V04-T16b "...and I hope we passed the audition."

.....Finally, the end of cassette two.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 16b

• 00:13 [excerpt from "GET BACK", ad lib by John Lennon]
• performed by The Beatles [nominally]
• original source: LP LET IT BE Apple PCS7096 (UK) May 8th, 1970
• and my source: CD LET IT BE Parlophone CDP7 46447 2 (US) 1987

.....The full text of the quote at the end of the song "GET BACK" is, "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition". Actually, the working title of the album was also GET BACK, until the tapes were eventually selected and packaged as LET IT BE. Maybe a little timeline is in order.

1. In 1968 the Beatles take five months to record the double album nicknamed "The White Album" (THE BEATLES). Much of the time was spent writing and recording separately.
2. Jan. 1969 the YELLOW SUBMARINE album is released. One side contains songs used in the movie, some of them old outtakes, the other side has George Martin's soundtrack instrumentals from the movie.
3. Jan. to May 1969: In order to work more collaboratively as a band, the Beatles began recording jam sessions of oldies: rockers, R&B and blues like "BLUE SUEDE SHOES", "BYE BYE LOVE", "LAWDY MISS CLAWDY", etc. Eventually they were inspired to write original songs together again. Sessions were filmed for possible use in a documentary and the music was produced by George Martin and their engineer, Glyn Johns. The project was called GET BACK, as in "Get back to your roots".
4. The album version of "GET BACK" was recorded January 27th. The single version and its B-side were recorded on the 28th. Then, on the 30th, the famous rooftop concert was filmed. It would turn out to be their last public performance and ended with the song "GET BACK" followed by Maureen Starr (Ringo's wife) applauding, Paul McCartney thanking her ("Thanks, Mo!") and John Lennon goofing around with the theme of returning to their early days by giving the quote I repeated at the top of this list. That snippet was later grafted on to the end of the studio version for the album.
5. Apr. 1969 the 7" version of "GET BACK" b?w "DON'T LET ME DOWN" is released in UK. (May in US.)
6. May 1969 the GET BACK album is completed. For a cover photo, the band recreates their pose from the photo sessions that yielded the cover to LP PLEASE PLEASE ME in 1963. Unfortunately, returning to an earlier, simpler approach to playing and recording created an album that sounded much rougher and more raw than the band felt comfortable with and they cancelled its release.
7. Jun. 1969 the 7" version of "THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO" b/w "OLD BROWN SHOE" is released in UK and US.
8. Jul. to Aug. 1969 the LP ABBEY ROAD is recorded with George Martin "really producing" (his words). He apparently didn't care for the GET BACK experiment.
9. Sep. 1969 Lennon, Ono and Clapton go to Toronto for the live debut of Plastic Ono Band at the end of an otherwise 1950's nostalgia concert with Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and many others. Two weeks later LP ABBEY ROAD is released.
10. Oct. 1969 the 7" version of "SOMETHING" b/w "COME TOGETHER" is released in UK and US.
11. Jan. 1970 the song "I ME MINE" is recorded and a second version of LP GET BACK is proposed and rejected.
12. Feb. 1970 the LP HEY JUDE, a collection of non-LP singles and two songs from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is released in the US only.
13. Mar. 1970 the 7" version of "LET IT BE" b/w "YOU KNOW MY NAME" is released in UK and US.
14. Mar. to Apr. 1970 Phil Spector is hired to remix existing unreleased tapes to salvage the GET BACK project. He radically remixes a 1968 recording of "ACROSS THE UNIVERSE", leading many fans to believe the band had recorded a new version. He also uses the 1970 song "I ME MINE", but the majority of the material comes from the year-old GET BACK sessions.
15. May 1970 the film and album, both named LET IT BE, are released. There's also a derivative US-only 7" of album tracks "LONG AND WINDING ROAD" b/w "FOR YOU BLUE".

.....And that's the over-simplified account of the events. I left out the ugly legal tangles and television appearances. The excessive studio behavior (during the "White Album" sessions there were 70 takes of "HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN") inevitably led to the band's desire to simplify. The problem was that they weren't the same persons, the same musicians or the same band they were in 1962. It was as though the accelerated lives their fame brought them provoked a mid-life crisis at age thirty. Having got that out of their systems they went back home to their wife (Martin) and created one of their best albums. McCartney cited the release of the LET IT BE album in court documents regarding the dissolution of the Beatles as evidence that the band's direction and business decisions were being harmful to his career. It's not that bad, even if Martin was a better judge of the band's strengths than Spector had been.

.....My reasons for closing with this clip? Like most of these selections it was mostly instinct at the time. In retrospect, I knew that one mix tape is an impulse and two is a proposal. The second implies a series not implied by the first. Of course, when I made the first one I had no delusions that I could distill the character of my music collection to 90 minutes. By continuing the format I had insinuated that the was no time limit being imposed. Therefore, distilling the character of my collection becomes, theoretically anyway, a legitimate objective to pursue. And it would be an objective that would take more than four cassette sides to seriously address. This blog reaches its first anniversary this week and the past year, if you've been reading it, has been the audition. And if you come back, I guess that means "we passed".