Beatles – Song ID Blog

“Get Back (Rooftop Performance/Take 3)” (1969) – The Beatles * Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney * LP : Get Back: The Rooftop Performance (2022)

Big Beatle rollouts, even momentous ones like Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, get more annoying with each passing year. This is thanks to the noisy social media theatre we’re locked inside of, where every moptopologist we know, along with everyone else, feels obligated to weigh in. (Case in point: what you’re reading. Although I did wait a full fourteen months.) Granted, they’re the world’s favorite group, but it feels like you can barely take something Beatle in on your own anymore without needing to close your eyes and shut your ears to spare yourself of people’s chatter.

So I watched Get Back, thought my own thoughts, marveled and observed, felt my internal download of the 1970 Let It Be film come apart and turn irrelevant, saw the dust fly off the prevailing narratives, witnessed songs take shape before my eyes, songs so familiar that I probably don’t ever need to listen to them again, and noted all the prismatic enhancement of the principals and their coterie that only ample footage can provide. But then came a part that although I knew was coming, nonetheless caught me off-guard in its extended form and got me all teary. It was the part when people on the street were given the opportunity to express how they felt about the Beatles.

“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” (1968) – The Beatles * Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney * LP: The Beatles * Produced by George Martin * Label: Apple

It’s likely that the well-read John Lennon, who once sang “turn off your mind,” had come across the notion of the human psyche as the “wild monkey,” swinging from branch to branch, and a challenge to control. This image rose up in the Buddhist Samyutta Nikāya scriptures and came up again in Swami Vivekenanda’s Raja-Yoga, where the influential Vedantist cites an “old story” about the restless monkey, possessed by the demon of desire, and stung by the scorpion of jealousy, as an apt description of that intellect that supposedly gives the human species an edge over all other living things. How else could the most outspoken Beatle stick it to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (about whom he’d written the disappointed indictment “Sexy Sadie”) than to celebrate his own wild monkey, who’s got “nothing to hide”? But then there’s that business about his lower monkey, who became unhidden on Two Virgins, two weeks before the white album came out.