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

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Late January 1969, the “Get Back” sessions were not over yet, but one night, engineer/producer Glyn Johns put together a rough compilation of songs recorded during that month to show The Beatles how he envisioned a future LP based on those recording sessions to be.

24 January : Basic studio documentation shows that certain (unspecified) titles were roughly mixed into stereo by Glyn Johns during a 90-minute session this evening at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, without the Beatles in attendance.

26 January : Again, basic studio documentation shows that certain (unspecified) titles were mixed into stereo by Glyn Johns during a 90-minute session this evening at Olympic.

From “The Complete Beatles Chronicle” by Mark Lewisohn

[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” by Ken McNab

From beatlesource.com:

It has been commonly believed, based on John Barrett’s research and Mark Lewisohn’s Beatles Recording Sessions, that Beatles’ producer, Glyn Johns, made his first mixes of the Get Back material on 10-13 March 1969. However, further research by Lewisohn (in Chronicle) and evidence on the film crew’s Nagra reels reveals that Glyn actually did the mixes during the latter part of the Get Back sessions in January 1969. The March date apparently being when the master reels were logged at E.M.I. Subsequently, acetates were cut from Glyn’s first mixes. Apparently, no photos of the acetates seem to exist and it is not commonly known where any of the acetates are today.

This compilation, surely, was never intended for release. It was merely a reference mix to see how the recordings sounded on record and for The Beatles to take home and listen to. This mix is significantly different than the “final” mixes. It’s noticeably less processed both in terms of editing and the use of reverb. It also includes an otherwise unavailable version “Get Back”, a short cover of Jimmy McCracklin’s “The Walk” and a variety of other audio snippets found nowhere else from a master tape. The acetates were probably cut late 30 January 1969 at Olympic Studios. Many of these performances (with new mixes) were, subsequently, chosen
for all versions of Get Back.

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.

About Glyn Johns’ “Get Back” compilations

A few months after the end of the “Get Back” sessions, engineer/producer Glyn Johns was given the task of compiling an actual album. Glyn made four different variants of the album, two of them having been considered for release at some point.

Last updated on January 14, 2022

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