Get Back

The stated intention of the sessions of January 1969 was for the Beatles to get back to their rock and roll roots and create a batch of new material, culminating in a live performance which would be recorded and released as an album without any overdubs.  Paul McCartney duly began work on a song with the title Get Back early on during the Twickenham Film Studios portion of those sessions.

The first set of lyrics for this song had a decidedly political bent to them, mocking the anti-immigrant stance popular at the time in England.  John even believed that Paul was directing the line "Get back to where you once belonged" at Yoko, who had by now become a permanent fixture by his longtime partner's side.  Wisely, the easily misconstrued "No Pakistanis" verse was dropped and the lighthearted, nonsensical verses about Jo Jo and Loretta were adopted instead.

Yet the lyrics have little to do with the success of this song.  It is the galloping forward motion provided by Ringo, Paul and George on rhythm guitar, the lighter-than-air lead guitar of John and the superior keyboard work of Billy Preston that help to sell this number as pure, unadulterated fun.  Get Back was probably rehearsed more than any other song at these sessions, and it shows.  By the time they settled on the idea of an abbreviated rooftop concert, this was considered to be the flagship song of the project.  They played it three times that day -  first as a warm-up quickly followed by a full out performance, and as the closing number of the 40-minute set.

In March of 1969, while engineer Glyn Johns was assembling a Get Back album, he found a great take of the song from the rehearsals at Savile Row Studio from either January 27th or 28th (I see differing accounts all the time), which was then chosen to be the A-side of a single credited to The Beatles (with Billy Preston).  Johns also used this take for the two unreleased Get Back albums, even adding more of the coda for the end of those albums.  This picks up exactly where the fadeout occurs on the single and continues through some forced "ho ho ho"s from Paul before fading out again.

For the Let It Be album, producer Phil Spector gave us the same exact take minus the coda to close out that album.  He cleverly added some studio chatter before the song and some remarks from the rooftop afterwards to make it appear as if it were part of that January 30th performance.  We finally did get to hear a bit of that actual performance on Anthology 3, featuring John and George's amps being temporarily shut off and Paul ad libbing about the police shutting down the show.

When the single was released in April of '69, it was touted as being "the Beatles as nature intended," even though Glyn Johns added a bit of reverb to the mix.  The 2003 album Let It Be...Naked presents a pristine mix of the track without the reverb and also without the coda.  The song appears on many more collections including the Blue Album, Rock and Roll Music (the Phil Spector version), Reel Music, 20 Greatest Hits (US & UK), Past Masters Volume Two and, naturally, on 1.

The video compilation 1+ offers two looks at the song.  The first film was made to promote the single in 1969.  According to the liner notes, it used footage from all three performances of the song on the Savile Row rooftop, though all we hear is the single.  The second was created to promote Let It Be...Naked in 2003.  Set to the cleaned-up version of the song from that album, it utilizes footage from the film Let It Be and shows the song being rehearsed at both Twickenham Film Studios and in the Savile Row Studio.  It also manages to use shots featuring many of the other important people involved in the work - Mal Evans, George Martin, Glyn Johns and, most delightfully, a dancing Billy Preston.