Forthlin Road, they don’t live all that far apart (~1 mile). So despite the story creating this myth of ~fate, it’s rather inevitable that they meet at some point.

Buried in the Tune In footnotes is this addition:

In certain private company, Paul sometimes reveals that he hadn’t only seen John on buses before the Woolton fete, but they’d also exchanged a few words. Paul says he was working as a paper-boy (on his bike, delivering the Echo to local houses in the evenings) when he once talked to John outside the newsagent’s shop. John never mentioned it, and Paul has chosen, consistently for decades, never to say it publicly. He was a paperboy after the McCartneys relocated to Forthlin Road in summer 1956, when he turned 14.

Paul is shy about giving away the shop’s identity to anyone who’d print it, but one local family who knew him think it was “Abbas.” At 166 Aigburth Road, close to the Cast Iron Shore, W. W. Abba would have been an oddly distant place of employment for a lad living and delivering three miles away in Allerton, and—as it was a mile farther still from John’s house—it’s far from being a cast-iron certainty. For now, there’s merely the possibility to digest that McCartney first met Lennon outside a shop called Abba.

It’s not unsurprising that there would be a public and a private story. The fete meeting is a contained story involving their brand: the music. It’s one of those stories that can be easy to cobble together after the fact, a compelling story to sell to biographers. Like a scientist’s Eureka story, condensing more mundane details down to one day, one event.

Even so, Lewisohn leaves a heck of a lot of implication between the lines here. Is there a need for a private story and a public story if the difference is that they only exchanged a few words before? Why would Paul be shy about giving away a shop identity? (I know, the wording is all on Lewisohn.) Why was John at the shop at all?

So, going back to Get Back, we’re left with this frame:

Is it a major editorial oversight in sorry need of basic factchecking? Or is it sly confirmation that there’s more to these private stories?

Regardless, by all math I know, this is most definitely wrong:

The exact date George officially joins is unclear, but all accounts from Quarrymen bandmates agree it is early 1958. George’s birth date is February 25, 1943. At earliest (if he joined before his birthday), he’s 14. To be 13, he’d have to join the Quarrymen a whole year earlier, months before anyone knew John and Paul had met.

So I’m leaning on the side of Jackson needing a factchecker. What a shame.