The Audition

It's a chilly January Thursday in London. It's lunchtime so, despite the cold, you decide to venture out.

You hear music. Really good music. And a crowd has formed.

It's January 30, 1969 and you're near 3 Savile Row, the address of the Apple Corps headquarters.

The Beatles are playing the famous "Rooftop Concert."

I can't guarantee how I would have reacted to such a thing at any age in my life, but I'm fairly certain "Holy ****" would have emerged from my mouth.

The Four Kings of EMI (as stated by The Monkees) played for 42 minutes, doing five versions of "Get Back" including the famous one where John Lennon says "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we've passed the audition."

While the police from the nearby West End Central station eventually broke the party up, they're not exactly the heavies that they are made out to be. They, in fact, warned the gang at Apple Corps that they'd be over (thus giving everyone time to dispose of...um...well...time to flush the toilet and get rid of any scents) and actually let The Beatles finish a final version of "Get Back" (with John's famous quote) before shutting things down.

In truth, Savile Row had become snarled with incredible traffic -- vehicular and pedestrian.

The concert was part of the recording of the Let It Be album which, up to that point, hadn't gone too well.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, filming his documentary Let It Be (which I've still never seen and is hard to find) had a crew on hand. Billy Preston -- brought in ostensibly to reduce tension among The Beatles -- was on keyboards. By that point, Paul wasn't thrilled with John or George, George threatened to quit, Ringo did quit at one point, John was on his way out, Ringo was happy to just be there and basically everyone hated Paul.

George Martin (for my money, the true "Fifth Beatle") produced the effort, with Glyn Johns engineering, as well as Alan Parsons, who sat in the basement of 3 Savile Row and recorded the music on two eight-track recorders. Some of what has been lost as the Lads goofed around on things such as "God Save The Queen" was a result of Parsons changing tapes.

Call it an "Alan Parsons Project."

Yes. Yes, I went there (and yes, it's the same guy).

Director Peter Jackson has a documentary coming out that he says will disprove that the Let It Be recording sessions weren't as bad as they've made out to be. I look forward to seeing that.

As for the audio of the Rooftop Concert, it exists in several forms. Some of it appeared as official releases in various places, including Anthology 3 and the Let It Be...Naked collections. I was given a bootleg of it years ago that I have on CD (thanks, Jon!).

I'm supposed to go to London for Hunt Scanlon later in 2020, and among my sites to see is 3 Savile Row -- now the location of a Abercrombie Kids store -- as well as a return to Abbey Road so I can get pictures at the crosswalk that I can actually keep (pictures of me there in 2000 are...er...unavailable).

Anyway, the audition turned out just fine, even if all was about to end. The Beatles went back and recorded Abbey Road, released the shelved Let It Be album, and faded into obscurity or something.

For many, the Rooftop Concert was their last glimpse, even if many couldn't actually see them.