80. Get Back

What a gift to be able to watch the birth of a number one hit

I’ve always liked Get Back, but I’ve had a hard time loving it. It never struck me as a particularly interesting song, and it certainly felt like a bit of an anomaly on the list of mega-hits from the Beatles’ mid and late period, which includes some of the very best work they ever produced.

I finally got it when I watched that scene from Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

There are lots of brilliant bits across the many hours of Peter Jackson’s production, but the most striking for me—and, I think, for a lot of other people—is the one where Paul invents Get Back live on the studio floor over the course of barely two minutes.

This is the sort of thing that songwriting pros don’t seem to find that amazing. They are certainly impressed that he found this tune and was able to turn it into a hit so quickly, but many of them say that some of their biggest and most iconic songs were written in a similar way: very quickly, on the spur of the moment. Cultivating the skills necessary for invention takes countless hours of work, but the actual act of creation is sometimes shockingly quick.

Most songwriters don’t have Get Back in their arsenal, but still, the principle is the same.

So I understand why this scene was merely cool instead of mind-blowing to some people. But for me, even if I can grasp intellectually that this is the sort of thing other people are capable of doing (and that it forms part of the origin story of plenty of songs I probably love), there’s a big difference betwee knowing something and actually being able to watch it happen.

Because the thing is, at the start of the scene, Paul has nothing. He’s just fiddling around, waiting for the absent John to turn up. Ringo and George are bored out of their minds, wondering what they’re even doing there. But then, suddenly, Paul seems to sense that he’s on the verge of a spark. And where there’s a spark you might just be able to coax it into a fire. So now he’s not playing quite so aimlessly; he’s trying to carefully circle around the flickering light, to find just the right angle to breathe life into it.

We, the omniscient observers with the benefit of historical knowledge, know that he’s right and something is about to be born. George and Ringo, however, have no idea. To them, it still just sounds like noodling. Until the switch is turned and suddenly the meandering, tuneless mess reveals itself to be an entire god-damned song.

As soon as the corner is turned, George notices. “It’s good, you know, musically it’s great.” Ringo starts clapping and George adds a few guitar flourishes. Paul finds the ‘get back to where you once belonged’ refrain. And then he returns to the verse and suddenly he’s got lyrics! ‘…thought she was a woman, but she was another man…’ leads into ‘[mumble mumble] thought she had it coming, but she gets it while she can.’

And just like that, they’ve got a song. So they start again and now Ringo’s at his drums and it sounds incredible. By the end of the clip, less than four minutes have passed, John has arrived, and is now playing as well, and it sounds incredible.

Right there in front of our eyes: from tedious noodling to number-one single in about thirty seconds.

They did spend a few weeks continuing to work on it—practicing it, exploring other iterations, taking it in all sorts of strange and perplexing directions.¹ But those ideas mostly didn’t stick. Which means the final version of Get Back—the one that became a number-one single and one of the tentpoles of their final released album—was pretty much exactly what it was the instant it sprang forth out of Paul, like Athena bursting fully formed from the head of Zeus.

There are a few wonderful Beatles easter eggs scattered throughout the Simpsons, but the best (and most expansive) Beatles reference is definitely Homer’s Barbershop Quartet, which parodies the rise and fall of the Beatles.

It also has a nice cameo from George, who drives by the Be Sharps’ rooftop gig and says ‘it’s been done.’ After which, Homer concludes with ‘I hope we’ve passed the audition,’ to which everyone laughs, except Barney who says ‘I don’t get it.’

1. For a while, they wanted to make the song a satire of Enoch Powell and the racist anti-immigration politics of the time. Wisely, they decided that this would probably cause a lot more problems than it would address. Among other things, the satire wasn’t particularly sharp, which might have led people to conclude that the Beatles were just literally telling immigrants to go back where they came from.