The Beatles Rooftop Concert Was Originally Supposed to Be Somewhere Much More Extravagant
The Beatles played their last concert together in 1969 on the rooftop of Apple Corps music headquarters. They had already stopped touring in 1966 so this one last hurrah was a major event. They originally had much bigger plans for the show, but simplified it to the rooftop show according to Ringo Starr.Starr was a guest on the Broken Record with Rick Rubin podcast on Sept. 21, 2021 to discuss his pandemic EP, Zoom In. The Beatles: Get Back was about to come out that December. So Starr also reflected on the rooftop concert that concludes that miniseries.
The Beatles rooftop concert was to perform the songs on their Let It Be album. Those were the sessions depicted in the original Let It Be documentary and the restored Get Back. Starr remembers Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original grand ideas.
“With the roof show, we had gone through that let’s do it in Alaska, let’s do it on Mt. Everest,” Starr said on Broken Record. “Michael Lindsay-Hogg was pushing for this Roman dome drone thing in somewhere, God knows where. Anyway, we said ah, I think it was Paul, ‘Let’s do it on the roof.’ Okay, we’re playing live. It all happened after the big discussion, big big big big, well, let’s just do this.”
Source: Fred Topel/cheatsheet.com
