Get Back session - January 6, 1969

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Event
Date January 6, 1969
Short description Get Back session.
Location Twickenham Film Studios

Third "Get Back" session. George gets in a fight with Paul. John's diary for this date read, "Got up. Went to work. Got home. Fucked the wife." Paul, who saw the group performing poorly in the sessions, decided to begin directing the sessions. When George complained that there would be thousands of screaming women, and they wouldn't hear themselves, Yoko had a suggestion. She suggested that they should play to a "conceptual audience," in an empty auditorium. None of The Beatles like this idea. Paul suggested they play at the Roman Coliseum with baying lions, to which George Martin added "and women in chains!" Paul, reminding that there were only twelve days until when the live show was scheduled, suggested that they should spend more time on rehearsing and less time on jamming. George was frustrated that Paul would not try any of his idea, later saying "Paul had a fixed idea in his brain as to how to record his songs. He wasn’t open to anyone else’s suggestions and it became stifling." Immediately, this turned into argument, with Paul saying, "I’m trying to help you, but I always hear as though I’m annoying you… I’m not trying to get to you. What I am really just trying to say is ‘Look lads… should we try it like this?’" Paul then brought up an incident during the recording of Hey Jude that made George very angry. In this incident, George wanted his guitar parts to be turned up to answer back to te vocal lines, but Paul would not let him. This made George yell, "Yeah, okay, well I don’t mind. I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it." As part of a cmpromise, Paul decided that each member should direct their own songs. Paul later said, "I think George got pissed off with me coming in with ideas all the time. I think, to his mind, it was probably me trying to dominate. But that wasn’t what I was trying to do… I started to feel that it wasn’t good to have ideas." George later said, "And the cooperation there contrasted dramatically with the superior attitude which for years Paul had shown towards me musically. In normal circumstances, I had not let it bother me and, to get a peaceful life, I had always let him have his own way, even when this meant that songs which I had composed were not being recorded. When I came back from the States I was in a very happy frame of mind, but I quickly discovered that I was up against the same old Paul… In front of cameras, as were actually being filmed, Paul started to ‘get at’ me about the way I was playing." About the rehearsals, George Martin recalled, "the thing that John had insisted upon from the start was that he didn’t want any of the old recording rubbish [overdubs]. And so, they rehearsed and we just recorded. Endless hours of recording. But we never got anything really spot on, as good as it should be, in spite of take after take… We’d get up to sixty-two takes of one track alone. So in order to get everything together and organised, Paul would be rather over-bossy… which the others didn’t like. But it was the only way of getting them together." John recalled, "Paul had the mistaken impression that he was going to rehearse us. But of course by that time we’d been playing together for about twenty years or something, and we just couldn’t get into it. So anyway, we laid down a few tracks, but nobody was really into it at all. It was just such a very, very dreadful feeling being there in Twickenham Studios at eight o’clock in the morning with some old geezer pointing a camera up your nose expecting you to make good music with coloured lights flashing on and off in your face all the time. To me the whole thing ended up looking and sounding like a goddam bootleg version of an 8mm home movie, so I didn’t want to know about it. None of us did."

[edit] Recorded On This Date

[edit] Source

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