Get Back was the year’s most captivating music documentary, but plenty of other candidates hit big and small screens in 2021.
Among those I haven’t seen (yet) are Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, Listening to Kenny G, Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love and Rage, and any of the four(!) different Britney Spears documentaries released this year.
But I did catch three others that I’ll highlight this week.
Disney stripped me of my ability to post clips from Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, but today I’ll list a few of the moments I was prepared to feature.
– Paul coming up with ‘Get Back’
This is the most talked-about moment in the series, because it so casually captures the birth of a classic song. Paul, George and Ringo are killing time waiting for John to arrive. Paul starts noodling away on his guitar until he stumbles onto the riff that would become the backbone of ‘Get Back.’
Initially, I planned to spend this week featuring clips from Get Back, Peter Jackson’s fascinating eight-hour documentary on The Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, available to stream on Disney Plus.
But Disney has apparently scrubbed the web of excerpts from the series, unfortunate for people like me who want to use them to celebrate the work.
Today we have one of those strange coincidences that crop up every once in awhile when posting on Random Weekends.
Exactly eight days ago, I featured a random song from Pernice Brothers’ 2001 album The World Won’t End. And here we are again with a second track from the same batch of 11 songs, an unlikely result given the 13,117 other possible tracks that aren’t on that album.
‘Rental Car’ is the penultimate track on Beck’s 2005 album Guero, a critical and commercial hit that continued a streak of stellar releases dating back to Mellow Gold in 1994.
That 11-year span saw the release of seven albums swinging between the kaleidoscopic alt-rock buzzsaw Odelay and the melancholy sobfest Sea Change. Guero falls a lot closer to the Odelay side, in large part because Beck reunited with the producing team The Dust Brothers.
Meet Me In Montauk 