Get Back

Get back to where you once belonged. That is the whole sermon, and Paul McCartney delivers it with a shuffle that feels like the road opening up in front of a beat-up truck. “Get Back,” from the album Let It Be, is The Beatles stripping the varnish off and playing like a bar band that happens to be the biggest act on earth. No sitars, no tape loops, no orchestra in the next room. Just a driving bass line, a dry snare, George Harrison’s clipped rhythm guitar, John Lennon taking a rare turn on lead guitar, and Billy Preston’s Fender Rhodes electric piano cutting through the mix like a smile in a room full of frowns. It was released as a single on April 11, 1969, billed as The Beatles with Billy Preston, and it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. The album mix you are hearing landed on Let It Be in May 1970, after the band had already come apart.

The song belongs to the January 1969 sessions that began as a film project and a back-to-the-roots idea. McCartney wanted the four of them on camera, rehearsing for a live show, writing in the open, no overdubs if they could help it. The working title of the whole project was Get Back. They started at Twickenham Film Studios in the cold, under lights, with cameras in their faces, and the mood went sour fast. Harrison walked out for several days. Ringo Starr had already quit the group once in 1968 and been talked back in. Lennon was distracted, sharp-tongued, and newly attached to Yoko Ono, who sat in on the sessions. The “live album, no overdubs” plan frayed. What saved the room, at least for a while, was Preston.

Harrison knew Preston from 1962, when a teenage Preston was playing organ in Little Richard’s band and The Beatles were still grinding through the Hamburg clubs. In January 1969 Harrison caught Preston with Ray Charles, invited him down to the new basement studio at Apple’s building on Savile Row, and the temperature in the room changed. Preston’s playing on “Get Back” is not decoration. The Rhodes part is the hook that the guitars lean on. Lennon later pushed to make him a full member. McCartney is reported to have answered that it was bad enough with four. The single still carries the only co-credit of its kind on a Beatles record: The Beatles with Billy Preston. The B-side was “Don’t Let Me Down,” another January track with Preston on keyboards, and one of Lennon’s most open vocals.

The track you know from the single was built mainly on January 27, 1969, with a coda taped the next day. They had already run the song through a pile of takes. Early versions carried sharper political teeth. McCartney had been kicking around lines about immigrants and Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, the kind of topical jab that would have landed the record in a fight. He pulled back. Jojo became a man who left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass. Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman, but she was another man. McCartney has said the names were pulled out of the air. Lennon, never one to leave a joke on the table, can be heard at the top of the Let It Be album version muttering a ruder variant, often heard as “Sweet Loretta Fart, she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan.” The single keeps a false ending and a reprise, with McCartney riding the Loretta lines one more time. Phil Spector, handed the tapes in 1970, dropped that coda on the album, pasted in chatter and applause from the rooftop, and left the joke and the thank-you where they sit.

That rooftop is the other half of the story. On January 30, 1969, The Beatles, with Preston, set up on the roof of 3 Savile Row and played in the cold wind to the office blocks of Mayfair. It was their first public performance since Candlestick Park in August 1966, and it turned out to be their last. They ran “Get Back” three times. The third take was the closer, and the police, answering complaints from neighboring businesses, climbed the stairs and told road manager Mal Evans to kill the amps. Harrison switched his back on so they could finish. McCartney ad-libbed a line about getting arrested for playing on the roofs. When it was over, Lennon leaned into the mic and said the line Spector later grafted onto the album version: he would like to thank the group and themselves, and he hoped they had passed the audition. The film Let It Be uses an edit of the rooftop takes. A fuller rooftop “Get Back” showed up later on Anthology 3.

Lennon’s lead guitar on the record is easy to miss if you grew up thinking Harrison played every solo. Here Harrison holds the rhythm and Lennon takes the fills, a wiry, slightly sarcastic counter to McCartney’s vocal. Starr keeps the shuffle unfussy. The whole thing sits in A, bright and unadorned, closer to the Star-Club days than to Sgt. Pepper. Glyn Johns mixed an early version of the album that Apple shelved. Spector’s Let It Be, with its choirs and strings on other tracks, split the band and the fans. In 2003 Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison issued Let It Be… Naked, which pulls Spector’s additions off and restores a tighter studio picture of “Get Back,” closer to what the single had promised.

A short bio belongs with a song this plainspoken. The Beatles came out of Liverpool: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, with Pete Best on drums until Ringo Starr took the chair in 1962. Brian Epstein cleaned up the image and got them a deal. George Martin, at EMI’s Abbey Road, became the producer who could follow them from “Love Me Do” to the tape experiments of 1966 and 1967. Between October 1962 and the spring of 1970 they released thirteen studio albums in the UK and a run of singles that rewired pop, rock, and the idea of what a band could do in a studio. They stopped touring in 1966. They kept making records that other bands treated as textbooks. By the time “Get Back” hit the shops, Apple Corps was leaking money, the partnerships were fraying, and the film cameras had caught the arguments. McCartney’s departure became public in April 1970. Let It Be arrived in May, the last album released, though Abbey Road had been recorded after most of these sessions.

What “Get Back” still does, all these years later, is refuse the myth that the end was only wreckage. The playing is loose and locked at the same time. Preston sounds glad to be there. McCartney sounds like a man who still believes a good riff can hold four people in the same room. Lennon’s audition joke is the perfect exit line for a band that had spent a decade being asked to prove it. On THE ZOO that is the kind of record that earns its place between the deep cuts and the hits you already know by heart: a number-one single that also documents the last time The Beatles played for a crowd, even if the crowd was on the pavement below and the police were on the stairs.

The catalogue is still tended by Apple Corps. The official home is thebeatles.com. The band’s verified pages are on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For session notes, take-by-take history, and the long paper trail on this recording, the Beatles Bible entry on the song is the fan-site standard at beatlesbible.com, and the older collector’s desk at beatle.net still walks the release history without the gloss. Put “Get Back” on, turn it up past polite, and let the Rhodes and that audition line do the rest. Jojo already left. The song stayed.