There’s never one reason as to why any band breaks up. Sometimes, living together in the studio and on the road for years at a time starts to get to a person, and for as much as people might have a good creative relationship, there comes a point where it starts to get a little bit monotonous if you know what you’re going to get from the rest of your bandmates. Although The Beatles were already on shaky ground during the Let It Be sessions, bringing in Phil Spector to clean up ‘The Long and Winding Road’ certainly didn’t help matters.
But let’s get one thing straight: ‘The Long and Winding Road’ is not a bad song. Sure, many Paul McCartney fans were used to this kind of piano ballad format for a lot of his downtempo material, but it was definitely strange seeing him write something so melancholy, especially since he was the guy who wrote something as chipper as ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’.
When the group recorded the song, though, they were still fleshing out what the Get Back project was going to be. They didn’t know if they had enough pieces to create a full record, and listening to them discuss the work in the documentary on Disney+, producer Glyn Johns talked about potentially saving the track when it came time to mix it.
Getting a good mix is usually the key to a great recording, but bringing in Phil Spector was a recipe for disaster. Since the album was supposed to bring them back to being a scruffy bar band, having the man behind ‘The Wall of Sound’ add huge orchestras to the song made it sound far too bloated for the track listing.
Spector’s touch brought ‘Across the Universe’ from a spare acoustic song to one of Lennon’s best performances, but it didn’t save McCartney from sounding anything but corny. Compared to the version that’s heard in the documentary Get Back, the version that came out on the final record feels like something heard in the background of some melodramatic soap opera.
It’s not like McCartney wasn’t open to having added instrumentation on it, either. When discussing the piece, he’s heard saying that he was considering putting strings on the track but wasn’t sure, but that shouldn’t have given Spector permission to just take the tapes off of the reels and bring in a choir and orchestra.
While Lennon stood by the fact that Spector worked his magic with what he had, McCartney was livid when he heard what they had done to his song. For as laid-back as McCartney presents himself in the public eye, reading the letter that he sent to Abbey Road Studios instructing them never to tamper with one of his tunes again is still one of the most cutthroat moves he made during his Beatle years.
After spending three decades in the mainstream, Let It Be…Naked gave fans ‘The Long and Winding Road’ the way that McCartney intended it, with only his piano, voice, and a full band arrangement rather than the overblown arrangement. There are moments when the orchestra plays off of McCartney’s vocals perfectly, but it’s better to have the version of the Fab Four in their rawest state than listening to Spector try to put a happy face on the band’s implosion.
