The Beatles song that John Lennon believed was better suited for Wings
By 1968, the ‘Summer of Love’s’ psychedelic excesses began to wane. This meant groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Band eschewed pop surrealism for back-to-basics roots rock indebted to Americana’s founding blues and country over the lysergic expansions that dominated the counterculture. The Rolling Stones entered their golden age, Crosby, Stills & Nash redefined the West Coast sound with their immaculate vocal harmonies, and even The Doors shifted from heady desert wanderings toward a rawer, bluesier direction.
Having led the psychedelic fore with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, The Beatles, too, felt an urge to ease away from the far-out sonic explorations and return to the original magic of four friends playing in a room. Such a cordial approach was at odds with the fractured reality that was already threatening the band’s unity when recording their eponymous double LP.
Little had improved by the time of their tenth album. Furthering the idea of the band’s musical refocus, the bright idea of conducting the following album sessions in a chilly Twickenham film studio with four 16mm cameras intrusively capturing every working detail only accelerated the underlying tensions.
Scrapping any further Twickenham sessions and continuing the project in the basement of their Apple Corps HQ—George Martin having brought two of EMI’s four-track recorders to the Apple Studio—the recording for their provisionally titled Get Back album became bogged down in scheduling conflicts, release delays, and perenially subject to haphazard mixes nobody was happy with. With Abbey Road commencing in earnest in January 1969, the Let It Be material began to languish in uncertainty.
Despite the sessions’ scrappy chaos, Let It Be boasts some of The Beatles’ finest songs. John Lennon’s ‘Across the Universe’ and ‘Dig a Pony’ are standout cuts, but it’s Paul McCartney’s contributions that present the album’s most canonical numbers. The title track, while often compared to ‘Hey Jude’, avoids the former’s over-egged mawkishness for powerful balladry that shoves every other song out of the way as the record’s defining cut. Beloved by fans but coolly received by the band, Lennon would express indifference to the track and offer an insight into its inspiration.
“Nothing to do with The Beatles,” he told journalist David Sheff in 1980. “It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what [McCartney] was thinking when he wrote ‘Let It Be’. I think it was inspired by ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’. That’s my feeling, although I have nothing to go on. I know that he wanted to write a ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’.”
It couldn’t have been Wings, because McCartney’s follow-up project never saw him pen a piece that could shine the shoes of even The Beatles’ mid-tier output. The closest clue to McCartney’s future Wings stylings is the Abbey Road medley that closes their “final” album, veering between brilliance and stuffy segues of ersatz grandiosity—all flourishes that could just as easily describe 1973’s Band on the Run.
Salvaged or murdered, depending on your tastes, but Let It Be was finally completed by Phil Spector, adding a dollop of syrupy strings and orchestral overdubs at odds with the original back-to-basics angle. Nagging McCartney for years, he unveiled 2014’s Let It Be… Naked, a remixed and reassembled album closer to his original stripped-down vision. Knowing the divine weight of his rock gospel, ‘Let It Be’ naturally closes the revised version of the album, the finale it should have always been.
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