The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

June 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives 

The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time, forty years ago in 1969, when Richard Nixon became POTUS.

GET BACK (THE BEATLES WITH BILLY PRESTON) performed by THE BEATLES

Forty years ago this week, the Number One song in America was (as it had been since 24 May) the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

Pace maker and peace maker: Billy Preston recording with the Beatles in the January 1969 “Get Back” sessions at Abbey Road studios in London.

By the beginning of 1969, when the Beatles went into the studio to begin work on a new LP and film project —in which the making of the album would be recorded in documentary style— the tensions that would soon tear the band apart were already at work.

George was unhappy and quarreling with Paul; Ringo felt unappreciated; and Yoko Ono was now silently shadowing John in an impassive-aggressive way that even today still seems more than slightly creepy.

In fact the atmosphere was so poisonous that, when George Harrison found keyboard player Billy Preston hanging out in the lobby of the Apple offices, he immediately invited him to join the band in the studio. As Harrison later recalled, Preston “came in while we were down in the basement, running through ‘Get Back,’ and I went up to reception and said, ‘Come in and play on this because they’re all acting strange’. He was all excited. I knew the others loved Billy anyway, and it was like a breath of fresh air. It’s interesting to see how nicely people behave when you bring a guest in, because they don’t really want everybody to know that they’re so bitchy… He got on the electric piano, and straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room. Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we’d created among ourselves.”

In fact, “Get Back” is attributed to “The Beatles with Billy Preston” — the only such shared credit in their entire catalog.

The concept of the new album —which was tentatively titled “Get Back”— was, precisely, to get back to the band’s earlier, simpler roots in terms of songs, arrangements, and production. This was to be a straightforward studio album minus the bells and whistles and overdubs that had started with Sgt. Pepper.

McCartney gave it the title by adlibbing “get back to where you once belonged” — referring to the song “Sour Milk Sea,” written by Harrison and recorded by Apple artist Jackie Lomax, which expressed the lyrical imperative “Get back to where you should be.”

So the phrase “Get Back” perfectly expressed the project’s intention and purpose of getting back to musical roots and basics. And during the extended jam-sessions-cum-rehearsals that became known as the “Get Back Sessions,” the band played scores of songs. But Lennon, who otherwise liked the song, claimed that every time McCartney sang the words “get back,” he glared at Yoko Ono. Lennon told Playboy in 1980: “I’ve always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul’s ‘Get Back.’ When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line ‘Get back to where you once belonged,’ he’d look at Yoko.

Paul McCartney’s attempts to mock and/or satirize Tory MP Enoch Powell’s infamous “River of Blood” anti-immigration speech provided both the backstory and the genesis of “Get Back.”

In the wake of the American riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., British Tory MP Enoch Powell made an inflammatory speech about the threat he claimed Britain was creating as a result of admitting the numbers of immigrants that would end up creating, in Britain’s insular society, the destructive problems that were endemic in America.

Powell was a classicist, and what the press immediately dubbed the “River of Blood” speech was named for one particularly vivid image came from Virgil’s Aeneid:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

It had been on Paul McCartney’s mind to address this bitterly-raging immigration debate —which was particularly focused on immigration from Pakistan— by sending up Powell’s rabble-rousing words.

At one of the “Get Back” sessions, McCartney improvised a “Commonwealth Song.” There is only one rough take of it, and the lyrics are fragmentary and only intermittently intelligible. But the message was clear: “You’d better get back to your Commonwealth Homes.”

You can hear the “Commonwealth Song” here at 3.28.

Commonwealth Song

Immigrants, immigrants had better go home,
Tonight Commonwealth… [Labor Party Prime Minister Harold] Wilson said to the immigrants,
You’d better get back to your Commonwealth homes,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said you’d better get back… home!

Now Enoch Powell said to the folks,
He (inaudible) to the colour of your skin,
He said he don’t care what it’s…
So Ted Heath said to Enoch Powell he said you better get off…,
Enoch… Enoch you better go home!

So Wilson said to the Premier, come on we gotta swing,
We gotta go back to the summat or the other
So Enoch Powell said to Wilson/Heath by… the Commonwealth!

If you don’t want trouble then you better go back to home!

Then John Lennon sings:
I went to India, I’ve been to old Calcutta and I’ve had enough of that,
I’m coming back to England-town.
(Paul: Yes, welcome!)
And dirty Enoch Powell and he’s had enough of coloured men.

Paul: Commonwealth!
John: Yes?
Paul: Can you hear me Commonwealth?
John: Yes!
Paul: Well Enoch Powell you gotta go back to home!

The “Commonwealth Song” was a discrete composition that remained unformed and unrefined. The melody (even where the lyrics talked about going back home) has nothing to do with the melody of “Get Back” which emerged for “No Pakistanis” — another even less subtle McCartney attempt at sending up Powell.

Once again the song was spontaneous and fragmentary.

…was a Puerto Rican… living in the USA.
Get back! Oh, get Back! Get back to where you once belonged.

…don’t dig no Pakistani’s taking all the people’s jobs.
Oh, get back! Get Back! Oh, get back to where you once belonged.

…was a Pakistani…
don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.
So, get back! Get back! Get back to where you once belonged.

As the song ends, the “Get Backs” are given an over-the-top satiric fierceness.

There was only one take of the “Commonwealth Song” and “No Pakistanis” at the “Get Back” sessions, which indicates that they were incidental jams that might have been intended to work through some ideas, or that might simply have been intended to relieve the tension and pass the time. This became relevant seventeen years later when the Get Back sessions became public and, despite the evidence at ear and the common sense of the situation, McCartney was accused by some of racism.

By way of explanation —and defense— he told Rolling Stone magazine:

When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to “Get Back” which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of “Get Back,” which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about “too many Pakistanis living in a council flat” — that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis… If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favorite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown.

Once “Get Back” gelled, the lyrics took a completely different direction.

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner
But he knew it couldn’t last
Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, Jojo
Go home

Get back, get back
Back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Back to where you once belonged
Get back, Jo

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman
But she was another man
All the girls around her say she’s got it coming
But she gets it while she can

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, Loretta
Go home

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Oooh…

Get back, Loretta
Your mama’s waiting for you
Wearing her high-heel shoes
And her low-neck sweater
Get back home, Loretta

The eleventh take (of fourteen) from the January 27th recording session was released in the UK as a single on 11 April, and in the US on 5 May. It immediately shot to Number One on the charts in both countries (for five weeks in England and a month in the States.)

As with all things Beatles, the exegeses of the song’s meanings are extensive. Tucson, Arizona, was the home town of McCartney’s fiancé Linda Eastman. Some thought that Jojo referred to a popular bar; others thought it referred to Ms. Eastman’s first husband Joseph, who had abandoned her and their daughter.

McCartney has claimed that the final lyrics are purposely ambiguous and mean nothing in particular. As he told a biographer: “Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and they’re not, let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous, I like doing that in my songs.”

Three days after the recording session, the Beatles went to the roof of their Apple offices on London’s tony Savile Row for what would turn out to be their last public performance.

They did three slightly differing versions of “Get Back” — and might have done more had the neighbors’ complaints not brought the police — and inspired McCartney’s extemporaneous addition: “You been out too long, Loretta! You’ve been playing on the roofs again! That’s no good! You know your mommy doesn’t like that! Oh, she’s getting angry… she’ll have you arrested! Get back!”

On 12 March, McCartney married Linda Eastman at the Marylebone Registry Office; on 20 March, Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. By that time the “Get Back” project had already been shelved and the dissolution of the band had begun. But all four members liked the title song so well that they agreed to its release as a single.

Against the Beatles’ wishes, Capitol Records hired producer Phil Spector to produce an album from the “Get Back” sessions. Spector made a new mix of “Get Back” in March 1970, and an LP —now titled Let It Be— was released —a year after the single— on 8 May. To the original 11th “Get Back” take of 27 January, Spector added dialog from the rooftop session. Now McCartney is heard saying “Thanks, Mo” — referring to Ringo’s wife Maureen who was cheering enthusiastically. And Lennon closes with: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the band and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”

Here is Spector’s sweetened and revised version — the twelfth and last track on Let It Be.

The original, unreleased, version can be heard on several bootlegs and, legally, on the 2003 release Let It Be…Naked.

Alan W. Pollock’s invaluable and inimitable “Notes on ‘Get Back’” answer any and all questions about the song. His conclusion is sad and wise:

In hindsight you’ll notice how the release of several Beatles singles seemed carefully timed as if to serve as a musical road sign, offering the observant follower a clue to the new direction ever so slightly ahead of the actual bend in the road. To the extent that you can trace this pattern you have to wonder how much of a conscious decision lay behind it.

“Get Back” (b/w “Don’t Let Me Down”) surely belongs to this group of singles. But whereas singles like “Paperback Writer” / “Rain” or “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever” each signal a compositional or stylistic leap in their wake, “Get Back” is musically rather simple stuff by comparison; its particularly enduring significance being more closely related to the chronicled history of the group per se.

As we all know, the combined album and film project named after this song was fated to end up as the painfully sad and the at times excruciatingly well documented commentary on the group’s inevitable breakup. The final edit and mixdown of the “Get Back” materials was aborted and indefinitely postponed in midstream until, almost a year later, long after the recording of the valedictory “Abbey Road” album, it was eventually post-produced and re-edited in order to be released under the transmographied title (not to mention, aptly reworded overarching message) of “Let It Be”.

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