Boy did you ever capture the greatness of “Get Back” and the Fab 4. I signed up for Disney + solely to watch “Get Back” and have canceled now that I binged watched all three glorious episodes. I haven’t smiled that much in years!
Peter Jackson should get MASSIVE credit and accolades for this thoroughly brilliant masterpiece of a documentary of a documentary. I saw “Let It Be” as a teenager many years after The Beatles broke up. It was wonderful and very sad. What “Get Back” did was demonstrate that the downer feel of “Let It Be” was very selective and generally not accurate.
“Get Back” showed the lads in all their glory, truly working as a team (all four of them). It seemed like the biggest downer of them all was first filming the movie in a cavernous movie studio in Twickenham starting early in the morning just after New Year’s Day 1969. I think pretty much anyone would have hated that environment, and things really picked up when they moved to their own building and studio in 3 Savile Row in London.
Paul was quite a bit of jerk to George in the early parts, talking down to him and basically ignoring him. What I loved was that when George said he was leaving the band, you could see the shock and sadness in Paul’s face, and the three remaining lads worked hard to make amends to George. George was incredibly sane by demanding they leave Twickenham and go back to Apple in Savile Row. And when Billy Preston come in out of the blue, it was sheer magic upon the magic of The Beatles. I can’t get over how much joy and teamwork there was among the four of them.
Paul jammed to Yoko, Paul’s soon-to-be daughter pretended to be Yoko, and you could see that everyone really cared about each other.
One of the things I had not fully grasped was the incredible lunacy that was the original premise of the movie: the Beatles rehearsing new songs for a show in a Libyan amphitheater, a boat, etc etc. What a brilliantly simple idea it was to do what was their final concert ever on the rooftop of the Apple building.
And yes, seeing Ringo’s All-Starr Band was one of the musical highlights of our family experiences. We even caught a rubber wristband that Sir Ringo threw out to the audience. Very great group and idea (incidentally, Joe Walsh of the James Gang and the Eagles is Ringo’s brother-in-law!)
While it was sad that the Fab Four broke up, I often wonder what more they could have ever done. As Rolling Stone once said, listening to their albums chronologically gives you the clear sense of their growing mastery and their growing up in an almost perfect progression. It’s almost like a sound documentary of four wonderful boys growing up to be four incredibly talented adults who had done everything they set out to do before they even turned 30.
