Lucky Stars

by Christopher

Sorrentino

One thing about staying inside is that as everyday life recedes you become susceptible to the creep of metaphor.  The limits to your storehouse of things become better known, are pushed at—and things become other things. 

An apt metaphor or two came to mind while I was watching the famously shambolic rooftop performance sequence from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary, Let It Be.  The clip popped up on YouTube a few weeks ago—excerpts from the film, outtakes, sometimes even the entire thing, appear online frequently.  The clip was swiftly taken down.  Then it reappeared, posted by someone else, and lingered for a few days before again being removed.  Removal from YouTube is the fate of most contraband Beatles footage, of course; the group vigilantly enforces its copyrights.

Let It Be is a special case, though.  The soundtrack has already been “corrected” of Phil Spector’s production via the 2003 remix, Let It Be...Naked, the latest episode in that record’s tortuous and well-documented history.  But the original album has remained available continuously for fifty years.  Its namesake film, on the other hand, has been notoriously difficult to see legitimately for decades -- unavailable on DVD, Blu-Ray, or streaming services, and rarely, if ever, publicly screened.  The film is the madwoman in the Beatles’ attic.

In Jane Eyre, the madwoman sets the house on fire and jumps off the roof.  Thus ends her quarantine.  In Let It Be, the house is ablaze throughout the movie.  “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all...whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it,” George acidly tells Paul, prior to his departure from the band (premature, temporary, and effected off-camera).  While the Beatles do not leap from the roof after putting down their guitars, the concert proves to be our final glimpse of them: it ends the movie, which premiered in May 1970, only weeks after the revelation of Paul’s de facto departure from the band.  I saw it during its first run, at the 8th Street Playhouse in the Village; the mood, as I recall, was funereal. 

In the clip, the Beatles emerge onto the rooftop of their building at 3 Savile Row into the grey winter light of London.  A person groping for a metaphor would say, they are emerging from their self-imposed quarantine.  It’s January 1969.  Two and a half years earlier, the Beatles had, without formally announcing it, retired from public performances.  Which is not to say that they fell into a Van Cliburn-like silence: they did, after all, release Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and the White Album; they sang “All You Need Is Love” before an international television audience of hundreds of millions; they allowed animated avatars (and anonymous voice actors) to represent them in the psychedelic cartoon Yellow Submarine.  But while avoiding the suggestion that time passed more slowly then, I will suggest that the temporal distance between their final, rote, performance at Candlestick Park in August ’66 and their appearance on the rooftop, a distance spanning both the efflorescent bloom of the Summer of Love in ’67 and the bloody violence of the Chicago Police Riot in ’68, with assassination, war, urban chaos, and general mayhem mixed in, seemed like a long time indeed as the sixties chugged into the station for its terminal stop. 

Were the Beatles even relevant to this moment?  The Left had already excoriated them for their lack of commitment, or for their ambivalent commitment, to the Movement voiced in the “Hey Jude” b/w “Revolution” single, where John announced that you could count him out (or maybe in) and Paul said that the movement you need is on your shoulder, the dangling half of a casual rhyme that obliterates with great effectiveness the hope that the Beatles could be looked to for musical agitprop.  And a good thing that disclaimer was.  If the Beatles were looked upon as passé, it was only within the context of a moment that had no permanent claim upon them, as the next fifty years would prove.  Charles Manson would come along in a few months anyway, and with him a cautionary tale about belief in rock stars as revolutionary prophets.  After the roof, the Beatles put their heads back down, recorded Abbey Road, argued money, broke up gradually at first and then suddenly.  Someone else was always willing to do the work of calling attention to them.

I think the real quarantine preceded all of this, though.  At their most visible—that relentlessly documented period between 1963 and 1966, during which we can see them transform from provincials participating in the excitement generated by their own early fame to jaded international stars “polished by more time spent beneath the blast of that high-voltage beam than any face I have ever seen,” as Ken Kesey wrote of John Lennon—they endured the harrowing isolation of the touring icon.  Guarded, exhibited, worshiped, touched, and then locked down.  The complaint, voiced in the film A Hard Day’s Night by actor Wilfrid Brambell, goes, “I’ve been a in a train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room.”  He is kvetching about the insular conditions he has endured throughout his travels with his “grandson” Paul’s band, constantly under siege by their fans.  The line allegedly was lifted from an actual gripe voiced by one of the group.  Traveling from one city to the next, seeing nothing, transported to and from concert venues in laundry vans, armored trucks, helicopters and then settling in to their hotel suites or rented mansions for the nightly bacchanal.  Whatever went on outside, whether it took the form of death threats from bible belt kooks or handmade gifts from little girls in Brooklyn, was kept at an anti-social distance, including the audiences who receded from the stage, replaced by cops standing shoulder to shoulder, as the venues grew larger and larger.  This was not living—when not on display, they were imprisoned with their entourage, fellow celebrities, hangers-on, showgirls, call girls, mumpers, schnorrers, and the dark promise of the next car, the next plane, the next room, the next weary novelty.  

Quarantine, as we all have now had the chance to discover, is a Procrustean bed, albeit one that once and under different circumstances might have fit: we have agreed to live together or we have agreed to live alone, but the commitment to that was never absolute.  A friend of mine said to me about a month into things, “We will all be separating when this is done.”  She meant it humorously, but who among us has not at some point during the last two-plus months thought, “Is this what I have to put up with?”  Each of the Beatles would later speak, with varying degrees of distaste, about the confining nature of Beatlemania.  To put it one way, the particular form of the quarantine they lived when continuously available to us as a composite entity denied them (and to an extent continues to deny the surviving Beatles) their existence as individuals.  How easy to say goodbye to that, to leave the stage and re-enter the world, particularly while on the verge of signing a new deal with EMI that would multiply their royalty rate by more than six times. 

So they returned to something resembling private lives—what appeared to the public as unnatural seclusion was to them the restoration of the ordinary, the removal of the Beatle-persona that locked each into his witty, pretty, quiet, or cute niche.   
The rooftop concert is the unconvincing happy ending tacked onto a dismal story.  Shooting it has obliged these men to take a stab at being The Beatles—as we understood them—all over again.  And like so many families and couples during these months spent at home, the Beatles stuck together in a room for the duration reveal themselves to be a questionably viable working unit.  Like a family halfheartedly attempting a game night, they meander together through the chestnuts of their Hamburg days.  They bicker.  They withdraw into separate corners like fighters between rounds.  They bring in the neutral family friend (in the form of Billy Preston) to lighten the mood.  It is a movie of multiple failures to communicate.

Then they emerge into the grey winter afternoon.  Their sense of bemusement is evident.  Confronting the obstacle course of gear separating him from his drum kit, Ringo utters a Ringoism, “What’s the best way out the way?” before ducking under a railing to reach it.  Paul jumps on the boards that have been laid across the rooftop to serve as a stage, testing them.  In the film, the concert lasts a little over twenty minutes (in real life, a little over forty): two versions of “Get Back” bookending the performance, “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony.”  Disturbing the peace in the streets below, they share screen time with the pedestrians whose reactions range from delight to bafflement to the businessman’s piqued “this type of music is all right in its place, but...”  Here, reflected in these others, for the first time in the film and for the last time ever, the Beatles are restored to us as a unified force for and against the world, depending on which side you’re on.   

It’s not a bad performance.  They seem to be enjoying themselves.  But nothing allows you to forget the apathy and rancor of the preceding hour, which only confirms the likely permanence of the split announced the month before the film’s release.  Thus the funereal mood at the Eighth Street Playhouse in the spring of 1970.  Let It Be is a fascinating if painfully banal document.  Unlike Gimme Shelter, which, culminating in murder, serves as a properly dramatic capstone to the sixties (the more utopian aspects of which never suited the Stones anyway), Let It Be confirmed the fabled decade as something that could fall apart like any suburban marriage under stress.  The Rolling Stones went on to perfect arena rock while defining the most performatively hedonistic strain of seventies solipsism: it is difficult, sometimes, even to think of them as a “sixties band,” whatever that means when even a group like the Searchers thought it was worth the effort to keep touring through the 2010s.  The Beatles, on the other hand, after acting out their dissolution before Lindsay-Hogg’s diffident cameras, had brilliant breakup sex in Abbey Road, and then, as ex-Beatles, went on to live like anyone’s parents who divorced during the seventies: new partners, sniping, snubs, makeovers, party drugs, relocations to greener pastures, all while maintaining a gritted-teeth position that they’d never been happier.

Again: we push at the limits of our storehouse of things.  One of the ways that the Beatles gave so much was by giving us so little, a legacy you can hold in your hands.  For decades the group has co-opted the black market for the by-products of their career – outtakes, demo tapes, radio performances, concert footage, etc.—by converting it into widely promoted official product.  But the core of the canon—the thirteen studio albums originally released by Parlophone Records, the BBC television special Magical Mystery Tour, and the four feature films released or distributed by United Artists, including Let It Be – is where our satisfaction begins and ends; these other things exist only in relation to it.  Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be is in the uncommon position of the authorized release that has taken on the shadow life of the bootleg, quarantined from view like E.L. Doctorow’s Big As Life, or, prior to his death, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom.  Or, for that matter, the Clash’s Cut the Crap.  Such artifacts can be heard crying out feebly for their release from their attic quarantines.  Made aware of their presence, we seek out glimpses of them.  Their reputations precede them, refined into legend.  Nobody wants to meet Rochester’s wife.  They want to see his madwoman.

 But we’ll be getting Jane Eyre.  Around the same time that the rooftop clip appeared Disney(!) announced the September 2020 release of Get Back, a new documentary assembled by Peter Jackson from the footage shot by Lindsay-Hogg.  This looming Event would seem intended to overwrite Let It Be’s divorce drama, as dubious as that may seem.  Disney’s press release promises “laughing” and “bantering”; Jackson himself is quoted enthusing, “We get to sit in the studio watching these four friends make great music together.”  As for McCartney and Starr, as well as the Widows Lennon and Harrison, Get Back has been made, to use the phrase associated with so much of the Beatles’ authorized afterlife, with their full cooperation.  The press release acknowledges the project’s corrective purpose in a couple of casual lines buried deep in its text: the original film was “not released until May 1970, three weeks after the Beatles had officially broken up.  The response to the film at the time by audiences and critics alike was strongly associated with that announcement.” 

And Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary?  “A fully restored version of the original Let It Be film will be made available at a later date.”

Christopher Sorrentino lives and works in Brooklyn