January Meme: Recent Developments in Beatles Fandom
Did you have opinions on Now and Then? Also, I have the impression that Get Back has significantly shifted the narrative on the band's history, so I'd love to know your thoughts on that. is what lurkinghistoric wants to know.
Now and Then: like with Free as a Bird in the 1990s, I have a twofold opinion. Musically speaking, I wish they hadn't, because while neither song is bad, they're both just okay, and one of the great things about The Beatles is that they ended on such high note with Abbey Road, that there never was a period of "just okay" or decline. Otoh, on a human level, I think it's both touching and understandable that they tried to do this, given there were some unfinished demo tapes of John's around. But look, I've never been tempted to seek out the song to hear it again and again, the way I would with songs of theirs that I really care about:
Get Back shifting the narrative: I think the process of the shifting narrative started years before that; Philip Norman is a useful weatherpole in this regard, going from repeating the same old clichés in his preface to the reedition of Shout! in 2001 to completely changing his tune re: Paul in 2008. (And now he's come around to George, God help us, and is surprised that Olivia and Dani wouldn't talk to him, just because he wrote an utterly mean-spirited obituary of George back in the day, how can they.) (Jann Wenner, otoh, can be relied upon to stick to the narrative he helped establish with Lennon Remembers, come hell or high water, no matter how many decades pass and additional or contradictory source material emerges.) But certainly what Get Back accomplished was spreading interest and excitement about the Beatles not just to "old" fans but winning new ones, and to do this in a way that goes with the narrative as starting to emerge from ca. the mid 1990s onwards. Also, while biographies and analytical books tend to be read by people who are already interested enough to know their Geoff Emerick from their Ken Scott, the three part series by Peter Jackson was also viewed by people who only know about the Beatles that they were a massively successful group, they split up, and maybe also that John got shot, but that's it, and they are surprised if you tell them George Harrison was a key supporter and financer of Monty Python or that Paul had a band named Wings.
Even for hardcore fans, though, I think Get Back did make a difference, not least because reading transcripts of the soundfiles (whether on tumblr, all hail to Amoralto, or paraphrased and published, like what Doug Supply did) to flesh out the Michael Lindsay-Hogg film just is not the same as what Peter Jackson pulled off when presenting it on screen. And what Jackson's version emphasizes is that even in this late stage, when everyone was heading towards the break up, there was still a lot of humor and warmth between the dysfunctionality, and the creative spark making the rounds was amazing. I don't think this was how fans saw it before. Not least because the Beatles themselves when talking about that last year in general and the Get Back/Let it Be sessions in particular emphasized a sense of misery, and the various memoirs writers agreed. And that is how it comes across in Lindsay-Hogg's film. So seeing Jackson's three parter and watching the band joking with each other not once or twice but a lot was quite the revelation. And then there's that amazing sequence, caught on camera, when we can watch Paul go develop Get Back, the song, from a riff to a full fledged melody. It's breathtaking to watch, composition in action, and I can't believe this wasn't in the original film because it would have been such a highlight.
What Get Back also accomplishes is bringing the various non-Beatles people around them to life, like their roadie Mal Evans, or producer George Martin. (It also made director Michael Lindsay-Hogg a target for fannish ire and/or jokes due to coming across like Sean Astin on the Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers audio commentary, but look, his was a very hard job, without which we wouldn't have had all that footage for Jackson to recut!) And it manages to make all four Beatles come across as sympathetic - not perfect! but sympathetic! - , which I think and hope helped somewhat with the polarization of fandom. My non scientic support for assuming this is that pre Get Back, I sometimes got comments to my fanfiction which included a mini or not so mini diatribe against the writer's object of ire, be they George or Brian Epstein or *insert name*, but post Get Back, this was no longer the case in the comments. Instead, there's more general warmth. And thankfully it's been many a year since the last time someone went off on an anti-Yoko outburst on me. In conclusion, Get Back did a lot of good things, imo, and also it managed to make the development of the same (not that many) bunch of songs, which includes endless replaying, which on paper must have sounded absolutely dreary, instead captivating to watch over three movie length installments, while making it clear how much works gets into the creation of an album. Hats off and eternal gratitude to our New Zealand Overlord!
The Other Days
Now and Then: like with Free as a Bird in the 1990s, I have a twofold opinion. Musically speaking, I wish they hadn't, because while neither song is bad, they're both just okay, and one of the great things about The Beatles is that they ended on such high note with Abbey Road, that there never was a period of "just okay" or decline. Otoh, on a human level, I think it's both touching and understandable that they tried to do this, given there were some unfinished demo tapes of John's around. But look, I've never been tempted to seek out the song to hear it again and again, the way I would with songs of theirs that I really care about:
Get Back shifting the narrative: I think the process of the shifting narrative started years before that; Philip Norman is a useful weatherpole in this regard, going from repeating the same old clichés in his preface to the reedition of Shout! in 2001 to completely changing his tune re: Paul in 2008. (And now he's come around to George, God help us, and is surprised that Olivia and Dani wouldn't talk to him, just because he wrote an utterly mean-spirited obituary of George back in the day, how can they.) (Jann Wenner, otoh, can be relied upon to stick to the narrative he helped establish with Lennon Remembers, come hell or high water, no matter how many decades pass and additional or contradictory source material emerges.) But certainly what Get Back accomplished was spreading interest and excitement about the Beatles not just to "old" fans but winning new ones, and to do this in a way that goes with the narrative as starting to emerge from ca. the mid 1990s onwards. Also, while biographies and analytical books tend to be read by people who are already interested enough to know their Geoff Emerick from their Ken Scott, the three part series by Peter Jackson was also viewed by people who only know about the Beatles that they were a massively successful group, they split up, and maybe also that John got shot, but that's it, and they are surprised if you tell them George Harrison was a key supporter and financer of Monty Python or that Paul had a band named Wings.
Even for hardcore fans, though, I think Get Back did make a difference, not least because reading transcripts of the soundfiles (whether on tumblr, all hail to Amoralto, or paraphrased and published, like what Doug Supply did) to flesh out the Michael Lindsay-Hogg film just is not the same as what Peter Jackson pulled off when presenting it on screen. And what Jackson's version emphasizes is that even in this late stage, when everyone was heading towards the break up, there was still a lot of humor and warmth between the dysfunctionality, and the creative spark making the rounds was amazing. I don't think this was how fans saw it before. Not least because the Beatles themselves when talking about that last year in general and the Get Back/Let it Be sessions in particular emphasized a sense of misery, and the various memoirs writers agreed. And that is how it comes across in Lindsay-Hogg's film. So seeing Jackson's three parter and watching the band joking with each other not once or twice but a lot was quite the revelation. And then there's that amazing sequence, caught on camera, when we can watch Paul go develop Get Back, the song, from a riff to a full fledged melody. It's breathtaking to watch, composition in action, and I can't believe this wasn't in the original film because it would have been such a highlight.
What Get Back also accomplishes is bringing the various non-Beatles people around them to life, like their roadie Mal Evans, or producer George Martin. (It also made director Michael Lindsay-Hogg a target for fannish ire and/or jokes due to coming across like Sean Astin on the Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers audio commentary, but look, his was a very hard job, without which we wouldn't have had all that footage for Jackson to recut!) And it manages to make all four Beatles come across as sympathetic - not perfect! but sympathetic! - , which I think and hope helped somewhat with the polarization of fandom. My non scientic support for assuming this is that pre Get Back, I sometimes got comments to my fanfiction which included a mini or not so mini diatribe against the writer's object of ire, be they George or Brian Epstein or *insert name*, but post Get Back, this was no longer the case in the comments. Instead, there's more general warmth. And thankfully it's been many a year since the last time someone went off on an anti-Yoko outburst on me. In conclusion, Get Back did a lot of good things, imo, and also it managed to make the development of the same (not that many) bunch of songs, which includes endless replaying, which on paper must have sounded absolutely dreary, instead captivating to watch over three movie length installments, while making it clear how much works gets into the creation of an album. Hats off and eternal gratitude to our New Zealand Overlord!
The Other Days