There are very few true bands where each player, singer, creative person is actually part of the process. … Most are one person with a vision and the people they play with, or maybe a partnership and the people cast roles around them. … I spontaneously burst into tears a few times just being able to see the exact moment a take I’ve listened to a thousand times was put down.Īdam Weiner, frontman of Low Cut Connie: I loved watching how a true band processes anxiety and irritation and boredom into great art. Jeff Tweedy, solo musician and frontman of Wilco: I don’t think of it like any other viewing experience I’ve had in my life. WaPo’s Travis Andrews rounded up the reaction of several notable songwriters: Most of the time, he’s not even playing drums.Īnd, like most everyone, I found seeing genius at work, such as this segment where Paul McCartney seems to invent what would be “Get Back” out of thin air, simply remarkable:Īnd it’s not just non-creatives who had that reaction. And poor Ringo seems just happy to be there but contributes next to nothing to the effort. George Harrison comes off as a whiny dolt, unhappy because he’s a junior partner in a group where two others write almost all the songs. McCartney seems most of the time the only member of the band interested in doing the hard work necessary to meet the ambitious timeline which, ultimately, they fail to do. Watching the dynamics of a band that I knew was on the verge of a breakup was rather discomfiting. Oh: and the band hasn’t done a public performance in more than two years. Watching it unfold, I was at first struck with the sheer audacity of the initial project: let’s film a documentary of us writing fourteen songs from scratch and getting them down so that we can record a live album on national television in three weeks. Like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, it could, however, have been condensed into something considerably shorter without much loss. As someone who became a fan of the group in junior high years after the breakup, it’s interesting to go into a virtual time machine. I watched Peter Jackson’s nearly-eight-hour treatment of the nearly half-century-old footage of the session that led to the Beatles’ last public performance and their final two albums over the course of several days.
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