Hacker News Reader

Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

This is the true role of a great drummer. To play what is needed and nothing more or less. Sometimes to be quiet and stay in the background, sometimes to be loud and take up space, sometimes just to crack a joke and break the tension when things start to get off track.

View on HN

It really shines through in Get Back - Paul, John and (to a lesser extent) George are flailing about, causing drama but Ringo just patiently sits behind his drums and as soon as anyone starts playing he's there to pick up the beat.

My musician friends were offended at the Beatles’ musicianship watching that film.

It’s hard to realize that being great isn’t good enough, you need lightning to strike and you need to be there when it happens.

Interesting. The biggest thing I took away from it was how unplanned everything was.

I can no longer listen to a Beatles album and ask "why did they decide to do this, and then that?" as I used to. Now I know that nobody had a plan: they had an infinite series of accidents and then edited -- or not.

It's almost like there's some truth to the "Trying to make dozens of shitty pots actually produces better pots than trying to make a single perfect pot".

Iteration eats inspiration for breakfast.

https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...

In a winner-takes-all game, there's iteration, but there's also a single top act, and a tremendous combination of skill, luck, and manipulation in ending up on top.

It's not as if the team making the most pots always wins. Though the winner often makes a lot of pots.

I wonder though how representative Get Back was for a Beatles recording session. The band was clearly imploding and in contrast to prior albums, they didn't have a lot of songs prepared yet. There are the famous Esher demos that were recorded before The White Album. And even though they are acoustic, a lot of songs seem to be worked out already. Of course, they've put all kinds of extra touches on them in the studio, but they'd work pretty well for "The White Album - Unplugged".

I was surprised how even under the circumstances stuff comes together pretty quickly. Like how McCartney makes up the main melody of Get Back in seconds while jamming, as if he is just picking it out of the air (assuming that it wasn't staged for the camera). Then once Lennon puts his mind to the sessions again, there is clearly a very strong chemistry between Lennon and McCartney where they are just having fun and tweaking and evolving the songs at a rapid pace.

I got a similar feeling from the documentary. Some of those songs seem so perfect, as if they were born that way - but the actual creative process was messy, with various wrong turns it could have taken, fumbling around in the unknown.

I also feel like I understand better how miracles like Sgt. Pepper happened - not by careful planning or having a clear design at the start, but taking the time, day after day, working on ideas, noodling and joking around, sometimes arguing with each other, sometimes discovering happy accidents.. And every take is different!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com