Revisiting the Summer of the Bands: July 2007, D22, and the Indie Rock Scene in Beijing

Punk on Wood promo flyer for D22 Beijing, July 2007

In the summer and fall of 2007, while living in Beijing, I spent a lot of time filming the rock club scene. This eventuated in a documentary film Down: Indie Rock in the PRC, co-produced with Jud Willmont in Shanghai. More recently I published a book based on my experiences documenting and filming the Chinese rock scene since those “golden years” called Rocking China: Rock Music Scenes in Beijing, Shanghai and Beyond. Lately I’ve given a few talks about my book and screened our rock doc, which is getting renewed interest since many of these bands have become quite famous in China, at least among people into indie rock music. The success of the TV show Summer of the Bands 乐队的夏天 has helped catalyze this rock renaissance in China.

I’ve also decided to go back into my video archive and publish some videos of the bands I filmed in the Chinese rock scene all those years ago. These are now historical documents of a time that many consider to be a golden period of rock music—and of art—in China.

On Tuesday, I’m giving a talk to a Shanghai audience organized by the RAS. The series is called “Stories of Things” and features speakers discussing objects of art or artifacts that help them to tell a story about Asian culture and society. Organized by Robert Martin, it’s been a fun series to be involved in, and so far I’ve already given two talks for the series. This time I’m using a poster or flyer from Beijing’s legendary club D22 featuring original artwork, which was used to promote a series of concerts dubbed “Punk on Wood”. This happened in July 2007. Four bands were asked to strip down to acoustic instruments and play their songs or cover songs they liked. I was there for two of the concerts, both featuring the band Joyside and lead singer Bian Yuan. The first was the entire Joyside band, and the second was an impromptu session featuring mainly covers, which happened when another band failed to show up for their concert. It was a great way to get to know the band Joyside and singer Bian Yuan in the intimate setting of the club. Not many people attended the concert, and the lower volume of the unplugged sessions made it easier for me to record the sound (usually the sound overwhelmed the mic on my camera). I put these videos up on youtube for people to enjoy and appreciate a crucial club and time period in the history of rock music in China.

 “Used to be Happy” cover by Joyside

“Russian Roulette” cover by Joyside

“Lonely Planet Boy” cover by Joyside

“Arms Around a Memory” cover by Joyside

“Disappointed in You” cover by Joyside

I also put up a couple songs by Carsick Cars, one of the leading indie rock bands in China, who performed at D22 in July 2007. And a video of the young band Hedgehog. Enjoy!

Gun 棍 by Carsick Cars

Noise Hit World by Hedgehog

熊猫 Panda by Carsick Cars

Saying Goodbye to 2022 and to Zero Covid: Another Challenging Year Behind Us, and a Promising New Year Ahead

As I write this post from my apartment in Shanghai, the city is undergoing its most intense encounter with COVID since the virus started plaguing the world in early 2020. For reasons we can try to guess at but will likely never truly understand, the government of China decided quite suddenly to end its “Zero Covid” campaign earlier in December. Since then, a “tsunami” of Covid infections has hit the populations of China’s biggest cities. Even small town and village life has been affected, at least in the area I live in neighboring Kunshan.

Among people I know in China, which includes family, friends, colleagues, students, and many others in my life, the initial reaction to the end of “Zero Covid” was one of relief. Having been through a challenging year of lockdowns, restrictions, obstructions, daily tests, QR codes, travel codes, school entry codes, and so forth, we were all ready to move on with our lives. If the price of entry into a more normal state of being was catching the virus, it seems that most people were willing to pay that price.

Over the month of December, almost everyone I know in China caught the virus. Some had a mild reaction to it, while others suffered through several days of fevers, chills, body aches, and other symptoms associated with the virus. Some recovered quickly, while others had persistent coughs and fatigue. It didn’t help that the years of masking and social distancing had probably weakened everyone’s immune systems. Yet I don’t know of anybody in my circles who had to have emergency health care treatment.

While catching Covid was a very scary proposition during the early months of the outbreak back in 2020, over the past year that fear diminished. It seems that the greatest worry for people in China in 2022 was of being sent to a “quarantine camp” or special facility, which was the policy for those who tested positive up until last December. Once that policy ended, I think people were far less concerned about testing positive. In fact, it quickly became a source of amusement and humor with endless references in social media to 小阳 “little positives” a synonym in Chinese with 小羊 “little lambs”.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t taking precautions. Most people still wear masks outdoors, even though they aren’t mandated anymore. I’ve even seen my neighbors in Kunshan wearing masks inside their own homes. I don’t know if they are being extra cautious and/or if someone in the home caught the virus. I live in a remote area of Kunshan, a relatively rural area of farmlands and fields, and even there, people are acting very cautious. Thus, it would be misleading to state that people in China have given up on protecting themselves from the virus. But the consequences of catching it are quite different to what they were up until a month ago.

In my own case, I decided to play it safe and stay in my home in Kunshan while the virus was raging in Shanghai. By mid-December both my wife and daughter, who live in Shanghai, had the virus, so for me going back to Shanghai would have meant getting exposed to it for certain. I ended up spending my birthday weekend and the following Christmas weekend alone in my house, and for three weeks I saw nobody outside of my immediate neighbors. By late December, my wife and daughter had recovered from the virus, though they still complained of fatigue and had persistent coughs. I decided to return to Shanghai for New Year’s weekend. I still played it safe and stayed home or took lone walks with my dog in and around our neighborhood. I’m trying to avoid this current wave, though I figure it’s only a matter of time before I too am exposed to the virus. Yet life goes on, and I can’t stay in my fortress of solitude forever.

While there has undoubtedly been a huge wave of viral infections since the change in policy was announced in early December, that wave already seems to be receding, at least in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Through most of December, both cities were like ghost towns, with residents either suffering from the virus and/or sheltering in their homes. In the past few days, I’ve heard and seen reports of cities coming back to life and people going out to dine and even to drink in local bars. It should be added that since the change in policy in December, there are no more restrictions on entering these places, so it’s a matter of preference now.

People whom I know in China are now waxing optimistic about the coming year. As soon as this wave diminishes, and as soon as “herd immunity” kicks in, people will be very happy to see their daily lives returning to normal without all the restrictions and the fears of lockdowns, green fences, quarantine camps and so forth. We are also very excited to have the opportunity to travel again both in China and abroad, and already a flood tide of people are leaving the country. Happily, the policy of quarantining incoming people upon their arrival to China is ending soon. On a sour note, other countries have laid on new policies and restrictions against people traveling from China, mainly asking for evidence of negative tests. In some cases, people from China are even banned from entering the country. This is all temporary though and I’m sure it won’t last long.

My prediction is that sometime after the Chinese New Year, people will have largely moved on, as they have already done in most other parts of the world. Yes, there will be casualties, as there were in enormous numbers even in such advanced countries as the USA. Yes, the virus will come and go, and some people will be reinfected. Yet over time, immunity levels will rise and Covid will indeed become something akin to a typical flu virus. I think this is what the government was banking on when they decided to end the “Zero Covid” campaign. Over time, we will have a much better understanding of the causes and consequences of the policy and its sudden ending. For now, I remain cautiously optimistic that our lives in China can be groovy once again.

Shanghai Gets Back to “Normal”: Museums, Movies, and Musical Life in China’s Great Metropolis


 

Looking out over the Huangpu River and the Shanghai Bund from a Pudong-side cafe as I write this post.

It has now been over four months since the Big Lockdown in Shanghai was officially lifted on or around June 1st. In this post, I discuss how life has returned to “normal” since that time (note: nothing is truly normal since COVID began in 2019.) I focus especially on some of the live music scenes I’ve been participating in lately, which for me are a barometer for city life. The week-long holiday following the 73rd anniversary of the birth of the PRC on October 1 provided me the opportunity to spend a healthy chunk of time in the city and reconnect with people and scenes, including of course my own Shanghai family. Thankfully, the sauna-like heat and humidity of summer are long gone, and except for one sweltering day, we experienced some refreshing rain and mild and cool fall weather. Here are some highlights of the past week.

 

After teaching my last class of the week at Duke Kunshan University, I returned to Shanghai on Thursday evening, driving through the usual barrage of city traffic towards the Old Docks along the waterway known as the Bund. Arriving there around 7:30 pm, I made my way up to the rooftop where Kathleen’s restaurant is located, where my wife and I attended a party to welcome the new Head of School for Shanghai American School. Since our daughter graduated from the school in June, I don’t currently have ties with the school, except for my legacy as a Board member. It was on that basis I was invited by the other members of the Board to meet the new HoS. It turned out to be a big party with maybe 200 people in attendance, mostly parents of course. We enjoyed the evening overlooking the Bund and the Pudong nightscape, and we met a few other parents as well as catching up with some of the Board members and school admin folk with whom I worked on the SAS Board from 2016-1019.

 

The band backs a singer (Paul) on the stage of Chair. “I can’t get no….satisfaction!”

Later that night, I attended an event at the Chair, a live music club in the Tonglefang neighborhood, a converted factory district that features bars, restaurants, and clubs (it used to be home to the original Muse 1). That night, the club was opening its stage to “amateur” musicians and singers. Apparently, this was being promoted as an acoustic or unplugged music night, but the musicians were amped up as usual. The house band consists of a drummer, a keyboard player, and a bass player. They backed up a range of artists, including some talented musicians as well as quite a few singers. Some of the singers had their songs down while others relied on their phones to conjure up the lyrics. My bandmate Jud and I pay attention to this, since we’ve been striving to go “off book” in our playing. When it was our turn to mount the stage, we encountered some technical issues, namely that there wasn’t a cable to connect Jud’s acoustic guitar. Lesson learned: always pack a cable or two in your guitar case, as well as spare strings and a device for changing them at a moment’s notice. We played the Led Zep song “Hey Hey What Can I Do” which has become a staple of ours over the past few months. Then our singer Tammy, who recently joined up with us, sang “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie while I accompanied her on guitar.

 

Musicians and guests hanging outside of the new Magpie cafe, a late-night hangout on Xiangyang Road

After that event, we rode bikes over to the new Magpie, a small café bar on Xiangyang Road, which has become a nightlife hotspot over the past couple years. We’ve been going to the new Magpie quite a lot lately, and usually we end up on mikes with our guitars plugged into the amp, regaling the small and mostly Chinese crowd with a mixture of English and Mandarin pop-rock songs. The owner Jackie and his wife, who runs the café, seem to appreciate our act. Jackie is a good musician, and he often plays guitar and trumpet in his café. He runs a larger café on Kangding Road where we have also spent some time, but nowadays we seem to be gravitating more to this small venue. We were joined that night by Ginger, a well-known singer here in Shanghai who used to sing at the Cotton Club with Greg Smith and band.

 

On Friday evening, I went to the Xintiandi complex with my wife and daughter to see the Chinese holiday film, 万里归土 which could be translated as “The Long Road Home.” This was the first film we’d seen in theater since the lockdown began in March. Based in reality with some dramatic license, the film tells the story of an intrepid yet beleaguered group of Chinese foreign service officers in 2015, who go all out to get Chinese work crews out of a war-torn country in North Africa, which is in the throes of a revolution. The hero is an officer who uses his linguistic skills as well as a mixture of diplomacy, guile, and grit to get his people across the border and back to China as guns blaze and bombs blast across the inhospitable desert landscape. China is drawing on the Hollywood blockbuster thriller model for its own propaganda purposes, and while the film has a strong political message (unlike some other countries, ahem, China doesn’t interfere with domestic politics in other countries and used no weapons, China is a safe place in contrast to the developing world, etc.) it does seem to work on the dramatic level, even if the film focuses on its Chinese characters while treating most others as a backdrop (again, echoes of Hollywood there). There are a couple of sympathetic individuals from the war-torn country who help the Chinese, only to meet a bad fate at the hands of the revolutionaries. I shan’t spoil it any more in case anybody wants to see the film. My recommendation? Go see it, if only to learn how China is advancing its political propaganda efforts through the medium of film. I found myself appreciating the actor who plays the role of the hero, who goes through hell to get his people back to safety. I would want this dude to have my back.

 

After all that activity, I had a quiet Saturday, which I spent taking my daughter to her tennis lesson and cycling around the demolition ground of the Old Walled City surrounding the City God Temple (a sad fate indeed for such a precious historical sector of the city).

 

I stepped out into the live music scenes again on Sunday. That evening I met bandmate Jud, fellow guitar fiend Tom, and a special guest for a jam session at 521, a café restaurant off Suzhou River. We have been jamming there frequently for over a year now. After our warm-up, we headed over to another open mic session, this time at the I Love Shanghai bar on Xinzha Road. This old dive bar has a fraternity feel to it with graffiti art on the walls and a pool table. It has a small stage on one end of the bar, where they hold performances. I gave a film screening of my jazz film there a year ago. The open mic night is hosted by some Filipinos in the musical and F&B community and attended by a variety of musicians. Some of the musicians, such as Ray Dio, play their own original songs, while most others cover well-known pop-rock songs. There is some overlap with the scene we attended at the Chair. We got up on stage and played a small set, and later in the night, after they turned off the amps, we joined a group for an unplugged singalong.

On the stage of I Love Shanghai, we support a singer as we lose our religion

 

On Monday evening, the restaurant Cottons on Xinhua Road hosted a special live event, featuring Greg Smith on guitar accompanying two singers. The first was guitarist Dave Stone, an Aussie who has been a feature of Shanghai live scenes since he landed here for the Expo in 2010. Following Dave’s set, Greg was joined by Ginger, who gave a lovely vocal performance that included Lou Reed’s song “Satellite Love”, the John Prine tune “Angel from Montgomery” and many others. It was truly a special event, and well attended by a mixture of Chinese and foreign guests. While enjoying the performance I had the chance to catch up with an old mate or two and talk to some other internationals about the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns on China and its precarious foreign communities. Needless to say, the lockdowns dealt a harsh blow to the foreign communities of Shanghai and elsewhere in China and catalyzed another mass exodus of foreign passport holders and international businesses out of China. Those who remain here hope for better times to come. Or perhaps like me, they are willing to forgive the lockdowns long as they never happen again.

 

The lockdown of spring, which I experienced in the neighboring town of Kunshan (see my previous posts), wasn’t as traumatic as it was for people in Shanghai. Many Shanghai-based folks I’ve talked to over the past month or so, whether Chinese or foreigners, seem to be suffering from a condition that people liken to PTSD. People are still scarred and recovering from that dark episode in Shanghai’s recent history. If music isn’t the cure for this ailment, it is certainly a palliative, and Greg, Dave, and Ginger’s performance had obvious healing powers for a community exhausted from the ordeals of the past few months.

 

Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena, one of his artworks at the MAP

On Tuesday, I joined my wife and daughter for a tour of the new Pudong Art Museum or MAP. Located in a prime spot overlooking the Huangpu River, with huge windows looking out toward the Bund, the museum is a nice place to visit. The main event was the exhibition of the works of famed Chinese artist Xu Bing. Known especially for his experiments with Chinese characters, his work is stunning when seen in its full glory. In addition, the museum featured a special exhibition of the Tate Museum called “Op Art” which showcased experimental movements in 20th century optical arts by artists in the USA, UK, Europe and elsewhere. One of the highlights of our visit was having lunch on the rooftop restaurant, where we met Alessandro, an F&B entrepreneur who was attending to the needs of the guests. While on the pricey side, I recommend this restaurant with its view overlooking the river and the Bund, and the food is delissimo!

 

On Tuesday night, we attended yet another open mic session at I Love Shanghai. This time we were joined by musician friends Tom and Kyle, whom we met in August while performing at the Jerry Garcia birthday event in the club Real Shanghai. They had just returned from a music festival in Hangzhou and had some interesting stories to share. They performed a medley of Elliot Smith tunes and one of Tom’s original songs. We performed a couple of our more seasoned songs on stage, and after they turned off the amps around 11 pm, we joined the others for a rousing jam session, with Jud and I leading the way for a while with some party songs and medleys from our growing repertoire. We find that knowing songs well and having two guitars gives us an advantage in these situations, as does our experience playing unplugged in noisy cafes and bars over the past year or so.

 

Excavation site in the Guangfulin complex.

On Wednesday, I accompanied my wife and mother-in-law on a drive out to Songjiang on the outskirts of the Shanghai metropolitan area, where we visited the 广富林文化遗址，a complex of old-style Chinese buildings and temples surrounding the excavation site where artifacts of habitations from 6000 BC were found. The excavation site is replicated in a big underground space that also takes one on a journey through Chinese history. With its replicas of ancient old tombs, artifacts, and local businesses from Ming Dynasty, ending with the Bundscape of Shanghai, this space reminds me of the previous instantiation of the Shanghai History Museum in the Pearl Tower in Pudong. The complex was packed with vacationers from Shanghai and environs, and despite the masks, it did indeed seem for a moment that holiday life in China has returned to its normal frenzy.

 

Last night, my remaining bandmate and I ended up playing our guitars for quite a while under an outside canopy at Ray’s bar, a neighborhood bar on Changle Road, while the rain on the canopy provided a canasta for our songs. Owner Ray seems very happy to have us there, and we may end up playing a regular gig at this bar in future. One plus is that inside the bar has an electric piano, and I ended up playing the piano and singing a few songs to Jud’s guitar accompaniment, much to the delight of a very happy group of Italians who were celebrating a birthday. Thus, we are doing our part to reinject some merriment into the city’s musical nightscape and give our international residents more reasons to stay here. Or at least we hope so.

 

 

 

Getting Back to 1969 on a Long and Winding Road: Some Observations About the new Beatles Doc by Peter Jackson et al


 

I’ve been watching music documentaries all year long as I worked on my own doc on the history of jazz in Shanghai. Partly these films are for inspiration—and a great deal of what I learned from these docs went into my own doc—and partly they are for fun and enjoyment. This week I took the time to watch the new three-part documentary film on the Beatles, “Get Back.” Directed by LOR director Peter Jackson, this film just came out at the end of last month on the Disney Plus channel (which means you have to buy into the channel to see it). Since I’m a huge Beatles fan and have been since I was a wee lad, it was a great pleasure to be granted privileged access to their recording studios in January 1969 and observe them closely as they put together a new album, which turned into Let It Be. 

This album and the accompanying Abbey Road album, which they made later that year, was their swan song as a group, since they separated and went their own ways afterwards. Also, the concert they held on the rooftop of their own Apple Corp. building in downtown London was the last time the band would ever play together. As a Beatles fan and as a musician with some aspirations towards songwriting, watching them rehearse and come up with songs for the album and concert is a fascinating experience. Though it’s a long film (around 8 hours in total), for me it was well worth the time it took (three consecutive nights of viewing in my case) to see the film in its totality.

For those of you who missed the news, Peter Jackson and his team sifted through around 60 hours of original footage from a documentary project originally led by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose 1970 documentary, Let It Be, was the first product of this filmmaking venture. Filmed with several cameras giving you several different vantage points, the footage captures all members of the Fab Four plus a “fifth Beatle,” the African American keyboardist, Billy Preston, who joined the band midway through their one-month slog towards making a new album. There’s also a “sixth Beatle,” namely their long-time producer George Martin, who although not the final producer of the album Let it Be (unfortunately) was helping them to record the songs in their own home-grown Apple studio, along with a healthy dose of equipment borrowed from his company EMI Records. The cameras and an aerial mic, which hovers into view now and then above them, capture all of the nuances of their interactions, musicianship, facial expressions, and casual conversations over nearly a one-month long period. In full color, and with all the magic that Peter Jackson and his team could assemble to fix up the old footage and sound , the results are stunning. Never have we the fans had a chance to be so close to the four gentlemen and their retinues as they craft an entire album of brand new musical goodies. (If you could smuggle a camera into Santa’s workshop, you might have a similarly magical experience.)

The film is divided into three parts. Sound familiar? After all, this is the dude who directed the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, much to our delight and our chagrin—at least, for those of us who would have preferred a Hobbit that cleaves more closely to the brilliant fantasy novel by Tolkien. My first thought upon hearing this news was: Couldn’t he have cut it into a single full-length documentary film? But no. Once you see the film in all three parts, you realize that it had to be done this way.

Why? First of all, this is a unique record of one of the greatest pop-rock acts of all time, and it will serve as an archive and a treasure trove of information for scholars and fans of the Beatles and of popular music for ages to come. Cutting it down would only have lessened its value, even if it enabled more viewers to see it in its entirety. As it is, other than die-hard Beatles fans, musicians, and lovers of rock music history, it is hard to imagine anybody willing to spend 8 hours watching all this footage. There is an arc to the story, but it’s a long arc indeed.

Part 1 covers the gathering of the band back together after a hiatus. It is obvious from the get-go that this is a last hurrah for the Beatles as a group. The individual members, particularly George, John, and Paul, have already started down their own pathways towards solo careers, or to being the front men of other bands, as the case was for Paul. They have all developed their own distinctive repertoires of songs and song fragments, which they are now competing with each other to get onto the new album and onto their next album, Abbey Road, though they didn’t know it at the time. Even Ringo has some songs to share. 

In the first part of the three-part film, Paul emerges as the dominant and driving force behind the band. We thought it was John, and in the early days, it was him. Now Paul is at the helm, driving the team forward through the ice and snow of a newly emerging project and album like a man driving a pack of huskies through a blizzard in Alaska. Not all are on board at first. There is some confusion over what their goal is with this new and somewhat nebulous project. They aren’t familiar with the director Michael Lindsey-Hogg, and they aren’t too comfortable with all the cameras hovering around them. Above all, they are very uncomfortable with the space they’ve been given to work out and rehearse their new songs—the voluminous Twickenham Studios (long story short, another director gives them the “opportunity” to use one of the studios for the project). 

Despite their initial attempts to pull themselves back together as a band, things quickly go awry. John (inseparable now from his amour Yoko Ono, who appears by his side throughout the film) is AWOL part of the time. His comings and goings are erratic at first, much to Paul’s chagrin. Here (spoiler alert) is one of the best bits in the film: We see Paul literally pull a new song out of his gut as he aggressively strums on the guitar or bass (can’t remember which now), which turns out to be the classic song “Get Back.” It’s as if he’s trying to call John back into the band—get back Jojo to where you belong!!! It’s one of the most thrilling and haunting scenes in this eight-hour drama, at least in my own humble opinion. 

Then, as the first part is winding down, George provides some additional drama to the story by leaving the band. He is apparently huffed because they aren’t taking his own musical ideas seriously enough and because of Paul’s tendency to micro-manage George rather than letting him work out his own bits in the songs. Paul does indeed appear in the film as a domineering leader, telling everyone else exactly what to do for each song. That said, this is the man who not only pulls “Get Back” out of nowhere, but also adds “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” to the song selection. If there’s one thing that stands out in this film, it’s Paul’s unquestionable genius as a musician, not to mention his incredible work ethic. 

In Part 2, the band continues to rehearse without George, but of course they manage to pull him back into the band eventually. George retreats for a few days, obviously a negotiation strategy on his part to be taken more seriously as a songwriter in his own right. Thankfully, after some meetings with George at his home, and after a long conversation between Paul and John that is clandestinely recorded by a mic (one of the more interesting conversations of the film), they convince George to rejoin the band. 

But the real turnaround is when they decide to abandon Twickenham Studios and move their operations to their own turf—the basement studio at the Apple office (their company office) in London. At first they try out the equipment that their friend magic Alex has set up only to realize that it is complete rubbish. George Martin and EMI come to the rescue by offering recording equipment and tech support, and they are off and running in their own “home” so to speak. The band members visibly relax and the bonding really begins. Surrounded by their retinue of loyal supporters and loved ones, the Beatles form a band again, and their jubilation flies off the screen as they come together with a combo of golden oldies and new bits and bobs. 

What’s fascinating about this process of songwriting is how much they rely on their prodigious knowledge of rock and pop music history. While they continue to forge on with new songs that miraculously come into being over time, they are constantly playing around with old songs—covers mostly, but also their own original songs from earlier stages of their history as a band. Not only do they trot out a veritable history of rock music and its deep roots in R&B and the Blues, but they also delight endlessly in goofing around with these songs. Both Paul and John make faces at each other while crooning in various styles from the sublime to the ridiculous. John adopts a low register for some songs, and he is constantly peppering the sessions with his own humorous if nonsensical verbal interjections (if Paul is the musical genius, John is the verbal genius). George and Ringo get into the groove, although they let Paul and John take center stage. All of this playing around proves crucial in pulling the band and their groove together.

Then in steps Billy Preston, a blues-based keyboardist steeped in the gospel tradition of the USA. His addition to the four-man band gives them even greater energy and spirit, while injecting a large dose of authenticity into their bluesy songs. It also allows the other band members to play around with various styles and instruments. This is the other thing that becomes apparent throughout the film: All members of the Fab Four are multi-instrumentalists. Of course, Paul is the most famous of the group for his ability to master different instruments. While a bass player at heart, he also plays guitar, piano, drums, and some other string instruments. At one point we see Paul and Ringo jamming together—on piano!—with Ringo taking the high keys and Paul (bassman) the low. We also get to witness Ringo working out his song “Octopus’s Garden” on piano. George also plays around on the keyboard now and then, as does John. Sometimes John takes over on bass while Paul plays the piano. This versatility is the band’s secret weapon.

Finally, we come to Part 3. By this time, the band is well on the way to producing yet another great album. We watch and listen closely as their songs coalesce into their familiar and classic forms. We see and hear the performances of multiple versions of many songs, including several that didn’t make the cut for “Let it Be” but made it onto “Abbey Road.” We get to witness their mistakes and missteps as they work out the details of each song. We also hear many songs or song fragments that would become part of their solo repertoires after the band broke up. Meanwhile, they continue to break out into joyful renditions of old pop and rock songs going back to the 1950s. Smiles abound as they re-explore songs from the Cavern Club and Hamburg days, which in turn evoke memories that they share with each other. While the seriousness of honing their new songs intensifies as the deadline for their performance approaches, they never stop having and making fun. 

By this time, after long discussions and heated arguments back and forth, the band settles on a solution as to where to hold a live performance, which was one of the stipulations of this filmmaking project. At first the Director Michael wants them to go to Libya for the concert, but they won’t have any of that and Paul makes it very clear that they are not leaving their home country. Yet comically, Michael keeps harping on this idea oblivious to their complete rejection of it. Obviously, none of them are too keen to get back into a public arena. If you know the history of the Beatles, you’ll know that they stopped performing three years earlier in 1966, mainly because they couldn’t hear themselves on stage due to the screaming, but also because they wanted to explore more complicated songs that weren’t easy to produce live (hence Sergeant Pepper’s). But they also felt threatened in live arenas. There was always the possibility of violence to their persons, given the mass hysteria that accompanied the band wherever they went. Thus, getting back onto a public stage must have been a formidable thing for the four lads to contemplate. Not to mention the fact that they look and feel rusty and out of practice (though they loosen up visibly over time). 

Finally, their sound engineer Glyn Johns, who has been with them and earned their trust throughout the film project, and their own trusted road manager Mal Evans convince them to go onto the rooftop of their own building, where they can be in the public eye while controlling who gets access to their stage. This turns out to be the ideal solution, and after some hesitation they agree. Most of Part 3 involves them rehearsing their new songs for the album and the live performance coming up in a countdown of days. The songs are getting more and more powerful as they lock into a groove for each song. They are also become more and more familiar and closer to the versions we know and love from the album. 

Finally, the long-awaited and anxious day arrives when after many delays and moving around of the schedule, they mount the rooftop stage and perform new songs to the public for the first time in three years. With cameras mounted on the rooftop, on a nearby rooftop, and on the street, as well as a secret camera in the downstairs office, we see the band go from song to song with increasing confidence, nailing each one as their local audience of neighbors and streetwalking pedestrians grows around them. The police come to tell them to kindly desist their noise-making, proving how polite and well-behaved they are in London (at least on camera, though since it was a secret camera they didn’t know it at the time), but the Beatles and their entourage ignore the pleas and finish their concert. Several of the songs, fed into the recording studio, are captured for the album. Everything goes swimmingly, and the Beatles, along with their new member Billy Preston, dismount the impromptu stage triumphantly.

Finally, we are treated to the sessions leading to the definitive versions of their studio songs, including the immortal song “Let it Be.” The filmmakers provide us with captions to let us know which are the definitive versions, and we get to see them performed live. All of these songs that we’ve known all our lives (at least for me, since I was born in the year 1969 when they filmed this session), we see and hear as the four lads conjure them up out of thin air and relentlessly perfect and polish them into the glittering gems and jewels that they became.