The other night, I started rewatching Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, on the Beatles’ infamous Get Back sessions of 1969.
Jackson’s documentary has become infamous in its own right a year after its release—owning mainly to its eight-hour running time, but also to its reliance on snatches of dialogue that can only be understood by reading along with exacting subtitles.
Having, in the year between viewings, listened to Let It Be (the album eventually cobbled together from the sessions) as well as Paul’s remixed Let It Be…Naked more times than I could count, the song snippets that start appearing in the first of the documentary’s three parts have a tantalizing quality.
They remind me of the Michelangelo quote—”Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” That’s the frame of mind for the knowing viewer.
Where’s that harmony? And the bass part? When will they thread together those two chunks of the song?
The answers (or many of them) appear over the course of the doc’s eight hours, subsequent takes or noodling asides revealing the next musical chiselwork.
But Michelangelo’s block of stone is an imperfect analogy for what’s going on.
As much as Paul’s keen sense of arrangement and fastidious approach guides the proceedings, there is still an improvisational spirit present.
There is no predetermined place for the song to end up—no “statue hiding,” as it were. The final form of “Get Back,” for instance—with its semi-nonsense lyrics (“Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona”) sound obvious to the present-day viewer, embedded as they are in rock history.
But to John and Paul, the lyrics are all mumbo-jumbo. They had the idea of “Get Back” as protest song, but set that idea aside at some point.
The better framing for the creative work at display in the documentary may come from Paul, who is shown casually explaining the joys of the piano to a set assistant.
Pointing at the piano he’s sitting out, he observes—and I’ll paraphrase, not remembering the exact quote:
“All of music is right there in front of you.”
And so it is: there’s no block of marble, just an infinite array of possible decisions.
Taylor Coe 