How Peter Jackson Used Artificial Intelligence to Restore the Video & Audio Featured in The Beatles: Get Back

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Music, Technology | December 6th, 2021

Much has been made in recent years of the “de-aging” process­es that allow actors to cred­i­bly play char­ac­ters far younger than them­selves. But it has also become pos­si­ble to de-age film itself, as demon­strat­ed by Peter Jack­son’s cel­e­brat­ed new docu-series The Bea­t­les: Get Back. The vast major­i­ty of the mate­r­i­al that com­pris­es its near­ly eight-hour run­time was orig­i­nal­ly shot in 1969, under the direc­tion of Michael Lind­say-Hogg for the doc­u­men­tary that became Let It Be.

Those who have seen both Lin­day-Hog­g’s and Jack­son’s doc­u­men­taries will notice how much sharp­er, smoother, and more vivid the very same footage looks in the lat­ter, despite the six­teen-mil­lime­ter film hav­ing lan­guished for half a cen­tu­ry. The kind of visu­al restora­tion and enhance­ment seen in Get Back was made pos­si­ble by tech­nolo­gies that have only emerged in the past few decades — and pre­vi­ous­ly seen in Jack­son’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a doc­u­men­tary acclaimed for its restora­tion of cen­tu­ry-old World War I footage to a time-trav­el-like degree of verisimil­i­tude.

“You can’t actu­al­ly just do it with off-the-shelf soft­ware,” Jack­son explained in an inter­view about the restora­tion process­es involved in They Shall Not Grow Old. This neces­si­tat­ed mar­shal­ing, at his New Zealand com­pa­ny Park Road Post Pro­duc­tion, “a depart­ment of code writ­ers who write com­put­er code in soft­ware.” In oth­er words, a suf­fi­cient­ly ambi­tious project of visu­al revi­tal­iza­tion — mak­ing media from bygone times even more life­like than it was to begin with — becomes as much a job of tra­di­tion­al film-restora­tion or visu­al-effects as of com­put­er pro­gram­ming.

This also goes for the less obvi­ous but no-less-impres­sive treat­ment giv­en by Jack­son and his team to the audio that came with the Let It Be footage. Record­ed in large part monau­ral­ly, these tapes pre­sent­ed a for­mi­da­ble pro­duc­tion chal­lenge. John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s instru­ments share a sin­gle track with their voic­es — and not just their singing voic­es, but their speak­ing ones as well. On first lis­ten, this ren­ders many of their con­ver­sa­tions inaudi­ble, and prob­a­bly by design: “If they were in a con­ver­sa­tion,” said Jack­son, they would turn their amps up loud and they’d strum the gui­tar.”

This means of keep­ing their words from Lind­say-Hogg and his crew worked well enough in the whol­ly ana­log late 1960s, but it has proven no match for the arti­fi­cial intelligence/machine learn­ing of the 2020s. “We devised a tech­nol­o­gy that is called demix­ing,” said Jack­son. “You teach the com­put­er what a gui­tar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like.” Sup­plied with enough son­ic data, the sys­tem even­tu­al­ly learned to dis­tin­guish from one anoth­er not just the sounds of the Bea­t­les’ instru­ments but of their voic­es as well.

Hence, in addi­tion to Get Back’s rev­e­la­to­ry musi­cal moments, its many once-pri­vate but now crisply audi­ble exchanges between the Fab Four. “Oh, you’re record­ing our con­ver­sa­tion?” George Har­ri­son at one point asks Lind­say-Hogg in a char­ac­ter­is­tic tone of faux sur­prise. But if he could hear the record­ings today, his sur­prise would sure­ly be real.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Paul McCart­ney Com­pose The Bea­t­les Clas­sic “Get Back” Out of Thin Air (1969)

Peter Jack­son Gives Us an Entic­ing Glimpse of His Upcom­ing Bea­t­les Doc­u­men­tary The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Lennon or McCart­ney? Sci­en­tists Use Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Fig­ure Out Who Wrote Icon­ic Bea­t­les Songs

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” to Celebrate Hannukah: Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

in Music | December 4th, 2021

As men­tioned ear­li­er this week, Foo Fight­ers front­man Dave Grohl and pro­duc­er Greg Kurstin have launched The Hanukkah Ses­sions, a fes­tive music series where they cov­er a song–one for each night of Hanukkah–originally cre­at­ed by a Jew­ish musi­cian. Above, watch them pay trib­ute to two nice Jew­ish boys from Queens named Jef­fery Hyman and Thomas Erde­lyi, aka the great Joey and Tom­my Ramone. Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cov­er Van Halen’s “Jump,” Cel­e­brat­ing David Lee Roth, One of the Hard­est Rock­ing Jews, on the Fourth Night of Han­nukah

Talk­ing Heads Per­form The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Togeth­er)

The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974)

The Ramones Play New Year’s Eve Con­cert in Lon­don, 1977

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Behold the Glass Armonica, the Unbelievably Fragile Instrument Invented by Benjamin Franklin

in History, Music | December 3rd, 2021

We’re all famil­iar with key­board instru­ments. Many of us have also heard (or indeed made) music, of a kind, with the rims of wine glass­es. But to unite the two required the tru­ly Amer­i­can com­bi­na­tion of genius, where­with­al, and pen­chant for fol­ly found in one his­tor­i­cal fig­ure above all: Ben­jamin Franklin. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed here on Open Cul­ture, the musi­cal­ly inclined Franklin invent­ed an instru­ment called the glass armon­i­ca (alter­na­tive­ly “glass har­mon­i­ca”) — or rather he re-invent­ed it, hav­ing seen and heard an ear­ly exam­ple played in Lon­don. Essen­tial­ly a series of dif­fer­ent­ly sized bowls arranged from large to small, all rotat­ing on a shaft, the glass armon­i­ca allows its play­er to make poly­phon­ic music of a down­right celes­tial nature.

The play­ing, how­ev­er, is eas­i­er writ­ten about than done. You can see that for your­self in the video above, in which gui­tarist Rob Scal­lon vis­its musi­cian-preser­va­tion­ist Den­nis James. Not only does James play a glass armon­i­ca, he plays a glass armon­i­ca he built him­self — and has pre­sum­ably rebuilt a few times as well, giv­en its scarce­ly believ­able fragili­ty.

Trans­porta­tion presents its chal­lenges, but so does the act of play­ing, which requires a rou­tine of hand-wash­ing (and sub­se­quent re-wet­ting, with dis­tilled water only) that even the coro­n­avirus has­n’t got most of us used to. But even in the hands of a first-timer like Scal­lon, who makes sure to take his turn at the key­board-of-bowls, the glass armon­i­ca sounds like no oth­er instru­ment even most of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry have heard. In the hands of one of its few liv­ing vir­tu­osos, of course, the glass armon­i­ca is some­thing else entire­ly.

“If this piece did­n’t exist,” says James, hold­ing a piece of sheet music, “I would­n’t be sit­ting here.” He refers to Ada­gio & Ron­do for glass armon­i­ca in C minor (KV 617), com­posed by none oth­er than Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart. “In 1791, the last year of his life, Mozart wrote a piece for the Ger­man armon­i­ca play­er, Mar­i­anne Kirchgäss­ner,” writes Tim­o­ty Judd at The Lis­ten­ers’ Club. Like every glass armon­i­ca piece, accord­ing to James, one ends it by drop­ping sud­den­ly into com­plete silence: “It’s the only instru­ment, up until that point, that could to that: die away to absolute­ly noth­ing.” Alas, writes James, not long after the debut of Mozart’s com­po­si­tion rumors cir­cu­lat­ed that “the strange, crys­talline tones of Ben­jamin Franklin’s new instru­ment were a threat to pub­lic health.” A shame though that seems today, it does suit the mul­ti­tal­ent­ed Franklin’s ancil­lary rep­u­ta­tion as an invet­er­ate trou­ble­mak­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Instru­ment Ben­jamin Franklin Invent­ed, the Glass Armon­i­ca, Plays Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sug­ar Plum Fairy”

Hear the Cristal Baschet, an Enchant­i­ng Organ Made of Wood, Met­al & Glass, and Played with Wet Hands

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover Van Halen’s “Jump,” Celebrating David Lee Roth, One of the Hardest Rocking Jews, on the Fourth Night of Hannukah

in Music | December 1st, 2021

For the sec­ond year in a row, Foo Fight­ers front­man Dave Grohl and pro­duc­er Greg Kurstin have launched The Hanukkah Ses­sions, a fes­tive music series where they cov­er a song–one for each night of Hanukkah–originally cre­at­ed by a Jew­ish musi­cian. For the fourth night of Hanukkah this year, they cel­e­brate “quite pos­si­bly the loud­est and proud­est of hard rock­ing Jews, David Lee Roth” with a rol­lick­ing ver­sion of Van Halen’s “Jump.” To watch their oth­er cel­e­bra­to­ry tracks, click here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cov­er 8 Songs by Famous Jew­ish Artists for Hanukkah: Bob Dylan, Beast­ie Boys, Vel­vet Under­ground & More

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

Dave Grohl Rocks Out, Play­ing Drums Along to the Orig­i­nal Record­ing of “Smells Like Teen Spir­it”

Dave Grohl Falls Off­stage & Breaks His Leg, Then Con­tin­ues the Show as The Foo Fight­ers Play Queen’s “Under Pres­sure” (2015)

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How Drummer Moe Tucker Defined the Sound of the Velvet Underground

in Music | December 1st, 2021

A high school girl from Levit­town, New York, the country’s first sub­urb, Mau­reen “Moe” Tuck­er hard­ly fit the pro­file of a rock star in one of the most influ­en­tial bands of the 1960s. Then again, nei­ther did any of the mem­bers of the Vel­vet Under­ground. Lou Reed, John Cale, Ster­ling Mor­ri­son, and Tuck­er had bare­ly begun before Andy Warhol intro­duced them to Nico and billed them as the Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable, and it was Warhol who helped turn them into cult heroes. But Tuck­er made them sound like no one else. “Her style of drum­ming, that she invent­ed” Reed once remarked, “is amaz­ing. I’ve tried to get a drum­mer to do what she did and it’s impos­si­ble.” Her approach to Reed’s songs was a “mix of African trance rhythms and Ringo-like arrange­ment genius,” Adam Bud­of­sky writes at Mod­ern Drum­mer. “Her play­ing style was huge­ly respon­si­ble for the Velvet’s sin­gu­lar per­son­al­i­ty.”

Lis­ten, for exam­ple, to 1970’s Loaded – which Tuck­er sat out due to preg­nan­cy — next to The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico, White Light/White Heat, or The Vel­vet Under­ground. Loaded, the only Vel­vet Under­ground album nev­er to go out of print, may be called by some a “near-per­fect rock album,” but it’s also the least exper­i­men­tal and least inter­est­ing of the band’s four stu­dio releas­es, the sound of the band with­out Cale and Tuck­er, reach­ing for radio hits. The Vel­vet Under­ground with Moe Tuck­er, on the oth­er hand, was the sound of a band that was con­stant­ly falling apart while root­ing down into a pri­mal rock and roll that would out­last them. It’s sub­lime, and Tuck­er deserves her rep­u­ta­tion as “one of the head hyp­no­tists,” in the words of Jonathan Rich­man.

Her con­tri­bu­tion was as much youth­ful enthu­si­asm and nerve as raw tal­ent. Com­pelled to play the drums by a love for the Rolling Stones, the Bea­t­les, and Niger­ian drum­mer Babatunde Olatun­ji, she might have banged away in unre­mark­able Long Island cov­er bands in her youth, becom­ing a more tra­di­tion­al play­er, had not Reed, who knew her broth­er, giv­en her the chance to play the first pay­ing VU gig at Sum­mit High School in New Jer­sey. As she remem­bers it in the punk oral his­to­ry project Please Kill Me:

I was a ner­vous wreck when we played that show. We were allowed to play three songs and we had prac­ticed them at John Cale’s loft. We played, “Wait­ing For the Man,” “Hero­in,” and I think the third one was “Venus In Furs.” 

Our set was only about 15 min­utes at the most and in each song some­thing of mine broke. All my stuff was falling apart! The foot ped­al broke in one song, the leg of the floor tom start­ed going loose. I thought, Oh shit, I’m going to ruin this!

Instead of ruin, what fol­lowed were more gigs and a peri­od of exper­i­men­ta­tion in which Tuck­er, who start­ed with only a snare, tried out dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions of the drum kit in long jam ses­sions at Warhol’s Fac­to­ry: play­ing her bass drum with mal­lets on the floor, then on chairs while stand­ing up, eschew­ing cym­bals alto­geth­er, mak­ing judi­cious use of tom toms and tam­bourines, play­ing a few mem­o­rable shows with trash­cans when her drums were stolen.… She had no train­ing, no one in the band told her she was doing it wrong, and so she was free to rein­vent the drums her way.

As you’ll see in the thor­ough doc­u­men­tary above, Foun­da­tion Vel­vet, by Cam For­rester, Tuck­er’s way was exact­ly what the Vel­vets need­ed to recre­ate rock and roll in their image. She had a “dis­ci­pline with regards to play­ing the song, and not the instru­ment,” For­rester says. You’ll also see him recre­ate Tuck­er’s instru­men­ta­tion. In the time­stamps below, click on the demon­stra­tions to see her drum set­up for each track on the band’s first three albums.

Quotes/Introduction — 0:00
Back­ground & musi­cal begin­nings — 3:50
“Tucker’s sis­ter plays drums?” — 6:14
Andy Warhol, ‘The Fac­to­ry’, and Nico — 9:07
The ‘Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable’ Shows — 12:46
A female drum­mer? — 15:09
‘The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico’ Ses­sions — 17:38
DRUM DEMONSTRATIONS — 21:22
Good­bye to Nico & Andy…hello to VOLUME! — 25:02
‘White Light/White Heat’ & DRUMMING DEMONSTRATIONS — 28:18
John Cale leaves, and Doug Yule joins — 34:35
The third album & DRUMMING DEMONSTRATIONS — 37:07
‘Loaded’, band breakup, and solo career — 43:09
Moe’s hero­ic return to the drums — 45:58
Retire­ment from the music busi­ness — 53:48
Influ­ence & lega­cy — 54:28
“A nat­ur­al drum­mer…” — 57:03

One can approx­i­mate Tuck­er’s style and recon­struct her influ­ences, as For­rester has done here bril­liant­ly, but there will nev­er be anoth­er drum­mer like her.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Vel­vet Under­ground: Get a First Glimpse of Todd Haynes’ Upcom­ing Doc­u­men­tary on the Most Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Rock­ers

The Vel­vet Under­ground & Andy Warhol Stage Pro­to-Punk Per­for­mance Art: Dis­cov­er the Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable (1966)

Watch The Vel­vet Under­ground Per­form in Rare Col­or Footage: Scenes from a Viet­nam War Protest Con­cert (1969)

Watch Footage of the Vel­vet Under­ground Com­pos­ing “Sun­day Morn­ing,” the First Track on Their Sem­i­nal Debut Album The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico (1966)

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Movies Teach Us About Mozart: Exploring the Cinematic Uses of His Famous Lacrimosa

in Film, Music | December 1st, 2021

In the annals of sur­pris­ing­ly impres­sive IMDb pages, few can sur­pass that of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart. Despite hav­ing died a cen­tu­ry before the birth of cin­e­ma, he has racked up and con­tin­ues to rack up more com­pos­er cred­its each and every year. Many of these owe to the use of one piece, indeed one move­ment, in par­tic­u­lar: the Lac­rimosa from his Requiem, which con­tains the very last notes he ever wrote. “We should prob­a­bly expect some of these uses to have a somber, fune­re­al qual­i­ty, and they do,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in the new video essay above. In Amadeus, Miloš For­man’s film about the com­pos­er him­self, the piece accom­pa­nies a sequence show­ing “Mozart’s dead body being uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly trans­port­ed and dumped into a mass grave.”

The short­com­ings of Mozart’s bur­ial have sure­ly been com­pen­sat­ed for by the glo­ries of his lega­cy. But that lega­cy includes all man­ner of uses of the Lac­rimosa in film and tele­vi­sion, both glo­ri­ous and inglo­ri­ous. Giv­en its “sense of both sus­pense and inevitabil­i­ty, which is a unique and potent com­bo,” it typ­i­cal­ly scores scenes of vio­lence and vil­lainy.

“The repeat­ed asso­ci­a­tion of Lac­rimosa with evil con­di­tions us to think of evil when we hear it, to the point that film­mak­ers choose it as a kind of short­hand, draw­ing on our mem­o­ries of its past uses.” Even­tu­al­ly this hard­ened into cin­e­mat­ic con­ven­tion, ulti­mate­ly becom­ing “such a trope that it works bril­liant­ly for par­o­dy and satire too,” as in The Big Lebows­ki’s meet­ing of its two tit­u­lar fig­ures. (Note that the music becomes muf­fled when the Dude leaves the room, imply­ing that Lebows­ki had actu­al­ly put it on him­self.)

Else­where, the Lac­rimosa has been mar­shaled to evoke such emo­tions as lone­li­ness, des­per­a­tion, and reck­on­ing — and even, in one of Puschak’s more recent exam­ples, “the immense, unruly pow­er of the social inter­net.” If such a phe­nom­e­non would be dif­fi­cult to explain to Mozart him­self, imag­ine show­ing him the tele­vi­sion series The Good Fight, where “Lac­rimosa ampli­fies the com­e­dy of a scene in which the lawyers get their hands on Don­ald Trump’s alleged ‘pee tape.’ ” But Mozart obvi­ous­ly under­stood full well the under­ly­ing artis­tic prin­ci­ples at work: Amadeus also depicts him com­pos­ing the Dies Irae, anoth­er of the Requiem’s move­ments, whose melody he adapts from a thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry Gre­go­ri­an funer­al mass. Even in his time, the music of the past offered a means of height­en­ing the feel­ings of the present. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

The Wicked Scene in Amadeus When Mozart Mocked the Tal­ents of His Rival Anto­nio Salieri: How Much Does the Film Square with Real­i­ty?

Ani­ma­tion Pio­neer Lotte Reiniger Adapts Mozart’s The Mag­ic Flute into an All-Sil­hou­ette Short Film (1935)

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Paul McCartney Compose The Beatles Classic “Get Back” Out of Thin Air (1969)

in Film, Music | November 30th, 2021


In its near­ly eight-hour run­time Peter Jack­son’s new doc­u­men­tary series The Bea­t­les: Get Back offers numer­ous minor rev­e­la­tions about the world’s favorite band. Among the film­mak­er’s avowed aims was to show that, even on the verge of acri­mo­nious dis­so­lu­tion, John, Paul, George, and Ringo enjoyed stretch­es of pro­duc­tive­ness and con­vivi­al­i­ty. Much else comes out besides, includ­ing that the cater­ing at Apple Corps head­quar­ters was mis­er­able (amount­ing most days to toast and diges­tive bis­cuits) and that, even amid the excess­es of the late 1960s, the Bea­t­les dressed more or less respectably (apart, that is, from George’s occa­sion­al­ly out­landish choic­es of out­er- and footwear). But it also lays bare exact­ly how they cre­at­ed a song.

The Bea­t­les went into these ses­sions with lit­tle mate­r­i­al pre­pared. All they knew for sure was that they had to come up with a set of songs to be record­ed live, with­out over­dubs, in order to “get back” to the sim­plic­i­ty that had char­ac­ter­ized their process before such aes­thet­i­cal­ly and tech­ni­cal­ly con­vo­lut­ed albums as Revolver and Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band. These they would then per­form in a con­cert film. The whole project was under­tak­en with what Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield calls a “mag­nif­i­cent arro­gance. In a way, that’s what helped keep them togeth­er, through all their ups and downs. With­out that lev­el of arro­gance, there’s no way an adven­ture as admirably daft as Get Back could hap­pen in the first place.”

Some­how, to the very end, that arro­gance always proved jus­ti­fied. For much of Jack­son’s Get Back, the Bea­t­les appear to be just screw­ing around, crack­ing jokes, drink­ing tea and beer, and launch­ing into abortive per­for­mances in car­toon voic­es. And that’s when every­one shows up. “Lennon’s late again,” says Paul in the clip above. “I’m think­ing of get­ting rid of him.” But instead of nurs­ing resent­ment for his unpre­dictable musi­cal part­ner, he sits down and starts play­ing. His first chords will sound famil­iar to any Bea­t­les fan, though they belong to a song that does­n’t yet exist. Paul then adds to his strum­ming a bit of most­ly non-ver­bal vocal­iza­tion, which soon coheres into a melod­ic line: we (and a yawn­ing George) are wit­ness to the birth of “Get Back.”

Dur­ing the life­time of the Bea­t­les, Paul seems to have been the most pro­duc­tive mem­ber. Even since the band’s end half a cen­tu­ry ago, music has con­tin­ued to flow unim­ped­ed from his mind, shaped as if by pure instinct. In that time it has become ever more well-doc­u­ment­ed that he moti­vat­ed the group to work, espe­cial­ly after the death of their man­ag­er Bri­an Epstein in 1967. While Get Back attests to a cer­tain over­bear­ing qual­i­ty in his atti­tude toward the oth­er Bea­t­les, it also shows how McCart­ney’s hard­work­ing-yet-free­wheel­ing exam­ple encour­aged each of them to express his own par­tic­u­lar genius. When George gets stuck on the end of a lyric, for exam­ple, he, too, sim­ply sings what­ev­er comes to mind. Hence the tem­po­rary line “Some­thing in the way she moves / Attracts me like a pome­gran­ate” — and we all know how that tune even­tu­al­ly turned out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jack­son Gives Us an Entic­ing Glimpse of His Upcom­ing Bea­t­les Doc­u­men­tary The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Paul McCart­ney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Ques­tions in Two New Videos

Watch Pre­cious­ly Rare Footage of Paul McCart­ney Record­ing “Black­bird” at Abbey Road Stu­dios (1968)

Chaos & Cre­ation at Abbey Road: Paul McCart­ney Revis­its The Bea­t­les’ Fabled Record­ing Stu­dio

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear Haruki Murakami Play Beatles Covers on His Radio Show, Murakami Radio

in Music | November 30th, 2021

Now ramp­ing up to a wide release is a film that will draw in no few fans of Haru­ki Muraka­mi around the world: Dri­ve My Car, adapt­ed by film­mak­er Ryusuke Ham­aguchi from Murakami’s short sto­ry of the same name. That name itself comes, of course, from the Bea­t­les song, their knock­out open­er to Rub­ber Soul. It was­n’t the first time Muraka­mi had bor­rowed a title from the Fab Four. The nov­el that made him a house­hold name, in his home­land of Japan and sub­se­quent­ly the rest of the world, was called Nor­we­gian Wood.

The Bea­t­les’ albums have also pro­vid­ed him with inspi­ra­tion, as evi­denced by his sto­ry “With the Bea­t­les,” pub­lished in trans­la­tion last year by The New York­er. It takes place in 1965, when the Bea­t­les had become huge­ly pop­u­lar in not just the West but Japan as well. “Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs,” says the nar­ra­tor. “I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits,” but “truth be told, I was nev­er a fer­vent Bea­t­les fan. I nev­er active­ly sought out their songs. For me, it was pas­sive lis­ten­ing, pop music flow­ing out of the tiny speak­ers of my Pana­son­ic tran­sis­tor radio.” Despite being a high-school, then col­lege stu­dent in the 1960s, “I didn’t buy a sin­gle Bea­t­les record. I was much more into jazz and clas­si­cal music.”

This sto­ry is fic­tion­al; its nar­ra­tor is not its author. Yet Muraka­mi, who hap­pened to come of age in the same era, made sim­i­lar remarks about his expe­ri­ence with the Bea­t­les a cou­ple of years ago. His orig­i­nal­ly one-off ses­sion as a disc jock­ey on Tokyo FM has become a more or less full-fledged show, Muraka­mi Radio. Each of its broad­casts he ded­i­cates to a dif­fer­ent musi­cal theme, and it was thus only a mat­ter of time before he got around to the Bea­t­les.

Despite his ear­ly indif­fer­ence, as Muraka­mi explains between songs, he lat­er, in his thir­ties, came to sense the genius of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, dur­ing a stay in Greece with their self-titled 1968 “White Album” on tape in his Walk­man — which, despite lack­ing its title song, inspired him to start writ­ing Nor­we­gian Wood. Apart from that mem­o­ry, the late-peri­od Bea­t­les fig­ure only sec­on­dar­i­ly into Murakami’s “Bea­t­les Night.” He focus­es instead on their ear­ly, pre-Rub­ber Soul work, or rather, on a vari­ety of less­er-known cov­ers there­of.

If you lis­ten to the actu­al broad­cast on Japan­ese video-stream­ing site Nicon­i­co, you’ll also hear such addi­tion­al Bea­t­les cov­ers as “Do You Want to Know a Secret” by Motown singer Mary Wells and “She Loves You” by Rita Lee of Brazil­ian rock titans Os Mutantes. Obvi­ous­ly, the appeal of the Bea­t­les tran­scends cul­tur­al bound­aries, as does that of the exten­sive­ly trans­lat­ed Muraka­mi. What explains it? Per­haps, in both cas­es, that they cre­at­ed their own gen­res — or rather, their own won­drous real­i­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Vinyl Col­lec­tion and His Strange Lit­er­ary Worlds

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day: Stream Sev­en Hours of Mix­es Col­lect­ing All the Jazz, Clas­si­cal & Clas­sic Amer­i­can Pop Music from His Nov­els

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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