While in London working on his colorized and digitized World War I documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, stopped by the Beatles’ recording company, Apple Records. He was initially invited to meet Apple executives for his advice about a possible virtual reality exhibit of the Beatles. Instead, Jackson inquired about footage from a 1970 Beatles film entitled “Let It Be.” The film and album were notorious for representing the time period in January 1969 when the Beatles, the most popular and influential music group in the world, were breaking up.3
The initial project of the film and album “Let It Be” was to show the Beatles in the process of writing an album of 14 songs then performing it in concert within about a two-week time span. The version of the “Let It Be” film released in 1970, however, mainly showed the times when the Beatles, under immense pressure to write and perform new material while being filmed, were bickering with each other. George Harrison famously quit the band for a few days during this time.
Jackson knew there was a lot more footage shot of the group that did not make the final film cut, and he inquired about it to the Apple executives. He was given access to more than 60 hours of footage, and what he saw was markedly different from what was released in “Let It Be.” Rather than showing a snapshot of when the Beatles were breaking up, he found reels of film showing the band still at their creative peak, relaxed, engaging, under a lot of stress, but having fun, too.
He approached Paul McCartney, who apparently had never seen the original “Let It Be” film and thought the remaining footage would be dreadful and convinced him to let him use the previously unseen footage to create a new documentary that showed the Beatles in a more positive light during the “Let It Be” writing and recording sessions.
The Introduction of a Machine Learning Computer
For the editing of the film, Jackson and his team at Park Road Post Production, in New Zealand, digitized the film reels, and then developed a machine-learning computer, or MAL, program to teach it to identify the different parts of the Beatles’ music. So, they taught the machine “this is a guitar,” or “this is Paul’s bass,” or “this is John’s voice.” By doing so, they were then able to isolate each sound of the songs. This groundbreaking technology has been used by the Beatles and producer Giles Martin to begin to remaster their old albums. In doing so, the improved quality of the old Beatles albums has been giving fans a way to hear the band like never before.
After the release of Jackson’s documentary, entitled "Get Back," McCartney approached him and Giles Martin about using MAL to fix up the last remaining demo of Lennon’s composition “Now & Then” from the Anthology days. For the first time, they were able to isolate Lennon’s vocals on “Now & Then” and remove the piano and background noises and improve the quality of his voice. The results are astounding. Lennon sounds like he was present in the room at the time of the remaining Beatles finishing the song.
Harrison, who died in 2001 of cancer, had only previously recorded an acoustic guitar track for the song. As the band’s lead guitarist, he was unable to re-record his part, so McCartney, a great guitar player himself, recorded the lead guitar in homage to Harrison, his bass part, Ringo re-recorded his drums, and the two of them recorded backing vocals. They also added backing vocals from past Beatles songs “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Because.”
