50 years ago, the Beatles released Let It Be (1970), their last release after nearly a decade of leading one of the most innovative eras in music history. In this near- apocalyptic Year of Our Lord 2020, the resonance of something truly great coming to an end is more easily heard and contemplated. In this case, it’s a group long disbanded. It will likely never be hard to understand why the Beatles are still relevant to people who have heard them, and no doubt this particular album sounds fresh as ever upon weary, virus-fearing ears.
The history gets a little muddled here, as Let It Be was the Beatles’ final release, while Abbey Road (1969) was the Beatles’ last recording—a bittersweet but collaborative effort after the trainwreck that was the nearly ditched “Get Back” project. For a band that led the Summer of Love, wrote some of the most powerful love songs of all time and was known for its general kindness and humor, the sessions for Let It Be were cold and full of infighting.
After the divisive sessions for The Beatles (1968), the group was exploding in four different directions. Ringo Starr finally got a song on an album after quitting the band for a two week “vacation,” and many of George Harrison’s songs were sidelined to later appear on solo albums. John Lennon had fallen into Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney had become the group’s de facto leader. While the Beatles were considered the first truly democratic group, without a bandleader, Lennon seemed the part in the Beatlemania days, playing keyboard (“I’m Down” and “We Can Work It Out”) and experimenting with deeper songwriting inspired by a Bob Dylan obsession (“I’m A Loser” and “In My Life”). After Revolver (1966), there was a noticeable change in dynamics, and McCartney can take credit for the ideas for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Magical Mystery Tour (1967), and, finally, Let It Be.
The original idea for “Get Back” was a documentary film showing the Beatles rehearsing and then performing their first live show since their performance in Candlestick Park in 1966. Instead of Abbey Road, they would practice at Twickenham Studios, which ended up being a cold, cavernous space. Harrison quit, returning once the others agreed to take the sessions to Abbey Road. Harrison was the Beatle who had pushed the most to stop touring. Under the camera’s gaze and McCartney’s attempt to hold the group together, he found himself resenting his place as the youngest. The two songs he wrote for the album, “I Me Mine” and “For You Blue” were frustrating to record with all the jeering and nagging from Lennon and McCartney.
Being at their home studio provided some levity and brotherhood, and in this better mood the live performance’s location was chosen: the rooftop. Billy Preston’s keyboard work also smoothed things over, as the family got along better with a guest present. Though the sessions had been hectic, the concert itself was legendary and a surprise that birthed so many questions. They were back, with music that could be reproduced live. These new songs drew from their roots; “One After 909” was a song Lennon and McCartney wrote as teenagers that they never thought would make it on a record. Somehow, after all the fighting, the rooftop version had the feeling of a wild, carefree group of teenagers that German businessmen would have seen at the Kaiserkeller in 1960.
While Abbey Road is the finish that best aligns with what the Beatles represented, Let It Be is unique in that it shows the men the Beatles had become, stripping bare the basics of their dynamics and inner workings. McCartney’s “Two Of Us” can be about romance, just as it can clearly be about friendship, growing up with someone, and knowing that those memories will always be there. This contrasts with Lennon’s non-album single “Don’t Let Me Down,” about a love that is brand new, literally “a love that has no past,” though in this case the relationship is clearly romantic.
Harrison’s “I Me Mine” is very clearly inspired by his frustrations with the group, a succinct, cleverly caustic contemplation on ego. Starr, fresh off his first full songwriting credit for “Don’t Pass Me By” on The Beatles, was in a more tolerant state than Harrison, saving “Octopus’s Garden” for Abbey Road. Like their Beatlemania-weary fourth record Beatles For Sale (1964), the music shows a tiredness, while the material never feels sluggish or lacking.
Symbolically, Let It Be includes a cover of a traditional Liverpudlian folk song called “Maggie Mae,” harkening back to their early years where heartfelt homages were made when they didn’t have enough songs. It is one of the shortest tracks in their discography, sandwiching the crown jewel of the record with another unusually short track, “Dig It.” The joking manner in which both were recorded is really Lennon’s most lasting jab at McCartney on the record, preceding “Let it Be” at the end of “Dig It” by saying: “And now we’d like to do, ‘Hark the Angels Come.’”
“Let It Be,” for its story of hope through the toughest times, is a microcosm of the Beatles’ world at this critical juncture. It’s mainly McCartney’s song; Mother Mary references his mother who passed away when he was fourteen. Starr dutifully lays down the drum part. Harrison, the workhorse, recorded multiple possible guitar solos, the best of which appear on the single, album, and later “naked” versions— all of them are tearjerkers. Lennon’s distracted bass performance was thrown out and replaced by McCartney, making his background vocals the only indication he ever worked on the track.
This realization of an inevitable split takes place with another half of the record still to go. Though some were still recorded during the heated studio sessions, these songs end the album feeling like the group truly has gotten back to a more cooperative place. “I’ve Got A Feeling” may be the most obvious example, a mashup of two song fragments, McCartney’s bluesy ramblings and Lennon’s uncharacteristically lush “Everybody had a hard year…” response.
For someone new to the album, you would think “Let It Be” makes the most sense as a closer, but “Get Back” as the last track on the Beatles’ last release in 1970 was clever. The song fueled the entire idea that birthed the record, that brought on the epiphany that the band was at its end, and this placement is so Beatlesque: pure self-deprecating humor. It wasn’t Lennon’s idea, but it might as well have been, and he gets the last word in: “I’d like to thank you on behalf of the group and myself, and I hope we passed the audition.”
50 years later, this album is still an emotional listen for Beatles fans. While critically considered one of their least consistent works, if this was the boys at their worst, they still ran circles around everyone else. It is also a divisive record due to guest producer Phil Spector’s “overproduction,” adding strings and other embellishments to the title track and a few others, much to McCartney’s chagrin. Some changes are subtle: the album version of “Let It Be” has echo on Starr’s cymbals, which arguably adds another layer of otherworldliness. However, the orchestra and choir on “The Long and Winding Road” might have been what ultimately drove McCartney to quit for good. In 2003, he and Starr organized the release of Let It Be… Naked, which does away with Spector’s spectre and corrects the tracklist to what the Beatles originally planned.
If the Beatles were an entity beyond their four human components, this was the group’s mortal death, with Abbey Road as a spiritual rise. Spector was the mortician, doing what he thought was best to beautify the body provided. Let It Be may have been a harrowing project, but its statement of death and acceptance, delivered fully clothed or bare naked, make it an eternal funeral worth attending.
Article by Stanley Quiros