The Beatles: Get Back, Part 3: Up On the Roof

If I had to pick the single best moments in the nearly nine hours of the superb, one-of-a-kind documentary that is Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back, it would be Paul McCartney saying "whew!" smiling, doing a dance, and continuing the concert, after turning and taking note of the robotic cops  (or whatever they call them in London) intruding into the Beatles' rooftop performance.  The same cops on the ground floor had been threatening arrests and claiming they weren't making threats before they demanded to go up to the roof.  Good thing they don't carry guns like the police do here in America.

Widening the focus a bit, the whole rooftop concert was a splendid, high-octane tour-de-force, finally shown in Jackson's movie in its full extent, making the original film of the concert that we've been watching all these years seem two-dimensional in comparison.  That original movie has flashes of the energy of that rooftop performance, which takes full and gorgeous expression in Jackson's documentary. 

It may have been the Beatles' finest moment.  "I've Got a Feeling," which I always really liked, is now in my top handful of all-time favorite Beatle songs -- the energy in McCartney's voice, the oh-yeahs, the nos, Lennon's bit, the instrumentation, is all just extraordinary. 

It certainly was their final moment in a public performance.  Some of the earlier part of Part 3 tells us why:

• Paul says to George Martin -- with Paul not sure that going on the roof the next day was the best thing, John saying it was, and George Martin saying they had to respect deadlines -- "that's why I'm talking to John not you".
• A little later, Paul's still not sure about the roof, George Harrison says he'd rather not do it, and Ringo declares they should do the roof concert.  Ringo's opinion carries the day.  But Paul is quietly a little dismayed with Ringo's opinion, or maybe that he has to put up with it.
• George tells John he wants to do an album of just his own songs, to see "what they all sound like together".  George winds up doing none of his songs on that roof.

But there are many beautiful moments to be treasured in the footage before the concert:

• George Harrison comes over to Ringo to help him write his song "Octopus's Garden".  It's a wonderful, redeeming moment.
• And then George Martin gets interested in the song.  Soon we see John on drums on the song.  In previous parts, we saw Paul and George on Ringo's drums.  In an interview conducted much more recently, Ringo lamented that every time he stepped out for a cup of tea, he'd return to find someone else in The Beatles on his drums.  But it's all endearing,
• Great jamming with Linda's daughter Heather in the studio, and it's great to see how each of The Beatles relate to her.
• Paul really groovin' and enjoying working on one of George's songs.
• George Harrison telling John he took John's advice, given some ten years earlier, that when you start writing a song, you should stay up and finish it.

So there was lots of love and good energy between the Beatles, even with all the problems, and the rooftop concert was magnificent.  So why didn't they stay together?  There's clearly even more to the story than Peter Jackson showed us in his documentary.  But watching it changed my perspective on The Beatles forever, largely for the better, and I'll be forever grateful Peter Jackson made it.

And here's "It's Real Life" -- free alternate history short story about The Beatles, made into a radio play and audiobook and winner of The Mary Shelley Award 2023

See also The Beatles: Get Back, Part 1: Soul Touching Anecdotes and  The Beatles: Get Back, Part 2: Back from the Threshold and my review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles and A Vote for McCartney (my very first published article, in The Village Voice, 1971)