Sunday, December 12, 2021

Get Back. Thanks for the memories.

 

‘I'm surprised they ever recorded any music,’ said my husband, Al, watching Get Back, Peter Jackson's startlingly evocative film of The Beatles' 1969 final sessions. (Streaming on Disney+) Admittedly, at times I too was wondering why they didn’t just get on with it. But they didn’t create like that.

I watched through intermittent washes of tears prompted by floods of memory and emotion. Experiencing Get Back was like finding some part of my own childhood and adolescence that I didn't know had been filmed.

The Beatles mostly comprised the soundtrack to my formative years. In the playground in Sheffield, England, my playmates and I pledged our undying love for either John, Paul, George or Ringo, a different Beatle depending on the day. This group stirred passions we couldn’t understand. My sister and I would wait expectantly to dance to The Beatles on Top of The Pops on the tiny black and white TV in the corner.

My adulation migrated with me to Melbourne, along with 'insider knowledge' that I imagined gave me some sort of referent power, clout as I navigated the alien dynamics of the Australian playground. You see, my uncle Bob had once been a bouncer at a Beatles' concert in Hull in England’s north in the early sixties, something I'd share when we children started comparing notes on pop stars. And who was Col Joye anyway? Some Australian girls were going on about him. For me it was the Beatles and Mick Jagger. I was eight.

I've never bought a Beatles' LP record. Too expensive. The records in our home were more Frank Sinatra or Dave Brubeck Quartet back then. No Beatles’ albums, but dad did buy She Loves You on a 45-rpm single, which we played repeatedly on the radiogram.

I’d learned all the words to Yesterday from the radio.  It was my first solo singing performance. Our grade 4 teacher, Mr Evans, the charming sadist, ordered his charges to either sing a song or get 'the cuts'.  (Imagine that today!) He'd line us all up at the front of the room and give us the choice. A single cut of the strap on your open palm or sing. No brainer. Other children’s post-strap grimaces suggested Mr Evans wasn't holding back. Me? I enjoyed singing and an audience and, do you know you can keep singing Yesterday for a very long time if you order your verses just so? I think Mr Evans had to threaten to strap me to make me sit down. Wonder if there's any connection between my solo rendition and subsequent bullying.

During the next four years, I evolved with Beatles' music, my hormones pulsing to the rhythm. The Beatles were simply there, usually on the radio. Mum called me inside from my play one Saturday morning in 1966 to listen to the satellite broadcast of All You Need is Love. ‘They’re making history,’ she told me in a wobbly voice, probably missing her home in England.

Aged thirteen, I attended a party for all the instrumental music students at my school. Old Mrs Florimel, my violin teacher, generously held the party in her gloriously shabby two-storey house – long since demolished - on a hill overlooking the Maribyrnong River. Someone had brought along the Abbey Road album which played continuously in the garden throughout the afternoon on a portable record player. Something, the George Harrison song, seemed to have floated down from heaven, the most sublime song I'd ever heard. Hormones? Perhaps, but it's still an extraordinary number.

1969. Sobbing in the schoolyard when we learned that The Beatles had broken up. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to feel grief. Remember how long life seemed and how grown up you felt at thirteen? How could this have happened?

All these memories fired as I watched Get Back. Jackson's three-part film is genius in its production values. The events seem to be happening in real time, all over again and yet we know they aren't. John, Paul, George and Ringo - and Yoko – don’t get me started! - are living in the minute. Obliviously carefree, apart from having to create an album and documentary from scratch in limited time. They smoke and drink through their days with no concept of what's written in the next few chapters of their lives. Ah, the overflowing ashtrays of youth in the sixties. Don't you wish you could still just smoke and drink with impunity?

My mind was in overdrive throughout the film. I didn't want it to end.

But this is the thing that bowled me over: the film allows us to witness the birth of songs that have become part of the canon. We see, for example, Paul playing the chord progressions of The Long and Winding Road before he's even thought up the words that we all know so well. This happens many times in the film. How is art created? You have nothing, you work at it and then you have something that didn't exist before you brought it into being. And The Beatles were well-practised, gifted artists.

Al, sitting next to me on the couch, was also a huge Beatles' fan. Watching the joking, chat, interruptions and delays as The Beatles worked on their songs, he became frustrated, wondering whether they'd ever accomplish anything. But I was transfixed, secure in the knowledge of the fabulous musical outcomes. My deep delight and satisfaction came from observing the creative process, despite the limpet-like presence of Yoko Ono. (It puzzles me, incidentally, that no one banged this apparently deeply insecure woman over the head with Maxwell's silver hammer. Too soon?)

Sure, I love lots of music, but The Beatles were my coming-of-age band.

 

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