Behind the scenes

There is still a light that shines on me

Posted on by brucehhackett

When Apple Records released The Beatles’ “Let It Be” album in May 1970, the world was still reeling from Paul McCartney’s public announcement the previous month that the band had broken up. (John Lennon had told the group privately six months earlier that he “wanted a divorce,” and George Harrison had already begun sessions for his solo debut, but the public had only just learned that the end had come.)

As a loyal fan, I bought the LP right away, but not with the excitement and eager anticipation I’d had with “The White Album” in late 1968 or “Abbey Road” in autumn 1969. “Let It Be,” apparently, would be The Beatles’ last album, which forever tainted it in the minds of many.

It was a strange record. Two of the songs (“Get Back” and “Let It Be”) had already been released as singles; four others seemed to have been recorded in some sort of live setting; two tracks (“Dig It” and “Maggie Mae”) were pretty much inconsequential filler; one tune (“One After 909”) was a Lennon-McCartney chestnut resurrected from their teen years; and sprinkled throughout were weird tidbits of verbal outbursts (mostly from Lennon). The album’s ragged nature seemed a letdown after the astonishing, polished work on “Abbey Road.”

There was mention of a “Let It Be” film that documented the making of the album, but it saw only limited release and was soon pulled from distribution, evidently because it was roundly panned and The Beatles themselves didn’t much care for it either. So I never saw it until years later. In fact, I went with my friend Barney one day in 1978 to a small Cleveland theater that was showing “Let It Be” in a double feature with “Magical Mystery Tour,” another neglected Beatle film project. (We never saw either film that day because theater personnel threw us out after I mischievously fired up a joint as the movie was just beginning!)

When I finally saw “Let It Be” a couple days later, I agreed with the critics who found it to be a dreary, uncomfortable, ultimately depressing look at my favorite band on the verge of dissolution. They all looked so glum and serious, with no sense of fun or even shared creativity. They sat in silence or bickered, and there was a clear sense that things were collapsing, and no one seemed to care. Sure there were a few entertaining moments, mostly the rooftop concert sequences, but I concluded they were right to bury the film in the archives.

What I never knew until about a year ago is that the film’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had shot nearly 60 hours of film, and sound crews had captured 150 hours of music and conversational recordings. Peter Jackson, the award-winning filmmaker behind “Lord of the Rings” and a huge Beatles fan himself, had always wished for the opportunity to review those source materials to see what was there, and four years ago, Apple Records gave him the green light to delve into them.

Beatles fans worldwide should thank their lucky stars that a talent like Jackson was selected for the task. In “Get Back,” his triumphant, seven-hour documentary released on Thanksgiving on Disney+, his efforts paid off handsomely, with grainy film images digitally restored and enhanced, and the sometimes unintelligible audio cleaned up to such a degree that what we see and hear is a thrilling revelation. True, it may be a bit long and sometimes tedious for the casual fan, but for rabid Beatles fans and professional musicians, it’s Shangri-La.

Most notably, we learn that the prevailing myth advanced by the “Let It Be” movie — that the sessions were nothing but ugliness and toxicity — is simply untrue. Granted, things started off shakily when they first convened in the cavernous Twickenham film studio, a cold environment hardly conducive to conviviality or productivity. The guys seemed understandably self-conscious about the cameras and microphones recording their every move, and they often showed up late, or not at all. However, once they moved the proceedings to the new studio set-up in the basement of the Apple Records office, the mood improved significantly, thanks in large part to the arrival of their old friend Billy Preston, who had only stopped by to say hello while in London but ended up staying for a week and contributing enormously to the vibe and the musical recordings.

It was mesmerizing to me to be a fly on the wall, witnessing the resilience and raw talent of John, Paul, George and Ringo, these four men I had idolized my whole life, as they coped with the absurd circumstances: They had reluctantly agreed to be filmed writing, rehearsing and recording an album’s worth of new songs in preparation for a live performance three weeks ahead, location still undecided. Talk about pressure.

We get to see several of The Beatles’ classic tunes transformed from rudimentary sketches to finished product, particularly “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” It’s the arduous process of songwriting and track recording, and while it may go on all the time for rock bands everywhere, it rarely happens with cameras rolling, and here it’s the bloody Beatles, for crying out loud!

As one young songwriter put it in a Washington Post article the other day: “You never get to see someone in that moment of making something up, especially a song like ‘Get Back’ that you know so well. That was totally incredible… Watching Paul do it that way, where he’s just plugging and plugging and plugging until he gets it, that’s how it actually happens.”

Said another musician: “This whole endeavor — writing songs — is filled with failure. Most people think, ‘Oh, the Beatles, everything they did turned to gold.’ Wrong. You’re always trying and discarding things and searching for the right thing. There’s a lot of sitting around, a lot of screwing around, a lot of playing nonsense music. Then there’s also a lot of slogging away, trying to get what you’re actually working on to be great. The reality is it often has to sound bad before it sounds good. These eight hours reaffirm that.”

“Get Back” offered many other discoveries, most of them pleasant, even exhilarating. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that McCartney, Harrison and Lennon seemed to have new songs just pouring out of them at this stage. (Even Ringo Starr debuted the beginning of his song “Octopus’s Garden” during these sessions.) In addition to the amazing McCartney songs that would end up on the “Let It Be” album, including “Two of Us” and “The Long and Winding Road,” we also hear him toying with early drafts of tunes that would end up on “Abbey Road” (“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Oh Darling,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Carry That Weight”) or his first solo albums (“Teddy Boy,” “The Back Seat of My Car”).

Lennon’s output included “Dig a Pony” (then known as “All I Want is You”) and “Across the Universe”; early previews of “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Polythene Pam,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” destined for “Abbey Road”; and “Gimme Some Truth” and a tune known as “Child of Nature,” which would later be recast as “Jealous Guy” on his “Imagine” album.

Harrison, meanwhile, brought “All Things Must Pass,” which The Beatles seriously considered but ultimately set aside, and it ended up the title track of his solo LP nearly two years later. In addition to his songs “I Me Mine” and “For You Blue,” which made the cut for the “Let It Be” album, Harrison also presented the rollicking “Old Brown Shoe” and perhaps his finest ever composition, “Something,” which Lennon later called “the best song on ‘Abbey Road.'”

How fabulous it is that we’re given the opportunity to watch and listen to all these eventual masterpieces played in their earliest forms. It makes me appreciate the finished recordings all the more.

The best part of the original film was, without question, The Beatles performing live on the rooftop. The same holds true in Jackson’s documentary, where we get to watch, for the first time, the entire 43-minute performance uncut, during which they play “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “One After 909,” “Dig a Pony” and “I’ve Got a Feeling,” some more than once. Running parallel to this excellent footage is the hilarious storyline of the ineffectual London bobbies trying to shut it all down and being stymied by clever Apple staff who hold them at bay as long as they can.

I mustn’t forget to mention how much I really enjoyed the moments in the studio when, as a way of cutting through the lethargy, the band broke into vintage rock oldies like “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Kansas City,” reminding us that, down deep, The Beatles were just a great little rock ‘n’ roll band who became larger-than-life icons — icons that we’re still interested in watching and learning more about, 50-plus years later.

A few other observations:

Paul still comes across as the true workaholic of the group, continually pushing the others to get to work in order to meet deadlines. He acknowledges that he could be overly controlling, but without the late Brian Epstein around to be “the Daddy figure,” someone had to step up. It seems likely the project would’ve fallen apart without his “C’mon, boys” approach, and he deserves credit for that.

John was a listless, unenthusiastic, even disruptive presence at first, clearly showing the effects of his recent dabbling with heroin in the off hours. In the later sections of the documentary, he seems far more engaged, performing the material with renewed purpose, and even joking around with the others.

Yoko Ono, whose influence on John has been widely accused of breaking up the band, rarely left his side, but in her defense, she barely said a word in the sessions, at least in the film sequences we see. (Well, there’s one bit where the band is jamming chaotically, and she pitches in with her signature caterwauling, but that’s an isolated instance.) Paul, George and Ringo may have been less than welcoming to her, overall, but Paul is on record here at one point saying basically, hey guys, they’re in love, give them a break. “If we force him to pick between Yoko and us, he’ll pick Yoko,” he warned. And he was probably right.

George, let’s face it, was tired of being disrespected by Paul and John, and was tired of being a Beatle in general at this point, which led to his five-day departure that caused no small amount of concern among the others. But they coaxed him back, and he showed a more professional, congenial attitude and some fine musical chops on the ensuing recordings, both in the studio and on the rooftop.

Ringo? Well, frankly, he looked bored, tired and unhappy through most of the documentary. I imagine he was thinking, “This used to be so much fun. What the hell happened?” But he still offered occasional moments of levity as well, and was always ready to play when the time came. He had a well-deserved reputation for being a drummer who played to the song, contributing exactly what the arrangement called for. The chugging train beat he came up with for “Get Back” is a perfect case in point, as is the understated work on “The Long and Winding Road.”

The other important characters who show up in the documentary show their true nature, good or bad:

Billy Preston, as mentioned earlier, was a godsend, bringing a calming amiability precisely when it was needed, especially in the studio.

Producer George Martin, so pivotal to The Beatles’ recorded legacy since their beginning in 1962, is reduced almost to a bit player here, but he handles it with aplomb as the cool professional we’ve known him to be.

Engineer/producer Glyn Johns, who would build his own legacy working with The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Eagles and many others, seemed to be grateful just to be asked to participate, sitting amongst the band during playbacks and even during tense conversations. It was Johns, evidently, who solved the problem of where the band should perform the new songs to conclude the film by suggesting the rooftop of the Apple building.

Mal Evans — personal assistant, roadie, friend, all-around good guy — was all of those things for the band before, during and after these sessions. What a hoot to see him procure and then bang on an anvil for a run-through of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

My impression of Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg is that he was a rather annoying presence throughout. He chastised the band when they needed nurturing instead, and he kept pushing to stage the performance in Egypt or Libya when it was clear they weren’t interested. Perhaps he was just trying to do his job in a very trying situation, but I’m guessing The Beatles wondered if they’d made the right decision in bringing him in to direct the project.

Lastly, a heartfelt thanks to Peter Jackson for the time and tender-loving care he put into this extravagant undertaking. Beatles fans around the globe are eternally grateful.

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Here’s a Spotify playlist of the songs that comprise The Beatles’ “Let It Be” 1970 album, and a few of the early drafts heard in Jackson’s documentary.

The music to the story in your eyes

Posted on by brucehhackett

Periodically, I use this space to pay homage to artists I believe are worthy of focused attention — artists with an extraordinary, influential, consistently excellent body of work and/or a compelling story to tell. In this essay, I take a detailed look at one of the most important British bands involved in pioneering the challenging genre known as art rock, or progressive rock, in which elements of rock music and classical music merge. Thanks to a substantial fan base, plenty of critical praise, and considerable commercial success with Top Ten singles and #1 LPs in the US and the UK, they grew from modest beginning in the mid-1960s into a bonafide musical legend: The Moody Blues.

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The Moody Blues in 1970: Ray Thomas, Mike Pinder, Graeme Edge, Justin Hayward, John Lodge

Popular music is full of stories of rock groups that were lucky enough to have a #1 single almost right away but then unable to duplicate their success. The record label might stick with them for a year or two, but without sales, the groups lose their contracts and are never heard from again. You’ve no doubt heard such artists referred to as “One-Hit Wonders.”

The Moody Blues, who went on to become one of the most successful British progressive rock groups in history, came pretty close to being saddled with that dubious distinction. They signed a deal with Decca in early 1964 and, before the year was out, they topped the charts in England with “Go Now,” which also broke into the Top Ten in the US. Like much of their repertoire at the time, “Go Now” was a cover version of a rhythm and blues song recorded by an American soul singer, Bessie Banks, with lead singer/guitarist Denny Laine as the front man. But then they struggled unsuccessfully for nearly two years to come up with another hit.

Their 1964 #1 single, with Denny Laine on vocals

Decca was ready to drop them from the roster. But the group had built up a debt that Decca wanted to recoup, so they came up with a plan: Use the Moody Blues to create a rock music version of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” to help promote the label’s new subsidiary, Deram Records, and its new high-end sonic development they called Deramic Stereo. The band had little choice but to go along.

The band quickly reached the conclusion that the project wasn’t going to work. Instead, with support from their producer and engineer, they boldly proposed to write a cycle of original songs about “everyman’s archetypical day” (dawn, morning, mid-day, late afternoon, evening, night) which would then be expanded and connected by classical music passages, written and conducted by Peter Knight and recorded with a session “orchestra” that called themselves the London Festival Orchestra. To their everlasting credit, the label agreed.

“Days of Future Passed” cover, 1967

The album they got, “Days of Future Passed,” was fairly astounding. It is regarded as one of the very first concept albums, released in 1967 in the wake of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” and Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” neither of which utilized classical music structures and instruments as comprehensively as The Moody Blues did. Although Decca had little hope that the album would sell much, it became a surprise hit, reaching #27 in the UK on the strength of its two singles, “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon (#19 and #24 respectively).

It should be noted that the album tanked badly in the US at the time, and critics savaged it. Rolling Stone said, “The Moody Blues have matured considerably since ‘Go Now,’ but their music is constantly marred by one of the most startlingly saccharine conceptions of ‘beauty’ and ‘mysticism’ that any rock group has ever attempted. They are strangling themselves in conceptual goo.” Truth be told, I’ve found the album to be a bit tiresome to listen to all the way through, and the orchestral sections seem rather heavy-handed. But “Days of Future Passed” stands as a landmark LP in its creative blending of rock and roll arrangements with classical song structures and instrumentation.

In the UK, the album’s success gave the group the green light to continue their experimentation. Fortunately, Mike Pinder, one of the group’s founding members, was exceptionally well versed in the Mellotron, an analog antecedent to the synthesizer. It was designed as an organ-like device that used tape heads activated by the touch of keys, and tape loops comprised of the sounds of horns, strings and other instruments generating an eerie, orchestra-like sound. Pinder, who not only knew how to play it but also once worked for the company that developed and built them, was able to perpetuate the group’s use of orchestral sounds without the expense of hiring classical musicians for the recording process.

“In Search of the Lost Chord” cover, 1968

The next Moodies LP, “In Search of the Lost Chord,” revealed the depth of talent of the band’s five multi-faceted musicians. Pinder worked the Mellotron and added piano, harpsichord, autoharp, tambura and spoken vocals. Ray Thomas provided flute, oboe, sax and French horn and vocals. Justin Hayward, who had replaced Laine as their primary singer, played acoustic and electric guitar, sitar and keyboards. John Lodge handled bass, cello and vocals, and Graeme Edge chipped in on drums and percussion. All five were songwriters as well, giving the album a wonderful diversity within the group dynamic. Lyrically, the songs examined themes like higher consciousness (Thomas’s ode to Timothy Leary and LSD, “Legend of a Mind”), spiritual development (Hayward’s “Voices in the Sky”), quest for knowledge (Lodge’s rocker “Ride My See-Saw”) and imagination (Pinder’s “The Best Way to Travel”). All this proved to establish the group as darlings of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic while also showing robust sales in the mainstream, reaching #5 in the UK and #23 in the US.

Front-and-back album cover art, 1969

Over the next four years, The Moody Blues honed and embraced this formula, offering five rich, diverse, sonically engrossing albums that achieved ever-higher positions on the charts in both the UK and the US, and Canada and Australia as well. “On the Threshold of a Dream” and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children,” both released in 1969, cemented their reputation as an “album band,” with tracks that segued into one another. Their trippy album cover art further sealed the deal, giving their attitude-adjusted audience something to look at while the music played on. “A Question of Balance” in 1970 and “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” in 1971 brought The Moodies back to the singles charts with two vibrant Hayward compositions: the melodramatic “Question,” with its frenetic acoustic strumming, and my personal Moodies favorite, the hard-rocking “The Story in Your Eyes.”

The band toured incessantly throughout this period, and because some of their pieces proved too daunting to attempt on stage, they found themselves consciously writing tunes that could be more easily recreated in a live setting. Consequently, “Question,” “It’s Up to You,” “Melancholy Man,” “Dawning is the Day,” “The Story in Your Eyes” and “Our Guessing Game” from the 1970-1971 LPs became regulars on their concert setlist.

Re-release single of “Nights in White Satin,” 1972

An unusual thing happened in 1972. While the group’s accurately titled album “Seventh Sojourn” became the first to reach #1 on the US album charts, its two Lodge-penned singles — “Isn’t Life Strange” and “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” — made the Top 40 but were completely overshadowed by the re-release of “Nights in White Satin.” A disc jockey in Washington had been signing off with the five-year-old song, and listeners began clamoring for it. Interest spread to other US markets, and soon Decca/Deram chose to re-release it as a single. It not only reached #2 on the US Top 40, but also brought “Days of Future Passed” to #3 on the US album chart, giving The Moodies TWO albums in the Top Five in December 1972.

Non-stop touring and recording took their toll, and The Moodies chose to go on hiatus for a few years, much to the displeasure of the record label. Pinder had grown tired of England and relocated to California to start a new family there, and Hayward, under pressure to come up with new Moody Blues-like material, teamed up with Lodge and their longtime producer Tony Clarke to make “Blue Jays” in 1975, which reached a respectable #16 in the US and #4 in Britain, even without any noteworthy singles.

The whole band reunited in 1977 to record the so-so “Octave” LP with the below-average single “Steppin’ in a Slide Zone,” but Pinder was so dissatisfied with the result that he refused to participate in the subsequent tour and officially left the group.

Various solo projects by Hayward and others filled the gap for a spell, but by then it seemed the music scene had moved on. Audiences became more fragmented, craving disco, punk, New Wave and heavy metal.

“Long Distance Voyager” cover, 1981

In 1981, though, The Moody Blues came roaring back with “Long Distance Voyager,” a synthesizer-driven #1 pop/rock album carried by two Top 20 Hayward hits, “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice.” A triumphant return to touring, including songs from throughout their catalog, was made possible by the industry’s improved technical improvements in concert sound.

This album, and those that followed over the next decade (1983’s “The Present,” 1986’s “The Other Side of Life,” 1988’s “Sur La Mer” and 1991’s “Kings of the Kingdom”), bore only a little resemblance to the psychedelia and mind-expanding albums of the band’s prime, but the accessible melodies, crisp production and Hayward’s ever-present voice kept the band in the limelight. Indeed, Hayward’s catchy pop song, “Your Wildest Dream,” and its apparent sequel, “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” got as much exposure as anything they’d ever done. Still, there were precious few memorable deep tracks behind the singles, certainly a discouraging development to older fans.

The Moodies in 2002, L-R: Edge, Hayward, Lodge, Thomas

The band’s last time in the recording studio was in 2003 when they cobbled together a Christmas-themed album called “December,” which came and went quickly, like most seasonal records. The Moody Blues, augmented by additional performers on stage, continued performing well into the 2010s, with Hayward and Lodge carrying the load. First Thomas and then Edge were forced to reduce their participation due to health issues. Thomas ultimately died of cancer in 2018, and Edge passed away of cancer last week, effectively bringing the story of The Moody Blues to an end.

I can’t think of any other rock band that had the audacity to offer tracks of cosmic poetry, spoken rather than sung, on almost every album. “In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” said Hayward about Graeme Edge in the wake of his death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”

There’s a song on “Long Distance Voyager” that, while not one of their better efforts, perfectly describes how The Moody Blues are perceived these days — “Veteran Cosmic Rockers.” Their spacey music and intelligent lyrics mesmerized a sizable fan base during their 1967-1974 era, and their 1981-1991 period perpetuated The Moodies brand as a worthy rock band that absolutely deserved their long-overdue induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

As Edge himself put it in a 2008 interview, “I never get tired of playing the hits. I think we have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s your duty, and the audience’s right.”

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