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.
This is an interesting ad in that it looks like an exhibitor is attempting to pass off Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme as something a little (or a lot) more smutty than it is. I imagine that more than one ticket buyer walked away disappointed.
Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina in Visconti’s The Stranger, I haven’t seen this and it doesn’t appear to be available on DVD, but my goodness, they do make a cute couple.
I got this 45 the other day of Max Romeo’s War Ina Babylon under its original title Sipple Out Deh on the Upsetter label. The thing is a little beat up but plays well enough. Anyway, it looks plenty cool. I especially like the credit “produced and directed by Upsetter L. Perry” and that the inclusion of the telephone number.
The discussion is still on the problems within the Beatles as Paul presents an amazing idea of how to end their current project. The plan so far was to film a documentary of the fabs rehearsing for a television concert that would be recorded and released as a live album of all new material. Some debate remains on how exactly the film and television special would be filmed and edited.
A few nights ago, Paul and Neil came up with what might have been the perfect ending to the television special which ultimately was canceled altogether in favor of only a documentary and LP. Paul suggests that while the Beatles were rehearsing for the TV show, they should have along side them, “say, the editor of The Daily Mirror [or] someone as good as him–a real hard news nut– rehearsing a team of really hard incredible news men with films, writing, so and so and so and so, so that, on the night of the show, in between all of [The Beatles’] songs is news, but the fastest and hottest from every corner of the earth… ‘We’ve just heard that there’s been an earthquake in so and so.’ Just, like, incredible news in between each [song] so that it’s like a red hot news program and at the end, the final bulletin is that The Beatles have broken up.” The others like the idea but not the ending as no one present wants to see the end of the fabs.
There is a little more talk about what is to be done with Yoko as Michael suggests that one way to get John away from Yoko would be to “drug her herb tea or something and put her away for a minute or two.” No one seems too amused by this. He goes on to refer to Yoko as the “yellow peril” and suggests that things might be better if she were to stay in the black bag.
Someone has been sent to ring John and conversation slows as everyone apparently waits to see if John is going to turn up or not. Paul breaks the silence saying, “And then there were two.” Ringo responds with “Tom and Jerry.” Causing Michael to say “Simon and Garfunkel.” To which Ringo replies “I know. I said it because you told me.” Linda asks what they are talking about and Ringo relates the story Michael told earlier about Simon and Garfunkel’s earlier teenage incarnation. Linda is not only aware of this but also sings a bit of Tom and Jerry’s 1957 hit “Hey Schoolgirl” and compares the sound of their records to Jan and Dean. So it turns out that Ringo wasn’t far off when he said they were surfers. I stand corrected. They were a lot of things.
Michael is next concerned with where the band’s lack of productivity leaves the status of the film and concert. It seems as though up until George’s departure, everyone was under the misguided notion that the concert might occur as early as the eighteenth. There is no definite answer given to Michael’s inquiry. This leads to a very lenghty and somewhat tedious discussion about what exactly the look of the film and television special would be. Paul envisions the film as “a study” of the band. He doesn’t want a lot of quick cuts or shots of anything but the band. In describing what he wants, he brings up a film of Picasso painting, possibly this:
Paul wants the concert to be covered as a news crew would cover an event. “If you see an event happen and the really good coverage, you know, is the shot of the fellow with the gun to his head and the fellow who got that shot, that’s the fellow–that was the man who covered the event. But the fellow who got the guy on the ground afterwards with the blood coming out of his head missed it…”
Michael somewhat convincingly argues that he knows what he’s doing and asserts that it is his job to “help the act” by serving them with the camera as the various band members do their various things rather than plunk the camera down and shoot their act in long shot. He says that plunking the camera down is what Warhol does.
Paul disagrees and in doing so makes Michael aware that he didn’t much care for The Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus or the Beatles’ own “Hey Jude” clip, both of which Michael directed. Paul goes on to predict that the film that Ringo is about to begin filming, The Magic Christian, won’t be any good. He’s mostly right about that one. This conversation goes on and on, nothing is ever really settled and the tapes get increasingly choppy excluding what might be large chunks of dialogue. At one point the tape cuts out and comes back in on Paul insisting that the TV special should have “camera movements the most fluid ever to be seen on TV, the most incredible camera movements. You had your lenses, your special lenses got from Japan, for really micro lenses and you had special and–and–the actual technical side of things is what we got into…obviously the answer is to do this thing I’m saying with great fluid movements in the desert, you know, and have all the cranes in the desert…Steadiness so it’s like a dream. You can shoot this thing like it’s a dream.”
At some point as the tape cuts in and out, it is established that John will arrive in an hour. Everyone present head over to a screening room on the lot to view rushes of the previous days’ filming. There is no audio of this and when the tape picks up again it is clear from the clatter of plates clanging against one another that the cameras have moved to the film studio’s cafeteria where the fabs, including a very vocal John and Yoko, are apparently eating lunch. On the first day of filming, Harrison was pretty insistent that cameras don’t film them eating so apparently they are taking advantage of his absence to capture a lunch break on film. Unfortunately the din of clanging china and silverware is such that most of what is said is unintelligible aside from a few tantalizing bits. The tape of this lunch lasts a half hour.
After lunch we finally get a bit of music. Rehearsals stick mostly to Paul’s “Get Back” but Lennon sneaks in a tiny bit of his “Dig a Pony.” “Get Back” began life during a jam session on the seventh and nearly every moment of its development can be heard on the bootlegs of these sessions. On this day, just before they begin playing the song Paul is heard instructing Mal to be at the ready with a pen and paper to transcribe any new lyrics that Paul might extemporize.
John and Paul play around a bit with the lyrics to “Get Back,” specifically trying to assign last names to the Loretta and Jojo (Jackson? Mary?) characters in the song and trying to make out what Jojo left his home in Arizona for (“looking for another blast,” “looking for a blast from the past,” “looking for the greener grass”).
After an hour of “Get Back” rehearsals that don’t yield any major breakthroughs, the threetles call it quits for the day. Before Paul leaves, Michael tries to nail down the schedule for the next week or so and Paul tells him to “stay flexible.” In order to guarantee to Michael that at least John and Paul will return the following day, they both agree to leave their instruments behind. I have no idea what John was playing that day but it might be safe to assume that he was on this beautiful thing:
Meanwhile, Paul tells Michael, “What greater faith can a man have than to leave his list? ‘She’s A Woman,’ ‘If I Needed…’, ‘…Tripper,’ ‘Baby’s in…,’…’I Feel Fine,’ ‘Yesterday’ ‘I Wanna Be Nowhere Man,’ ‘Paperback Long and Tall,'” This list is the one affixed to Paul’s old touring bass, which had been taken out of mothballs for these sessions, and happens to be the set list of the fabs’ last concert, or their last concert until the 30th of January of 1969.
chained and perfumed 
