THE HIT HAMMER: The Beatles' "Get Back" (feat. Billy Preston)

(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please CLICK HERE)

The Beatles - "Get Back" (feat. Billy Preston)

Hit Number 1: May 24, 1969

Stay at Number 1: 5 Weeks

"Get Back" started out as a jam fest. In January of 1969, the Beatles were in a recording session at Twickenham Studios, when the band started playing a bunch of random songs and notes just for the hell of it. Paul McCartney saw some potential with the random song they were playing, and with a little bit of time, came up with some weird and nonsensical lyrics to go with it. He tampered with George Harrison's "Sour Milk Sea", using the lyric "Get back to the place you should be", and turning it into "Get back to where you once belonged". McCartney continued to work on the song, eventually coming up with the "Sweet Loretta" verse, along with the rest of the song. Later that month, they were recording it. So what started out as a jam fest, turned into a recorded song in the same month, and that song becomes a #1 hit.

In nature, everything about "Get Back" is strange. The song starts out with the group making a bunch of random noises, and John Lennon utters the famous line "Sweet Loretta Fart she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan". (If Lennon was sober when he said that, then I'm concerned for all the other crazy crap he's said that we don't know about) After the weird intro, the song launches into a funky, catchy tune, but some of the lyrics are completely random, and it makes me wonder how much of a factor LSD was in the making of the song. The song introduces us to a loner who leaves his home of Tucson, Arizona, to go get some "California grass". We also get introduced to a man who thinks he's a woman, and the girls around "her" say "'she's' got it coming". McCartney commands both of them to "get back" to where they once belonged. For the first time in a while, I'm at a complete loss here. I have no idea what message the song is trying to send, if any at all. I don't have a freaking clue what "Get Back" is about, but if you have an interpretation of it, or if you think you have a good idea on what it's about, please be sure to let me know.

Anyway, the lyrics are just a small part of the song, and I'm not really paying that much attention to them. Instead, the song is a funky banger, and it's just a fun song to listen to. We get some fun guitar strums, and an electrifying piano solo by a still relatively unknown Billy Preston, who would go on to have a successful solo career in the 1970's. (We'll hear from him in this blog) I would never put "Get Back" among the best of the Beatles' songs, but it still does okay for itself. With all the crazy stuff going on in the song, it keeps me entertained, and this nonsensical story is fun to sing a long with, even though I have no idea what I'm singing about. Overall, "Get Back" is nothing special, but it's a perfectly silly song about loners and men who think they're women. It's just a fun time!

GRADE: 7/10

JUST MISSED:

On the other hand, the pretty unexciting "Love (Can Make You Happy) by Mercy peaked at #2 behind "Get Back". It's a 4, but here it is anyway.