Photo: Ethan A. Russell / © Apple Corps Ltd.
Glyn Johns was relaxing at his London home one night in December 1968 when the phone rang. It wasPaul McCartney. Johns told him to f— off.
At just 26, Johns already had an illustrious career as a first-call studio engineer, guiding sessions for some of Britain’s biggest bands, including the Pretty Things, Small Faces, and Spooky Tooth. Most famously, he’d worked withthe Rolling Stoneson a string of classic albums, including their then-current smash,Beggar’s Banquet. Hence why a late-night joke from Jagger wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. But a cold call from one ofthe Beatleswas a little more unusual.
“Paul very politely told me what his plan was and asked if I would be interested in doing it,” says Johns. “And I went, ‘Absolutely, yeah! Great.’ So he said, ‘Well, we’re going to start rehearsing just after New Years and I would really appreciate it if you’d come to all the rehearsals.’ I said, ‘Sure, okay.’ And off we went.”
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Even so, the Beatles immediately embraced this relative stranger in their midst. “All of them were unbelievably welcoming,” says Johns. “They made me feel so comfortable. From the minute I walked in the door, [Beatles' roadie] Mal Evans greeted me and was lovely. Then, when each member of the band arrived, it was as if we’d been working together for ages, almost. They were very collaborative indeed. They made me feel very comfortable.”
Ethan A. Russell / © Apple Corps Ltd.
The physical accommodations, on the other hand, were slightly less comfortable. They spent their first week of rehearsals in a drab and drafty soundstage at Twickenham film studios on the outskirts of London. To Johns, playing in the warehouse-sized room was akin to playing a game of ping pong in the middle of a football stadium. Even under these unusual circumstances, the Beatles retained their discipline and enthusiasm. “It was a bit odd, but it worked okay. We just got on with it, really,” Johns says. “My whole experience with the Beatles was really no different from any other band, except it wasthe Beatles. There was nothing unusual about their behavior or their work ethic or anything else. They were exactly like any other band that I had worked with, in that regard. They jammed, just like anybody would. If everyone was in a good mood and having a good time, they would mess about.”
But good times weren’t always forthcoming. Johns had unwittingly entered the Beatles' orbit duringthe most troubled time in their history. The project’s working title ofGet Backwas more than just the name of a new McCartney song but also a mission statement. The Beatles —and McCartney in particular— yearned for a simpler era before business pressures and private psychodramas threatened to erode their core friendship. A return to the stage would mean a return to being aband, rather than four distinct studio artistes with increasingly different ideas of what, when and how to play. The live album would be the antithesis of their increasingly elaborate studio productions likeSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club BandandThe White Album, both of which took months to complete and exhausted the Beatles' collective goodwill. Instead,Get Backwould be spontaneous and exciting, a reminder of everything they had originally loved about rock ‘n’ roll.
John Lennon and George Harrison.Disney+
Matters came to a head just after lunch on Jan. 10, when Harrison withdrew from the rehearsals and temporarily quit the group. Though he was coaxed back into the fold days later, the moment has gone down in Beatle lore as “the beginning of the end” of the band. Yet Johns maintains that the incident has been exaggerated in its retelling over the years. “It was disappointing, but they’d been together a long time,” he says. “They had an argument and they made up, just like anybody else. If people work in an office for a few years, there are going to be falling-outs. This was the same s—. I’ve worked with lots of bands that have had arguments in the studio and somebody’s gone off in a tiff and then they came back again. But because it was the Beatles, everybody made this huge bloody great issue out of it and turned it into the end of the world. But it wasn’t.”
Glyn Johns (far left) with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in the control room of Apple Studios, January 1969.Disney+
A more immediate concern was how to craft an end to the documentary in progress. With Ringo Starr due to shoot a feature film in less than two weeks, the deadline was fast approaching. “We were in the middle of doing something that had gone incredibly well musically to that point,” says Johns, “but our film was being made about a concert that wasn’t going to happen anymore. So it was a bit of a predicament, really.”
The solution arrived one day when the group broke for lunch. “Ringo was sitting next to me,” Johns recalls. “We were on the top floor of the [Beatles' office] building and he said, ‘Have you ever been up on the roof here?’ And I said no. He said, ‘It’s incredible. You can see the whole of the West End of London from the roof. Come on, I’ll show you!’ I honestly don’t remember whether it was my idea or his, but from that visit to the roof, the two of us came up with the idea of possibly playing up there.”
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On the afternoon of Jan. 30, 1969, the Beatles climbed five flights to the top of Apple Records headquarters and played nine songs (or five titles) over the course of 42 minutes. Scaffolding planks had been laid to support the weight of the gear, and the sensitive guitar and drum mics were sheathed in women’s pantyhose to guard against the gusts of wind. Other than that, few concessions were made. “Recording in the open air was a complete doddle,” says Johns. “The biggest problem was the temperature!” To ward off the winter chill, both Lennon and Starr wore their ladies' coats, and a staffer held a steady stream of cigarettes to warm their fingers. It was arguably the most unusual concert of the Beatles career — and also their last.
The sessions for what was still known asGet Backwrapped the following day, on Jan. 31. The tapes gathered dust until that spring, when Johns got another call from Paul McCartney. “He asked me to meet him and John at Abbey Road [Studios]. They said, ‘Do you remember the idea that you had while we were doingGet Back?’ And I said yes. And they said, ‘We’d like you to go away and do it.’ All the tapes were on the floor in the control room — piles of tapes! I went, ‘Okay, when do we start?’ They said, ‘Well,we’renot going to be there. It was your idea.Yougo and do it.’ At first I thought ‘Blimey, that’s marvelous.’ But in the car on the way home and I suddenly realized, ‘Hold on a minute. They’ve obviously lost interest in this completely. They don’t think I’m marvelous, they just don’t give a s—!'”
Parlophone
By the dawn of 1970, the Beatles existed in name only. Lennon had privately informed his bandmates of his intent to leave the group just beforeAbbey Roadwas released September, but there was still the not-insignificant issue of finishingGet Back, which had been retitledLet It Beto distinguish it from the now months-old single. Johns revisited the tapes a final time that January, with its tracklist altered to align with the almost complete film. Coming on the heels of the highly polishedAbbey Road, the band began to have second thoughts about their unvarnished “warts and all” experiment. “Having madeAbbey Roadas beautiful a record as it was, there was obviously some disagreement about [the direction for]Let It Be,” says Johns. “I’m reading between the lines here, but I can only assume that John wasn’t really happy with what I’d done or that idea.”
And there was also a matter of credit. Johns’ had been brought on as an engineer, yet his work far exceeded the job description. Hoping to remedy this, he asked if he could be credited as producer, near the top of the studio hierarchy. “I didn’t want any royalties, I just wanted credit,” he explains. “Because at that point it would’ve done my CV good. And everybody was quite happy about that, except for John. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want any money! I said, ‘Listen, you could release the four of you singing the phonebook and it would sell a huge number of records, no matter who did what. So I don’t think I deserve any financial recompense, but a credit would be quite handy.’ But it didn’t come to pass. John wasn’t unpleasant, he was just quizzical. But I didn’t take any offense.”
Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Today, Johns is 79. He was 26 when he recordedGet Back. Does he feel a sense of closure now that this half-century saga is complete? Not quite. “I’m not overly concerned with it at this point in my life, but I guess it’s okay,” he says with trademark understatement. “It’s pretty good.”
source: people.com
