Because I have been fixated on this recording of “Rock Around with Ollie Vee” for the past few days, Buddy Holly. Innovator, Life long smoker (though he only lived to twenty-two), singer-songwriter, rock and roller.
The tape picks up again after lunch. Much of the next hour or so is devoted to extremely lengthy instrumental improvisations. When the jamming begins it seems as though the fabs are going to work on George’s “For You Blue” because they are on the appropriate instruments (Paul on piano, Ringo on drums, George on guitar, Billy on organ and Lennon on slide guitar) and Lennon plays a bit of the song’s intro. An thorough work out of “For You Blue,” far from my favorite song that the fabs endlessly rehearsed during these sessions, would have come as a welcome substitute for the uninspired noodling that the band engage in. The Beatles, as it turns out, aren’t the strongest “jam band” out there. While this instrumental goes on and on, Yoko can occasionally be heard very faintly doing that caterwauling shit that she does but thankfully it seems as though she is singing into a microphone that is switched off. No one in the control room bothers to tell her that the mic is off.
After the jamming ends, Paul seems to want to work on “Let It Be” some more but after five renditions, none any better or worse than the ones that they had done before lunch, the band decide to give that one a rest chiefly because Lennon wants to “give up singing [the harmonies] for a bit.” Heather uses this down time to cease the microphone and imitate Yoko’s vocal approach to Lennon’s amusement. Before the band can decide what song they’ll play next, there is more jamming. This time Harrison takes vocal duties and extemporizes typically grouchy lyrics (“I told you before not to come knockin'”) to another bluesy instrumental. Heather occasionally joins in with some moaning. This goes on for twenty-five minutes.
Finally, the fabs get back to serious business. Paul begins to play the opening of his “The Long and Winding Road” and this signals a transition back into rehearsal mode. John, again on bass, is still largely unfamiliar with the song. “What key is it in?” He asks. “E flat! Fucking hell, you must be mental.” Even though it is quite late into the sessions, this is the first occasion that the band devote much time to rehearsing this song. Up until this point, it had only been played by Paul alone, usually on days when he was the first to arrive at the studio.
There is a moment of debate as to whether the fabs should even bother recording this song at all as it seems to be something that needs a string quartet, which might require overdubs–something that the band had swore off when beginning these sessions. Paul is of the opinion that the song should really be given to Ray Charles. Despite this, the band work on the song for the next two hours.
The band make short work of getting familiar with the song and, like “Let It Be,” come reasonably close to nailing it but, also like “Let It Be,” they would not record the version used on the LP until the last day of the sessions. In the mean time, Macca and Lennon amuse themselves by imitating the announcers of some televised ballroom dancing program (“Rita and Thomas Williams…He’s wearing a dark beard and a sombrero…Her husband is wearing a crinoline skirt which he made himself.”)
“The Long and Winding Road” is another song from these sessions that has never been a favorite of mine, but it works a lot better here in the almost lounge-y arrangement that the fabs give it rather than with all of the shit that Spector hung on it (some of these rehearsals have the feel of Air’s “Playground Love“). The fabs weren’t treating it as a powerful enough song to require all of Spector’s bells and whistles. Despite repeating many times that he hates Spector’s mix of the song–even going so far as to name its corruption in the lawsuit that dissolved the band (Macca is so fucking awesome!)–Paul plays it in the Spector arrangement to this day in concert.
As the day comes to an end, the fabs and their producers pile into the control room for playbacks of the material they just recorded. Georges Martin and Harrison and Paul discuss the arrangement of “The Long and Winding Road” while Heather proposes marriage to Glyn whom she calls Mr. Sock while asking him to pull off her socks. She then kills him and then brings him back to life (“I see you’ve been dead and I’m the queen…”). There is still some question as to how to handle playing “The Long and Winding Road” live without overdubs. George Martin asks if he should book The Mike Sammes Singers, a white bread vocal group upon whose services the fabs occasionally call when they need some extra voices. That’s them singing “stick it up your jumper” and “everybody’s got one” at the end of “I Am The Walrus,” they’re also on “Good Night” and all over Paul’s Thrillington album. They never appear during these sessions but someone calls them in for postproduction. Paul abruptly announces that he and Linda are going home to put Heather “back in [her] box.” Heather will not be returning the next day because she has school. With the day’s work behind him, George Martin decides to have a drink–there is plenty of booze around.
The last bit of the tape features Harrison having a conversation with the seldom miked Billy Preston. They seem to be discussing plans to record a Billy album. He was signed to Apple a few days earlier. George tries to think of who is free to record some songs with Billy. He suggests Ringo (if he can squeeze it in with his work on Magic Christian) and Paul. Lennon isn’t mentioned. The very last thing on the day’s tape is Harrison explaining to Preston that he has to “go into hospital” after the Get Back sessions for some dental surgery. “You see I’ve got a tooth–and it’s a bad one…and they have to cut through the gum and scrape out all this shit and it’s very bloody…” and there the tape ends.
That’s the end of the Get Back sessions posts for now. Maybe I’ll do more someday. I also plan on doing a post or two on Paul’s 1980 arrest in Japan and maybe some other fab-related things.
The fabs are now in rehearsal mode. They are on their “Let It Be” instruments: Paul on piano, George on guitar, Ringo on drums and Billy on organ. This leaves John on bass duties, a role he hardly relishes. He complains to Paul that he “can’t get a neat sound out of it–so that the fat string doesn’t go ‘ppffft.'” Paul coaches him with, as always, an example from their prior recording history, “Bass is, uh, if you get into it a bit like guitar but fatter. That’s another way: play high, don’t play fat–another style altogether, like “Rain,” you know, I did that.”
Feeling he has properly placated John, Paul is almost ready to get into “Let It Be,” but not until after a brief detour through The Killer’ssongbook. They also do a fantastic “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” Not thatone, but a song that Ray Charles recorded. While Paul messes around some more, George tells John of an interview he had read the night before with Wilson Pickett, where Pickett said that ‘”Hey Jude” is “the most beautiful song he’s ever heard.” While he gets no argument from me on that one, Pickett hasn’t heard “Let It Be” yet. The fabs seem accustom to this sort of praise and launch right into the first “Let It Be” of the day. Nearly thirty will follow.
During a break between run throughs of “Let It Be,” it becomes apparent that George is looking at some kind of girlie magazine (“look at her.”). John feels that Apple should publish its own girlie magazine filled with photos of Apple blonds. He then asks if anyone has heard of the American group called The Motherfuckers (“they’re never going to get into Billboard.”). Lennon is only half correct here, there was a group called The Motherfuckers, but they were a political activist group and not a musical act. John’s idea of a band called The Motherfuckers causes Paul to launch into one of his earliest compositions, a schmaltzy ditty drenched in “show biz” entitled “Suicide.” This song also has a Sinatra connection. Paul offered it to Sinatra a few years earlier and Sinatra rejected it saying, “The guy’s out of his fucking mind. I wouldn’t sing that on my crapper.” George and John join in on “Suicide.” The fabs never recorded the song properly but Paul thought enough of it to include a snippet of it (between “Hot as Sun,” another early Macca composition that makes an appearance during these sessions, and “Junk”) on his first solo LP.
After several renditions of “Let It Be,” during which they get increasingly close to nailing it except for a few minor issues, George takes it upon himself to finalize the arrangement telling the others when their solos come in, how many verses come between choruses and so forth. He observes that the song is “very country and western.” Lennon corrects him, “country and gospel.” Throughout these Get Back tapes, George is heard more than once making arrangement decisions on Lennon/McCartney songs. It’s getting near lunch time and it seems as though everyone wants to eat. Paul tells them that they’ll “do it…twice more and have a ten minute ‘put your feet up, lads.'” Between the two takes, John comes up with this inspired bit of nonsense:
Directly after this, the fabs pull off one of their more impressive feats of the day, an extended jam that eventually got the title “Dig It.” Anyone familiar with the finished Let It Be LP has heard the forty-nine seconds of this included there. Including it in such a truncated form is one of the more bizarre decisions that Spector made when compiling that record. In fact the version of the song that that short segment was extracted from runs a full fifteen minutes long; incorporates elements of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout;” and features the vocal stylings of six-year-old Heather whose screeching is at times oddly similar to Yoko’s. After seven minutes, Heather, who mostly moans and sings the words “bang, bang, bang” entirely too close to the microphone, loses interest (or is overcome by a need to dance) and it is at that point where the song picks up in the film. Don’t miss George Martin on that shaker.
Heather rocks pretty hard, not surprising when one considers that she would be an eventual follower of Echo and the Bunnymen (the other fab four from Liverpool):
Upon completion of these sessions, there was talk of there being a second record, one of rock and roll oldies, emerging from the hundreds of hours of recordings, but the quality of the oldies performed throughout the month varies wildly, with most being marred by the band’s (especially Lennon’s) inability to remember song lyrics. Out of the oldies played on this day, some eventually made it onto Anthology Three but those tracks were infuriatingly edited and polished.
Seeing as how three people were kind enough to compliment me on earlier installments of this feature, here is the sequel. I am picking up almost two weeks after the thirteenth of January, which was arguably the least productive day of the entire Get Back project. (Well, the fourteenth might edge out the thirteenth–little outside of “Watching Rainbows” happened on that day.) Since we left off, George has agreed to come back to work provided the rehearsal sessions take place at Apple instead of the Twickenham film studios; the fabs have gotten a bit more serious about their rehearsals and have been joined by keyboard player Billy Preston, who was invited to work on the sessions by Harrison.
The day begins with only Ringo and Georges Harrison and Martin present. Harrison takes advantage of the absence of the groups’ two principle songwriters to try out some of the material he has been squirreling away for the past few years. He introduces his “Isn’t It a Pity” by explaining that he had written the song “about three years ago and I…sung it to John and he said, ‘that’s too much like fuckin…’ you know. Anyway, but I thought it was good.” He goes on to explain that while “in L.A.,” a friend who had some association with Reprise Records asked George if he’s “got a song for Sinatra.” George thought to himself, “that’s nice, fancy him wanting one of my songs.” But then he thought about what “horseshit” the by-then way past-his-prime Sinatra was accustomed to recording, and decided “fuck that, I’m not letting him sing it. He just learns it and he comes in and the band has learned it and just walks in and does it in, like, two takes and that’s it…because there’s nothing more that he’s going to do with it even if he does ten takes.” After playing a lovely “Isn’t It a Pity,” he describes his never-released song, “Window, Window,” as an “Irish or Scottish reel or jig or something like that.”
Before playing “Let It Down,” George remarks that he wishes that he could “come in here and feel the way you feel when you’re leaving, because there’s not too much difference except I was over there [yesterday] and I had the brown trousers on…it’s exactly the same: same songs, same ciggy.” George smokes Kents by the way.
Next George asks Ringo if he has written any more words to any of the songs he’s in the process of writing. At this point Ringo has only one full song under his belt, “Don’t Pass Me By” from the previous year’s self-titled LP. That song had a four year gestation period–it was first mentioned, and dismissed by the other fabs, in a 1964 BBC broadcast. In these sessions, Ringo has played two songs-in-progress on the piano for his bandmates, one is called “Pablo Picasso” and the other “Takin’ a Trip to Carolina.” While Ringo’s composition skills are minimal when compared to his absurdly talented bandmates, he has never been without his share of fans: Harrison has already reported that “Don’t Pass Me By” was Dylan and The Band’s favorite track off of the white album. On this morning, instead of messing around with “Picasso” or “Carolina,” Ringo plays for George a new song, one that had gone unnoticed by John and Paul when he debuted it for them three days earlier. He calls it “the octopus one.” Ringo plays what he has so far of “Octopus’s Garden”–the tune and some of the lyrics to the first verse–and the others react with enthusiasm that was missing when Ringo performed the song for John and Paul. Immediately all assembled get to work on fleshing out the song with Harrison contributing more than the eventual songwriting credit would suggest.
The song is worked on for nearly an hour during which time the Lennons and Paul, Linda and Heather arrive. John goes straight behind the drum kit and thrashes about. George and Ringo crack one another up by changing the chorus’ lyric to “octopussy’s garden.” Some of this can be seen in the “Let It Be” film (unfortunately, the better of the two clips of this available on youtube doesn’t allow embedding but can be seen here <–this clip gives us a better look at the amazing outfit that Heather was dressed in that day than the one below does.)
Paul comes in asking the others what they thought of "the dubs"–recordings of the songs they’ve been working on that each went home with the night before–Ringo listened to them and deemed them "terrible," George agrees and Lennon admits to having "left [his] in the car." Paul meanwhile thinks that the dubs are evidence that The Beatles are "the greatest band ever." He’s correct there. Lennon changes the subject by bizarrely asking Paul, "Hey, did you dream about me last night?" Paul doesn’t remember his dreams. Lennon had a "very strong dream–we were both terrified! Different dreams but you must have been there. I was touching you." Paul does his best to ignore this as everyone goes back into "Octopus’s Garden." Lennon works in a bit of Donnie Elbert’s "Little Piece of Leather,” which, up until a minute ago, I though he had made up on the spot. It’s not an improvised Lennon original as I had thought, but an old R&B tune. A bit of back story is given by Ringo with support from George on what exactly an octopus’s garden is. As Harrison explains, it turns out that “octopuses pick up all the seashells, do you know about that? They collect all nice-looking things and make a garden around where they are just with all the groovy things they find.
As work on “Octopus’s Garden” winds down, Heather becomes increasingly vocal. First she announces that her cat has had kittens (Lennon inquires if she plans on eating them, “lots of people do. You put pastry ’round them and have cat pie.”) and then launches into extended impressions of alternately “a pussy cat who was just born” and “a tame tiger” (“if I wasn’t tame I might scratch you. And I might eat you but I’m too tame to.”) After a bit of this she excuses herself saying she’s going “next door.” Paul tells her she can go anywhere she pleases so long as she doesn’t “interfere with anyone.”
She picked a good time to leave as the fabs, Glyn and George Martin are getting in to the tedious business of listening to several “playbacks” of the previous day’s work. These playbacks are possibly the most frustrating parts of these Get Back tapes–just as you begin to think that you can’t bear to listen to another mediocre take of, say, “Dig A Pony,” the band retires to the control room to rewind the tape and listen to whatever it is they’ve just recorded–now you’re not only listening to the same mediocre takes of “Dig A Pony” again, but you’re listening to them with the fabs talking over them and you can barely make out what is being said.
On this morning the band is listening to several renditions of “For You Blue” that they had recorded the day before. It takes some time for Glyn to find the take of “For You Blue” that they are looking for and then there is debate as to whether it’s the “good” one or not. Thankfully, the tame tiger returns to liven things up with more talk of kittens and band aids and chap stick. This kitten talk causes Lennon to observe that “they always make cat food tins too small.” Paul and Linda insist that canned food “isn’t any good for them.” George says his cats “really dig turkey and rabbit…fish too.” John also likes to give his cats ping pong balls to play with. Heather and Ringo list the various animals that jump. The fabs then listen to two different takes of “Let It Be” from the day before. The song still needs a lot of work.
Forty years ago this month the Fabs were recording what would become their last LP, Let It Be. The album was the result of 20 days of the band rehearsing for what turned out to be a 45-minute concert performed on the roof of the Apple building.
I hope to do at least one major post on these rehearsal sessions seeing as how I spent this past summer listening to nearly one hundred hours of the rehearsal tapes on bootleg.
The story that surrounds this period of the Fabs career is that it was an unhappy time for them and these rehearsals were something of a disaster. The truth is a bit more complicated than that. I want to write a bit about what went on in the rehearsals because some of it is pretty strange and hilarious. In the mean time let’s look at what the critics said about the finished, such as it was, LP, Let It Be. When it was initially released on May 8, 1970, the reviews were mostly unkind. Under the headline “New LP Shows They Couldn’t Care Less,” NME reported, “If the new Beatles soundtrack is to be their last then it will stand as a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop”. Rolling Stone, in replying to Lennon’s “hope we passed the audition” line, said: “Musically, boys, you passed the audition. In terms of having the judgment to avoid either over-producing yourselves or casting the fate of your get-back statement to the most notorious of all over-producers, you didn’t…”
Time of course has been kind to the album and how little the Spector production, especially on The Long and Winding Road, added doesn’t matter much when there were moments like this when the band was absolutely on fire.
Nearly thirty years after the LP was released the only rock critic who matters was asked by a music magazine to show off his favorite albums. Apparently forgetting that he usually cites his favorite Fabs LP as Pepper, Brian Wilson presented Let It Be.
If you are interested in these Get Back (Let It Be) rehearsals they can be painstakingly downloaded, 83 discs in all, each disc split into two downloads to avoid compression issues, by clicking the “fab sounds” link in my blog roll. If you’d like to only dip your toe in the water, listen to this two hour crash course that aired on NPR a number of years ago. It is pretty excellent but shys away from some of the more lurid aspects of the sessions while focusing on the music.
This will be a new very occasional feature. Sir Chas managed to have eleven children between 1919 and 1962 (yeah, by 1962, he was seventy-three) and that’s including the malformed one who died after three days and was buried under a stone that read “The Little Mouse.” Let’s see what we can dig up on the rest of them shall we?
Today we will begin with my favorite (meaning the one I find the most physically attractive), Victoria Chaplin, born to Chas Chaplin and Oona O’Neil Chaplin on May 19, 1951. I can’t pretend to know much about any of these Chaplin children outside of what most biographies on the old man can report (i.e. he sent them to boarding school in France where they learned to speak French, a language he couldn’t be bothered to speak himself) but here’s what I can gather regarding what exactly Victoria Chaplin has been up to since she was born fifty-seven years ago.
Victoria is one of the less cooperative Chaplin children when it comes to appearing in the occasional documentary produced about their father and his work. Those duties usually go to Sydney, Geraldine or Michael (who sometimes is interviewed speaking in French, sometimes in English). So it is with a certain beggars-can’t-be-choosers attitude that I compiled this in-no-way comprehensive post on this Chaplin daughter.
Whatever. Victoria Chaplin has carved out a bizarre and more than slightly awesome niche for herself. I have no idea what the exact circumstances were, but it seems that at some point Vic married one Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée. Yeah, that is the guy who played Delphine Seyrig’s stepson in Alain Resnais’s Muriel (which in my opinion runs circles around the director’s more-praised Last Year in Marienbad).
When Victoria and Jean-Baptiste eloped, old Chas is said to have been furious—partly because this ruined Chas’s plans to star Victoria in his next feature, The Freak
and partially because when she ran away, she ran away to the circus.
That’s right, Jean-Baptiste and Victoria founded a circus which has been called variously over the years Le cirque bonjour, Le cirque imaginaire, and, finally, Le cirque invisible. Apparently modern circus acts like Cirque du Soleil owe something to this Thiérrée/Chaplin circus. It is odd, then, that Chaplin, a man who gave us these images from a film of his entitled The Circus (!), would be annoyed when his daughter ran away to join the actual circus, but whatever—he seems like he might have been a bit of a prick to get along with.
Here’s a pic of a Christmas gathering at the Chaplin home. Circled are Victoria, the very elfin Jean-Baptiste and baby Aurelia.
Anyway, I found a bit of video of Victoria on the stage circa a few years ago. This is a case of the apple not falling too far from the tree and it is actually quite lovely.
Also there is the matter of this Aurelia, granddaughter of Chaplin, who has joined the family circus biz and has appeared in a handful of films including Goya’s Ghosts and The People vs Larry Flynt. Here she is doing her circus thing:
Finally, I would like to mention that I will hopefully some day get around to the most groovy member of the Chaplin clan, Michael Chaplin. Of course, it all hinges on whether or not I ever get around to reading this little gem:
chained and perfumed 