Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Peter Jackson
Disney Plus

SEE ALSO: GET BACK (PART ONE) linked
SEE ALSO: GET BACK (PART TWO) linked

+

Full review of the LET IT BE album in the Reviled series at Around and Around (linked)

This is the exciting one, where for the first time the entire rooftop concert will be revealed.

There is a power in the very lengthy process of eight hours of Beatle chatter (I expect we said that about those extremely long avant garde movies where little happened). If you’ve been into The Beatles for 59 years … yes, I remember hearing Love Me Do for the first time … there is much revealed, much to talk about afterwards. We had a long one on ostentation in Parts two and three. Take the cars. John arrives in an in-your-face massive white Rolls Royce. Both Ringo and George arrive in the largest Mercedes, but Ringo gets out of the back. George is driving himself. Paul walks along the street … he is still known for using public transport.

Then there’s clothes. George is the dandy, in pink and white striped suit and royal blue ruffled shirt. Later he has a bow tie. As Karen noted earlier, his hair is always freshly-washed and blow dried. I said it came of living with a supermodel, but she points out that in every phase of life, George was particular about his appearance. Ringo has really great shirts, and hair and moustache are neat. John is scruffy, then add that very non-animal rights penchant for real fur … it’s said that in the Dakota Building, John and Yoko bought another apartment to store their fur coat collection. Fair enough, I collect LPs and books. John collected fur coats. Paul with that heavy black bushy beard and dark clothes is the least interesting sartorially.

So Part 3. The shortest. Great start. George and Ringo are working on Octopus’s Garden, only Ringo’s second ever song credit. It’s a nice moment, the two outside the Mac-Len duopoly helping each other. Ringo’s playing piano, George is playing guitar. George Martin hovers looking rather balefully, I thought, but then there is a lot of cutting and editing. The song was inspired by a boat trip in Sardinia with Peter Sellers (his current co-star at the time of filming this), when Ringo was told that Octopuses (Octopi for the pedantic) build gardens with stones under the sea. George assisted with the chord changes.

Paul and Linda arrive with Heather, Linda’s daughter. While they’re trying Let It Be she has the run of the studio, all of The Beatles appear charmed. She gets to stand next to Ringo and help out on the cymbal. John sings an instant verse for her:
John Lennon: Somewhere out in Weybridge, lives a cat whose name is Babajo …

Heather imitating Yoko’s ‘Aaaah!’ wail is wonderful. For Dig It, Paul plays piano and Billy Preston moves to organ. We get a rock ‘n’ roll sequence with Paul on piano, John on bass for Blue Suede Shoes and Shake Rattle and Roll.

It’s another of Paul’s songs, The Long and Winding Road. Paul stays on bass, with Paul on grand piano, and Billy Preston on electric piano. Ringo is seen having a lie down and snooze. George gets a tad piss-taking on the lyric. Did they all know that the two Paul ballads would be the most memorable tracks on the album?

The onto the next day; Kansas City, Miss Ann, Blue Suede Shoes again. John and Paul jive.

Then they’re working on George’s Old Brown Shoe, with George on piano, indicating that all four of them knew how to tickle the ivories. Paul is on drums. Billy Preston has picked up the 6 string bass.

We hear bits of Something, with John Lennon suggesting She attracts me like a pomegranate while George searches for a finish to She attracts me like …

For fun, we get a bit of Love Me Do, which breaks into I’ve Got A Feeling.

Hierarchy …

John Lennon: Glyn, can you come and fix my microphone. It keeps falling down.

I’d say you ask the engineer about a sound issue with the mic, but if it’s a matter of simply tightening the stand, then you ask a roadie. Though then again, if you’ve ever been in a band and set up your own gear, as everyone must have done, you just do it yourself. Not John.

You’d see it at Watford Gap at 3 a.m. I say Watford Gap, because that was the legendary motorway night stop for travelling bands, but Leicester Forest East was equally busy. With most bands, the musicians and roadies queued together for drinks and snacks. We noted in those days that some bands went straight to sit down, leaving the roadie to fill the tray and bring it over. We looked down on that behaviour.

George Martin still hovers, noting Your bass is slightly out of tune, Paul. His presence, representing EMI, is undefined. He was not producing, and Glyn Johns said George Martin took him to lunch, says he trusted him to do it and there was no issue with Glyn doing it.

A happy moment is when John announces Yoko’s divorce has come through. Paul sings Oh, Darling and John and Yoko have a quick snog.

Enter Allan Klein

John Lennon: I just think he’s fantastic! He knows everything about everything!

Paul was not present at that conversation.

Three were persuaded, John, George and Ringo, while Paul took his future father-in-law’s advice, that is Lee Eastman, and rejected Klein. Klein was famed for forensic accounting, and could genuinely promise artists that he would find sheaves of money if he were given access to their accounting. He’d done it with Bobby Darin, Sam Cooke, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Vinton and most famously, The Rolling Stones who he went on to manage. Klein had been sniffing around The Beatles since 1964 where he offered Brian Epstein £2 million to switch them from EMI to RCA. Epstein had made some seriously dumb decisions, particularly on sub-rights for merchandising. After Epstein’s death, The Beatles formed Apple Corps, and were being ripped off right, left and centre. Klein got to them through John.

I’ve attended two book publishing seminars on forensic accounting, and it is tempting. As they pointed out, when checking royalty payments they found errors virtually every time. 98% of the errors favoured the publisher, only 2% of errors favoured the author. That will be true at least as far in music. It’s so easy. Say the author gets 10%. This will be halved for a licensed edition abroad, but then the publishers licences it to a wholly-owned subsidiary abroad, halving the royalty payment from that country. In my own experience, we used to sell one teacher’s book to every 40 to 50 student books. Our teacher’s books were interleaved, colour and spiral bound, so very expensive to produce. Fine, but then in 1980s Korea we found we were selling thousands of these official Teacher’s Books, but zero students books. i.e. we were being heavily pirated, but the Teacher’s Book wasn’t worth pirating.

So if you are an author or a musician, you ask yourself, ‘Is someone somewhere ripping me off?’ The answer will be, ‘Yes.’ Obviously there is a downside. A flat out forensic accounting exercise will not endear the artist to the label, nor will it enhance future relations. You may find your book or record going out of print soon afterwards.

Ringo summed Klein up very well: A conman whose on our side for a change.

Glyn Johns (having worked with The Rolling Stones) adds He bothers me.

Back to the studio

The atmosphere is a little prickly again. George Martin reminds them about the deadline, and Paul says snappily That’s why I’m talking to John, not you. Paul is complaining that It’s like I’m trying to produce the Beatles. I can’t do it. The four involved are too strong.

You have to feel for George, who says plaintively:

George Harrison: Well I’ve got my quota of tunes for the next ten years of albums. I’d like to know what mine are like together.

His quota was a maximum of two per album. He was soon to find out what it was was like altogether on All Things Must Pass – arguably the most successful Beatles solo album of all.

There’s a fine John Lennon / Billy Preston duet on I Had A Dream with Preston on organ and co-vocals.

Paul and John are still playing with Two of Us, now as “goggle of gear” ventriloquists.

Up On The Roof

They should now issue a DVD of just the concert, losing the vox-pop and shenanigans around it. They should have prepared that decades ago, say around Anthology but they didn’t. Will they now?

Peter Jackson is going the full Woodstock, with split screens, double, triple and quadrupleones. Given that they must have decided to go the streaming / Disney Plus route some time ago, triple is misguided. Fine in a cinema with huge screen. Not so good on a TV, even a big one. .

Quadruple is fine because it fills the screen

They had ten cameras in various positions, one was on another higher roof, three were at street level. Lindsay-Hogg had decided that the street reaction was an important part of the process. Passers-by sound posh, but then it is Savile Row. Glyn Johns and George Martin were in the basement studio.

In Part two they were clambering up onto the roof with difficulty. In Part 3 it’s obvious that there’s a long established stair and doorway. So was all that clambering a fake for the cameras? I think so.

We hear Get Back twice at the start. It sounds really good.
They move into Don’t Let Me Down, I’v Got A Feeling, One After 909. There’s a bit of God Save The Queen instrumental, then I’ve Got A Feeling Again. is this the true sequence with repetition? We get Don’t Let Me Down Again and a final Get Back. Is that the third go at it?

They knew that Savile Row police station was 200 yards away. They only had seven songs, and they expected (hoped?) to be stopped before they ran out of material. Once they were past the Hamburg days, they had only done thirty-minute sets. Concerts nowadays usually have a 90 minute contract, though few are like Dr John who we saw with a timer on his keyboard. It went off, he played a final flourish and that was it. The Beatles had not done a normal set in many years.

There’s a footnote on the 19 year old policeman who pulled the plugs.

Liam Kelly interviewed Ray Dagg, one of the policemen. Two of them arrived at 3 Savile Row, and noted a microphone in a flower pot in the lobby. They felt something was odd, but were not aware of the camera hidden behind a two-way mirror in the lobby.

Ray Dagg: I thought there’s something going on here. I said to P.C. Shayler that we had both better be on our best behaviour because we were being filmed.

Sunday Times 12 December 2021

They were stalled for ten minutes before Mal Evans came down to the lobby. I loved Debbie’s comment to the police: Don’t go up on the roof because it’s already over weight.

Sunday Times report:

‘I’m not going to be difficult about this,’ he told Evans, ‘All right, so you’ve got to record but this isn’t necessary, is it? We’ve had 30 complaints at West End Central within minutes.The thing is at the moment we can hear it up in Compton Street. It’s got to go down, otherwise there will be some arrests. I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you what’s going to happen.’ Dagg now says that “while the phone was going bonkers, I don’t know where I got 30 from. I probably made it up.“

Sunday Times 12 December 2021

Dagg threatened to arrest the band for highway obstruction and obstructing a police officer in the course of their duty.

P.C. Dagg was an opinionated young man, willing to inform The Beatles road manager about audio on film. They were telling him that it was a scene from a “big feature film.” They added They’re just doing a couple of numbers, that’s all.

P.C. Dagg: You can be taken in for that offence … Can you turn it down, please? … Can you turn the PA off? I’m sure you can dub the sound onto the film, can’t you?

Finally they got upstairs. A sergeant lumbered onto the scene. Mal Evans unplugged George’s guitar. It ended.

‘obstructing the police in the course of their duty’ was the Metropolitan Police’s catch all threat. See the Not The Nine O’Clock News skit for arresting someone for walking on the cracks in the pavement.

Ray Dagg: “obstructing a police officer in the course of their duty and obstructing the highway are powers of arrest by the police but they are not applicable on private premises,” he said, “The gamble was that they didn’t know that. Probably because I was so young and stupid I was running a bluff on it.”

Sunday Times 12 December 2021

If the Beatles and the film company had been serious about playing a full concert, a couple of sharp lawyers should have been in place, and would easily have fended off the young policemen for an hour. They would have called the bluff. For starters, you’d ask for a senior officer, not a couple of pimply youths.

P.C. Dagg had to attend a viewing of the Let It Be film with his commander. He had to be paid a permission fee before Let It Be was shown, and was paid £3000. As he reminisced, it was two years wages, and the price of a house outside London. Because he was a serving officer, he was not allowed to receive it, and it was paid instead to the Widows and Orphans Benevolent Fund. He said it took him a while to realize that he could simply have resigned, taken the money, then rejoined another police force. But he didn’t.

And in the end …

They go to listening back in the studio with Take This Hammer playing over bits. Why?

The credits are long and centred around Let It Be.

We finished. Looked at the screen, went and got the Let It Be box set and put on the sublime Giles Martin 5.1 Blu Ray HD mix and listened through.

Then we listened to Long and Winding Road twice more. It’s safe to say the film won us over to the album again.