I recently re-watched the documentary for the first time since it originally aired on PBS, among the excitement of a "new" Beatles track, "Free as a Bird", the video for which got a prime time network television airing. I had forgotten how on-the-nose the video was with populating the screen with references to their songs. The track itself was a John Lennon demo that the rest of the band, along with ELO's Jeff Lynne, overdubbed to completion. Given Jeff Lynne's instantly identifiable production techniques, and the surviving members entrenched solo tendencies, it comes off as a hodgepodge of styles, though given its origins that's not a big revelation.
What struck me the most about the documentary is how chronologically unbalanced it is, spending most of the 10 hours focusing on the Beatles beginnings and pre-Sgt Pepper period. It's a long slog to the era-defining concert at Shea Stadium, which is treated like a cliffhanger, despite the band still having another American tour ahead of them (though it was hampered by controversy and low ticket sales). After the band decides to stop touring, their last 4 records are covered in the final two 70-minute episodes. Perhaps it was the lack of in-studio footage, but the band's studio years are as worthy of dissection as their live years, when they played the same 30 minute set for several years. Sgt Pepper's gets screen time, mostly to show how the band changed their recording approach, though besides Let It Be it was the worst recording experience they had. Oddly enough, while some of the songs on the White Album are discussed, the actual iconic cover is never once shown on screen. Let It Be takes up most of the last episode, though it's also the one that’s well-documented despite basically being the record of their breakup. It was a bit funny that Phil Spector got zero mention, perhaps as retaliation for his bizarre behavior and the general consensus that he ruined the record with his signature overdubs. Remember this documentary came out almost 20 years ago, when Spector was a crazy has-been, not a convicted murderer.
The second surprising thing is how often entire songs are played, when most modern music documentaries will play about 30 seconds then cut to a talking head. Curious to see uncut footage of the band on Swedish TV, being awkward with the host? It's all there. Ever wanted to know what it was like to try and hear the band over the screams of 50,000 fans? The barely-audible video is there in its entirety. Oddly enough, there are at least 2 instances of the members discussing the difficulty in playing live in the era before stage monitors, then showing footage of a sloppy performance where they barely kept it together. That goes along with the entire project's odd insistence on showing the band struggling musically, either with flubbed takes on the CDs or their increasingly poor live performances at the end of their touring career.
There's an odd bit during a press conference (again, a large portion of it is shown for some reason) where the interviewer mentions John's wife at the time. He's clearly unprepared for it, and manages to ad-lib a bit about not knowing who she is to get a laugh, but it's telling that they decided to keep that bit in. The rest of the band's significant others, besides Yoko Ono, barely get a mention. There's no talk about their early girlfriends, John Lennon's secret marriage to Cynthia Lennon, or the tension between George Harrison and Eric Clapton over Patti Boyd, who would eventually leave the Beatle and inspire "Layla". But why should they include any of that? It's none of our business, though they've lived the majority of their lives in the public eye and prying into their personal lives in a bit of a national pastime. It seems like maybe there was an early edit that did include more personal information, thought the living member's used their power to excise those parts from the film.
John Lennon's absence, though he was presumably represented by Yoko Ono behind the scenes, meant that he was shown in the least flattering light. One of the oddest, most incongruous parts of the whole thing was a sequence where the band remembered John's habit of mimicking the stereotypical movements of a retarded person for a laugh. It's absolutely horrible to watch, and not only do they mention it for some reason, there is even high quality footage of him acting out on stage in front of an audience. Why was this included at all, if only for the surviving members to get back at a member they clearly were irritated with much of the time?
There's quite a few "what were they thinking" moments in the documentary, but the most pointless, and the one that me & my wife are still laughing about, is a montage of the group visiting some islands they were looking at buying, set to the tune of "Baby You're a Rich Man". It goes like this: The band says they thought about buying an island together for privacy from the outside world. There are home movies of them on boats. And that's it. Remember, the White Album is barely mentioned, but the band's holiday gets three minutes of screen time. It's one of several misguided attempts to turn it into an odds 'n sods collection for obsessive fans.
Brian Epstein's death is treated to a fitting montage, though his homosexuality (and its effect on his lifestyle and eventual death) isn't mentioned once. Maybe it was the tenor of the times in the mid-90s, but it would have been eye opening to hear that both his job as a the manager of the biggest band in the world, and the fact that his lifestyle was against the law at the time, would lead him to use drugs to cope with the constant stress and fear of arrest. It would have been difficult to balance that revelation without seeming like he was a tortured gay man who killed himself (I agree with the popular theory that it was an accidental overdose), but to completely ignore it turns Epstein into a one-dimensional figure.
The entire project ends up being exactly what it seems, an exercise by three guys with monumental egos to create a new product to feed the Beatles machine. Isn't it odd that the first volume of Live at the BBC came out about the same time, but the sequel was only released recently to extend it's copyright? Though it’s much more interesting and culturally relevant than Beatles toys or other collectibles, in the end the Anthology is yet another Beatles product for the masses.
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