Let It Be (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Let It Be, the twelfth and final studio album by the Beatles, arrived in record shops on the 8th of May 1970, nearly a month after the world had already learned the band was finished. That sequencing matters. The music came out after the obituary. Listeners held in their hands something that felt less like a release and more like evidence. How did the Beatles' last chapter unfold as a filmed experiment, then a shelved album, then a salvage job by a producer two of them did not want? The story begins not in a recording studio but on a cold January morning in 1969, when a camera crew arrived at Twickenham Film Studios, and the most famous band on earth started trying to remember why they loved playing music together.

• 2. A Band Under Glass

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  Rehearsals at Twickenham began on the 2nd of January 1969, and the cameras were rolling from the start. Apple Corps executive Peter Brown later characterised the atmosphere as a "hostile lethargy". John Lennon had been arrested on drugs charges the previous October and was, along with Yoko Ono, in the grip of heroin addiction; Ono had also suffered a miscarriage. Lennon kept his distance from his bandmates and dismissed Paul McCartney's ideas. George Harrison had just returned from time in the United States, where he had jammed freely with Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York and felt a musical warmth there that was absent at Twickenham. Harrison brought several new songs to the sessions, and Lennon and McCartney rejected some of them. When the band rehearsed McCartney's "Two of Us" on the 6th of January, McCartney and Harrison clashed over Harrison's guitar part. During lunch on the 10th of January, Harrison berated Lennon for his detachment, and journalist Michael Housego reported in the Daily Sketch that the exchange turned physical. Harrison denied any punch-up in a subsequent interview for the Daily Express on the 16th of January, saying simply: "We just fell out." That same afternoon, Harrison told the others he was leaving the band and said, as he walked out: "See you round the clubs."

• 3. Moving to Savile Row

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  On the 15th of January, the remaining members met and agreed to Harrison's conditions for returning. The live concert plan was dropped. They would move from Twickenham to Apple Studio, in the basement of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, and be filmed recording an album instead. The move exposed a practical problem immediately. Recording equipment designed by Lennon's friend "Magic" Alex Mardas had been installed in the basement, and it was not fit for purpose. Producer George Martin, who had been a marginal figure at Twickenham, arranged to borrow two four-track recorders from EMI Studios. He and engineer Glyn Johns prepared the space. Sessions at Apple began on the 21st of January. Harrison had met keyboardist Billy Preston outside the Apple building on the 22nd of January and invited him in, and Preston's presence lifted the mood. Preston went on to contribute to most of the recording and also became an Apple Records artist.

• 4. Forty Minutes on a Rooftop

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  Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn noted that the idea for a rooftop concert was conceived just days before it happened, and who first suggested it remains uncertain. Billy Preston recalled it was Lennon. According to director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the band was undecided about the concert until the last minute on the 30th of January, when Lennon broke the silence and said, "Fuck it, let's go do it." The four Beatles and Preston reached the rooftop of 3 Savile Row at around 12:30 pm. Pedestrians on their lunch break heard music and stopped in confusion. Word spread, and crowds gathered in the streets and on nearby rooftops. Police officers climbed up to the roof just as the band started the second take of "Don't Let Me Down". The concert ended with the last note of "Get Back". Three of the tracks eventually chosen for the Let It Be album were drawn from that afternoon's performance.

• 5. Two Mixes Nobody Wanted

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  In early March 1969, Lennon and McCartney summoned Glyn Johns to Abbey Road and gave him free rein to compile the album. Johns booked time at Olympic Studios and completed a final master tape on the 28th of May. That version, titled Get Back, included a jam called "Rocker", a brief take on the Drifters' "Save the Last Dance for Me", and a four-minute edit of "Dig It". A cover photograph taken by Angus McBean on the 13th of May, in the interior stairwell at EMI's Manchester Square headquarters, was chosen as a deliberate echo of the band's 1963 debut sleeve. The Beatles rejected the album. A tape copy of the acetate later reached the United States, where radio stations in Buffalo and Boston played it in September 1969. By then, the band had already recorded and released Abbey Road, and the Get Back project sat in limbo. On the 20th of September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and manager Allen Klein that he wanted "a divorce" from the group. Johns prepared a second mix between December 1969 and January 1970, adding "I Me Mine", recorded fresh on the 3rd of January 1970 because no multi-track recording of it existed. The Beatles rejected this version too.

• 6. Phil Spector's Intervention

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  Lennon and Harrison invited American producer Phil Spector to take the abandoned Get Back sessions and make them releasable. Spector chose three tracks from the rooftop performance and included "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae", which had been improvised in the studio. He applied orchestral and choral overdubs to "Across the Universe", "I Me Mine", and "The Long and Winding Road". For "Across the Universe", he used an edited version of a 1968 recording, played back at a slower speed, which dropped the key from D to D flat. McCartney had conceived "The Long and Winding Road" as a simple piano ballad; Spector's version surrounded it with strings and a choir. McCartney was furious. Lennon took a different view. In his Rolling Stone interview later known as "Lennon Remembers", he defended Spector by saying: "He was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit - and with a lousy feeling to it - ever. And he made something out of it. He did a great job. When I heard it, I didn't puke." Producer George Martin, who received no credit on the final album, reportedly suggested the sleeve should read: "Produced by George Martin, over-produced by Phil Spector."

• 7. Reception and Aftermath

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  Let It Be topped the album charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and the single "The Long and Winding Road" also reached number 1 in the US. Critical reception was another matter. NME's Alan Smith called it "a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop." Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn acknowledged the musicianship but accused the band of poor judgment for handing the project to "the most notorious of all over-producers". In 1971, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special, and McCartney personally accepted the award despite his objections to Spector's work. That same year, the Beatles won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score for the songs in the film. Rolling Stone ranked Let It Be at number 86 in its 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; the position shifted to number 392 in 2012 and number 342 in the 2020 edition. McCartney's long-standing dissatisfaction led to Let It Be... Naked in 2003, which stripped out Spector's embellishments and altered the tracklist. Then in November 2021, director Peter Jackson released The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+ as a three-part series built from the original January 1969 footage, and a super deluxe edition of the album followed in October 2021, including the original 1969 Get Back mix that Glyn Johns had prepared and the band had twice refused.