Let It Be

But wasn’t Let It Be The Beatles last album? Let It Be was released in 1970, after the band split up and was the final album released by the Fab Four. It was not, however, the final album recorded. Arguments over the album (originally titled Get Back) caused the project to be shelved for a time. In the meantime, The Beatles recorded Abbey Road and released it. Generally, Beatles fans consider Abbey Road the final album, and I am going to consider it as such as well.

This history of this album can take up a lot of space, so I will try to boil it down to a few paragraphs. After some of the disastrous white album sessions, the Beatles were on the verge of breaking up. McCartney wanted to keep them together and felt that if they could get back to the original style of them playing together as an ensemble, they might be able to work. For much of the previous albums, they had each recorded separately which was later mixed together. McCartney really wanted to tour, but the rest of the band did not. At least he hoped to record a live album, and the group went into rehearsals for such a performance.

These sessions were also filmed for a documentary to fulfill their three movie deal with United Artists (Yellow Submarine was not counted despite the Beatles hoping it would be). This movie was meant to show the band rehearsing for a live show, but really shows the slow breakup of the band. By the third day of the sessions they were already talking about breaking up and after 10 days, Harrison actually left.

A week later, Harrison agreed to come back as long as they could move back to the recording studio rather than the rehearsal space. They did and they began to record the Get Back album. They liked the idea of a live recording and it brought them to do the famous rooftop concert where they were recording on top of the Apple Studios building (which was shut down by the police due to the noise).

The first version of Get Back was intended for a July 1969 release, but it was nixed because they wanted the songs to match what would be in the Get Back movie. So the engineers remixed the album to be like the movie, but the Beatles rejected this as well. During this time, they recorded and released Abbey Road.

In March of 1970, the session tapes were given to Phil Spector who created the album which was called Let It Be. The album and film were released in May, 1970.

McCartney was not happy with the Phil Spector release, and so in 2003 he oversaw a remix of the album which removed all of the Phil Spector overdubs and changes. This album was called Let It Be… Naked. I had planned to do a comparison of these two, but I can just say that the Let It Be… Naked versions are all better than the original and leave it at that.

Here are both versions of The Long And Winding Road (from the 2009 re-master and from the Naked Remix). This is the best example of the difference between what the Beatles wanted and what Phil Spector created. You Choose!

Enjoy!

Let It Be
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsPcGCAgvvE]

Let It Be… Naked
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfaO8NWu4nM]

Added bonus! Here is the song from the movie (basically the same as the Naked album version)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31x7hwQaEaQ]