And so it comes around to Let It Be in 2021. It too received the remix treatment, and again, why? Paul McCartney has already issued "Let It Be: Naked" in 2003. So let's dig into the what's here and why.
Let It Be was a contentious project from the get go. Morale in the band was at an all time low, and trying to flesh out an idea for a project to re-ignite enthusiasm was difficult. The idea was to work up new material and play live again, but they owed their film company another picture - Yellow Submarine still was a way off yet.
The Apple Corps project was a way to keep ownership of more of their money and intellectual property, so they formed a label and a publishing company, a recording studio, an electronics R&D centre, and a fashion boutique. Largely, it was a disaster. The Apple Boutique was a haven for shoplifters and lost money hand over foot, Magic Alex, in charge of electronic R&D was a shyster who squandered loads of cash and achieved nothing, and the record label was short lived and only moderately successful. It all went downhill from there.
Get Back, as the project was originally coined, was designed as a circuit breaker, to get back to basics and work together as a band creating music, as opposed to in isolation as it was for most of the White Album. They also decided to film the creative process, but more on that later.
Over the course of January 1969 they set about working up material, and also loosely jamming on old songs and vintage favourites. The filming took place on a sound stage at a film studio, but that was fraught with tension too. The live concert idea went through many iterations and ideas and they ended up just jamming on the roof of their offices in Saville Row, London.
The project was shelved ultimately after no one could agree on a final product. A single was released from the project, "Get Back"/"Don't Bring Me Down" but nothing else surfaced.
Glyn Johns, an engineer who would soon go on to engineer some of The Who's major triumphs, like "Who's Next" had a crack at making an album of the tapes, but the Beatles shelved his version. The only part that saw the light of day from Johns' mixes was the "Get Back" single. The tapes were handed over to Phil Spector, for him to tamper with, and provide the album we've all loved since 1970.
Spector's production was notorious, because he added massed choirs, reverb and overblown orchestrations to the mix and to some listeners (and especially Paul McCartney), it killed the music with kindness. That's why Paul remixed and reissued Let It Be in the "Naked" format in 2003 - the way he wanted it to sound.
This new boxed set was particularly anticipated by me, as I do love the music on this album, but as there has already been a revisionist version previously issued, plus outtakes on the Beatles Anthology and a number of bootlegs of this material, what is there that could be exhumed from the vaults that would be interesting?
As it turns out, this box included the official release of the Glyn Johns mix, although that has been doing the rounds on the internet as a bootleg for years now. The rest of the alternate takes are works in progress, that are reasonably sloppy and don't add much to the picture of the album's creation. There are some demos of songs that would end up on post Beatles solo albums, like Teddy Boy and Gimme Some Truth, and some rehearsals for songs that ended up on Abbey Road, however, a lot of that stuff was also on Anthology 3.
The real revelations are the jams with Billy Preston, like "Without a Song", and a band rehearsal of "All Things Must Pass" that was rejected as a Beatles song (which is unthinkable knowing what we know now!).
The real money, in my view, is the fact that director Peter Jackson has been through the 50 hours of video footage and is creating a 6-hour documentary from the remaining footage that wasn't issued in the original 1970 film. There promises to be some seriously fascinating things uncovered in that, and for that I cannot wait.
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