'Let It' Be Proves That George Harrison Never Quit the Beatles

Peter Jackson's new restoration of Michael Lindsay-Hogg's original Beatles doc reveals the Fab Four (mostly) happy together -- including George

May 16, 2024

THE BEATLES DOCUMENTARY LET IT BE, released in 1970 and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, has been given the Peter Jackson treatment. Using state-of-the-art technology in the same way Jackson transformed the dozens of hours of original and mostly unused Lindsay-Hogg footage plus over a hundred hours of audio into the monumental eight-hour, 2021 documentary Get Back, Jackson has gone back and made Lindsay-Hogg’s original film brighter and clearer with crisper sound.

Jackson has not tampered with the original documentary -- which until now has not been widely (or legally) available since its release -- as constructed by Lindsay-Hogg. The new version, currently streaming on Disney+ (there are no plans I know of to make it available for purchase on DVD), plays out the same as the original, whose release in spring 1970 immediately followed upon the news that the Beatles had broken up.

Never intended to be a valedictory, the movie wound up being seen in the context of the crackup of the most popular rock group of all time. Viewers examined the film, which captured the band in rehearsal over a few weeks in January 1969, for hints of dissension. A short exchange between Paul McCartney and George Harrison over their differing approaches to arranging songs in rehearsal, particularly regarding Harrison’s guitar parts, was seized upon as evidence of unrest or dissatisfaction within the group, particularly on Harrison’s part, leading to wholesale overestimation of Harrison’s role in the eventual breakup of the band. Otherwise, Let It Be contained almost nothing that would hint at unrest or dissatisfaction within the group. Rather, the movie presents the Fab Four enjoying making music together even while Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras were rolling, capturing the proceedings for a potential film or TV special.

PETER JACKSON’S EIGHT-HOUR GET BACK was a phenomenal glimpse inside what made the Beatles tick – and what ticked them off – in January 1969. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute Let It Be quietly captured the foursome as a working band, enjoying jamming with each other on original songs and rock ‘n’ roll and soul classics and collaborating on the writing and arranging of new songs that would eventually find a home on their next two albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be. Harrison-watchers see a George fully committed to working with the group and a group that welcomed his participation and his songwriting and instrumental contributions. The Lindsay-Hogg film shows Harrison working closely with Ringo Starr on the writing of “Octopus’s Garden.” (If I’m not mistaken, in a different take from the one that was included in Get Back). The film gives equal time to all four Beatles, both alone and engaging with each other, devoting their efforts and creativity to making the best possible music. Far from being ignored, Harrison is given plenty of face time in the movie, introducing the group to newly written songs including “I Me Mine” and “For You Blue” – with Lennon contributing lap-steel guitar on the latter – and leading them through the old R&B chestnut by Smokey Robinson, “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” a version of which the Beatles included on their second album. Yoko Ono is indeed glued to John Lennon’s side for most of the rehearsals, but her presence appears to be relatively innocuous.

Viewing the new Let It Be now in context with Peter Jackson’s Get Back, which included lengthier scenes and dialogue that did reveal some occasional frustration among the Fab Four – particularly on the part of Paul McCartney, who expressed unhappiness that the role of rehearsal manager had fallen totally to him – one struggles to understand how the myth developed on the basis of Let It Be that Harrison was so frustrated he quit the band, thereby setting in motion the breakup of the group the following year. First of all, no footage of or reference to Harrison’s five-day hiatus from the rehearsals was included in the original Let It Be. Nor were any scenes included wherein the musicians discuss and debate what the purpose of these sessions were in the first place. As we know from Get Back, there were a handful of ideas about what the group would be working toward that month. Lindsay-Hogg had the wild idea that it would culminate in a concert at a 2,000-seat amphitheater in a Libyan desert. Also bandied about was the possibility of inviting members of the public into a rehearsal room for a live TV broadcast. Different members of the group felt differently about each idea, often changing their minds.

Eventually, they all came around to agreeing to stage an unannounced concert on the roof of the Apple building in downtown London, which served as their business headquarters, clubhouse, and recording studio. Harrison was indeed the last holdout for not going up on the roof (he had just generally been burned out by performing live with the Beatles and preferred they continue working as a studio-only band), but he acceded to the idea after it was clear that the consensus was to perform on the roof. And, as Let It Be shows, once he was in, he was all in, applying himself to the task at hand with the same dedication and devotion he gave to the rehearsal sessions leading up to the rooftop concert. In fact, when the London police arrived on the roof and demanded that the Beatles stop playing, it was Harrison who took it upon himself to not allow the Beatles to be bullied: Let It Be captures him switching on the guitar amplifiers that Beatles assistant Mal Evans had turned off by order of the police.

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WE HAVE LONG KNOWN THAT HARRISON did leave the recording sessions early in January 1969, saying “I’m leaving the band” as he packed up his guitar and left, seemingly without any provocation. Something was eating away at him, and as I discuss in my forthcoming book, Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison, this something could well have been events in Harrison’s personal life rather than what was happening at Twickenham Studios. This is not to say that Harrison did not experience inner conflicts about what was going down at Twickenham or felt long-suppressed frustrations about his role in the band bubbling up to the surface. In one of several interviews I conducted with Michael Lindsay-Hogg – who was in the room the whole time at Twickenham – for my book, the director pretty much affirms these interpretations of what went down there.

When Harrison said, “I’m leaving the band,” he was being provocative and maybe, perhaps, calling their bluff. The fact, as we can all see when we watch Get Back, is that the rehearsal sessions up to that point were largely meandering and pointless – although, for us as fans and viewers, still a lot of fun. Harrison forced the issue, insisting in ongoing negotiations over the course of the next few days that the band move its efforts to Apple’s own, more intimate and comfortable recording studio (Twickenham was a cavernous, cold barn typically used for making movies) and drop all talk of traveling to North Africa by way of the Queen Mary to perform in the desert. The result once Harrison returned to the fold, as we see in both Get Back and Let It Be, is a foursome newly rededicated to working together (especially with the addition of keyboardist Billy Preston), all together in a room at the same time (which had not been the case since the 1966 sessions for Revolver) rather than working separately on their parts (as was increasingly the practice beginning with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and especially in the recording of The Beatles, aka The White Album). This was the “getting back” in the song “Get Back” that lent its name to Jackson’s documentary.

It was Harrison’s insistence on focusing on the careful creation of recordings befitting the Beatles, and the decision to once again work with George Martin at the helm as producer (which was not the case for the recording of the songs that wound up on the album Let It Be), that helped steer the Beatles to the recording of what became their final studio album, Abbey Road, often regarded as their greatest success, and an album on which Harrison rose in status to become a full-fledged co-equal to Lennon and McCartney, having written and sung that album’s two best songs, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” songs which to this very day rank at the very top of the list of the most-streamed Beatles songs.

As I write in my book, and as we can see in Get Back and Let It Be, George Harrison never quit the Beatles. The Beatles quit him.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of the forthcoming Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison, to be published by Oxford University Press on October 1, 2024, and which is currently available for pre-order at your favorite independent bookstores and at all the major online book retailers.

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