The real Beatles’ last song is called The End. It ends the great B-side of Abbey Road, a collection of 11 short songs, the last eight in a row, ending with three guitar solos (from Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) and a drum solo (from Ringo Starr) earlier from the verse : “And in the end, the love you take with you will be just like the love you give.” The recording was made in the summer of 1969.
The mini-documentary Now and Then. The Beatles’ latest song premiered on Wednesday (on Movistar+ and video platforms), hours before the song was released on Thursday at three in the afternoon. reconstructed from a cassette that John recorded shortly before his death in 1980, which Yoko Ono sent to McCartney with a handwritten postit (“For Paul”) and which he has now completed with Ringo.
The program lasts just 12 minutes, so it wouldn’t put off those of us who swallowed the eight hours of “Get Back” almost all at once, Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary that takes us through three weeks of Let It Be sessions in January of 1969; and before that, we follow the ten-plus hours of The Beatles Anthology, the 1995 and 1996 series that chronicled their entire career with plenty of unreleased material. Two new songs emerged from Anthology: The three survivors worked on Lennon’s unfinished material to release Free as a Bird and Real Love. Then they couldn’t do “Now and Then” because the sound didn’t have enough quality to separate John’s voice and piano into two tracks.
The short documentary is limited to telling what has now been done and trying to justify its opportunity. The technology Peter Jackson used in Get Back to purify the sound of every voice and instrument used artificial intelligence to serve one final mission: to remove Lennon’s crystalline voice from this third home recording and isolate it from the piano. So Paul and Ringo returned to the studio because Harrison died in 2001. Harrison (an integral part of the band and perhaps the one who shone the most as a solo artist of the four) incorporated the electric and acoustic guitar parts he recorded into this song. in that failed attempt in 1995, and that went unnoticed; On the slide guitar solo, McCartney imitates George’s style (the style he developed alone should be added). There is a difference to the two songs from the nineties: Harrison’s signature is missing here.
McCartney admits in the short that he had many doubts about completing “Now and Then,” but concluded that Lennon would have been thrilled. And as for the use of AI, so worrying, remember that the four always relied on technological innovation to create art in the studio. Sean Ono Lennon assumes his father would be happy, he and Yoko Ono certainly were.
Would the author of Imagine really approve of this? It’s doubtful. The last Lennon, the one from the 70s, had announced (in God): “I don’t believe in the Beatles.” At his solo concerts, of which there weren’t many, he hardly presented any songs from the Fab Four’s discography (Come Together , Cold Turkey and Yer Blues, are not among the most symbolic). It’s hard to believe that before his unexpected death at the hands of Mark Chapman at the door of his New York home, this non-conformist who rebelled against his legend had recorded these tapes reflecting on posterity and the reunion of his Liverpool team-mates .
McCartney’s question is correct: Should they do this song? The answer is questionable, even if “Now and Then” is a nice song (as it was in the original demo), even if the new mix sounds reasonably good. That’s a far cry from the excellence they achieved in just over seven years in the 1960s. It adds nothing to the Beatles’ legacy, nor could it; Nor was it possible to stain it.
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