Forty-six years ago John Lennon sat down at his piano, turned on his tape recorder and played a song he was working on that wasn’t quite complete. Last week, after decades of musical massaging, “Now and Then” finally got an official release as the final Beatles song.
It’s incorrect to call it a “new” Beatles song. Lennon’s demo tape has been available on bootlegs for almost 30 years, ever since the surviving Beatles tried to make it the third posthumous single mined from Lennon’s recordings timed for release with their “Anthology” CDs in 1995. They gave up because the technology of the day couldn’t separate Lennon’s vocals from the piano or entirely dampen the substantial background hum, and, according to Paul McCartney, because George Harrison thought it was “rubbish.”
McCartney has talked of finishing the tune for years, and it became possible using the process director Peter Jackson used for his “Get Back” documentary series. McCartney has altered the original tune, dropping a section that came between the verse and chorus, singing some passages where Lennon’s vocals dropped out or lyrics were unfinished and supplying a Harrison-esque slide guitar. Harrison’s rhythm guitar was salvaged from the 1995 session, backing vocals were scraped from old songs like “Because” and “Eleanor Rigby” and strings were added. Ringo added backing vocals and a new drum track, so it’s the last recording on which all of the Fab Four play.
The result has gotten generally good reviews, with most critics noting that though it’s nowhere near the level of their classic songs, it’s a fitting coda to rock’s most influential band. That result is mostly McCartney’s doing. The dropped section of the demo made plain that it “Now and Then” was written for Yoko Ono, but without it Lennon’s lyric “now and then I miss you” sounds like it’s addressed his ex-bandmates.
Jackson also directed the video released the day after the song, drawing on archival footage, some of which had never been publicly seen, including material he got from original drummer Pete Best.
