Paul McCartney and the search for the hit song
Hi, friends!
Not long ago, Peter Jackson's three-part documentary about The Beatles and the creation of their 1970 album Let It Be was released on Disney+. If you haven't seen it yet, here's a trailer.
While I'm not much of a Beatles fan (or even much of a Peter Jackson fan), I got pretty curious about this documentary after reading author Ted Gioia's tweet. Hit that link and you'll be treated to a two-and-a-half minute clip from the documentary. It's nothing flashy, just Ringo and George sitting idle while Paul strums away at his guitar.
Gioia writes:
I’ve never seen anything like this on film before. Paul really has nothing at the 30 second mark—but 45 seconds later he’s got the makings of a hit single.
The documentary, which tracks the Beatles' efforts to write an album's worth of new songs in about two weeks' time, building to a live show, is filled with tension. Several times, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was with the band, filming the documentary Let It Be, says that the live show might be the band's last. Everyone involved is stressed-out and tightly wound.
In the clip, a caption appears, setting the scene:
Feeling the pressure of their approaching deadline, Paul searches for new song ideas.
What is about to emerge will become the Beatles' next single.
While that text is on the screen, Paul really is just roaming all over his guitar and humming (maybe even moaning?). Gioia's right: Paul doesn't seem to have much of anything at all. But about ten or eleven seconds in, you can see him find a shred of the song he's traveling toward. By thirty seconds, he's stringing a few of those shreds together; by forty-five, he's trying new shreds and discarding them when they don't quite fit. But at a minute-twelve, he stomps his foot, two-three-four, and sort of starts over, and there it is: the song he's been looking for. He doesn't have the words, but he's got the tune, the rhythm of it. It sounds like a song now.
George picks up on it as soon as it happens, and moves his hands to his guitar and begins looking for his own road through the song. And Ringo, who has just been sitting there, sort of listening and taking everything in—Ringo does a lot of listening in this documentary, at least as far as I've watched—starts clapping out a rolling beat for the others.
About a minute-forty, Paul has words:
Get back Get back Get back to where you once belonged
More of the words come soon after, and as the clip winds down, we're no longer watching a musician wandering, searching for something; we're seeing a group of people gathered around an idea, each playing a key part in bringing it into focus.
Gioia, in a followup tweet, added:
There’s a widespread view that creative people wait for moments of inspiration. But McCartney, at age 26, is literally able to force these moments to happen. What a skill! And note his confidence & absorption. This is what the ‘flow state’ looks like in real time.
In "10 lessons in productivity and brainstorming from The Beatles," Tom Whitwell pulls apart moments of the documentary to find the creative principles on display. And sure, he relates several of these back to his consultancy business, but that doesn't diminish the value of the lessons. He highlights the way the band resolves disagreements about process, how they throw out work (by bringing something better to the table), how they stumble into good ideas completely by accident (and know how to embrace them). It's a good read, too.
On some levels, Get Back is an excruciating documentary. It's four hundred sixty-eight minutes long. (That's almost as long as the theatrical cuts of all three Lord of the Rings movies.)
But another perspective is that the length, even the tedium, is a sort of gift. Whether you love the band or not, it's undeniable that their contributions to music are significant, that many of the songs they wrote changed music and culture. How does a band do that? Well, if the documentary is any indication, through a lot—a lot—of boredom, hard work, frustration, collaboration, patience, intuition... Watching all of those moments stack up reveal so many important lessons about the creative process. We'd have a shorter film if Jackson cut out all the waiting around, the arguments, the exhaustion—but we'd have missed how the art got made.
I'll fess up right now, I'm not finished watching it. I'm not even finished with part one just yet. I'm just taking it in slowly. But boy, I'm enjoying it. I love watching people create art. It's never a tidy process, and there's so much to learn from every artist's particular mess.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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