When I was a kid, I had no idea this was a Beatles song. The singer sounded nothing like a Beatle. Little did I know that Paul McCartney was going through a bit of an identity crisis and thought he should be sounding like Levon Helm as roots rock began sweeping away the old grandiose psychedelic affectations, which the Beatles had come to embody.
It seems plain that McCartney's phrase "get back" is partially referring to an attempt to get back to the basics of their rock songwriting and musicianship. You can look at this two possible ways.
One, maybe McCartney heard this new roots rock music and started missing the old days of the Beatles as a simple rock n roll group playing live shows, which it hadn't done in years due to their obsession with recoding ingenious, complex studio albums. Their recording sessions had become incredibly time consuming, which left little time for touring. And even if they wanted to tour, most of their songs were unperformable live with the technology available. Maybe he saw his group possibly splitting up and wanted to try getting back to what they started out as before it was all lost.
Or two, groups like the Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead had caused a paradigm shift in musical taste, ushering simplicity and the soul of Americana back to the forefront. And maybe Paul knew it was the Beatles' asses if they didn't drop the psychedelic masterpiece stuff and keep up.
What you tend to believe probably has something to do with how you view Paul McCartney. Paul is the easiest target of the Beatles: He is the source of some of the most mind-bogglingly perverse conspiracy theories. And he can be viewed by cynics as both A. the most strategic, career-minded Beatle and B. the one who was less emotionally accessible. He wrote songs about "Sweet Loretta Martin," a complete cutesy fabrication, while John Lennon wrote about his dead mother.
I mean, "Let It Be" was about Paul's dead mother and "Hey Jude" was about Lennon's neglected son during Lennon's divorce, which even Lennon wouldn't face - but popular narratives are popular for a reason! Because they sound plausible and support our deep-seated resentment of people who are very organized, responsible, and get things done.
Also, this cutesy song about Sweet Loretta Martin is not just an order to "get back" to basics for aesthetic reasons. It was also a satire against the racist, nativist, conservative trend taking hold in his country at the time, as some white people in that county began raging about dark-skinned people coming to Britain to live and work from the lands such as Pakistan which the British had subjugated under brutal colonialism. The nerve of these immigrants, right? When a superpower's policies ruin a person's home country, so that person decides the superpower owes them a life and job on their own enlightened soil: How much more entitled can you get? (Sarcasm) There is a great deal of serious depth behind Paul's playful seeming lyrics.
And by this time, John Lennon was perpetually addled by heroin addiction, George Harrison had checked out, and Ringo never meddled, so Paul was doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping basic band operations going. Yeah, what an opportunist tool of the establishment.
Too bad that not only did Paul want to write more roots-based music to keep up with musical tastes and possibly save his band - he could do it. Incredibly well. And "Get Back" is one stomping badass little gem with excellent melodies (including an iconic chorus), sweet guitar solos, and guest Billy Preston on electric piano making this song. No way John Lennon was going to plop his slurring ass down in front of a keyboard and be able to do half the things Billy Preston did.
Yes, Paul apparently could be a testy, autocratic jerk. The sessions for this very song attest to that. But sometimes I have to put myself in his position as seemingly the only one by then trying to keep that Beatles marriage going and forgive him for the constipated look on his face that was becoming fairly omnipresent.
He wrote great tunes. He wanted the Beatles to live, so he responded with the can-do work ethic that enabled him to survive the pains of his life. He failed. For better or for worse, you can't really get back.
