In the 1960's music was the medium that attracted young people most, via the then new portable transistor radios. The Beatles ruled the music world, less because of their manager's doubtful business acumen as the band took their place on the world stage, and more for their innate ability as musicians to write, record, and perform strong songs that would very much outlast their era.
Whilst the parents of the 1960's were being sold televisions on the back of the world sporting events that led the headlines in the newspapers they read, the young listened to pop radio instead. What nobody could test at the time was what the result might be when the world of music and television properly met. Their first long term introduction to each other had resulted in the formulaic 'Top of The Pops', where from November 1964 to 2004 the music stars of the day openly mimed to their own songs to audiences who were indifferent towards them, they were there to pretend to dance, which was hardly the best introduction anything.
'Monterey Pop' was filmed in Summer '67 by D.A. Pennibaker, but the film was still being edited and would not be released in any sort of time to influence them when The Beatles came to consider making their own film of themselves. And the documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England, 'Don't Look back', had barely been seen at all.
Meanwhile in England in the autumn of 1967 Paul McCartney led The Beatles through making their third film, this time self produced, just an hour long, and made to be shown at Christmas for the then new colour channel BBC2. 'Magical Mystery Tour', was their first film and music venture without the measured hand of Brian Epstein behind it. What the plot of their film lacked in plot, pace, and sure direction the songs more than compensated for. The critics struck as hard as they could against the whimsy of it all, as if they had always been waiting for the the band to fail at something. But from when the film was made now, the film and the songs have never been out of public view, and are now known for having a sunny charm-that has long outlasted the barracking critics of the time, who have long since been forgotten.
Enter stage left French/Swiss film director Jean Luc Goddard who filmed The Jefferson Airplane playing live for free, and without a license to play, atop a hotel roof near Times Square, New York, in December 1968, the first ever such rooftop performance. The band had already performed live for television before a tame audience, and had used expletives that could not be deleted before they went out on air.
After filming Jefferson Airplane off the cuff, so to speak, Jean Luc Goddard sought to film The Beatles in their natural habitat, the studio, recording a song. But Goddard found all cohesive and firm contact with the band hard to make amid the many different film and music projects that Apple and the band had taken on, projects that the band did not realise the scale of until the overseeing of the work overwhelmed them. Before recording of what became 'The White Album' between May and October 1968 they had already recorded four songs for the United Artists cartoon project 'Yellow Submarine', to complete their contract with the film company that had started with 'A Hard Day's Night' in 1964, and George and John had each laid down plans for solo releases, all for release on Apple Records.
Goddard found what he wanted much easier with The Rolling Stones instead. He made the film he wanted to make. 'One Plus One; Sympathy For The Devil' as an art house film released in 1969. Whilst the act of filming a song being recorded seemed exciting in theory, Goddard made the actuality of both the song and band seem strangely disengaged, as they engaged with the unknown in the form of extracting the as yet unwritten/unrecorded song, albeit a song that would gain the band an apt notoriety, from the ether.
Michael Lindsay Hogg was the first television director to regularly put live music onto English television screens with the ITV programme 'Ready Steady Go' between 1963 and 1966. This led in turn to the BBC responding with the mimed Top of The Pops' 1964-2004. Hogg also filmed promotional films for The Beatles 'Paperback Writer' and 'Rain', and later directed The Rolling Stones and friends in the film 'Rock and Roll circus, filmed December 1968 but unreleased until 1996. Were The Beatles inspired by the failed discussions with Goddard to contact Hogg to make their own 'how we write and record a song' film? If so the project grew and the idea of a live impromptu concert became yet another idea for them to explore without them knowing what the end point for the idea might be. As it was, the idea was already ambitious, with the planned film already being about the making the making of a whole album's worth of songs combined with a clear profile of each member of the band. And Hogg filmed many more performances of songs on the way than were ever going to be used in the film. Material that was seemingly doomed to languish unheard and unseen, as the performances were left on the cutting room floor as part of the many under-rehearsed rehearsals.
That such a project was fraught with difficulty was obvious to all except the participants. The first difficulty was that at the start of filming nobody knew whether it was to be a cinema film or a made-for-television film, it could have been either. When recording started it was 'just' footage of rehearsals for what was hoped might be a live concert, with new songs being developed for the would-be-concert which at the start of filming had no planning or preparation. Whilst Hogg filmed he could not tell the band what to do, merely record what was happening in front of him. The band were the drivers for what was filmed and they were always working out what they wanted to perform as they went along. To write and record a song without your normal producer, George Martin, shaping proceedings was one thing. To record said song whilst being filmed sketching out the song with the rest of the band is another, to informally direct yourself whilst writing and recording said song was to put yourself and your art through the maximum pressure to perform/achieve that any artist could contemplate. With such split aims, lack of prior planning, singular pressure, and lack of formal leadership for the project it was no wonder that the end result initially seemed to be no more than a mass of footage with no story.
Nonetheless, what they achieved between January and July of 1969 was remarkable. They had released the soundtrack to a feature length cartoon, 'Yellow Submarine', written the songs for two group albums, and accumulated over 60 hours of footage and over 120 hours of audio as source material for an impossible-to-edit film of the writing of one the albums. With the album that went with the film half completed but then shelved, whilst the film remained in a state of chaos. Each member of the band had also written key songs for their first solo albums, albums that as they rehearsed the songs they did not know they would be making in the next year/to eighteen months as the start of solo careers where each of them would be tied by reputation and comparison to the other for decades, where they would each have vast success on their own.
The project that was started as 'Get Back' became 'Let It Be' in the Autumn of 1969. In it's first iteration it became a boxed set presentation of an album, complete with a book of photographs and dialogue from the film, issued on Apple in April 1970. Then it became an 80 minute film that was released world wide where the longer it remained released the more it was viewed as proof of how the band so disagreed with each other and were so riven by the inability to see the other's point of view that the film became proof of why they each needed to have solo careers. The film became an epitaph for the band that none of them saw coming before it arrived. Whilst in private it was difficult for them to argue against that epitaph, however inaccurate it was, whilst all the legal Gordian knots that had tied Apple up, and had tied them all to Apple were still so tightly tied.
Completion of the project has now taken longer than the lives of many of the people who feature in the the film, were involved in making it, or were legally involved in what became a very tight Gordian knot that stayed impossibly tight for many years. In loose order they include......
trusted roadie Mal Evans (1935-1976),
John Lennon (1940-1980),
George Harrison (1943-2001),
Billy Preston (1946-2006),
Apple projects manager Neil Aspinal (1941-2008),
later manager of The Beatles Allen Klein (1931-2009),
legal attorney for Paul McCartney Lee Eastman (1910-1991),
Beatles producer up to Let it Be George Martin (1926-2016),
producer of 'Let It Be' Phil Spector (1940-2021),
backing vocalist on 'Let It Be'-Linda McCartney (1941-1998),
Maureen 'Mo' Starkey-wife of Ringo (1946-1994).
and the host of Apple staff members who engineered, tape-opped, and did all the vital smaller jobs connected with The Beatles studio work during their time at Twickenham Film Studios and Apple studios between January and June 1969.
The living who are still connected with the film as I write this include...
Jean Luc Goddard (born 1930), Yoko Ono (born 1933),
Paul McCartney (born 1942),
Ringo Starr (born 1940),
Michael Lindsay Hogg (born 1940),
Producer of the 'Get Back' album Glyn Johns (born 1942),
and engineer Alan Parsons (born 1948),
All of whom would go on to be complete many other projects and be part of greater achievements in the 1970's and well beyond.
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