On Get Back

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• On Get Back
• Lorrie Moore (bio)

The Beatles: Get Back directed by Peter Jackson (2021) The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon (2021) (consulted: Lennon Remembers by Jann S. Wenner; All We Are Saying by David Sheff; Love And Let Die by John Higgs; George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman; George Harrison: Living in the Material World directed by Martin Scorsese)

Early Beatles songs, when one gives thought to them, are often rockabilly numbers: “Love Me Do” (their first hit) or “I Saw Her Standing There.” While often considered baby boomers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were of course born earlier than that (part of the mysteriously named “Silent Generation”) and came of age in the 1950s. Their influences were Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. (According to Jann Wenner, Lennon sometimes claimed that no [End Page 295] song by anyone ever surpassed “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”) This inspiration is seen repeatedly in the long, amusing breaks John and Paul take in Peter Jackson’s extraordinary 2021 documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, as Lennon and McCartney appear to seek refuge from composing their own material on a brutal deadline (in the winter of 1969 they had less than four weeks to finish a dozen songs for a TV special) and instead begin to horse around, launching merrily into “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Roll Over, Beethoven,” or even “The Harry Lime Theme” from The Third Man.

Yet two of the Beatles’ most haunting ballads (a year before the composition of “Yesterday”) were released together early in 1964: “And I Love Her” and “If I Fell.” The former is widely attributed to McCartney (Lennon referred to it as McCartney’s first “Yesterday”) and the latter belongs to Lennon who sings the main melody. (On YouTube one can find a group of mourners at Central Park’s Strawberry Fields all singing “If I Fell” in grieving chorus around Lennon’s memorial.) Listening to the two ballads, one might be forgiven for assuming that they both had the same singularly brilliant composer. Which, in a way, they did. Credited as Lennon-McCartney compositions, as most of the Beatles’ songs were, the sound was indisputably theirs. Both pieces have beautiful switches into open minor chords and a subtle cha-cha meter underneath. They were released on a single forty-five but neither was really a B side, though the B side was dealt to Lennon, the Beatles’ usual practice; McCartney typically had the A side. (George Harrison had the A side once, with “Something,” on a double A release with Lennon-McCartney’s “Come Together,” the latter eventually the target of a lawsuit from Chuck Berry. “Everybody was nicking from everybody else,” says McCartney to Paul Muldoon in the recent edition of The Lyrics, a huge two-volume beauty, which, although it leaves out “Come Together,” still does not quite fit on a coffee table.) [End Page 296]

In later years, however, McCartney and Lennon lightly squabbled over who in 1964 had contributed what to “And I Love Her” and “If I Fell”—the bridges (the middle eight) seemed most in contention. “We both had our fingers in each other’s pies,” Lennon said after they had broken up. McCartney later acknowledged that Harrison—who received no attribution at all at the time—had contributed the stirring four-note opening to “And I Love Her”—a bit of flamenco Harrison cooked up on the spot. Despite John and Paul’s intense collaboration, rooted in their early closeness as creative adolescents who had both lost their mothers—were Lennon and McCartney “hurt” into songwriting? Muldoon, in The Lyrics, believes so—the group was destined for rupture. (Ringo, then George, were the first ones to walk away from the band, later returning: Ringo to a roomful of flowers from George, George to a contrite Paul and John.) Rumors of the Beatles’ difficult and financially risky breakup began early. Among Beatles fans there was much discussion of Lennon and McCartney’s ostensible alienation from each other (Yoko Ono was sometimes blamed; sometimes the Maharishi). There was even, briefly, a conspiracy theory that Paul had died. Was...