THE HAPPY RETURN TO GET BACK
Ringo Starr has this dream. It is January 30, 1969, and he is behind the drum set that sits on a wooden platform atop London’s Apple Corps building. Ringo is keeping rhythm for what Rolling Stone magazine has called the greatest live event in rock music history: the Beatles’ rooftop concert, which is the finale to Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 music documentary Let It Be. The film chronicled the making of that eponymous album; it also offered such a dour look at the bickering bandmates that the group refused to authorize its wide release in the decades that followed.
The rooftop concert—the first live performance by the band in over two years—famously ended abruptly but respectfully, with the police stopping the performance after complaints were lodged by neighbors and the bank next door, saying that the lunchtime tunes were just too loud and disruptive. In Ringo’s dream, however, it all ends with a bigger bang. “In my mind, [the police] come and drag me off the drums,” he has said. “I thought that would’ve made the documentary more interesting.”
While ending can’t be rewritten, the cheerless legacy of can. Peter Jackson’s release of , is a six-hour re-edit of Lindsay-Hogg’s raw footage. This new edit from the director of the acclaimed and trilogies reveals a level of energy, camaraderie and collaboration painfully missing from . When asked what one should expect from Jackson’s limited series, no less on Disney+ is, as promised for fans, the ultimate Thanksgiving treat—with all the trimmings.
