On May 8, 1970, The Beatles released their final album together, fittingly titled Let It Be.
The album contained some of the group's biggest hits, including "Across the Universe," "Get Back," and of course the title track, "Let It Be." It was also the group's first and only collaboration with legendary producer Phil Spector, who spent the last decade of his life in prison for murdering actress Lana Clarkson.
Spector was famous for his "Wall of Sound" present on tracks like "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes and "River Deep — Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Spector would layer orchestral arrangements and multiple instruments to create a thick soundscape that was unmistakably his. When Spector did this on the track "The Long and Winding Road," it infuriated Paul McCartney. So much so that McCartney wrote a letter to Spector demanding that he remove the excess orchestra, ending it with an assertive command: "Don't ever do it again."
Let It Be wasn't just an album. It was also a simultaneously released documentary, capturing the making of the Fab Four's final collaboration and the tensions between them that ultimately led to their breakup. After its theatrical release, the doc wasn't widely available on home video, making it a rare artifact from The Beatles' archive. In 2021, a restored version became available to stream on Disney+.
The album's release was all the more complicated by the fact that the group had publicly broken up just a month earlier. While many fans like to blame the breakup on John Lennon's relationship with Yoko Ono, it was actually far more complicated than that.
The larger impetus for The Beatles disbanding, as Historynotes, was the death of their manager, Brian Epstein. This left a power vacuum on the business side of things and forced the artists to dip their toes into the world of management, which led to interpersonal squabbles. Separately, Lennon and McCartney's personal relationship also began to fall apart.
Lennon left the band first, followed by McCartney. The four never publicly reunited again.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/Q4zfpYe
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