The Beatles: Get Back Traditional Cache

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The Beatles have had more number-one albums on the British charts and sold more singles in the UK than any other act. According to the RIAA, they are the best-selling band in the United States, with 177 million certified units. In 2008, the group topped Billboard magazine's list of the all-time most successful "Hot 100" artists. As of 2013, they hold the record for most number-one hits on the Hot 100 chart with 20. They have received 7 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and 15 Ivor Novello Awards. Collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most influential people, the Beatles are the best-selling band in history, with EMI Records estimating sales of over one billion units. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the Beatles as the best artist of all-time.

"Get Back" is a song by the Beatles, originally released as a single on 11 April 1969 and credited to "The Beatles with Billy Preston."  A different mix of the song later became the closing track of Let It Be (1970), which was the Beatles' last album released just after the group split. The single version was later issued on CD on the second disc of the Past Masters compilation.

The single reached number one in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, West Germany, and Mexico.  It was the Beatles' only single that credited another artist at their request.  "Get Back" was the Beatles' first single release in true stereo in the US.  In the UK, the Beatles' singles remained monaural until the following release, "The Ballad of John and Yoko".

"Get Back" is unusual in the Beatles' canon in that almost every moment of the song's evolution has been extensively documented, from its beginning as an offhand riff to its final mixing in several versions.  Much of this documentation is in the form of illegal (but widely available) bootleg recordings, and is recounted in the book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles' Let It Be Disaster by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt.

The song's melody grew out of some unstructured jamming on 7 January 1969 during rehearsal sessions on the sound stage at Twickenham Studios.  Over the next few minutes, McCartney introduced some of the lyrics, reworking "Get back to the place you should be" from fellow Beatle George Harrison's "Sour Milk Sea" into "Get back to where you once belonged".  McCartney had played bass on Jackie Lomax's recording of "Sour Milk Sea" a few months earlier.  On 9 January, McCartney brought a more developed version of "Get Back" to the group, with the "Sweet Loretta" verse close to its finished version.  For the press release to promote the "Get Back" single, McCartney wrote, "We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air... we started to write words there and then...when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to roller-coast by."

The released version of the song is composed of two verses, with an intro, outro, and several refrains.  The first verse tells the story of a man named Jojo, who leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some 'California grass'.  McCartney's soon-to-be wife Linda had attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, where the couple later owned a spacious ranch.  The second verse is about a sexually ambiguous character named "Loretta Martin", who "thought she was a woman, but she was another man."  The single version includes a coda urging Loretta to "get back" to where she once belonged.

At the beginning of the Let It Be version of the song, Lennon can be heard jokingly saying "Sweet Loretta Fart, she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan."  The album version of the song also ends with him famously quipping, "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition".  (Originally he said that at the end of the rooftop concert, but Phil Spector edited it into the "Get Back" song on the Let It Be album.)  In 1980, Lennon stated that "there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there", saying that McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang "Get back to where you once belonged."

Around the time he was developing the lyrics to "Get Back", McCartney satirised the "Rivers of Blood speech" by former British Cabinet minister Enoch Powell in a brief jam that has become known as the "Commonwealth Song".  The lyrics included a line "You'd better get back to your Commonwealth homes".  The group improvised various temporary lyrics for "Get Back" leading to what has become known in Beatles' folklore as the "No Pakistanis" version.  This version is more racially charged, and addresses attitudes toward immigrants in America and Britain: "...don't need no Puerto Ricans living in the USA"; and "don't dig no Pakistanis taking all the people's jobs".  In an interview in Playboy magazine in 1980, Lennon described it as "...a better version of 'Lady Madonna'.  You know, a potboiler rewrite."

"Get Back"