Welcome to week six of The Music of the Beatles here on Coursera, our last week of the class, and so this week, what we're going to deal mostly with 1969 and the two recording projects that were, were part of the Beatles' activity. A large part of the Beatles' activity during that year. The get back project, which would be later in 1970 released as the album let it be, And then Abbey Road which really takes most of the year for them to get recorded. Just to say a word about the get back project we'll talk about that in some detail as we go forward this week. But, I am considering the album that you probably know as Let It Be to be the album, the second to the last album, and I'm considering Abbey Road to be the last album for the Beatles. Because most of the music that appears on Let It Be was recorded before Abbey Road with the exception of I, Me, Mine. So, it, in terms of the way we're looking at this music, that is in terms of stylist development, it really makes a lot more sense to think about Get Back/Let it Be as one project. Realizing that as we'll learn, it was abandoned and released after Abbey Road, really at the very end of the group's career while the breakup was really sort of in full swing. So the way we'll, we'll handle 1969 is to talk about Get Back and Let It Be first and then Abbey Road second. But let's have a, a an overview of what was going on in the year 1969, and into 1970, the period that we'll be talking about this week. well, in January there's the recording and the filming of Get Back, the project I was just mentioning. The Let it Be film and album was released in May of 1970, but almost everything from it is recorded in January, as part of this project and we'll talk about that a bit more. The Beatles abandoning the get back project go into the studio February through August to record Abby Road, which is released in October of 1969. So in terms of what they're doing with recording. It's, it's pretty clear that the first month is spent working on the Get Back project and then shifting over to Abbey Road. Interestingly, a lot of the music from the Get Back project ends up on Abbey Road and ends up on solo albums. It isn't like they just, you know, abandoned all the tunes and decided they didn't want to do anything with them. Anyway that, that keeps us really with the Beatles, in the studio through the end of the summer of 1969, and the release in, in October. Well, in that time of course they were releasing a product. And so in April of 69 you get the song Get Back, the Paul song Get Back went to number one. Both sides of the Atlantic with Don't Let Me Down being the B side of that. That even went to number 35 in the United States. In May of 69, you get The Ballad of John and Yoko, a John tune which goes to number eight in the United States, number one in the UK. The flip side of that is Old Brown Shoe. In May of 1969 Allen Klein is named manager of the band. At least, manager of three of the four Beatles and we'll tell more of that that story in a later video this week. In October of 69, about the time that Abbey Road is being released the single. Something is released that George Harrison song. I think the first ever George Harrison song to be released as a Beatles single. Also interestingly one of the first times that a single released with the album is actually on the album. Anyway, something goes to number four and the UK number three in the US and the flip side of that is come together. Which does a little bit better in the U.S. tha, than Something did. Come Together goes to number one in October of '59. Flipping over into March of 1970, going into the, the new decade, we have the release of Let it Be, the single, number one in the U.S., number two in the U.K., with the flip side being You Know My Name. Look up the number. I, I'll tell you a little bit more about that later. That's a, a fantastic obscure track, as far as I'm concerned, at least in terms of fun. In April of 1970, Paul announces his official departure from the Beatles. He officially announces it and then something like a week later his own solo album, McCartney is released. because by the time Paul announced he was quitting the band, at one point or another all of the, the, each of the three other members of the band had already quit once. So you know? So it goes, but any-ways that was pretty much the, the, the defining the last, nail in the coffin, you might say. In May of 1970, the Long and Winding Road is released. That track going to number one in this country with the flip side being For You Blue. There's a big ruckus over the Long and Winding Road, over the way it was produced by Phil Specter and the way it was released, much to Paul McCartney's dissatisfaction, and we'll get into that story. A little bit later in the lectures this week some of the main points we're going to want to hit on during this period that we're talking about 69 into 1970 it might seem obvious but one of the main points of this is that the Beatles are in fact drifting apart They'd been together for a long time. They were you know, sort of almost childhood or at least teen age friends, they'd been through a lot of times a lot of trouble a lot of good times together but their really starting to pull apart and you see this increasingly throughout the year. The story that's often tal, told is that Paul tries to keep it together I don't think anybody that, that any of the Beatles have ever contested that Paul tried to keep the whole thing together. But he was also perceived as being kind of bossy, by the other guys. It's again this is like thanksgiving dinner with your family. These guys are as good as brothers or siblings. So you know, they get into these kinds of squabbles. That really only siblings or people who are really close growing up together can get in. So I credit all of that to that. It does seem like Paul is the one trying to keep the thing going but one of the main points we also get through 1969 and into 1970 is everybody in the band realises that there is no going back to the way things used to be. That the band is essentially sort of at the end. And with Abbey Road it's maybe to go out with a, better to go out with a bang than to go out with a whimper. Considering the fact that the Get Back project hadn't worked out. So as, as Ringo likes to say, there was not a moment where they were, this is the last song, the last track, the last. You know, what, there was no moment like that but it was pretty clear at the end. That they they things were sort of breaking up. And then we'll talk a bit, at the end of this week, about the breakup and the Beatles' role in history, a little bit about their solo careers going into the 1970's. This is what the overview this week is going to be like looking at the, the these two albums and the story of the, the way the group sort of ties up its business at the end. So, in the next video, let's really dig into the Get Back project.
