The Beatles solo songs that should have been on ‘Let It Be’
For a long time, it was hard for Beatles fans to look back on Let It Be without a little bit of a sour taste in their mouths.
The band were fracturing as far as everyone could tell, and seeing them stitch together the remnants of an album as their swansong made it look like they went out with a whimper instead of a bang. But since the band never actually wanted to release the record to begin with, what could their actual swan song have sounded like if they actually managed to throw in tunes from their solo years?
If we’re going down this rabbit hole, though, this would also mean taking a hatchet to the original version of the album. There are some great moments on the final product and more than a few tunes that signal where the band would have been going had they stuck it out, but if we were to take out some of the more forgettable tracks and throw in what they had been working on around that time, this could have been a record that could have at least gone toe-to-toe with Abbey Road.
First order of the business: get rid of the interlude tracks. ‘Dig It’ and ‘Maggie Mae’ do make you feel like a fly on the wall as they’re playing, but for an album of this calibre, these aren’t the tracks we’re looking for. And for an album intended for them to get back to their roots, Paul McCartney had a lot of decent tunes to work from. ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ could stand alongside the rest of the record, but for an album with a basic approach, songs like ‘Junk’ and ‘Every Night’ from McCartney do a much better job at showing what that stripped-back sound could have been.
The same could be said of some of John Lennon’s early solo tracks. ‘Cold Turkey’ and ‘Instant Karma’ benefited from sounding a little bit lo-fi, but while there are some great songs on Plastic Ono Band, they all exist as a better outlet for his grief after leaving the band. So, really, the only post-1970 track that fits the bill here is ‘Gimme Some Truth’, especially since they had been working on the song around the time they were woodshedding tunes like ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’.
But the one person who needs some redemption here is George Harrison. All Things Must Pass was his excuse to let go of the “musical constipation” that he was feeling around that time, so to have him be relegated to a few half songs is an absolute joke. ‘I Me Mine’ is a decent enough tune, but if we ditch ‘For You Blue’ and ‘One After 909’, ‘All Things Must Pass’ would have been the perfect way to close the album and their career.
It’s also fitting in a way. Harrison was peaking as a songwriter around the time that they had wrapped things up, and after being called ‘The Quiet One’ for so long, it’s only fitting for him to have the last word on the band rather than having to play into Lennon and McCartney’s musical rivalry every single time they perform.
And while Ringo Starr is left dubiously absent from any new songs, he doesn’t really need any representation here to be one of the bright spots of the album. His drumming is what drives all of the songs anyhow, and if the band managed to keep things together and make another album, there would be no one more happy to be playing music again than Starr. At heart, he was the biggest Beatles fan of them all, and he would have done anything to get them all together again.
So while we can only speculate what kind of album The Beatles could have made with Let It Be, a reimagining of their final record with some solo songs added would have been the perfect way to bring the band back down to Earth with a little more grace. They had spent their first record slogging away in Abbey Road Studios for one day, and with this kind of album, they would still be going back to their roots, but with a lot more depth to the songs they were writing.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.