Did The Beatles look like walking skeletons in Get Back and how they embraced the anorexic trend of the 60s?
Watching the documentary footage from Get Back, one can’t help but ask: are these rock stars or patients in a sanatorium for the starving? The sight of John and George in January 1969 is frankly terrifying—they are so shrunken and thin it looks as if they might collapse under the weight of their own instruments at any moment.
It all started with a playful remark in 1965. During the filming of Help!, a journalist had the audacity to tell John he looked "fat." That was the moment Lennon put a stop to food forever. He called this his "Fat Elvis period" and spent the rest of his life in a panicked flight from every gram of fat. While in Get Back he melts away on macrobiotic rice and heroin, his biological clock is completely blocked by his obsession with thinness.
George was no better. After India, he became an extreme vegetarian, even an ascetic. In Get Back, George looks like a man who eats nothing but meditation and air. In fact, everyone—with the possible exception of Ringo—was infected by the anorexic trend of the Twiggy era, when body fat was considered a bourgeois relic.
Even Paul, who always had a healthier fridge thanks to Linda, wasn't immune. All those oversized suits and beards in the studio were a shield to hide how thin he had become as well. They integrated into this 60s trend with such speed that, in the end, they looked like "clothes-hanger child" Twiggy dressed in fur coats.
Ultimately, The Beatles created their greatest masterpieces during this period, but was the price a savage hunger that only a Mega Legend could endure? Watching the Rooftop concert at Apple, I can practically hear their stomachs growling.
