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Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Breakaway Pop Hit: The entire Let It Be album, and especially "Let It Be" and "Long and Winding Road."
- Creator Backlash:
- Paul was dissatisfied with what Phil Spector did to the album, being especially angry with his work on "The Long and Winding Road", as he believed it was ruined by the process. This is mainly why he ultimately worked on an alternate version of the album, based on its original concept as Get Back, titled Let It Be... Naked, which was released in late 2003.
- The reason why the film was out of print for decades is that none of the Beatles were very proud of it at the time, and they're even less so now.
- Creative Differences: The movie is essentially what happens when someone has a film camera and films a band suffering from this — lots of bitter, snide passive-aggressive sniping. There's one famous scene with Paul McCartney and George Harrison having a bitter fight over a chord.
- Deleted Scene: The Beatles: Get Back would reveal that Michael Lindsay-Hogg cut a LOT out of this movie. There is no mention of George quitting the band in the middle of the sessions, and no hint that the sessions were suspended for nine days while the Beatles figured out what to do next. Additionally, Let It Be portrays Billy Preston as materializing at Apple with no explanation. (George brought his friend in to support the Beatles' live ensemble with keyboards, and to help calm down a fractious group.) Tellingly, Get Back expands the film from 80 minutes to almost 8 hours, revealing that much of the editing had been manipulated to portray (and eventually create) a more divisive band.
- Development Gag: "I pick a moondog" in "Dig a Pony" is often taken to be a nod to Johnny & The Moondogs, a name briefly used by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and ex-Quarryman Ken Brown for some gigs in 1959 during the transition from The Quarrymen to The Beatles.
- Early-Bird Release: Not an official release, but one of Glyn Johns' early mixes for the album—given to a reporter by Lennon when the Plastic Ono Band played the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival in September of 1969 (Lennon would later confirm this story in an interview)—wound up at several American radio stations, who aired it in full in the latter part of the year. This became the basis of the first Beatles bootleg album, Kum Back.
- Executive Meddling: Due to Creative Differences from the members, the Beatles' new manager Allen Klein gave the Get Back tapes to Phil Spector, and Paul's complaints to the result were ignored by Klein.
- Hostility on the Set: The already tense relations between the band members reached a breaking point:
- Paul McCartney tried to organise and encourage his bandmates, but his attempts to hold the band together and rally spirits were seen by the others as controlling and patronising.
- McCartney and George Harrison got into a heated argument during the recording of "Two of Us".
- Harrison got into a blazing row with John Lennon over creative disengagement from the band. According to journalist Michael Housego of The Daily Sketch, this descended into violence with them allegedly throwing punches at each other. Harrison denied this in a 16 January interview for the Daily Express, saying: "There was no punch-up. We just fell out." The Get Back documentary would reveal that this story was basically made up, with John and George even jokingly preparing to fight each other like old-timey boxers because of how ridiculous it was to them.
- The Get Back documentary shows that much (although not all) of the hostility on the set has been exaggerated over the years, as a result of speculation about what wasn't shown in the film. Harrison never had a "blazing row" with Lennon, and even his argument with McCartney turns out to have been part of a conversation that the whole band was having, in which McCartney was frustrated with Harrison's constant complaining and relative lack of good ideas while Harrison was just trying to understand what Paul actually wanted from him, all the while Lennon and Starr were sitting there watching. Early on, Lennon even attempts to defuse the argument by joking "Calm down, girls..." but they ignore him.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: Before 2024, the film was out of print for decades, until Peter Jackson's remaster was added to Disney+. In 2021, Jackson made a documentary series about the making of the album.
- Saved from Development Hell: The album was supposed to have been an early 1969 "back to basics" album called Get Back (and accompanying "making of" film), with an album cover in which the 1969 Beatles recreated their Please Please Me album cover in the original setting. With the Troubled Production and band squabbles delaying the album, the cover was scrapped (it was used later in 1973 on the compilation 1967–1970) and the album abandoned while the band recorded Abbey Road. With production work (and overdubbed orchestral accompaniment of several songs) by Phil Spector it was finally released a month after the band broke up under the new name. The original idea for the album would eventually see official release when the Super Deluxe remaster of Let It Be included both Glynn Jones' original 1969 mix with a the cover that it would've theoretically had if it had released at the time.
- Screwed by the Lawyers: For a long time it was believed that film wouldn't be re-released as long as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are still alive, due to its unflattering and downright painful look at the slow collapse and eventual breakup of the band. This was proven false in 2024 with its Disney+ re-release, following the release of a 2021 documentary showing that the film was Accentuating the Negative in regard of the band's tensions.
- The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The band recorded the album in 1969 but then shelved the whole thing and went back to the studio, producing and releasing Abbey Road in 1969. The album (along with its accompanying film) was released in 1970.
- Throw It In!:
- Lots of Studio Chatter is thrown into the songs on the album, including the "passed the audition" quote, which closes the album in the same way it closes the film.
- Lennon's terrible bass playing on "The Long and Winding Road" remains on the final album because the band abandoned the song long before he had learned the chords properly.
- Troubled Production: The lads started working on the album (as Get Back) in early 1969, thinking that returning to the good ol' days of studio jams would get them out of their rut. It didn't work, of course, and the documentary film that was supposed to capture genius at work instead captured the ugly breakdown of a once great band.
- The original plan was for a climactic TV performance in front of a live audience at Twickenham Studios, but the band were unimpressed by the room's acoustics, and although they were racing against the clock due to Ringo's commitments to filming The Magic Christian, they struggled to come up with material; John was in a creative funk (not helped by drug problems or Yoko Ono's fragility following a miscarriage the previous month), Paul was uncomfortable with the perception that he was the sole decision maker, and George was growing frustrated at being sidelined as a songwriter. A week into rehearsals, George announced he was quitting the band, and he only agreed to return after several meetings with the other Beatles and the scrapping of the TV special idea.
- Fed up with the poor acoustics at Twickenham and thinking a change of scene might help heal the internal strife, the band decided to decamp to Apple Studios, but an initial test of Alexis "Magic Alex" Mardas' "cutting edge" sound system produced a distorted mess, resulting in the hasty acquisition of a portable recording system from EMI.
- Though the sessions went more smoothly thereafter, especially when keyboardist Billy Preston (whom the Beatles had known since the early 1960s) stopped by to say hello and was invited to play on the album as a guest musician, and the "live performance" idea evolved into the iconic Rooftop Concert (until it was shut down by the police following noise complaints by local business owners), producer Glyn Johns' attempts to put the results together as an album were consistently rejected by the band.
- The album was eventually released in May 1970 when Phil "Wall of Sound" Spector cobbled together what usable bits existed of the recording sessions and turned them into complete songs; while John approved of the resulting mix of "Across the Universe",note Paul was livid at the lush overdubs to "The Long and Winding Road". In 2003, Paul completely remixed the album as Let It Be... Naked, producing a rawer, more stripped down sound that he claimed was closer to the band's original vision. Because of the bad memories it stirred in the surviving Beatles, the accompanying film was not shown publicly between 1981 and 2021, when it was re-mastered during production of The Beatles: Get Back.
- What Could Have Been:
- When the album was planned as Get Back, its cover would have been an Affectionate Parody of the cover of the Beatles' first album Please Please Me, with the band members (looking very different than they did in 1963) posing in the same place and in the same position. The photo was eventually used for the Greatest Hits Album 1967-1970 (also known as the "Blue Album").
- The album was originally supposed to be a return to the band's original sound, recorded alongside a documentary, and culminating as a live album. Instead, the documentary was less of the creation of an album and more the end of a band, the live show was on a rooftop, and the tapes were given to Phil Spector, who added strings and his trademark lush sound.
- There were plans to release it on DVD in the early 2000s, to tie-in with Let It Be...Naked. It was so far along in development that special features had even been produced, with Mark Lewisohn interviewing key figures. But for unknown reasons, this release was scrapped.
- Working Title: The album was originally planned to be released as Get Back, as a reference to the band's desire to, well, get back to their roots in terms of musical style.
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Much of the bootleg session tapes that have circulated among fans feature the band jamming, and occasionally making up songs out of the blue. One of these eventually evolved into "Get Back". The other, abandoned songs are of varying quality, but a few have become fan favorites, like the 50s Rock & Roll throwback "Suzy Parker" (or "Suzy's Parlour"—there's debate on what the actual title should be), and the John-sung "Watching Rainbows", which anticipates his style circa Imagine, centering on a quintessential Lennon refrain, "Instead of watching rainbows, I'm gonna make me some".
- The Get Back doco would actually reveal how bad this got because of how much time the band wasted just trying to figure out what to do. The song "Get Back", one of the most well-known songs from Let It Be and widely considered one of its few genuinely good tracks? Paul wrote the basic outline and melody of the song while waiting for John, incredibly stressed, and fully conscious about how little time they actually had to get this project done.
- The main reason the band had to basically just play until they stumbled upon something they liked is because the original project was very ambitious and they were under a very tight deadline; Ringo was cast in the movie The Magic Christian and so wouldn't be available while filming. The sessions, which would have also included a live performance for TV that was to be a full-on production, started in January, and filming for The Magic Christian started in February. Even when they abandoned the live show they still had only half a month in the studio, not including weekends, to write and record an entire album's worth of original material. With that context, you can see why Let It Be contains some subpar efforts and a couple of less-than-a-minute jams in its tracklist just to fill it out.
