On Jan. 30, 1969, the Beatles stepped onto the roof of 3 Saville Row in London to play a concert. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were joined by a rabble of cameramen, roadies, and rubberneckers. A crowd of onlookers watched from neighboring rooftops. Tweedy grandfathers mingled with Carnaby Street hipsters. Cheeky lads in sweaters snuck cigarettes, while ladies in furs braced themselves against the cold.
Five minutes in, a squad of bobbies spilled out of the access door; it could have been a snippet of B-Roll from A Hard Day’s Night. Lennon and McCartney didn’t notice. The band rolled through ten songs in 45 minutes before the police shut the whole thing down. The last note of “Get Back” rings in the air, and John quipped, “I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we've passed the audition." With that, the show was over. It was the band’s last public performance; 11 months and a pair of albums later, the Beatles were no more. The concert was an echo of the Beatles’ early days as a club band. It was also the finale to a career that reshaped the pop landscape.
The road to the rooftop concert was long and winding, but it started with Let It Be, the last album released by the Beatles. It was also the name of a song on the album. Let It Be started life as an album called Get Back (also the name of a song on Let It Be.) While the Beatles were rehearsing and recording the album Get Back (which would eventually become Let It Be), director Michael Lindsay-Hogg filmed the band as part of a documentary called Let It Be. After recording the album (and documentary) the band butted heads over the album’s production. While Get Back sat in limbo, the Beatles recorded and released Abbey Road (also the name of studio where the band recorded the album).
Eventually George Harrison and John Lennon hired producer Phil Spector to finish the album. Spector radically reimagined the record, now renamed Let It Be. In April 1970, Paul McCartney publicly announced he was leaving the Beatles, and the band broke up. John Lennon had privately left the group weeks earlier, and Ringo Starr and George Harrison had both briefly quit in 1968 and 1969 respectively. A month later, Let It Be (the album) and Let It Be (the documentary) were released to mixed reviews.
Fast forward to 2021. Director Peter Jackson reedited unused footage from Let It Be (the documentary) to make a series called Get Back (also the name… well you get it). Jackson’s documentary ties up many of the loose threads in the Beatle’s story.
While there are dozens of other threads to untangle the last days of the Beatles, we’ve focused on a few highlights below.
Abbey Road (1969)
Although Let It Be was the last album the Beatles released, Abbey Road was the last one they recorded. With fifty years of hindsight, Abbey Road feels more like the proper swan song. Every member of the band takes a moment to do their particular Beatle thing. Paul mugs like a Music Hall comedian on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” John marries rock star spikiness and art school nonsense on “Come Together.” George gets pastoral and pensive with “Here Comes the Sun.” Ringo wraps up the whole affair with his one and only drum solo as a Beatle.
Abbey Road is the Beatles doing what they do best: Top 40 craftsmanship, studio innovations, hippy mysticism, and Python-esque silliness. It was also the band’s most cohesive album in years, thanks to extended medleys and a liberal dose of synthesizer. If Let It Be was meant to look back, Abbey Road is a premonition of the theatrical rock of the 1970s.
Let It Be (1970)
Music critic Richie Unterberg summed up Let It Be’s legacy as “the only Beatles album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews, there are few other rock records as controversial as Let It Be.” No doubt most listeners today are a lot kinder than the rock journalists of old. Still, it’s easy to see why Let It Be caught so many fans off guard.
The album was supposed to be a stripped-down rock n’ roll record, a chance for the Beatles to return to their roots. After months of tinkering and disagreements, it emerged as an album of baroque pop songs buried under syrupy strings and church choirs.
Behind the scenes, the band rejected producer Giles Martin’s initial bare-bones sound. The album stayed on the shelf while the Beatles moved on to Abbey Road. Finally, John and George brought on American producer Phil Spector, famous for his “Wall of Sound” approach to pop.
The 2021 special edition of Let It Be lets you listen along with the album’s evolution. The box set includes the original Phil Spector version of the album, remixed in stereo by Giles Martin, son of long-time Beatle’s producer George Martin. It also features a disc of rehearsal outtakes and conversation, as well as Glynn Johns’ initial “stripped down” version of the album.
Anthology 1 (1995)
The Beatles originally saw Let It Be and the accompanying rooftop concert as a return to their earliest days as a band. The Fab Four spent the early sixties gigging in nightclubs in Hamburg, Germany. The hours spent playing cover songs for sailors were crucial in their development.
Anthology 1 is a collection of the Beatle’s earliest recordings, including a number of songs from their time in Germany. Most of the tracks are covers of American artists, but the album includes four takes of “After 909” recorded in 1963. Written around 1957, “After 909” was one of the band’s earliest originals. The first official recording of the track was during the rooftop concert in 1969.
The Beatles: Get Back (2021)
Peter Jackson combed through 60 hours of unused footage from the 1970 movie Let It Be and pieced together this documentary series that chronicles the Beatle’s final days. In Let It Be, the band’s eminent break up is subtext. In Get Back, Jackson brings the group dynamics to the forefront.
Make no mistake, Get Back is an uncut look at the recording of an album, a process that can be repetitive and dull for long stretches. If watching hours of idle chat and the minutia of musical arrangement and production doesn’t pique your interest, The Beatles: Get Back might not be for you.
But the series is also full of quiet thrills. During a break, Paul mumbles on-the-spot lyrics while he thwacks out an endless blues lick on the bass. In the span of two minutes, he’s worked out most of the song “Get Back.”
Then there’s a jarringly candid conversation between John and Paul. George has unexpectedly quit the band, and Paul can’t understand why. George feels like the band would rather tell him what to play than listen to his idea, John explains, and confesses that he agrees: “Yeah, we treat him a bit like that. See, because he knows what we’re on about. But I do think that he’s right… And that’s what we do, and that’s what you do to me.” After years of rumors and cracks about Yoko, Jackson unearths the very everyday grievances that split up the Beatles.