Good Morning/Good Afternoon/Good Evening. Song of The Day •Get Back, The Beatles 19th British single, Get Back was the first release by the group from their 1969 back-to-basics phase. Get Back is Paul. Thats a better version of Lady Madonna. You know, a potboiler rewrite. John Lennon All We Are Saying, David Sheff The song began as a satirical and critical look at attitudes towards immigrants in Britain. McCartney intended to parody the negative attitudes that were prevalent among politicians and the press. Race issues evidently played on McCartneys mind during the Get Back sessions. He led The Beatles through Commonwealth, an unreleased improvised satire loosely based on British politician Enoch Powells notorious Rivers of blood speech. The most infamous of the unreleased Get Back versions is known as No Pakistanis, and contained the line Dont dig no Pakistanis taking all the peoples jobs. While mostly unfinished, the song did include a mumbled rhyming couplet which paired the words Puerto Rican with mohican. Various demo versions of this early version were recorded, one of which contains the following lines: Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis Living in a council flat Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is Wont you tell us where youre at? Despite being satirical in nature, it didnt prevent accusations of racism being levelled at McCartney for years to come, after the Get Back bootlegs became public. When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to Get Back which were actually not racist at all - they were anti-racist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats - you know, living 16 to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of Get Back, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about too many Pakistanis living in a council flat - thats the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis... If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favourite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown. Paul McCartney Rolling Stone, 1986 The origins of Get Backs chorus are unknown, although George Harrisons song Sour Milk Sea, demoed by The Beatles in 1968 and later recorded by Jackie Lomax, contains the refrain, Get back to where you should be. John Lennon, however, later claimed that McCartneys words were directed towards Yoko Ono. I think theres some underlying thing about Yoko in there. You know, Get back to where you once belonged. Every time he sang the line in the studio, hed look at Yoko. Maybe hell say Im paranoid. You know, he can say, Im a normal family man, those two are freaks. Thatll leave him a chance to say that one. John Lennon All We Are Saying, David Sheff The Beatles eventually realised that their intentions could be misconstrued, and the story of Jo Jo and Loretta Martin evolved. Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and theyre not, let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous, I like doing that in my songs. Paul McCartney Many Years From Now, Barry Miles Whatever the true meaning, Get back served as a neat summary of The Beatles back-to-basics musical intentions, and the song became the title track of what they intended to be their next album. Although two different versions of the LP were compiled by producer/engineer Glyn Johns, the songs were eventually remixed by Phil Spector and released as Let It Be. Get Back was released as a UK single in April 1969 and the following month in the US, as the follow-up to Hey Jude. Paul McCartney wrote the following for the press advertisements: Get Back is The Beatles new single. Its the first Beatles record which is as live as live can be, in this electronic age. Theres no electronic whatchamacallit. Get Back is pure spring-time rock number. On the other side theres an equally live number called Dont Let Me Down. Pauls got this to say about Get Back: We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air... we started to write words there and then... when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to roller-coast by. P.S. John adds, its John playing the fab live guitar solo. And now John on Dont Let Me Down: John says dont let me down about Dont Let Me Down. In Get Back and Dont Let Me Down, youll find The Beatles, as nature intended. youtube/watch?v=en-liwDGzaw
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:00:00 +0000
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