We turn now to the Let It Be album which I've been saying was generated out of the get back sessions from January of 1969, but released in May of 1970, the album itself going to number 1, of course on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time it was released, May of 1970, the news had already gone out that Paul McCartney had left the group and the Beatles were breaking up. The the album was originally going to be produced by George Martin, but during January when everything was going so wrong he gave up and walked away from the project. So Glyn Glyn Johns, who had been HIs had been one of the engineers at Abbey Road working with the Beatles, took over and kind of produced one version of what he thought the get back, as it was called then, album should be. And the Beatles were unhappy With that for. for, wha, for, I guess, for a variety of reasons. And then it was Phil Spector who you remember has kind of kept a relationship with the Beatles. He was on the plane when they came over the first time in February of 1964. He was on the plane, with the Beatles. Re, re, remained friendly with the group, Phil would have been seen as kind of a senior A senior figure to them. Even though he wasn't that much older than them, he'd had hits before they'd had hits. He was an American producer who was a big guy in the music business, or at least had been a few years earlier. So, he took the thing over. Sorted through all the hours of tape and choose the songs he wanted to use and the takes he wanted to use and put it on And put together the album that we know as "Let it Be." He added string overdubs and voice overdubs and things like that. And that was the source of some controversy in the Beatles' camp. Especially with Paul. Who did not like the song especially the long and winding road, and the way that Phil added extra voices and strings to that, and that really, really, really upset Paul, was almost like the straw that broke the camels back, I think as far as he was concerned. There were for years many other possible versions of this album using different takes and different songs. So if you're somebody who knows the Beatles bootleg market, for example. There are other kind of combinations of different takes and different songs. The Beetles themselves. Or the remaining beetles anyway. Released their own version improved on with that I think they must have believed. Their improved version of Let it Be called Let It Be dot, dot, dot naked. In 2003 and that was mostly so. So Paul could take all the Phil Spector stuff off it. And have those songs the way he thought that they might originally be. Or shoudl have originally been released. So in some cases he used different takes, and in some cases he used the same takes. But he took the overdubs off. But anyway, the funny thing is that Paul, you know, Paul would know best how he wanted the record to sound back in 1969. When we listen to, Let It Be, I don't know about you, but All I hear are tunes with missing parts [LAUGH] you know. I mean, maybe you don't like the Phil Spector parts but it's, it's, you miss them when they're not there because you've been listening to that record sounding that way for so long. So so it goes. Future generations probably won't have that problem because they won't have been listening to it For thirty years before they hear a different version. Interestingly on this album Billy Preston guests on piano and organ. That apparently was part of George Harrison coming back after he quit. Was to bring Billy Preston into the fold to have him play Maybe to have a friend there [LAUGH] in the group while he was around these other Beatle guys. The way George has explained it is, you know, when you bring a guest in everybody's on their best behavior, and it takes some of the acrimony out of the relationships. And in fact Billy Preston did act as a kind of a softening had kind of a softening influence on the Beatles relationship and they, they treated each other a little bit better, at least when he was around. The Paul songs on the Let It Be album are, The Two of Us, interestingly an A, A, B, A form. And really in the old fashioned Beatles kind of way, A, A, B, A with a partial reprise. So it's A, A, B, A, B, A. A song that, at least formally, looks back, toward what they had been doing earlier. Remember, the whole idea here Was to get back to their previous sort of rawer sound and not all this big productiony kind of stuff. Let It Be, a contrasting verse-chorus form. We're going to talk about that in one of the song closeups, so I will save my remarks on that, as well as The Long and Winding Road. In AABA form. In this case, AABA withy a partial reprise of, of, BA. This tune, the Longer Winding Road, as I've said before, exists in, 2 versions. 1 without the strings and the chorus. And then you might want to listen to the most recently released version of it. But as I said before, it was the way in Phil's, the way that Phil Spector produced this up that really caused Paul McCartney to get so upset About about the group and the way things were going. Then there's the song, Get Back. Which deals with supposedly, according to Paul deals with immigration. Maybe it deals with Yoko and all sense of Yoko, you know, get back, everybody's got their own ideas here. I think in many ways it can be kind of related to Lady Madonna stylistically. It's a contrasting verse chorus song. And again, here's another song that exists in 2 versions, like a lot of this this this Let It Be stuff depending on, on, on which version you get, the album version or the single released version. The John songs we have Dig a Pony is a great one and we'll talk about Dig a Pony in just a minute in the song closeup, so I'll save my remarks for that. Across the Universe is a great tune on this album, but it was actually recorded in February of 19 68, and so he rem, may remember that we were talking about The White Album and the song Julia and, and some of the other sort of, John Lennon songs. I sort of, placed across the universe back sort of, in that era because that's really when it was when it was recorded. Again it one of these kinds of songs that this rev, reveals John at his most sort of, vulnerable and You know, peaceful compared to some of the more sort of angry or, or ironic things that he was doing at about the same time. Another song, One after 909, is a song from John and Paul's earliest days together. Not surprisingly, that's an A A B A form with a partial reprieve. So A A B A, A B A. People like to tell the story, I don't know if it's exactly the first song they ever wrote together but, that's kind of the way the story goes. Again, getting back to your roots, going back and grabbing a song that goes back to when you were sort of skipping school and writing songs in Paul's living room, you know. This is, this is the spirit of what was happening in January, 1969, trying to get back to what they What they were before a don't let me down and not included on the album a but was the B side to get back and record it under about the same time as contrast to verse chorus song with a bridge and the ballad of John and Yoko. Which was recorded a little bit later than the Get Back project in April of '69, a single that wasn't on the album. And that's a modified A-A-B-A form that tells the story of, obviously, of the wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. That one having a rather interesting form that goes A-A-A-B AA, so it's like an AABA form with an extra A on either side and then a tag. Of the George songs, we su, we see on on this album there's the George Harrison song "I Me Mine," which unlike all the rest of the stuff, was recorded in January of 1970. The stuff we've talked about so far it was not recorded in January [UNKNOWN] but January of 70 and so in fact was recorded after Abbey Road when they were thinking about fleshing out the let it be album. We'll talk about this one in a song close up in the next video. For you blue another song that was recorded in January of 1970 another George Harris song It's a old school, 12-bar blues. A simple verse form. You might look for the sort of small A, A, B, fray structure you often get in blues. Say that, you know? Here's, here's a verse. Then say that verse again. Then say a different thing as oft, so often happens in a 12-bar blues structure. And then Old Brown Shoe, which is recorded in April of '69, about the same time as, Is John's Ballad of John and Yoko and ended up being the B-side of that single. And that's an AABA form. AABA, BA, a partial reprise. Of the group tracks, we get a little bit of the song Dig It. There's just a What is there, maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds of "Dig It" on the actual album. The original version is said to have lasted about 5 minutes. So the silliness you get there went on for some time. There's "Maggie May", a traditional song the band used to sing back in the early days in Liverpool. Very, you know, a tune that everybody in Liverpool would have known. "I've Got a Feeling" Is a song that John and Paul wrote together and I'm going to talk about that in the song close up the follows that's that's may be the most musically ambitious song on the record nears one way in which we can see something happening in get back that really harkens back to their more sort of progressive musical tendencies. So even though the project was really about getting To a simpler thing with I've Got a Feeling they they continued to be a little bit more experimental. And then of course the song You Know My Name, which is not on the album, but is the B-side of Let It Be, and as I said before, was recorded in the Summer of 67 so right after, it, most of it had been done right after the Sgt. Pepper sessions with some overdubs done in the April 69 A sessions a that produced a both old brown shoe and the ballet of John and Yoko so having done overview of this let it be album let's dig in. To 3 songs in a little bit more detail in the next video. Let it Be, I Dig a Pony, I Me Mine, I've Got a Feeling. Actually that's 4 songs. We'll talk about that next.
