John Lennon, Charles Manson and UFOs — what The Beatles: Get Back left out

It’s easy to forget that The Beatles were once four beanpole yobbos from Liverpool. Such is the gravitational pull of their fame that the scrappy energy of the Fab Four has solidified into the pop-culture equivalent of Mount Rushmore. Even the debates around the band move at a tectonic pace – you’re either Team Lennon or Team McCartney.

The Beatles’ reputation has looked especially granitic this year. First, we had the release of Paul McCartney: the Lyrics, a two-volume slab of retrospective musical analysis. Then there was a cap-doffing New Yorker profile of McCartney, and a special episode of Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, teeing up the book’s release.

And now we’ve got Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. Culling 200 hours of video and audio footage from The Beatles’ 1969 Let it Be recording sessions, it’s an exhaustive and exhausting three-part series, clocking in at nearly eight hours of viewing time. And yet, despite its sprawling size, Get Back feels narrow. It’s the record of four friends, many fag breaks and the struggle to make an album in a fractious, fuggy room.

You can’t help wondering what might have been. Jackson’s sober, hagiographic approach doesn’t quite capture the white heat of Beatlemania, the far-out dedication they inspired. Like Low Traffic Neighborhoods, or US presidential elections, the Beatles were so big, so important, that they couldn’t but generate paranoia, conspiracism and urban legends. Here, then, are a few of the stories you won’t find in Jackson’s goody-two-shoes documentary.

Lennon’s numerology

With his owl-like glasses and flowing hair, John Lennon embodied the wigged-out wackiness of the 1960s, especially towards the close of the decade and the band’s final recording sessions at Abbey Road. In The Beatles: Get Back, for instance, he seems visibly off his rocker for much of the footage.

Indeed, Lennon was largely responsible for The Beatles’ flirtation with the more far-out elements of the counterculture. As their renown grew, he increasingly took a performative, Warhol-esque approach to their fame. While McCartney chucked buckets of water over the press, Lennon preferred to tease them with cryptic pronouncements.

His apparent belief in numerology was a favourite topic. Lennon claimed he was haunted by the number nine: he was born at 6.30am (6+3 = 9), on October 9, on a Wednesday (which has nine letters); The Beatles played the Cavern Club for the first time on February 9, 1961; they made their America-breaking debut on the same date three years later. And, most significantly, there’s The White Album’s Revolution 9, an eight-minute musical flim-flam that consists of snatches of voice, music, static – and a dry, crisp British accent repeating “number nine”.

Lennon explained that, for this song, he took “an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine.’ I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number-nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn’t realise it – it was just so funny.”

When John met ET (and Uri Geller)

Lennon’s extraterrestrial encounters are harder to dismiss. He appears to have sincerely believed that he was visited by aliens at least twice. In 1974, four years after the events of The Beatles: Get Back, Lennon had moved to New York. One summer night, he spotted a UFO hovering outside his window. It was so close, he told an interviewer, that “he could have hit it with a brick”.

According to a sketch Lennon drew of the visitation, it was a classic flying-saucer shape, with a ring of blinking white lights “like normal light bulbs on a billboard around its edge, and a red light on top”. The saucer was completely silent; Lennon could hear the sound of the motorway below. It hovered for a few more minutes before it zoomed off down the Hudson and “turned right at the United Nations building”. Lennon recorded the moment on the cover of his album Walls and Bridges: “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.”

ET’s next appearance was more eerie and intimate. Uri Geller, the Israeli mentalist, told the Telegraph in 2004 that he and Lennon had been having dinner when the talk turned to UFOs.

“You believe in this stuff, right?” Lennon asked Geller. “Well, you ain’t f---in’ gonna believe this.”

One night in the Dakota Building, with Yoko sleeping beside him, Lennon had been awoken by a blinding light around the door. “It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with search-lights, or the apartment was on fire.”

Leaping out of bed, Lennon pulled open the door to find “four people” behind it. “They didn’t want my f---in’ autograph,” he told Geller. “They were, like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths, and they were scuttling at me like roaches.”

Lennon tried to throw them off – but the aliens pushed him back. “They didn’t touch me. It was like they just willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy.”

Then the Beatle blanked out, but awoke the next day with a curious memento in his pocket: a small, smooth, golden egg. Lennon, Uri claimed, had been carrying the object around with him. But he now wanted to rid himself of its stardust: “Keep it,” Lennon told Geller. “It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.”

And Geller has. The intrepid can find it among Geller’s many other curios – Salvador Dalí’s crystal ball, a model plane built by Muammar Gaddafi – at his private museum in Tel Aviv. Geller conducts enthusiastic tours himself. The tickets are less than the cost of a Disney+ subscription, and it’s sure to be a breezier day out than sitting through the entirety of Get Back.

The Charles Manson connection

On August 8–9 1969, members of Charles Manson’s “Family” cult murdered the actress Sharon Tate as well as four others at her home. The next day, they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Italian-American immigrants. At his trial, when asked why his followers had committed the murders, Manson replied: “It’s The Beatles. The music they’re putting out. These kids listen to the music and pick up the message. It’s subliminal.”

Manson’s Beatles obsession was fierce. Their music, in particular the experimental 1968 The White Album, was dragged into his convoluted ideology. Manson claimed to believe in an imminent apocalyptic race war between white and black people, and, according to Family members, he cited “The Beatles and the Bible” as his primary inspirations. The Fab Four were, in fact, he argued, the four horsemen of which we’re warned in Revelation – or, perhaps, the locusts that crawl from the abyss with faces “which resemble human faces [and] hair like woman’s hair”.

Manson cited the song Revolution 1 from The White Album, on which The Beatles seemed to foresee a coming revolt, and they sing that they can be “counted out”. Meanwhile, Blackbird’s references to “blackbirds singing in the dead of night” and Piggies’s lines about “the little piggies / crawling in the dirt” pointed, Manson claimed, to his most hated groups: black people (“blackbirds”) and the Establishment (“little piggies”).

But it was Helter Skelter, with its vision of a topsy-turvy world thrown into disorder, which fired his imagination most fatally. Manson adopted the phrase “Helter Skelter” to refer to the entirety of his murderous creed. The phrase was found scrawled on the wall of the LaBianca home.

The Manson Family tried to contact The Beatles numerous times, deluging them with letters, telegrams and even attempting to call them three times. For their part, The Beatles worked to distance themselves from the macabre Manson circus. Ringo Starr had met Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski, and said he was relieved when Manson was arrested. Paul McCartney refused to play Helter Skelter for several years after the incident.

‘Turn me on, dead man’

Elvis. Michael Jackson. Tupac Shakur. Any pop star worth their salt has at least one post-mortem sighting to their name. Like medieval saints, the alchemy of fame allows them to cheat death. Step forward, Sir Paul McCartney. The hale 79-year-old is the most visible of the two surviving Beatles – but what if he’d actually died in 1966, and has been impersonated by a doppelg?nger ever since?

That is the substance of the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy with which The Beatles have been contending, with various degrees of good humour, ever since it began circulating on American university campuses in late 1967. The story went that McCartney had actually died in a minor car-crash on the M1 motorway on 7 January 1966. To spare fans’ grief, the band continued to tour without him – and replaced him with the winner of a lookalike contest, a figure known as “William Campbell” or “Billy Shears”.

The theory seemed sufficiently plausible amid the heated pitch of Beatlemania that it started to gain traction in student magazines and on radio stations. It blew up in October 1969, when a caller to the Detroit radio station WKNR-FM picked over the story with the disc jockey, Russ Gibb. Later that week, the Michigan Daily’s satirical review of Abbey Road, entitled McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought to Light, was soberly reported by the national press. “Very soon, every college campus, every radio station, had a resident expert,” wrote music journalist Merrell Noden. The Beatles’s press office tried to tamp down the rumours – to no avail.

The Beatles themselves shared some of the blame. They teased their fans by seeding their music and artwork with Easter eggs and “clues”. On the back cover of Sgt Pepper, for instance, McCartney is the only Beatle to be pictured facing away from the camera, and the front cover of Abbey Road showed him barefoot and walking out of step with the others, as though striding purposefully off this mortal coil.

Then, on the 1968 track Glass Onion, John Lennon sang: “Here’s another clue for you / the walrus was Paul”. The line, he later confessed, was an exasperated response to the rumour. Yet again, The White Album proved fertile ground for off-kilter sleuthing. Many believed a section of the song Revolution 9 had been backmasked – a process where music is recorded backwards to encode a message – with the phrase “Turn me on, dead man”.

The ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory would ultimately disguise a simple, sadder truth: by 1970, the Beatles had acrimoniously split, and McCartney was lying low at his farm in Scotland, licking his wounds. The Beatles: Get Back captures the tension that led to this rupture. McCartney is an occasionally hectoring and abrasive figure as he tries to hold the band together; Lennon, for his part, can be cold and cruel. Yoko Ono is largely silent. In retrospect, her muteness feels taut.

“It was a bit weird meeting people shortly after that, because they'd be looking at the back of my ears, looking a bit through me,” said McCartney. “And it was weird doing the ‘I really am him’ stuff.”

Still, he clearly has a sense of humour about it – his 1993 album Paul is Live sent up the conspiracy in vivid fashion. Its cover showed a very-much-alive McCartney being dragged across the famous Abbey Road crossing by a large, fluffy dog.

‘Oswald couldn’t have done it’

McCartney wasn’t adverse to a spot of conspiracy-mongering himself. The assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963 came as The Beatles were at their peak in the UK, but before they broke America. And, as impressionable young chaps, they got caught up in the swirl of rumour that surrounded the US president’s death. Or, at least, McCartney did.

In 1966, Mark Lane, a New York attorney, met McCartney at a small private party in London. At the time, Lane was putting the finishing touches to Rush to Judgement, his incendiary (and subsequently bestselling) investigation into JFK’s death, in which he argued that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have fired the fatal shot.

“[McCartney] walked up to me, offered his hand, and told me his name,” Lane recalled in his autobiography. “The introduction was hardly necessary as he was one of the most famous people in the world. He said, ‘I understand you have written a book about Kennedy’s assassination. I would like to read it.’”

Lane explained that the book was still in manuscript, and he only had two mimeographed copies. The 24-year-old Beatle persisted, however, and, well, he was Paul McCartney, so Lane relented and sent him one of the copies. To his disappointment, McCartney sent the manuscript back a few days later without comment. But that night, as Lane was settling down to rewrites, the phone rang.

“Well he couldn’t have done it, could he?” a voice said. Annoyed at the interruption and not recognising the voice, Lane replied: “Who is this? And who couldn’t have done what?”

“Sorry. Paul, Paul McCartney,” said the voice. “We met the other night. And I meant that Oswald could not have killed President Kennedy.”

In fact, McCartney was so impressed by Lane’s theory that he invited him for dinner a few nights later at an obscure Polish restaurant. That evening, the Beatle buttonholed Lane about the assassination and Harvey Oswald’s involvement, talking for hours, until word spread that McCartney was in the neighborhood and a crush of fans interrupted their detective work.

That wasn’t the end of McCartney and Lane’s involvement, though. The next year, as Lane was editing the documentary based on his book, Macca swung back into his life. Lane picked up the story in his autobiography:

“(McCartney) asked if there was going to be any music, and I said that the director and I had not even thought about that yet. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I would like to write a musical score for the film, as a present for you.’”

Lane warned him that Rush to Judgement was hugely controversial in the US, and it could compromise The Beatles’ career across the pond. Dauntless, McCartney replied: “One day, my children are going to ask me what I did with my life, and I can’t just answer ‘I was a Beatle.’”

Alas, McCartney’s involvement wasn’t to be. The documentary’s director, Emile de Antonio, thought a McCartney score would distract from its sober approach and interfere with its “stark and didactic” style.

It turns out “didactic” wasn’t what audiences wanted, and Rush to Judgement flopped. It was a better year for The Beatles, though. In 1967, they released a new studio album, whose cover depicted the band flanked by famous faces (but not JFK or Oswald): Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles: Get Back is on Disney+ now