Cover Story: Buried Treasure: The Story of the Beatles' Lost Tapes

"All the things that have been written about Let It Be — it sounds like the whole thing was doomed and ugly," says Glyn Johns, who engineered the sessions. "It wasn't like that at all. It was the four of them playing together without any overdubs. They'd already proved themselves to be the greatest innovators of production of popular music" — on Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Let It Be, Johns contends, "was the complete reversal of that."

Lennon remembered it differently in his two-part Rolling Stone interview, published in early 1971: "[Paul] had these ideas that we'll rehearse and then make the album. And of course, we're lazy fuckers.... We're grown men, we're not going to sit around rehearsing. I'm not, anyway.

"It was a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham studio.... I just wanted to go away," he said. "You couldn't make music at eight in the morning, or ten or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you, and the colored lights."

The music — in the movie, on the Let It Be album and on the Nagra reels — proves that Lennon and Johns were both right.

At about 10:30 A.M. on January 2nd, 1969, under the colored lights at Twickenham, Lennon played the first documented notes of the Let It Be sessions: an instrumental fragment of "Don't Let Me Down." He wrote the song in 1968 as a plea and tribute to his lover and collaborator, the artist Yoko Ono. The two had been inseparable since the spring of 1968 and would marry in March 1969. In between, all that January, Ono sat at Lennon's side as the Beatles struggled to hit the natural perfection that came so easily to them in 1963, when they cut nearly all their first album, Please Please Me, in ten hours.

"It wasn't that bitter," Ono says of the Let It Be sessions. "The press wanted to sensationalize it, because afterward the group was over. But it was a creative time and a big session. It was not a commercial situation, where the producer was saying, 'Do this.'"

There was no one in charge. George Martin, the Beatles' father figure for their whole recording lives, did not go to Twickenham — the group was only practicing for the planned concert recording — and basically rolled tape at Apple, where the group really ran the sessions. Martin received only a "thanks" credit on the Let It Be album.

In the film, McCartney traced the Beatles' crisis of direction back to the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, of a drug overdose in August 1967: "We've been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away.... It's like when you're growing up, and then your daddy goes away at a certain point in your life, and then you stand on your own feet.