Get Back

• 1. Introduction

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  "Get Back" began not as a song but as an offhand riff played on a Höfner bass at Twickenham Studios on the 7th of January 1969. Paul McCartney was noodling, the cameras were rolling, and what came out of that unstructured jam would become the Beatles' 17th number one on the Billboard Hot 100, matching Elvis Presley's record. It would also become the final song the Beatles ever performed live in public. But the path from that aimless riff to that rooftop moment was anything but straightforward. The song passed through dozens of takes, a controversial set of protest lyrics, a last-minute recruitment of an old friend, a confrontation with the police, and a posthumous editing job that blurred the line between studio and stage. How did a throwaway bass groove become the closing track of the final Beatles album? And what was John Lennon really doing when he made that crack about passing the audition?

• 2. From Riff to Record

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  The melody took shape when McCartney was working out the rhythm and harmony of a primary riff on the 7th of January 1969. Searching for lyrics to fit, he reached back to a line from George Harrison's song "Sour Milk Sea": "Get back to the place you should be." McCartney had played bass on Jackie Lomax's recording of that very song just a few months earlier, so the phrasing was fresh in his mind. He bent it into something new: "Get back to where you once belonged."

  By the 9th of January, McCartney brought a more developed version to the group, with the "Sweet Loretta" verse already close to its finished form. In a press release he wrote to promote the single, McCartney described the process with characteristic lightness: "We were sitting in the studio, and we made it up out of thin air... we started to write words there and then... when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to roller-coast by."

  In Playboy magazine in 1980, Lennon gave his own assessment of what they had made. He called it "a better version of 'Lady Madonna'. You know, a potboiler rewrite." Lennon also noted that he believed there was "some underlying thing about Yoko" in the lyrics, claiming McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang the refrain "Get back to where you once belonged."

• 3. The Protest Lyrics

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  Before the song settled into the version the world knows, it passed through a phase that the Beatles never intended to release. During the Twickenham rehearsals, while the "Get Back" chorus was already fixed, McCartney improvised a series of temporary verses. These lyrics took aim at the anti-immigrant views of Enoch Powell, a Member of Parliament whose racially charged speeches, in particular the Rivers of Blood speech, had recently drawn heavy media attention.

  The improvised lyrics addressed attitudes toward immigrants in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Lines included "don't need no Puerto Ricans living in the USA" and "don't dig no Pakistanis taking all the people's jobs." This version circulated in Beatles folklore and became known as the "No Pakistanis" version. Later in the same session, immigration came up again in a second improvised jam that the group called "Commonwealth," which included the line "You'd better get back to your Commonwealth homes."

  The satire was pointed, but the material never made it past rehearsal. McCartney abandoned the protest verses and the song moved in a different direction. Those recordings survive in bootlegs and are examined in detail in the 2021 Peter Jackson documentary, which gave the public an unprecedented view into those Twickenham sessions.

• 4. Billy Preston and the Sessions

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  Billy Preston arrived at the sessions on the 22nd of January 1969. He was an old friend of the Beatles who happened to be in England for television appearances, and the group invited him to sit in. Preston took a seat at the Fender Rhodes electric piano, and his presence immediately changed the atmosphere in the room.

  The group, now with Preston on keys, recorded about ten takes on the 23rd of January. They returned four days later, on the 27th of January, and made a concerted push to nail the song, recording about 14 takes. By that point, the arrangement had grown to include a false ending and a reprise coda. After many attempts, the band broke to jam some older material and then came back for one final try. That performance, Take 11, was considered the best yet: musically tight, punchy, and free of mistakes, though the song finished without the intended restart. On the session tape, George Harrison can be heard remarking, "we missed that end." That take became the basis for the version heard on the Let It Be... Naked album.

  The line-up for the released version was McCartney on lead vocal and bass, Lennon on lead guitar and backing vocal, Harrison on rhythm guitar, Ringo Starr on drums, and Preston on electric piano. Harrison normally played lead guitar, but he had temporarily quit the group on the 10th of January. That left Lennon to work out and record the lead guitar part, making "Get Back" one of the rare examples of Lennon featured prominently in that role.

  On the 28th of January the group tried to capture the quality of the previous day's best take, recording several new takes each with the coda. None quite matched Take 11, but the coda from those sessions was later edited onto the master take to produce the version ultimately released as the single.

• 5. The Rooftop and the Police

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  On the 30th of January 1969, the Beatles climbed onto the roof of Apple Studios on Savile Row in London and performed for the last time as a live band. The audience below was mostly office workers who had wandered out onto the street. "Get Back" was performed in full three times during that rooftop set.

  The third performance ended in a way that nobody had planned. Police arrived, responding to complaints from nearby office workers. After speaking to road manager Mal Evans, the police persuaded him to switch off Lennon and Harrison's amplifiers. Harrison promptly switched them back on, insisting the band finish the song. McCartney turned the interruption into one final piece of performance, addressing the invisible authorities directly: "You've been playing on the roofs again, and that's no good, and you know your Mummy doesn't like that... she gets angry... she's gonna have you arrested! Get back!"

  After the final notes faded, the crowd applauded. McCartney looked toward the audience and said, "Thanks, Mo", a nod to Maureen Starkey's cheering. Lennon then stepped forward and delivered the line that would end the album: "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we've passed the audition." That rooftop performance of "Get Back" was later released on Anthology 3 in 1996, while the first two rooftop takes were not released until January 2022.

• 6. Stitching the Single Together

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  Producing the final releasable version of "Get Back" required careful editorial work that went against the original spirit of the sessions. The original concept had been to capture the band playing live, without studio trickery. What emerged was something more constructed.

  On the 4th of April 1969, producer George Martin and engineer Jeff Jarratt created a mono mix at EMI's Room 4. McCartney was unhappy with it. On the 7th of April, he and Glyn Johns went to Olympic Studios to create new remixes for the single release. Their edit combined the master section from Take 11 of the 27th of January with the "best coda" ending from the 28th of January sessions. The join was so precise that the result sounded like a single continuous take, achieving the conclusion the band had never quite managed in real time.

  Apple Records released the single on the 11th of April 1969, paired with "Don't Let Me Down" on the B-side. The packaging was deliberately plain: a black sleeve with a cursive-style font reading "The Beatles on Apple." Neither Apple nor Capitol Records produced a picture sleeve. Apple's print advertising showed a photo of the band alongside the slogan "The Beatles as Nature Intended," a signal that the sound of "Get Back" was meant to echo the group's earlier style.

  It was the Beatles' first single release in true stereo in the United States. In the UK, the Beatles' singles remained monaural until the following release, "The Ballad of John and Yoko."

• 7. Chart Records and Legacy

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  "Get Back" entered the official UK singles chart on the 23rd of April 1969 at number one, a position no Beatles single had debuted at before. It held that spot for six weeks of a 17-week chart run. In the United States, it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 the week ending the 10th of May and reached number one two weeks later, staying there for five weeks. That number one made it the band's 17th chart-topper on Billboard, drawing level with Elvis Presley's record of 17 number ones.

  The song reached the top position in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Australia, France, West Germany, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium. It was the only Beatles single to credit another artist, "The Beatles with Billy Preston," at the group's own request.

  Phil Spector later remixed the song for the 1970 Let It Be album, folding in studio chatter from just before the 27th of January master take and replacing the single's coda with Lennon's rooftop quip. The single's chamber reverb effect was dropped from both the Spector remix and the 2003 Naked version. Then in 2006, George Martin and his son Giles produced a version for the Love album that wove in elements from "A Hard Day's Night," "A Day in the Life," "The End," and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)," treating the song as a canvas for the Beatles' entire recorded history.

  McCartney performed "Get Back" atop the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater on the Late Show with David Letterman on the 15th of July 2009. When Letterman asked whether McCartney had ever played on a marquee before, McCartney replied simply, "I've done a roof."