How "Get Back" Made Me Love The Beatles (All Over Again)

I was pretty sure I’d be the last person to give a damn about “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles documentary. Eight hours watching the band trapped in the studio making “Let It Be,” an album which never spoke to me in the first place? No thanks.

Long story short: I did. And I’m glad: The film touched me in ways I could never have predicted, filling me with an unexpected surge of wistfulness and gratitude. More than the songs the band were working up in this final chapter, it’s the revelation of John, Paul, George and Ringo as human beings that stays with me. They finally become real people, ones I feel I’ve known my whole life, despite never actually meeting any of them. And with this comes a soft reckoning: I see how much their music shaped me, even as the era of starry-eyed optimism it invoked quietly ends.

I was born in 1971, the sweet spot to inherit an older sibling’s Beatles LPs. And that’s exactly what happened: When I was just on the cusp of five, my half-sister deposited her albums with me, the American ones with rainbow-colored bands around the labels. I can’t remember the first time I heard “With a Little Help from My Friends,” but I’ll never forget the effect it had on me. I was in need of a little help myself then: Tragedy had just ripped through my family, and there was no one to help me make sense of it all. Ringo’s clear and reedy baritone signaled that—along with its challenges—life just might have its moments of balm, too.

It was difficult to tell whether The Beatles were real people or make-believe. If that sounds strange, remember I was on the leading edge of the first post-Beatles generation. Unlike my sister—eleven when Beatlemania hit the U.S.—I couldn’t hear the band interviewed on the radio, watch them at televised press conferences, read about them in the newspaper. Those magnificent record sleeves aside, our relationship was purely sonic. And it’s only now that I see what a gift this was. Because some of the jackets called out each song’s singer, I felt like I knew them, and they me. When I close my eyes, I can touch on the feeling songs like  “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home” elicited: A sort of half-thrilled, half-dreadful sense of ascending the rollercoaster. I knew the music would touch on the unexpressed grief and bewilderment swirling through my household, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The thing was, I didn’t want to: Though the experience was nearly painful in its intimacy, I always felt better afterwards. The same went for the sonic treatments, the way heavy compression made the music seem to surround me, how those sinister snippets of backwards guitar beckoned and teased. They suggested there was something beyond what I saw with my own two eyes, something that couldn’t merely be described to me. I would have to go find it for myself. I couldn’t see it, but I could damn sure hear it.

But by the era depicted in “Get Back”—January of 1969—those sonic excursions have largely ended. Maybe that’s why nothing after “Sgt. Pepper’s” really grabbed me. After the cauterizing events of the previous year—one my straight-laced father described as “feeling like the world was ending”—the mood is darker, less optimistic. The Beatles haven’t performed live in over two years, and Paul and John—the two principals, a point the film makes abundantly clear—can’t agree on a direction forward. Should they make an album or a film, or stage a concert? Executives from Apple, their record company, talk about the “fantastic entertainment package” the combined offerings would be. A different era, a different Apple.

They do all three, eventually, but getting there is painful. If you still harbor fantasies The Beatles were superhuman (or, Paul aside, even extraordinary musicians), “Get Back” will deflate this notion. The group dynamics—how the chief songwriters treat their bandmates as supplementary figures—are painfully evident. At moments, Paul’s face betrays his impatience, dictating George’s parts to him and correcting his work: “Is that grammatical?” he asks, looking over the lyrics to “I Me Mine.” George and Ringo are alternatingly laconic, dreamy, and apathetic.

Then there’s the music. Much has been made of the sequence in which Paul wills “Get Back” into life, implying he and the band could simply spit out classics at will. But having spent far too much time in rehearsal rooms and soundchecks—admittedly, none of it creating songs half as memorable—I respectfully disagree. This is simply how collaborative songwriting works, and I saw nothing particularly unusual about The Beatles’ process. What is remarkable is the way the band—in particular John and Paul—sang together, how their Everlys-by-the-Mersey harmonies infuse all their work with an essential humanity. There’s a brief but delicious shot in which John and Paul hit a sustained harmony, then clip it off in crisp unison; John’s fierce but fleeting grin is priceless.

There are dozens of such moments scattered throughout “Get Back,” ones which reveal the band in ways I never dreamed possible. There’s also a deep dose of sadness. We know, but the band doesn’t, that the party is over. An era of optimism and dash—one in which they can dream of bringing Eastern religion to the masses, or George can wear cowboy boots that appear to be made from a child’s quilted bedspread—is about to end. The Beatles have topped every chart and broken every record, but those incredible memories are just that: memories. It’s all coming to an end, and none of the band is even thirty years old. Worst of all, we know the appalling senselessness of John Lennon’s murder is fewer than a dozen years away.

Do you need to watch “Get Back”? I can’t answer that. It’s certainly not a good introduction to the band; more a protracted, painful, and breathtaking goodbye to their meteoric career. For me, the film brings the legend of The Beatles bumping gently down to earth. Observing them as actual people—inspired, flawed, funny, boring, occasionally wasted—is a Great Oz moment: There really isn’t anything behind the curtain. Strangely, it makes me love them all the more, and I’ve spent the weeks since reacquainting myself with their jaw-dropping catalog. They were real people who found themselves at the center of an impossibly impactful era, and often—not always—did something remarkable and lasting with that privilege. I’m just so grateful I caught a bit of their stardust.