Fifty years ago today, the Beatles gave their last live public performance, an impromptu session on the roof of their recording studio in central London while they were working on their last album Let It Be. The session lasted for 42 minutes before police shut it down, presumably because they did not have a permit and were disturbing the neighbors.
Here is the group singing Don’t Let Me Down.
Here they are with Get Back.
Michael Tomasky gives the background to the session.
Apparently Peter Jackson is making a film of the last recording session using 55 hours of previously unseen in-studio footage.
OMG.
Fifty. Years.
But will we still love them when it’s 64?
My earliest vivid memory of The Beatles is a school trip when I was 10. On the bus, we heard “Ticket to Ride” several times on the radio. Wonderful stuff. And, for me, they reached their peak with “Penny Lane” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Actually, I believe the main reason the cops shut them down was because they were causing a massive traffic jam. Lack of a permit may have been the justification, though.
With Billy Preston on keyboards….
But yeah, 50 years.
Douglas Adams had an idea he never used about the policemen who had to stop them. It involved an alien offering the copper a choice: do this thing now, or be instantly transported from here into the body of some walrus-thing on an alien planet. And to avoid the embarrassment, he takes the walrus-thing option. Interesting that his take-away from that situation was how mortifyingly horrible it must have been for the human being required to go and tell the FUCKING BEATLES to stop playing live.