Switched on Pop - The Beatles get back to their roots

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ final album, Let it Be. To commemorate the occasion, the remaining members of the band have remixed the album and unleashed an eight-hour-plus documentary directed by Peter Jackson that lays bare the making of the record. For super-fans this video memoir reveals a lot about the messiness of the creative process: The Beatles nearly broke up while making it! Author Tim Riley says that the band approached Let It Be with an aesthetic challenge: to get back to playing as a live band. But the original release of the album deviated from that mission and received mixed reviews. Over the decades, The Beatles have revisited this work with multiple mixes and alternative takes that try to show the original spirit of this direct-to-tape, live album. Charlie and Nate listen back, warts and all, to get to the heart of this enigmatic project. Songs Discussed The Beatles - I Saw Her Standing There, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Strawberry Fields, Dig A Pony, Good Golly Miss Molly, I’ve Got A Feeling, One After 909, Get Back, Two Of Us, The Long & Winding Road, Let It Be, I Me Mine Little Richard - Tutti Frutti More Read Tim Riley's works on The Beatles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So it's the 50th anniversary of the Beatles album, Let It Be. And to commemorate, they've released yet another mix of the album and partnered with filmmaker Peter Jackson

on an eight-hour plus long film called Get Back on the making of this record. For super fans, this behind the scenes video memoir reveals a lot about the vulnerability and messiness of the creative process. You know, the Beatles nearly broke up while making

Let It Be. And though the record received mixed reviews in its time, it has gone on to be a great commercial success and a real personal favorite. So what I want to do is listen back, warts and all, to the many different versions of this album.

and get to the heart of what is this enigmatic project that has been released and re-released so many times? I'm so down, Charles. Though I am a beatophile, this album is probably the most unknown and mysterious of their entire oeuvre. So I'm excited to dig in and uncover some of its musical secrets with you. To understand this record, we actually have to go back to the very beginning. You know, the Beatles famously started as a live band playing clubs in Germany. Hamburg, specifically. Is that a Hamburg recording?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds like garage rock or something. I love it. For sure. Sounds like protopunk almost. Like CBGB's kind of version of the Beatles. They were a really fun live band. And, of course, Beatlemania then swept over the world.

And they began to perform in stadiums around the globe. So this was the point in their career when they decided to stop playing live because the chaos and the deafening noise of their live shows meant that they couldn't even hear themselves on stage. Yeah, they quit touring in 1966 and become a studio album band. And they innovate all of these wild new creative sounds with backwards tape machines and all kind of studio wizard. which you can hear on some of my favorite recordings like strawberry fields the counterculture the psychedel the counterculture the psychedelia the experimentation you can hear it all these are four young men from Liverpool searching for a new sound As much as it was a site for creativity, the studio was also a place in which a lot of turmoil took place.

Three years after they've stopped touring, there are factions in the band. People are quitting, no one's getting along, and Paul McCartney decides that they need to get back to their roots. They need to start playing live again. They need to remember where they came from. And so in January 1969, in just three weeks, they are slated to write, rehearse, and record an entire album that's supposed to first be performed in front of a live TV audience, which is then later scrapped for a rooftop concert famously done on the top of Apple Studios where they recorded Let It Be. This album release of the song Dig A Pony was actually recorded live on that rooftop,

and you can tell from some of the chatter after the end of the song. Thank you, brothers. My hands getting too cold to play a chord. This is January in London, and John Lennon's hands are literally getting too cold to keep on playing. That's good. And that's what's so fun about this record, is that it's actually mostly done live to tape. The Beatles author and rock historian Tim Riley points out how unusual this is for the Beatles, this studio band. It's kind of an aesthetic challenge they've placed themselves.

They say, let's not do any. overdubbing on this. They wanted to make it a mission statement. They kind of wanted to see, well, you know, we've done all this elaborate stuff. Now let's see we can just get back to the basics. So just to make sure I have this right, at this moment of personal tension and

sort of professional uncertainty, the band gets together and decides to make a totally live in the studio recording from scratch in the span of three weeks. It's kind of a ridiculous thing to do. Think about it this way. You have one of

the biggest pop groups of all time deciding to scrap all of the armor of the studio and say, let's take on some real creative limitations, play like a live band directly to tape, and we're going to reveal everything imperfections and all. It's like Beatles unplugged or something, a little anachronistic. But yeah, okay. That is a bold, risky move. And you can hear it in the record. Like, it's sparse on a song like two of us,

which opens the album, Let It Be. There's actually no bass because both John Lennon and Paul McCartney are playing guitar, Ringo Starrs, of course, on drums. And George Harrison plays a sort of like bass-like approximated line, but on the guitar. I see what you mean. Listening to that, I feel like it has more in common with those Hamburg live gigs from the beginning of the decade than it does with the Strawberry Field studio experiments that they had moved towards.

They started out these sessions trying to remember their past by playing songs that they loved as kids. Author Tim Riley describes the mindset of the Beatles going into these sessions. We do love playing together, but we are way too sick of each other, right? We're a little bit worn out.

Maybe if we play a bunch of rock and roll oldies, we can find the spark. And the oldies kind of led them down the right path. So they walk into the studio. They're covering their, favorites, folks like Chuck Berry, and they even bring out old songs that they had written, including one from the late 1950s, called One After 909.

They recorded the song as one of their early singles, but scrapped it. It didn't come out until much later in an anthology. And so they thought, why don't we revisit this song from our teens? We're trying to get back to our roots. Like, let's get some of that early, like, rock. club vibe. And they're also trying desperately to get enough material to fill a full length

long playing record. So yeah, they're like plumbing. They're going to the trunk. That's what's called the trunk songs. Yeah, exactly. Let's hear how they approach it. I always loved this song for its raw, rock and roll kind of vibe. But what I didn't know until watching this get back film was that this recording was

performed live on that rooftop in one take. Are there ways that you're hearing the live sort of feel in this recording? I think there's a roughness around the edges that makes you feel like you're kind of in the audience and as this is unfolding before you, the way their vocal harmonies aren't always perfect, the way the guitar fills are kind of like constantly morphing and sometimes not in the right place, the way that Ringo seems to like barely stop his drums at the break in the song. I like this. It has the feeling of this is all, this is like a train on the track.

And I mean, the song is about a train. And that it is barely like hanging on to the track as it goes around a tight curve. Like that's, and that's kind of fun and suspenseful to listen to in a really, in a really exciting way. Yeah, I mean, the guitars are out of tune. and the voices are not super tight harmonies. They sound like they are tracked live. And if you compare it to the original, it just doesn't hit as hard,

but it does have a little more studio polish. The vocals are really right on top of each other. But even though it's live, you can tell that this is a band that has been playing for a decade and has grown a lot. You can particularly hear it if you compare the original guitar solo to the 1969 re-reporting done live to tape. Yeah, they've definitely grown and evolved.

And there's like a technical and stylistic fluency that wasn't there before. So that's kind of a cool case study to go from basically a decade in time and with the same exact song and hear how their technique has evolved. Yeah, and I got to hand it to him. That is still a pretty raw guitar solo, and no kidding, because it's live. Generally, your favorite rock guitarists spend hours multitracking and learning their guitar solos to make them as epic as possible. And there you're just getting the thing, which is, that's what you got. Off the top of your dome. So revisiting their favorite oldies and trunk songs is a way of connecting with that early feel of the band.

And it continues in other songs that they write in this very short period. of time. A song like I've Got a Feeling comes to mind. You can hear Paul McCartney's vocal summoning the sound of Little Richard, one of his icons and an artist he had opened for. I love hearing those back to back. Again, it's like you can hear this band just going back to their roots, going to that rhythm and blues, rock and roll, garage band kind of aesthetic. These early influences end up being really important. In fact, the keyboardist for Little Richard guy named Billy Preston ends up joining the Let at B sessions

and acting really as a fifth beetle playing the keys. And he solves a problem, right? Remember, on two of us, they only had so many people to play the instruments at the same time. And so Billy Preston's playing comes out to really fill in some of the sparseness in these recordings.

And he also had a role in mediating some of those personal tensions, right? Like his presence kind of put the band on their best behavior as well. because they didn't want to, you know, look like a bunch of infighting amateurs in front of Little Richards piano player. I don't know if that's exactly how it went down. That's my interpretation.

But George Harrison did invite Billy Preston into the studio after having quit the band momentarily as a way of potentially healing tensions. They had a lot of respect for him. And he definitely helped reset the energy in the studio to a point where the Let It Be Sessions, end up being incredibly productive. They write and rehearse nearly half the songs that they'll put on their next album, Abby Road. And we get some great songs with Billy Preston for Let It Be. He is a phenomenal pianist, electric pianist, organist. I mean, he is like the secret weapon of these sessions.

He definitely is. And these sessions, despite being a bit of, unruly, quickly done, and thought of as maybe not that successful in their time, end up being wildly productive. They record a song like Get Back, which starts actually as a protest song commenting on anti-immigration sentiment in the UK. It kind of evolves lyrically into a track that comments on the themes of getting back to their origins. you can hear it in how the song is arranged. It opens with a bunch of chatter in the studio. And then guitars, bass, drums, keys, and now we're grooving.

And you're in. And it sounds live. You can hear Paul pull back from the mic when he gets loud. And when John's solos, you can hear the simplicity of the song. This is just a live band and they need someone like Billy Preston to fill things in to take a solo when the song is feeling sparse. Awesome Billy Preston piano solo. Reviewers initially thought this album was a real mixed bag, especially critical of other tracks that were indeed overproduced. But this live approach on Get Back was a success.

The track goes to number one in a dozen countries and is released as a single. The band are so excited about it when they record it in this studio. They're like, go, put this one out. Yeah, listening to this, it really captures the live in the room experience of this album, the energy, the roughness, the mistakes even. It's all there, and it's part of the pleasure of listening to it. And it's maybe a testament to the Beatles' popularity, their charisma, this kind of golden run that they were on in the 1960s,

that even though this recording has nothing to do with the kind of, maximalists carefully overdubbed, you know, pushing the limits of studio technology recordings that they released directly before and directly after. People still wanted to hear this. They wanted this band and maybe they also wanted to connect to the nostalgia they felt when they first encountered the Beatles like 10 years earlier. I think that's all wrapped up in this already. And this is one of the most extraordinary moments in the documentary or the memoir, as you called it is, is you watch Paul McCartney and he's just doing this kind of chugging rhythm on the bass, dun-d-d-d-d-da-dun-d-da. And he's exploring these different melodic monos.

Dun-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. And you're like, oh, whoa, wait, that kind of sounds like get back. And all this thing is, dun-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-you're like, oh, that's the song. It's like that you see that moment of creation unfold before your eyes. And that is so cool to me because the thing that drives me crazy about any biopic about a musician is they always skip over the part where they're actually like creating something. It's always like, oh, I have an idea for a song. And here we are performing it in front of a million fans. It's like that part of actually figuring out like,

how the hell do I write this melody is like so riveting to me. Anyway. There's a lot of playfulness that it takes to find a song. And we get to witness the way in which so often the melodies and the grooves, the feel of the song comes first, gibberish. lyrics originally. Right. And then slowly it comes together and you're seeing them workshop things in a way where

some of the early demos, they're rough around the edges. Sure. And I think some of that undisciplined playfulness that happened in the studio along with some infighting led to these sessions maybe going astray from their original intent, getting back to the old style song, the live playing. Because from here, the album has some real inconsistencies. In the final mixes, the Beatles abandoned the no overdub philosophy, much to the chagrin of critics, fans, and even members of the band.

We'll hear how things went wrong and how they tried to remedy it in the second half. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay.

Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. I think it's amazing that an album is made so quickly, just a handful of weeks of practice and boom, iconic lifelong legendary songs. Right. That, so saying at the beginning were not originally a critical success. It was felt this recording had inconsistencies. In fact, Let It Be comes out after their final actual studio recording, Abby Road.

Let It Be is going to be a film. And so they hold the recording to coincide with the film's release. It actually comes out after they've broken up in 1970. And in the most recent film, Get Back, we see how much. much the decision making around what is this project is constantly evolving. First, it's going to be a live TV special. Maybe they're going to fly to Tripoli and record in North Africa. Or no, they're actually going to do this rooftop concert. And it's kind of a living document of creativity in action, a way in which we get to see how a work is never finished. In some ways, you could think of let it be as a very Kanye West sort of album.

You know, Kanye has been known for releasing an album and then changing the track order and re-editing things and re-releasing it all within the span of a couple of days. The Beatles have done the same with Let It Be, except over 50 years. I mean, given that Kanye and Sir Paul were collaborators on four or five seconds. I'm not surprised that some of the... this predilection for the unfinished album has seeped into both of their evers. What does that look like in practice for the Beatles? Like, what is the afterlife of this Let It Be album? As a listener, it can be kind of hard to know where to start,

because at the moment, there are at least four official releases of this album available on streaming services. And they all sound different. They've all approached the music with different, degrees of adherence to that original mission of being a live band. Okay, so let's take it from the beginning. What's the first release? The very first mix that was done is by Glenn John, the producer on The Sessions.

And the Beatles ultimately reject his version. And it's actually just been finally officially released in the 50th anniversary deluxe edition. When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me. And I get why they rejected it because it's big and a wash and reverb. It doesn't have that live kind of quality. But as this album is sort of delayed and delayed, they eventually say, let's go to Phil Spector, the disgraced former record producer and now known as Convicted Murderer. He takes his hand at the record adding a bunch of orchestrated

to songs like I'm a mine across the universe, long and winding road, and let it be. And then in 2003, the remaining members of the band are like, well, what have we paired it all back to the original intent? And they put out this record called Let It Be Naked that loses all of that orchestration added by Phil Specter. And finally, there is now a 2021 version of the album mixed by Giles Martin, the son of George Martin, the longtime Beatles producer. And it is most adherent to the Phil Spector recordings. It has all the orchestration, but it's just mixed to sound cleaner. It's a really nice, sparkly version, more 3D, if you will. So there's all of these different versions.

and there is endless debate about which most strongly connects with that original mission of being a live band again. So I thought what we should do is listen to a couple of those selections where overdubs have been added, where it's not just a live band, and think about, is it working? Or do we wish we heard those original recordings done straight to tape? I'm down. Let's check it out. So the worst offender, the song that Paul McCartney loses it over, is the production added by Phil Specter on the long and winding road. Right there. Orchestra notes right from the beginning. But if you listen to the version on Let It Be Naked, where they strip all of that out, you get just the band.

I mean, Charlie, it's no contest for me. that second stripped down version is so much more pleasant to listen to and so much truer to the intimate nature of the song. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, remember I said at the beginning, this album was always the outlier for me in the Beatles discography. I never really got into it. And I think listening now, I think that had a lot to do with Phil Spector's overwrought,

overdone, symphonic, overdub production. on here. Like, it just covered up so much of the expression and intimacy of these songs for me. Now, I can say that now, you know, in the cold light of day and decades past. I feel like I can locate a specific moment that ruined the entire experience for me. What's that? Dda, those hits? Those hits.

It's just... It's so clunky. It totally is. And when you get rid of them, it's refreshing. It just breathed. The song is vulnerable again. That's so much better.

Like, what a shame that we had to listen to those Phil Specter productions for low these many years. I'm glad we have a plethora of different versions of this song. But maybe it's worth considering. Is there a reason that they're there? like when I talked to the author Tim Riley who was like, you know, this is a schmaltie song. Like,

Paul McCartney, schmaltzy? If you're asking Phil Spector to do his thing, the wallow sound, big recordings that he was known for doing orchestrations, like that's what you're getting when you hire Phil Spector. Fair. Yeah. Maybe it pairs with the song.

Like when we move into the bridge, perhaps the original. let's listen to the Glenn John's version, lacks the build that you need. So that's the rejected mix. Yeah, okay, I'm okay with that. That can stay buried. What Phil Spector does to it.

Okay, I'm not mad at it. We've got even like a chorus there, which is kind of cool and wild. So yeah. It's very bad. bizarre. Okay, I don't want to completely toss out these original releases because maybe there's some beauty there for sure. Thinking about it now, maybe there's a mismatch. It's like, if it's many times I've been alone, like, why is there a whole chorus of people behind you supporting you?

Maybe that is a total disconnect. Well, it's like, it's, I guess it's right. It's, it's amplifying some of the most cloying aspects of the song. And whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing, probably depends on your relationship to sentimentality in the first place. Yeah, for real. I think there might be another place where you could defend the use of big orchestras. Okay. It's in the George Harrison song, I Me Mine, which actually was recorded in 1970 after the sessions were done.

John had actually left the band. The original song hadn't been properly recorded. And so there's many ways in which the song might not fit in to the original intent of the record. But let's hear it as it was with just the band, Sons, John Lennon. As compared to the fully arranged version. I'm not mad about it. There's a sort of old world waltz feel to this song. two, three, you can like sort of picture people spinning around a ballroom. And actually when

George Harrison is playing this for them, John Lennon and Yoko do get up and start waltzing around the room. And in that respect, yeah, having this kind of like Viennese orchestral accompaniment in the background makes sense and maybe like adds a level of grandiosity to the song that is well deserved. It's definitely serving the song because as they're recording it, George Harrison describes he'd been watching television. BBC 2 had done some sort of giant sort of court waltz scene that had inspired him to write this waltz. And so it is fitting to the song, but perhaps not to the overall sessions. That's sort of how I'm feeling. I think to conclude our conversation on whether the record fulfills its intended aesthetic challenge,

we have to listen to the title track, let it be. Indeed. I think to really know this song's heart, you have to listen to it as it was being written. We have recordings in this deluxe 50th anniversary edition of some of the earliest takes of Let It Be. Here's Take 10. I'm like, what? Is Ringo swinging his drums and kind of playing actually almost like a reggae-style beat? What is happening? You can hear that even Paul is working out the lyrics.

he's going. Right. Hold on a minute. There will be no sorrow. Let it be. The final lyric is, of course, there will be an answer. Let it be.

Oh, yeah. Okay, I was going to say, Huh. What a dramatically different way to end the song. Which direction? Yeah. It's actually a little more ambiguous

to say there will be an answer, even though it seems like it's giving you the answer because he doesn't give you the answer. He just says there will be. And that's a little more mysterious than saying, there will be no more sorrow and maybe gives the song a little more longevity.

That's cool. And even though we can hear the song being workshopped and that there are overdubs of orchestration added to the final version, the recording was still done straight to tape. And you can even hear errors in the final release of the song. Paul McCartney misses a chord. You hear that's a little buried, right when he says Mother Mary. Okay, rewind it back one more time. Oh, yep. There it is. There it is. Sorry, I was distracted the first time by Ringo's reggae Phil's. That's interesting. Wait, you're saying that was on the original released version, that wrong chord? Yeah, that's the original released version. That's the Phil Spector mix.

That's fascinating. Huh. I mean, talk about a live recording. There it is. You know, like wrong chords and all. Ill-advised reggae drum fills and all. It's all in there. It's got a sense of what's added to the song. Yeah, as much as there is some funny stuff in that live-to-tapeep version, of course, there are things that are added. And so let's get a sense of what Phil Spector puts on the song. That's the Phil Spector.

Let's hear the original mix as Glenn Johns put it out. I mean, I like that. That's like Billy Preston on Oregon there, I'm guessing. Exactly. we have that beautiful organ sound, whereas on the final release version, it has all of these big, brassy horns, which, frankly, I think are overwrought, not just for the intent of this session, but also, if you think about the life of this song, even though most people will have heard that original recording, I think of this song as so ecclesiastic.

It feels like a staple that people play at important moments, even in church. And you get that church sort of sound when it's all pulled back and played naked. Oh, yeah. And hearing that last ringing chord with the organ and it's Leslie speaker rotating, giving you that kind of vibrating tremolo effect, it feels like you've just been listening in this gospel sermon. that's a special sound that needs to be highlighted. Yeah, I don't know why you would choose to bury that.

And it makes you wonder, why do the Beatles have four official recordings of this album available? Because I think we are seeing a work in progress. There is no definitive version. There's the version that you most connect with. For me, I'd probably take the 2021 mixes and then I would take all of the orchestrated songs, which are The Long and Winding Road,

I mean mine, across the universe, and let it be. And I personally would probably sub in the 2003 Let It Be Naked versions because I like it in the original intent of the record that were just all a live studio band. But honestly, if you connect with those really sentimental orchestral strings, those are the songs for you, that's totally fine. Why not? There's no problem with it.

with it. There's still a mix just for you. You know what else strikes me after this discussion is that there's something here for like modern musicians as well. There's a takeaway about the value of that live recording experience, right? Yeah. Like we still would gravitate towards that today, I think. Even at a moment where music is even more sort of hyper massaged and processed. than at any point during the Beatles career, like there is something to be gained from that live in the studio magic that can't be replicated.

And I feel like young, up-and-coming artists today could take a page from the Beatles playbook here and pull like a risky kind of move and just go in and live and let all the kind of rough edges and mistakes hang out. and maybe you'll be rewarded for it. Just let it be. Just let it be, Chuck. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and me, Charlie Harding.

We're edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, social media by Abby Barr, illustrations by Alice Gottlieb. Our executive producers are Honora Rosen and Nishaw Kerwa, or a member of the Box Media Podcast Network and a production of vulture. You can find more episodes of our show anywhere you get podcasts, and our website, www.Switchedonpop.com. Also, hit us up on Insta, on Twitter. We're at Switch on Pop, and we love hearing from you.

Have you watched all eight plus hours of Get Back the new Beatles memoir? If so, tell us what did you love? If you didn't, tell us why you couldn't make it through at how many hours you actually got to see. We're very curious. And you don't want to miss next week episode. We'll be speaking with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant about their latest release raise the roof. It's a conversation I am really excited to be sharing with y'all. Until then, thanks for listening.