Mixing the "Get Back" album (1st compilation)

On January 24, 1969, The Beatles continued work on the “Get Back” sessions at Apple Studio in London. It was their fourth day recording at their new studio and the 15th day of the project overall.

That evening, engineer Glyn Johns took several recordings from the past few days to Olympic Sound Studios, where he prepared a series of rough mixes during a session reportedly lasting around 90 minutes. These were never intended for official release — they served as reference versions, allowing The Beatles to evaluate how the tracks sounded on record and take them home for review.

Johns created rough mixes of “Get Back,” “Two of Us,” “Dig a Pony,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Teddy Boy,” and a brief cover of “Help!”

The following day, January 25, the session began with Glyn Johns playing back the results of his overnight mixes.

Glyn Johns returned to Olympic Sound Studios once again on January 26 to prepare additional mixes.

TODO:

In January 1970, this first compilation of the “Get Back” sessions was unofficially released on what is believed to be the very first Beatles bootleg, “Kum Back“.

Some more formal work to prepare a “Get Back” LP would start a month and a half later, on March 10, 1969.

[The Beatles] had proved to make the most extraordinary produced records, and here I was witnessing them right back at the beginning, sitting around playing and singing live. And I thought… that maybe that would be a great way to have an album out of what we were in the middle of without an end. So, I took some multi-track tapes to Olympic after my session at Apple one night and I did a bunch of rough mixes very quickly of what the idea could be. The following day, I took the quarter-inch tapes of the mixes into Apple. They had their own cutting room, and I got their cutting engineer, Malcolm, to cut five acetates, one for me and one each for the band. And the following day they all came in and said, “You’ve got to be joking.” [laughs] Nobody liked the idea at all.

Glyn Johns – Interview with Beatlefan #252 (September – October 2021)

Having no real end in sight for the album, one evening after our session at Savile Row, I took it upon myself to take the multitrack recordings I had made during rehearsals to Olympic Studios to mix and edit what I thought could be an idea for the album. This was to show in an audio documentary what I had witnessed in the previous days, as a “fly on the wall” insight to the four of them interacting, having fun, jamming, taking the mickey, stopping and starting and creating some wonderful music, warts and all. I had five acetates cut the following morning and gave one each to the band, keeping one for myself, saying it was just an idea and asking them to take a listen. The next day I got a resounding NO from each of them, which I completely understood and had fully expected.

Glyn Johns – From “Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles , Eric Clapton, the Faces…”, 2014

The extraordinary thing is that [The Beatles] proved up to that point that they were the masters of the “Produced Record”, yet the stuff I did with them wasn’t “produced” in that way at all, it was all recorded live in a room, in a rehearsal situation. And for that, I think it has great value, because I originally put together an album of rehearsals, with chat and jokes and bits of general conversation in between the tracks, which was the way I wanted [‘Get Back’] to be – breakdowns, false starts.

Really, the idea was that at the time, they were viewed as being the be-all-and-end-all, sort of up on a pedestal, beyond touch, just gods, completely gods, and what I witnessed going on at these rehearsals was that, in fact, they were hysterically funny, but very ordinary people in many ways. And they were capable of playing as a band, which everybody was beginning to wonder about at that point, because they hadn’t done so for some time – everything had been prepared in advance, everything had been overdubbed and everything. And they proved in that rehearsal that they could still sing and play at the same time, and they could make records without all those weird and wonderful sounds on them.

I got the bit between my teeth about it, and one night, I mixed a bunch of stuff that they didn’t even know I’d recorded half the time – I just whacked the recorder on for a lot of stuff that they did, and gave them an acetate the following morning of what I’d done, as a rough idea of what an album could be like, released as it was. There was one thing that only happened once, a song that Paul played to the others, which I believe he later used on one of his ensuing albums, called “Teddy Boy”, and I have a tape of Paul actually teaching the others this song. I loved it, and I was hoping they’d finish it and do it, because I thought it was really good. But my version does go on a bit, and they’re just going round and round, trying to get the chord sequence right, I suppose, and the best bit is where John Lennon gets bored – he obviously doesn’t want to play it anymore, and starts doing his interjections. They came back and said they didn’t like it, or each individual bloke came in and said he didn’t like it, and that was the end of that.

Glyn Johns – From “And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles” by Ken McNab, 2020

Session activities

1. Two Of Us

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.24.48

2. Two Of Us

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.24.69

3. Get Back

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.23.79

4. Get Back

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.23.80

5. I've Got A Feeling

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.23.81

6. Help!

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.23.82

7. Teddy Boy

   Written by Paul McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.24.33

8. Dig A Pony

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.22.68

9. I've Got A Feeling

   Written by Lennon - McCartney

   Mixing • DDSI.22.69

Staff

Production staff

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