In 1970, The Beatles released Let It Be, the final record John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr would put out together. Though it was not the last thing they recorded, the album sat unreleased for a while and came out after the band had already broken up. Lennon said this was because of how bad it was. According to him, none of The Beatles wanted to touch it. McCartney had a different perspective on the matter.
John Lennon did not think The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ sounded good
The Beatles recorded Let It Be in early 1969, but it wasn’t available to the public until May 1970. As it languished in the interim, manager Allen Klein brought in producer Phil Spector to work on it. Lennon felt that this was the best thing that could have happened to the album, even though Spector’s version has many critics.
“If anybody listens to the bootleg version, which was the version which was pre-Spector, and listens to the version Spector did, they would shut up — if you really want to know the difference,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “The tapes were so lousy and so bad none of us would go near them to touch them. They’d been lying around for six months.”
He believed Spector did well with a job that none of The Beatles wanted.
“None of us could face remixing them; it was terrifying,” Lennon said. “But Spector did a fantastic job.”
Paul McCartney felt very differently than John Lennon about ‘Let It Be’
McCartney didn’t agree with Lennon. He believed Spector disregarded the original vision for the record and was horrified when he first listened to it.
“So now we were getting a ‘re-producer’ instead of just a producer, and he added on all sorts of stuff — singing ladies on ‘The Long And Winding Road’ — backing that I perhaps wouldn’t have put on,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think it made it the worst record ever, but the fact that now people were putting stuff on our records that certainly one of us didn’t know about was wrong. I’m not sure whether the others knew about it. It was just, ‘Oh, get it finished up. Go on — do whatever you want.’ We were all getting fed up.”
Longtime Beatles producer George Martin felt similarly.
“That made me very angry — and it made Paul even angrier because neither he nor I knew about it till it had been done,” he said. “It happened behind our backs because it was done when Allen Klein was running John.”
Others who worked with The Beatles felt this was wrong
Though Spector’s version was the one that reached the public, others in The Beatles’ camp sided with McCartney. Press officer Derek Taylor could completely understand McCartney’s frustration.
“I know that Paul was very cross about ‘The Long And Winding Road’ being interfered with,” he said. “I took the view that nobody should have ever interfered with their music. That was to me — I don’t want to say shocking — but wrong, certainly. And if you were a McCartney seeing your work being altered … I can imagine the outrage!”
In 2003, The Beatles released Let It Be … Naked, which aligned more closely with McCartney’s original vision.
