There are, of course, hundreds of reels of Beatles recordings from the January, 1969 Get Back sessions, including dozens of hours of conversation and dialogue. Actual interviews from the period are few and far between.
Filming and rehearsing began January 2nd in a cavernous soundstage at Twickenham Studios. By January 10th, George had walked out, vowing to quit the band, a fact John Lennon doesn't allude to when interviewed on the set January 14th by a reporter from CBC-TV.
News of a Beatle squabble did leak in the interim between the Twickenham and Apple Studios sessions, and Ringo fielded David Wigg's queries about the matter when interviewed en route to Apple on January 21st.
"Magic" Alex Mardas had attempted to create a usable multitrack mixing board for Apple's basement studio, but as this recording attests, the design proved unusable, and equipment was duly borrowed from EMI.
In any case, plans for Get Back, conceived as a live TV and/or concert performance tied in with a "making of" documentary and LP featuring new material, quickly collapsed. The only immediate result was the legendary January 30th performance on the roof of Apple. In this undated interview, Paul discusses the difficulties of tackling a live Beatles show in the post-Beatlemania era.
John commenting on Apple in a January 1969 interview with Ray Coleman:
ReplyDeleteI think it's a bit messy and it wants tightening up. We haven't got half the money people think we have. We have enough to live on but we can't let Apple go on like it is. We started off with loads of ideas of what we wanted to do, an umbrella for different activities. But like one or two Beatle things, it didn't quite work because we weren't practical and we weren't quick enough to realise that we need a businessman's brain to run the whole thing.
You can't offer facilities to poets and charities and film-makers unless you have money definitely coming in. It's been pie-in-the-sky from the start. Apple's losing money every week because it needs closely running by a big businessman. We did it all wrong, you know, Paul and me running to New York saying that we'll do this and encourage this and that. It's got to be business first, we realise that now.
It needs a new broom and a lot of people will have to go. It needs streamlining. It doesn't need to make vast profits, but if it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in the next six months.