How Paul McCartney’s attempt at bringing The Beatles closer together led to their Let it Be fallout

What began as a sincere attempt from Paul McCartney to bring The Beatles back together ended up as one of their most fractured albums. Even after the end of the band, once John Lennon had told George Harrison, McCartney, and Ringo Starr, that he was done, Let it Be raged on. McCartney found himself throwing his weight behind protecting and preserving not just the result, but the continuity of The Beatles as a four-piece. Between the unhappy final mix and the involvement of Allen Klein as manager, McCartney ended up leaving The Beatles. Part of the reason is a longer-running set of problems, but the breaking point, it would seem, is the very album he suggested they make to bring the four closer together. Animosity prevailed in the Get Back and Abbey Road recordings, though little of this fragmentation can be heard on the albums directly.  

A desire from McCartney to push the group back into a simpler rock and roll formation was attempted. For that, he must be praised. Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary is a masterclass, a true document of understanding for the fractured feel throughout The Beatles. Whatever opinion held of Yoko Ono, of Eric Clapton and George Harrison’s friendship, of the frustrations McCartney felt in being tethered to the group, there is a rising goodwill in these recordings which perhaps does not appear as much as first thought on the documentaries charting the studio work. A scrapped live performance, a sudden rooftop gig which is now legendary, these are the two bookends of a band doing everything they could to reinvigorate their sound and working relationship.  

Quotes from the immediate aftermath of The White Album suggested The Beatles were keen to get back to their roots. Harrison suggested their next project would get back to a sound as “funky as we were in The Cavern [Club],” while Lennon suggested the post-White Album projects would hear the group “remember what it was like to play.” Honest intentions going into the recording dissipated quickly. McCartney perhaps took it a step too far when he shared his desire to play live with the group again, and though a TV special was approved, it did not feel at all within the realm of possibility. Harrison would later air his concern at performing a sudden show on the roof, to think he wanted a live broadcast of his work from the Twickenham Studios before that would be madness.  

But what we can gauge from all of this, is that The Beatles began those Get Back sessions with honest and optimistic intent. Half of the group were excited to be continuing, Starr had returned from his brief departure to Sardinia, and McCartney had a desire to bring the band back to their rock and roll roots. All of this points to an idyllic recording scenario which turned troublesome rather fast. In a quieter space, The Beatles could have worked slowly and assuredly with one another. The trouble with intrusive cameras, early starts and a rigid schedule aiming for a live show is that the pressure is very much on. In making that pressure present once more, McCartney and the rest of the group buckle almost immediately. 

Where the Get Back sessions were intended to rekindle the simplicity and straightforward works of The Beatles pre-psychedelics, what they found was difference between the group. Irreconcilable changes in their musical interests. It would be all the better in the long run, after all, who can knock the tremendous works each member would make post-split? But for the recordings itself, it meant the goodwill was undone immediately, and the proposed plan from McCartney to rebuild The Beatles as fresh faces of pop (as he would do by himself with his solo works and Wings) did not come to fruition. There is sincerity and honesty in what McCartney had wanted from these sessions, and the initially positive attitude of the band cannot be denied, but there is a sense that this positivity was taken too far.

It is one thing to put down a new album of rock and roll, another entirely to do it under the dissection of documentarians, of celebrity visits from Peter Sellers, and while dealing with hang-ups and jealousy brought on by Yoko Ono’s presence. Influence is the key here. The personal lives of The Beatles and the interests which would drag them this way and that when it came to their solo works are at play here. For Harrison, who had been jamming with The Band and Bob Dylan (of which there are some incredible bootleg tapes available), his focus was on the Americanised sound, the liberated feel of religion too played its part. Lennon and Ono were reeling from the latter’s miscarriage and heroin addiction, and it meant the Imagine songwriter was dried up for material. A heavier burden on McCartney, then, and the usual sidelining of Starr, unravelled the group before they even truly got started.  

To get anything out of these recordings is a miracle; to get two albums of sincere quality is divine. Klein can be criticised for many things; he was a businessman first, after all. But his push for Let It Be to be a project of its own is reassuring, however temporary. McCartney would oversee the moment The Beatles could have made it back from the clutches of a psychedelic sound which, in the years to come, would develop far beyond anything else they could have afforded the genre. They had checked it off the list, and their move to experimenting with medleys and recording style was the right route to take. But changing times also meant McCartney, even after dealing with the explosive end to a band he had spent a decade with, was tasked with protecting the final albums.  

Let It Be in its original form is a wonderful piece of work, even with the additions that went against the wishes of McCartney. The Phil Spector production is still hammy and holds a faux sentimentality, but it was popular for the times. Everyone from Leonard Cohen to Harry Nilsson was fond of the sound, and it made a hard fight for McCartney during the fallout and eventual end of The Beatles. There is, too, the suggestion that outsiders were what The Beatles needed. Fresh perspectives from new artists who would go on to not only cement their sound within the latter days of the discography, but keep the band whirring. Relationships did improve when Billy Preston laid down keys, but as Harrison later suggested, these additions were the only way to keep the peace.  

Spector and Klein were outsiders, too, and following the same logic as Preston and the desire to keep The Beatles going once Harrison left by inviting Eric Clapton, there is an acceptance that fresh voices must prevail in the creative war. It was a poor move to say the least, and Let it Be… Naked, does well to counter the unhappy McCartney mood, a dark period which he ended up in after trying to bring the band back together. It is one of the more heartbreaking moments in The Beatles’ history, but there is no denying that, in the early days of those recording sessions, and for a period at Apple Studios, The Beatles were fighting to be closer together than they had before. But they got too close, and found they had drifted apart both personally and influentially. What followed was a period of some incredible solo works, rightfully reappraised after release. Can McCartney be thanked for that? He had wanted the band closer than ever, and the opposite occurred. Whatever the case, the death knell for The Beatles came as soon as the band agreed, finally, they were going to get back in the studio.