Don’t Let Me Down: Somebody at Disney Needs to Have a Hard Day’s Night - Westerkamp
Monday, December 06, 2021
I started writing this to complain about how disappointing the first four hours of the Disney docu-series on The Beatles was when I realized I didn’t watch all four hours because I fast-forwarded through much of the second part because it was so inane.
The Beatles Get Back, the holiday Beatles special was so stupid that I wondered if Keeping up With the Kardashians might have been more interesting than this over-hyped Disney special. The promotion claimed it would be six hours of never-before-seen footage (found in a vault) of The Beatles rehearsing for a planned TV special, which everyone knew would have been the bands’ final performance.
The promotional hype was pure P.T. Barnum or maybe more accurately more like Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s vault, which of course turned out to be (like Geraldo) empty. Thirty hours of never before seen film footage of the Beatles rehearsing for a television special, edited down to six, the best parts, with more than fourteen new songs and a concert.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBut wait there’s more! In order to turn the hype-machine volume up to eleven, somebody at Disney managed to enlist Lord of the Rings super director Peter Jackson to put his name on it and “produce” the three-part special scheduled to stream starting on Thanksgiving day for your holiday viewing pleasure.
For a confirmed Beatles fan since 1964 before they appeared on Ed Sullivan this sounded too good to pass up. I subscribed to Disney Plus and was off to the races even though I’m not otherwise keen on most of Disney entertainment fare.
The first part had some interesting stuff including the story of what they were planning to do and the challenge of coming up with fourteen new songs. The viewer gets to see the dynamics of how the group interacts with each other and the roles they play. As someone who has played in a few bands over the years, I found it interesting that Paul McCartney seemed to do most of the heavy lifting as far as writing and playing new material. He introduced Get Back! and developed the music, chorus and the basic story of the song. John played some guitar riffs and vocals but the creative drive came from Paul. George’s job was to develop the guitar riffs to fill out and embellish the melody and chorus and sing harmony, but he had to wait until the song was more fully formed to do that. Ringo just banged on the drums here and there.
Part one had some revealing parts but it had a lot of fly-on-the-wall video of Beatle banter that became more annoying than interesting and frankly, just self-indulgent goofing around that came out because they knew they were being filmed.
The highlight of Get Back part one was near the end when George Harrison announced he was leaving the band and walked out. Pretty shocking stuff but without fireworks or shouting – just (paraphrasing) “I quit and I’m done”. Then there was footage of John and Paul acting strange, joking around as if George wasn’t serious and it was left hanging.
That should have been an intro to an interesting part II, but that was not the case. Part II started with a lot of nonsensical conversations with Paul and John (Ringo hardly says anything) and various producers and managers and (strangely) very little from George Martin. It was obvious that no one had much influence on Paul and John who ran the show. It was like watching a dysfunctional family that was up against a deadline of a scheduled TV special with few songs being developed and no one doing anything.
After a few days, George Harrison returns and there’s a meeting that irons out issues enough that the group can get back to work preparing for the TV special. But from there the film just records a lot of pretty uninteresting banter. The viewer doesn’t get to see any of the process of creating songs. John and Paul (especially John) just goof around. When the banter got stupid – playing for the ever-present camera – I just skipped forward hoping for something more compelling. Also, as a musician and music lover, there was no music to enjoy in this so-called special. I was wondering, is this all that Peter Jackson had to work with? Apparently so.
So part two ends with them talking about how they think they are ready to do the concert on the rooftop of Abby Road that we’ve all seen clips of. The planned TV special was in the dustbin and they had presumably, a bunch of songs to play out the musical mystery tour of the Beatles.
Get Back part III
Get Back, Part III is where Disney delivers on the best of the thirty hours of video discovered in the vault. The promotion that started months before the Thanksgiving holiday release promised extraordinary, intimate footage of the Beatles rehearsing for a special event. And the great director Peter Jackson was producing it!
Now the viewers would get to see how the Beatles made their music as only they could. The stage was set for a musical event that would wrap up the group’s unmatched body of work before breaking up.
But the whole idea of recording the making of a TV concert of their final performance had fallen apart. If there had been a TV special, it would have been the focus and the fly on the wall video in parts I and II would have stayed in the vault. But the band wasn’t able to come up with fourteen Beatle-worthy songs to give a credible send-off to arguably the most prolific, innovative and popular rock and roll bands ever. They were looking at a disappointing blunder in the making. Sadly, the first two parts of Disney’s specials confirmed that.
If part III failed to live up to the hype, it was none the less, better. There are more interesting vignettes of the group practicing as they settled on material for what would be the famous concert on the rooftop of the Apple Records building. Ringo is working on the melody of Octopus’s Garden on the piano and gets stuck. George Harrison steps in to help him find the notes and to resolve the next chords.
Paul McCartney’s kids are in the studio and again you see that Paul leads to process of writing the songs, particularly Get Back And Long and Winding Road. He spends a bit of time coaching Ringo on how he thinks the drums should come in.
John is lead on Don’t Let Me Down, one of the handful of songs they will perform on the rooftop concert.
There are more segments of the group goofing around. They play some early classic rock including Blue Suede Shoes and Shake Rattle and Roll, which seems to get them into a musical groove that keeps their interest in working away at the new material.
Billy Preston, who dropped in to visit the group in part II is recruited to play in the concert and contributes greatly to the rhythm and melody of Get Back His high-energy keyboard work drives the song especially the musical bridge. Preston is the fifth Beatle. One wonders what it would have been if he hadn’t dropped in.
There are a number of distractions including George working on the melody and lyrics to Something, and he gets help from the group on the words. It’s interesting to see the pattern where Paul and George craft the melody and chord changes and figure out the lyrics after. They practice Don’t Let Me Down several times which begins to get tedious and I just fast forward through it.
Then there is a key meeting where they are listening to playback tapes with George Martin and they realize they only have seven songs not fourteen, squashing any idea that they can make an album. So there would be no special event and no album which they had hoped to issue to put an exclamation mark on the end of the Beatles extraordinary career.
The disappointment was so great because, from the beginning, the Beatles were able to produce an extraordinary amount of hit songs. They would issue at least two hit albums a year - unmatched in the music business. No group or individual in rock history has come close to the Beatles in creating chart-topping hits year after year. Few have been as innovative and varied in the style and sound of material.
The rooftop concert is memorable but sad because it was a poor substitute for what they originally set out to do. Because of the lack of material, they repeated songs, which few realized because video of the full event hasn’t been available.
Somewhere in the Disney organization is an executive or two that should lose their jobs. In greenlighting this show they knowingly duped the public and their customers. Peter Jackson needs to explain himself. He lent his name to this project even though he did not shoot one frame of the video footage. He glued it together and not all that well. He hyped it in promotional spots on TV and the Internet. I’d hate to have to watch the footage he didn’t use.
If Jackson cared about quality, he should have told the suits at Disney – “folks, sorry to tell you but you don’t have anything that special. Let it be.
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