Band Of Brothers

I spent the back end of my Thanksgiving holiday watching the Peter Jackson Beatles documentary Get Back.  Like so much else that Mister Jackson has done, this is epic and expansive and maybe even at times excessive, but being a Fab Four Fan forever I was immediately drawn to it. This is a behind the scenes look at the behind the scenes documentary Let It Be. That one ran one hour twenty-one minutes. Compare that to the nearly eight hours presented by the Lord of the Rings auteur. 

The one made back in 1970 showed the slow disintegration of the world's greatest rock band. It concludes with the iconic rooftop concert, the last time the lads would play together as a band. Bittersweet hardly begins to describe it. Peter Jackson's film winds up with the same show, but the path to that gig is made so very much more clear that deciding to come together (see what I did there?) one last time on top of the Apple Headquarters was healing and inevitable. 

Spending three weeks with the Beatles as they tried to bring the vision of their next project to fruition gives us a chance to see the love and respect they shared. Not the divisive grumbling that would eventually become canon. George Harrison, history tells us, became a Beatle when he was only thirteen years old after John and Paul who were only a year or so older invited him. Ringo was comparatively old when he joined the band at twenty-two. Still, he got in at the ground floor and took the ride with the other three to the top of the pops. They were elevated beyond what they and the rest of the world had ever seen before. 

Expectations were high. This brought tension that could only truly be felt by the boys in the band. It is important to remember that their manager, Brian Epstein had died only a year and a half prior to this, and no one was minding the store. The Beatles were amazing musicians, not businessmen. You can see them struggle with suggestions from the director of the film within the film, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, for an enormous extravaganza set in the ancient amphitheater in Sabratha, an ancient Roman city in Libya. 

Somewhere in the midst of all this hoopla, George decides he's rather just quit. Only a couple of meetings with just the lads convinced him to come back and give it one more go. Watching the results of the sessions, not just the ten songs captured that would become their penultimate album, but all the noodling and jamming and silliness that took place in that basement studio brings joy to the session on the roof that closed things down. That was January 1969. Eight months later, The Beatles were finished. 

More than fifty years later, they are together again. One last time. And it's an amazing thing to watch fall apart.