Documentary "Get Back" shows half-century old, unseen footage of Beatles writing and recording

it's january 1969 and the beatles are unrecognizable from the wide-eyed mop tops who appeared on the ed sullivan show just five years prior their popularity is unrivaled they've stopped touring and fame is exacting its price now comes a self-imposed stress they've given themselves three weeks to record 14 songs that they'll play to a live audience all the while trailed by cameras the astonishingly intimate footage was recently extracted from a london vault and placed in the capable hands of filmmaker peter jackson as we first reported last november his resulting three-part disney plus documentary series get back adds considerable light and joy to what was always considered to be the beatles darkest period you might say jackson took a sad song and well you know the rest the story will continue in a moment [Music] often as we hear bands play we rarely glimpse bands at work much less the biggest band that ever was well teleport to 1969 and meet the beatles [Music] you're the first person to look at this with fresh eyes in years and years what was it like watching this footage it was fascinating after 50 years you'd have every right to believe that everything with the beatles had been talked about every bit of film had been seen every bit of music had been heard that there was no more surprises with the beatles from his base in new zealand director peter jackson took a break from directing big budget studio films like lord of the rings i want to show you the bit where paul is practicing his head shakes and has spent the last four years hanging out with john paul george and ringo suddenly bang out of nowhere comes this incredible treasure trove of flounderable material 52 years later it it it still blows my mind it actually honestly still blows my mind so how about how about changing around these two and when you're saying don't you know it's gonna last we sing it's a love that has no plan so give us some historical context here under what circumstances was this footage shot they've lost what they loved as teenagers they've lost being the four guys playing in a band so they're going to record a new album with songs that only that they're only going to play live and they're not going to do any studio tricks there's going to be no multi-tracking and they had to just they had to figure out where and how they were going to perform to an audience as the beatles wrote and rehearsed they allowed a film crew to capture every riff both on guitar and in conversation i mean connie's all right in this one because what he's doing is courtney but see that's that's the thing that will make it not corny if we sing different words so he said i'm in love the month's worth of filming yielded only the forgettable 80-minute documentary let it be released a year later after the beatles broke up a lifelong beatles fan peter jackson had always wondered what had happened to all those hours of unseen footage so here we are in vault number three his tolkien-like quest took him deep under the london headquarters of applecorp the beatles label they just said we've got it all we've got um 57 hours of footage we've got 130 hours of audio and then they said that they were thinking about making a documentary using the footage i just put up my hand and said well if if you are looking for somebody to make it um don't please just um think of me back in new zealand jackson began the ultimate binge watch screening this musical mother lode frame by frame given that any beatles fan will tell you that let it be comes shrouded in sadness forever associated with the great divorce in rock and roll history jackson braced for the gloomy worst i was watching i was waiting for it to get bad i was waiting for the narrative that i believed over the years to start happening i was waiting for the arguments waiting for the discontent waiting for the misery and you know it didn't happen i mean that shows you know it shows issues it shows problems but but any band any time has though has those um has those problems this is not a band that's breaking up these are not guys that dislike each other that's not what i'm what what we're seeing here that's not what was being filmed [Music] here's what was being filmed the four liverpudlians in their late 20s working collaboratively surrounded by a strikingly small tight entourage there's linda linda eastman at the time taking photos and of course yoko ono as long as we're here let's dispense now with that famous bit of beatles breakup mythology the casual fan looking for yoko ono broke up the beatles might come away from this disappointed i suspect yeah i think that's a good thing because you know i mean you know yoko didn't break up the beatles and and no one thing broke up the beatles that's the original that's the original so giles martin is the son of late beatles producer george martin giles grew up in the beatles orbit and has since remixed most of the band's albums when peter jackson enlisted him for this series martin plowed through all the hundreds of hours of audio and video you can see the cracks appearing the one thing about this movie is that people understand why they were getting tired of each other because you get the sense of what it's like to be in a room with them which is such a privilege for all of us despite those cracks the beatles alchemy remains potent at one point we have footage of paul mccartney sort of strumming on it on his base which he uses as a guitar half the time [Music] just sort of strumming i think that it's early in the morning and they're waiting for john to hasn't arrived yet he's just biting some time he slowly finds the tune [Music] so you see the song kind of just be plucked out of the thin air left his home in tucson arizona [Music] yeah seriously it's where they make high chaperone you know i can make sense of it jordan left his nose hoping it would be a blast pretty soon he found that he'd have to be a loner with some california grass you know okay you make that makes sense but it doesn't sing good the beatles had always been furiously productive but this was the creative process in double time 14 songs in 22 days was that as much an absurd time pressure in 1969 as it would appear to be today yeah this is the biggest band on the planet saying we're going to do it we're going to do our first show in three years in three weeks time but we don't know where it's going to be and we don't know what songs we're going to play as you listen to all the recordings for this project what impressions did you arrive at in terms of their chemistry my impression of it is that paul and john kind of knew that they were growing apart and let it be was almost like a marriage that's failing and they want to go back on their date nights again [Music] compounding matters george harrison restless in his role in bristling under paul mccartney's driving ambition leaves the band after a week it's the most low-key walk-out that you've ever seen in your life it's just um i'm leaving now what i'm leaving the band now and then he goes there's no fight there's no argument there's no disagreement john was in love with yoko and in his words he was mistreating his body the band was competing for his attention not always successfully when i was younger much younger than today i never needed anybody's help in any way but now my life has changed in oh so many ways we can't carry on like this indefinitely we seem to be we seem to but we can't see what you need is a serious program of work not an aimless rambling amongst the canyons of your mind paul had grudgingly become the band's hall monitor more lead than singer george was persuaded to come back but with the live performance approaching the beatles decided they needed a change of scenery they relocated to a makeshift studio in the basement of apple records i dig a pygmy by charles hawtry on the decades phase one in which doris gets her oats a surge of fresh energy also came in the form of a keyboard player billy preston a 22 year old texan brought in by george [Music] is [Music] what was the influence of billy preston on this album and on the beatles at the time this hot shot comes in and they just had to suddenly improve their playing because they had this force of nature in the room with them and i think that's what he did i think he worked as a catalyst and galvanized them so they could make the record or make them do the right performance it's an upbeat scene at odds with how so many remembered that time not least the principles themselves but peter jackson's get back series doesn't just restore lost footage or the beatles music it restores something much deeper you mentioned memory before i wondered did their recollections match up with this this documentary evidence you were presenting them with 50 years later i'm talking to toringo and paul and their memory was very miserable and unhappy and i said look whatever your memories are whatever you think your memories are this is the actual true truth of it and here look look at look at this you and i have memories [Music] they started to realize what what this is i mean this is a an incredibly amazing historical document of the beatles at work and four friends at work and clearly they're four friends [Music] the looming deadline didn't exactly dampen the mood in the studio [Music] in what of the culmination of these sessions that live performance the band simply walked up a few flights of stairs and on january 30th 1969 played atop the apple offices [Music] no one at the time suspected it but this would mark the beatles final performance before splitting up 14 months later it took a half century and an exacting director on the other side of the world who knows plenty about the power of myth to revise the lore surrounding the beatles breakup and set the record straight [Music]

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 728,626

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, The Beatles, Get Back, Jon Wertheim, Peter Jackson

Id: nAXZhSZc7ik

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022