It turned out to be the first time that they were not completely up to the challenge. Even without the trip to Africa, the brief was still unreasonable: Write and record a new album in front of rolling cameras and then get your live chops up to speed for a performance to be viewed by millions. They finally settled on the more practical but still strenuous plan of three weeks of filmed rehearsals and then a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row in London. Serious consideration was given to holding the concert in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia-not exactly what you’d call modest. The Beatles were simply too massive to do anything on a remotely small scale and soon enough, the project had morphed into a documentary that was to precede their first live performance in three years. It wasn’t a horrible idea, but it wasn’t quite feasible. Put on notice by Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones’ roots-adjacent ’68 masterpiece Beggars Banquet, McCartney suggested they try their own hand at a stripped-down, informal approach, one that would reconnect them musically to one another and re-establish their working man’s band bona fides. Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ self-appointed problem-solver, saw in this trend an opportunity to address a creative issue while exploiting a commercial possibility. Following Bob Dylan’s self-conscious rejection of psychedelic pageantry John Wesley Harding and the magisterial traditionalism of the Band’s first two releases, the hip move was a return to basics. And yet, against what feels like common sense, the Beatles reconvened just 10 weeks later in January, intending to find some way to top themselves yet again.įor a rock band in 1969, “getting back” was all the vogue.

The four-month sessions for the White Album had both tested relationships between the Fabs and emboldened each of them to pursue the possibilities of what might be accomplished alone. In 1967, their beloved longtime manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose, a casualty of Beatlemania’s ceaseless pressure cooker.

They had legal issues and Apple-the utopian multimedia company they had recently founded-was quickly devolving into an untenable boondoggle. Their fame was such that even having begged off touring three years previous, they remained far too well-known to walk comfortably down any street.

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