Get Back

:This article is about the song. For the album project of the same name, see Let It Be.

"No Pakistanis"

"Get Back"'s life began on January 7, 1969, when McCartney lifted "Get back to where you should be" from fellow Beatle George Harrison's "Sour Milk Sea" (the song was later given to Jackie Lomax to record, and McCartney makes a reference to it when in the second verse of "Get Back" he shouts "Come on, Jackie!"), and turned it into "Get back to where you once belonged" as part of the Beatles' recording sessions for their proposed album, Get Back (which later became Let It Be after the Beatles abandoned Get Back and turned over their recordings to producer Phil Spector). Later, on the press release to promote the "Get Back" single, McCartney would write, "We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air... we started to write words there and then...when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to roller coast by."

Related Topics:
January 7 - 1969 - George Harrison - Jackie Lomax - Phil Spector - Apple Studios

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Two days after he had the first inklings of "Get Back", McCartney was inspired to satirise the "Rivers of Blood Speech" by British Cabinet minister Enoch Powell, in which Powell used a reference in Virgil to the river Tiber foaming with blood to describe what he thought would happen if the tide of Commonwealth immigrants was not stemmed. McCartney wrote what he called the "Commonwealth Song" based on Powell's speech. One of the stanzas was "You'd better get back to your Commonwealth homes". However, as evident from bootlegs, the "Commonwealth Song" has no resemblance to the final version of "Get Back".

Related Topics:
Rivers of Blood Speech - Enoch Powell - Tiber - Commonwealth

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The day after recording the "Commonwealth Song", the Beatles recorded yet another version of what was to become "Get Back", this time entitled "No Pakistanis". The choruses of both were almost the same, but "No Pakistanis" was more racially charged, as the singer sang about how he "don't dig no Pakistanis taking all the people's jobs". However, most of the song was random screaming and vocalizing with random lines such as the aforementioned one slapped in at the beginning.

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Eventually McCartney realised he would be savaged if the song was released in this form, and rewrote the lyrics, describing a man named Jojo who leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona "for some California grass", and then recommending that he return to Tucson. Linda McCartney's former residence in Tucson was likely the inspiration for the revised lyrics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, Lennon described it as "...a better version of 'Lady Madonna.' You know, a potboiler rewrite."

Related Topics:
Tucson - Arizona - California - Grass - Linda McCartney - Playboy - Lady Madonna

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As the Get Back sessions contained a copious quantity of never-released work by the Beatles, they were bootlegged widely over the years, leading to the proliferation of technically illegal early versions of "Get Back" such as "No Pakistanis". In 1986, bootlegs featuring "No Pakistanis" were made public. As expected, McCartney was heavily criticised for his alleged racist tendencies. Although McCartney denied the accusations, the controversy failed to subside for a few months.

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