So It Goes & Let It Be

Kurt Vonnegut, The Beatles & Lessons On Creativity

I originally wrote this for a now defunct internet magazine in December 2021. That version is no longer available online, but I recently rediscovered a draft and decided to share it here.

“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’” —Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

I spent a recent weekend steeped in 1969.

That was the year that Kurt Vonnegut published his novel, Slaughterhouse 5, the book at the center of Robert Weide’s excellent new documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. It was also the year the Beatles wrote and recorded the bulk of their final album, Let It Be, the focus of Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking new documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back.

Nineteen sixty-nine is also the year that I was born, so as I watched these two films over the course of three days I was overwhelmed by the undeniable influence that Vonnegut and the Beatles have had on culture during my lifetime, and specifically on the two creative disciplines that have long held sway over me: writing and music.

Like Weide, I discovered Vonnegut in high school (although I was never lucky enough to have a teacher assign his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions).

Instead, the guitarist in my high school punk band handed me a copy of Deadeye Dick  at rehearsal and said seven magical words I had never heard before: “I thought you would enjoy this book.” I devoured Vonnegut’s back catalog, becoming a lifelong fan of his taut writing, dark humor and profound insights on the human condition.

Of the many lessons I learned from reading Vonnegut (whom I’ve long thought of as my surrogate grandfather, although we never met), I most identify with his absolute belief in the power and necessity of the extended family. “We all need more people in our lives and they do not have to be high-grade people, either. They can be imbeciles. What matters is numbers,” Vonnegut says during a college commencement speech featured in the documentary. For me, that extended family came in the form of rock and roll, a vast universe of like-minded souls.

I first explored the Beatles thanks to my neighbor’s mother who let my friends and me borrow her battered old ‘60s LPs. And then there was the girl in junior high who gave me a copy of the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night for my thirteenth birthday. I was in the midst of making the transition from heavy metal to punk rock, but the Beatles planted an important pop seed that would come to dominate my own musical tastes and output in later years.

Watching these two documentaries back-to-back had a strong effect on me.

And not just because it once again shined the spotlight on two towering figures that loom large on the creative planes where I most often roam. What really struck me most about Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time and The Beatles: Get Back are the hard truths both docs revealed about the creative process.

Vonnegut had already published five novels to little acclaim when he became an “overnight sensation” in 1969 with Slaughterhouse 5 (the book that introduced and uses his best-known catchphrase, “So it goes”—a mantra, a literary tic, a coping mechanism—one hundred times). It is easily Vonnegut’s most personal novel, fantastically confronting his own traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, yet it took him many years and countless attempts to write it.

“You just see him persevering and rewriting again and again, and he just can’t crack the code. It’s like he’s not just trying to get a bead on the book, it’s almost like he’s trying to purge the whole Dresden experience from his soul once and for all. And just when you think Dresden is about to claim yet one more victim? He nails it,” Weide says in the film. (Like Vonnegut, who was known to insert himself into his novels, Weide unwittingly ends up a featured subject in the documentary he directed.)

The same year that Vonnegut published the work that catapulted him into mainstream awareness, the Beatles were toiling away at Twickenham Studios and Apple Studio in London on what would become the album and film Let It Be. Unlike Vonnegut, whose star was ascending that year, these sessions show the former Fab Four barreling toward their eventual break up in 1970—although Jackson masterfully demonstrates how John, Paul, George and Ringo were still able to create incredible music together (and perform it live in their final rooftop performance), even as they struggled with personal and artistic differences.

“I just thought we should all just head back into 1969 and sit there and watch these guys. Don't get in the way. Just watch them. And also, the great thing with the ‘Get Back’ sessions is that it all goes terribly wrong. Now, if the ‘Get Back’ sessions were perfect [and] nothing goes wrong, then it'd be much more boring,” Jackson told Screen Rant.

Interestingly, both films are also documentaries about making documentaries, which adds more depth to the meta-narrative about the creative process.

Weide first wrote Vonnegut to propose a documentary about the author’s life in 1982, filming/editing on-and-off for almost 40 years. Jackson made The Beatles: Get Back over four years using almost 60 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio originally captured by Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg who himself becomes a recurring character in Jackson’s sprawling three-part series.

In this way, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time and Get Back: The Beatles are also meditations on the passage of time, exploring the depths of the personal relationships each of us—readers, listeners, viewers—have with these artists and the groundbreaking works they produced. Like Billy Pilgrim, the “unstuck” protagonist from Slaughterhouse 5, these films allow us to go back 50+ years to witness the blood, sweat and tears poured into the creation of our favorite books and music.

Much of the Vonnegut interview footage that Wiede uses was shot on a commuter train, an apt metaphor for the only direction in which most of us assume time travels (in stark contrast to Vonnegut’s view on the subject). At one point, Vonnegut has this to say about his traumatic experiences in Dresden as the train rumbles along its tracks: “Laughter was a great relief day after day, and it would have been embarrassing to cry day after day…I prefer laughter to crying because there’s less cleaning up to do afterwards. Also, you can shut it down faster.”

I was reminded of this Vonnegut quote when I watched The Beatles: Get Back a couple days later. (Beatles fans will naturally imagine an implied comparison to the train scenes from A Hard Day’s Night here.) There is a hilarious moment in Jackson’s documentary where John and Paul, the band’s two leaders who are engaged in some kind of polite power struggle throughout the film, sing “Two of Us” to each other through gritted teeth. Despite their growing artistic differences and weighty Beatles baggage, we get to watch as two old friends share a bizarre, tension-busting larf.

Silly as it may seem, that was the moment when it all came together for me.

Watching these two films, it’s possible to infer that the greatest works of art are forged from copious amounts of nicotine combined with endless conflict and strife (and tea and toast, for that matter)—which may be true on some level—but a more subtle reminder lies beneath the surface: although it is often messy and sometimes painful, the act of creating art also has the power to deliver truly transcendent joy.

The trick seems to be in appreciating those fleeting moments for what they are, while never demanding or expecting them to happen. As Vonnegut and the Beatles demonstrate again and again in these films, you can only hope to conjure them by showing up and doing the work—draft after draft, take after take, day after day—until you decide that you’ve finally said enough and move on to the next chapter of your life.

Here’s what Vonnegut had to say about creativity in A Man Without A Country:

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Or, as Paul McCartney sings in “Let It Be”:

And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me
Shinin' until tomorrow, let it be
I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time and Get Back: The Beatles offer much more than a peak behind the curtain at how the sausage is made.

The genius of these two films is in how Weide and Jackson manage to humanize their extraordinary subjects, flaws and all, in order to underscore the magnitude of their achievements.

We’ve all loved these books and this music for so long that it’s easy to take their creation for granted, forgetting that true artistic mastery is an absolute human marvel.

Even for Kurt Vonnegut. And the Beatles.

So it goes. Let it be.

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