Tag: John Lennon

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Beatles: Get Back

Get Back captures the intimate makings of the Fab Four’s last album together.

I was 15 the first time I played with a real rock-and-roll band. The first song we learned was “Get Back” from The Beatles’ final released album Let It Be. We started with that one because it was easy — or at least it sounded easy. That’s when I learned that great rock music is deceptively simple. It wasn’t hard to hit the notes. What was hard was hitting them at exactly the right time, with exactly the right feel. We must have jammed on “Get Back” for an hour trying to get it to sound right, which of course we never did. 

I went on to play in rock bands for 30 years. In college, I played a lot of gigs and made a lot of money. After college, I played cooler shows, made good records, and didn’t make much money. I’m still doing it — my last album was released in 2020, got good reviews, and even turned a modest profit.

Maybe that’s why, in the new Beatles documentary Get Back, when we see Paul McCartney, frustrated because his bandmate John Lennon is late for rehearsal, plop down on a chair in the corner of a soundstage and pound out “Get Back” off the top of his head, it’s kind of like watching a tape of yourself being conceived: profound, moving, and also a little icky. Paul, it turns out, was just a band geek like the rest of us.

Let It Be was recorded in January 1969. Having spent 1966-1968 revolutionizing studio recording, the plan was to get back to their bar band roots by writing a new album’s worth of songs and premiering them with their first live concert in three years. Crucially, they were going to do it all in front of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras, in a soundstage at Twickenham Studios, where A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had been filmed. That meant they had essentially three weeks to write 14 songs, whip them into shape, and record them in front of an audience. This was difficult, but not out of the question for the band who had changed pop music in one day with the 10-song session that produced Please Please Me. Legend has it that the sessions ended in acrimony, with George Harrison briefly quitting, and the band trying to salvage the project with an impromptu live show on the roof of their Apple records studio. The album was shelved, and the band returned to the studio for Abbey Road. After they broke up in early 1970, Let It Be was finally released, and Lindsay-Hogg’s feature documentary became notorious for capturing the “breakup of The Beatles.”

A few years ago, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson acquired the rights to the Let It Be sessions footage, which encompassed more than 60 hours of film and more than 180 hours of audio. He spent four years editing the chaotic mess down to a “crucial” 468 minutes.

If your first reaction is, maybe he could have gotten a little more crucial than eight hours, you’re right. This is not a film with a punchy narrative; in part three, Lindsay-Hogg complains that he has lots of footage, but no story. This is the ultimate hangout picture, because you get to hang out with The Beatles. That’s what’s so compelling — you’re watching some of the greatest artists of the last century at work.

For a seasoned show dog, it’s fascinating to watch the greatest of all time systematically violate the rock band rules. First, the rehearsal space is sacred. Don’t record the writing process, or the frank discussions that take place there. Second, no significant others in the studio. This is known as the “Yoko Rule,” which Get Back shows is unfair. Yoko Ono is omnipresent and clingy, sitting next to John in the early going, before getting bored and leaving as the sessions drag on. She’s a non-factor in the lads’ conflict, which largely stems from trying to do the delicate mental work of composing songs while under the camera’s gaze.

The Beatle who is up to the challenge of working in the spotlight is Paul. In one stunning moment, while John is meeting with Lindsay-Hogg to plan the ill-fated concert, Paul is in the background, noodling around on the piano, and “Let It Be” emerges. When he takes it to the group, and The Beatles’ eyes light up, it’s like watching Leonardo da Vinci sketching The Last Supper. Get Back shows that The Beatles, often reduced to cartoon characters, were human after all — and that makes their art even more extraordinary.

The Beatles: Get Back is now streaming on Disney+.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Eight Days A Week

Here’s my big takeaway from Eight Days A Week: The Beatles were a great band.

The Beatles play Washington D.C during their 1964 tour of America in Eight Days A Week.

I mean, yeah, big whoop, right? The Beatles were a great band. Stop the presses. But I think The Beatles have been swallowed by their own legend. In the hip hop era, extolling the virtues of The Beatles will get the kids’ eyes rolling. They are the quintessential Baby Boomer phenomenon, and this documentary is directed by another Baby Boomer phenomenon: Ron Howard, a guy whose showbiz career started in 1959. Lately, the Apollo 13 director has devoted his time to low-impact adaptations of DaVinci Code books, and this movie is another softball. Nobody ever went broke selling The Beatles to Baby Boomers.

There are some parts of this production that seem phoned-in. The sound design, which you would expect to be perfect in a project like this, is occasionally haphazard. It’s not exactly briskly paced. There are a few colorized segments that look head-scratchingly tacky. As an obsessive fan of the band and of music in general, I didn’t really learn anything significant about The Beatles from this film.

But wow, they were a great band. And they’re still great. A couple of years ago, my wife and I paid a bunch of money to see Paul McCartney at the FedEx Forum. Our expectations were tempered by the fact that Sir Paul was 70 years old, but we figured if we just got to watch Paul Freakin’ McCartney’s muscle memory fire for an hour or so, it would be worth it. The man is living history. But the show wasn’t like that at all. Paul killed it. He played for more than two hours, alternating between bass, guitar, piano, and ukulele, never leaving the stage. The only clue that he exerted himself at all was that he took his jacket off after a few tunes. If nothing else, the man is a good argument for vegetarianism.

Before the show, we were talking about how it would be preferable to see Sir Paul in a small room instead of the Forum. But during the show, he casually dropped an anecdote about his last tour where he played to a crowd of 300,000 in Ukraine, and we realized that for him, the Forum was a small room.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1966

Eight Days A Week makes it clear that Paul and the lads pretty much invented the modern arena concert—or rather, it was invented because of them. Thanks to a ten-camera film setup, the first mega-show The Beatles played, Shea Stadium in New York, provides the documentary’s most compelling footage. They perform out on the baseball diamond, with the stage about where second base would be. The isolation from the 50,000-strong throng of their rabid fans provides a prefab visual metaphor for what it was like to be one of the Fab Four in 1965. There is no huge sound system visible, like there would be at a modern arena concert, because they simply hadn’t been invented yet. A good system for getting amplified music out to a crowd that big wouldn’t be assembled for years, when The Grateful Dead’s sound crew finally cracked the problem. At Shea, The Beatles played through the stadium’s built-in PA, a primitive system only designed for at-bat announcements and the organ player. Even more unfathomable from a modern musician’s perspective, they played without monitors. They couldn’t hear themselves. And yet, they played in tune, in rhythm, and sang harmonies more complex than just about anything you hear on the radio today. The show, which is appended in full to the version of Eight Days A Week now showing at Studio on the Square, is a dazzling display of virtuosity and stage smarts under difficult conditions that had no real precedent.
Like I said, The Beatles were a great band—not just a collection of genius songwriters and visionary artists, a great band. When Howard trots out 1963 footage of John leading the band through an Earth-shaking rendition of “Twist and Shout”, I thought, the young Beatles would kill at Gonerfest, the annual garage punk festival occurring in Memphis next weekend. Eight Days A Week confirms that every young group of miscreants who have picked up guitars and drums in the last fifty years have been playing in The Beatles sandbox.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis screens A Hard Day’s Night

Richard Lester’s noisy, jumpy, compulsively ironic A Hard Day’s Night has played an important part in the Fab Four’s creation myth since its London premiere on July 6, 1964. Like the Beatles themselves, the film is strangely resistant to negative criticism. It has never really gone out of fashion, which is partly why Indie Memphis is screening a great-looking 50th anniversary restoration on Wednesday, July 9th, at Studio on the Square.

This meticulously scripted yet seemingly improvised piece of fanboy and fangirl propaganda seduced critics immediately. The Village Voice‘s Andrew Sarris proclaimed that “A Hard Day’s Night has turned out to be the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals, the brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural particles as the pop movie, rock n’ roll, cinéma vérité, the nouvelle vague, free cinema, the affectedly hand-held camera, frenzied cutting, the cult of the sexless subadolescent, the semidocumentary, and studied spontaneity.”

In enthusiastic prose that suggests Sarris was momentarily infected by the same hysteria propelling Night‘s hordes of screaming teenage girls, Sarris also wrote, “My critical theories and preconceptions are all shook up, and I am profoundly grateful to the Beatles for such a pleasurable softening of hardening aesthetic arteries.”

Nearly 40 years later, Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” essay echoed Sarris’ sentiments while highlighting the film’s continuing influence on pop-culture consumption. “Today,” he wrote, “when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night.” Although countless reality shows and endless infotainment programming have rendered the expressive possibilities of Lester’s sound-image syntheses commonplace clichés, it’s hard to argue with Ebert’s assessment.

Along with Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, A Hard Day’s Night is the definitive movie about being in a rock-and-roll band — which doesn’t necessarily make it truthful or authentic. In a new essay for the Criterion Collection’s DVD release, Howard Hampton praises the film as a truthful-looking act of calculated image manipulation: “Collective and individual identities — the John-Paul-George-Ringo lunch box and merchandise concession — are worked out and woven through a treadmill environment where the hamsters play satiric havoc with the business of light entertainment and teen merchandising.” However, no amount of cynicism or satire can deflate the first “Can’t Buy Me Love” interlude, where the Beatles jump, scuffle, dance, and collide with each other in an open field like overheated molecules.

Disharmonious voices about the film were seldom heard. They did exist, though; in his 1966 essay “Day of The Lesteroids,” Manny Farber wrote “Lester’s trademark is a kind of thickness of texture which he gets purely with technique, like the blurred, flattened, anonymous, engineering sounds which replace actors’ voices, plus the piling up of finicky details, as in the scene of the Beatle shaving his friend’s image in the mirror.” And remember the guy who once sang “I don’t believe in Beatles,” too. But I don’t want them to spoil the party.

A Hard Day’s Night screens at Malco’s Studio on the Square Wednesday, July 9th, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tickets are $8.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

John Lennon doc overvalues hippie rabble-rouser, undervalues the artist

David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s inept, tiresome new film The U.S. vs. John Lennon depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 move to New York City and their subsequent involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The couple’s status and media importance also led them into relationships with activists such as Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. These uneasy alliances between rock stars and rabble-rousers alarmed then-President Richard Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who placed Lennon under FBI surveillance. The government also tried to deport Lennon and Ono in 1972, the year Nixon defeated George McGovern for the presidency.

Lennon’s anti-war demonstrations may merit a historical footnote in yet another book about the significance of the ’60s, but they are wrongly recast as mythic countercultural stands by a parade of talking heads, including McGovern, Gore Vidal, Yoko Ono, and Geraldo Rivera. None of these pundits offers any insights. The only useful head is journalist Robin Blackburn, who correctly points out that Lennon’s vague utopian stance was powerful principally because he was an artist and a good interview subject whose “protests” were funny and strange but not terribly cogent — more conceptual art than political program.

Ironically, Lennon’s best music from this time tells a different story. The hoary old hippie anthems “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” are dusted off once more to establish Lennon as a legitimate revolutionary, but the other Lennon music in the film highlights his sarcasm and distrust of all authority. This is most clear when anti-war and draft-protest footage is scored to “Well, Well, Well” and “I Found Out,” two numbers from Lennon’s 1970 album Plastic Ono Band. These brutal songs condemn mass action in favor of a clear-eyed independence from all things communal and especially political. Yet here they are used, sincerely and mistakenly, as battle cries.

As history, the film is even worse, leaping from 1971 to 1966 to 1970 to 1969 to 1973 in a vain attempt to construct a chain of tangentially related historical events. Rather than illuminating events, such fumbling reinvents history as nostalgia; to claim that Lennon would have made an enormous difference in an election McGovern had already bungled beyond repair is useless ahistorical speculation.

In our current frightening political climate, where government surveillance may soon be a fact of life for everyone, self-congratulatory documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon serve no clear or worthwhile purpose.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

Opening Friday, October 13th

Studio on the Square