Monday, January 17, 2022

post-Beatles Beatlemania

If you were born in the fifties or early sixties, and you haven't watched Get Back: The Beatles yet, put it on your must-watch list. It's tedious at times, sometimes for long stretches of time, and we've fast forwarded over, um, a bit of it. But mostly it's fascinating. 

I will confess I was never a huge Beatles fan, at least partly because believe it or not, I was a bit young for Beatlemania--I was eight when they split up. But their music was everywhere in the sixties, the playlist of my childhood. They were so much a part of pop culture that everyone knew who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were. 

But it turns out, they--the four Beatles-- aren't who I expected them to be. Watching them interact with Linda's daughter Heather is just sweet, there's no other word for it. And I've always thought that John was sort of self-consciously art-y and pretentious, so that if I'd known them, I would have been more on Paul's side. But if I'd had to listen to Paul's long-winded, half-whiny lectures for ten years, I'd have wanted to exit stage left, too. Immediately. Good lord. 

Interestingly, even though he's easily the one who talks the most, he rarely wins out-- witness his long argument about why they shouldn't do a rooftop concert (ha). And however arty and avant-garde John and Yoko were, John is also kind of hilarious. He's the one who's always goofing around, trying to lighten the mood.

Watching them work, you wonder that they ever got anything done, they spend so much time clowning around and goofing off and trying this and trying that. It's probably exactly the way musicians write songs, I've just never watched it happen. You can tell that the whole enterprise is frequently in danger of completely coming apart (and it did, a year later, but this is not the last album they recorded--that would be Abbey Road-- even though it was the last to be released, so they lasted through at least one more set of studio sessions). But you can also tell that they are deeply, deeply embedded in each other's lives, the irritating teenage best friends that you can't quite live without.

When they're working on one of their iconic songs and they don't have the words or the melody quite right yet, you want to yell at the screen, No, you dummies!! That's not how it goes!! It's "attracts me like no other lover," not "attracts me like a cauliflower" (granted they're joking around with the cauliflower but they haven't yet come up with the words we all know by heart, and it seems like it should be so obvious). 

And then suddenly they get it "right," i.e., the way we know it's supposed to go, and it's like the finicky car engine you've been fiddling around with for days suddenly starts up and runs smoothly. I confess, I've been a bit obsessed. In case you couldn't tell.

Get Back is only on Disney+ right now but I suppose eventually it will be released more widely.

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