Beatles BOMBSHELL from the ‘Get Back’ tapes REVEALED: The day John Lennon pushed for a ‘FIFTH BEATLE’, Paul McCartney shut it down — and a chaotic jam called ‘Dig It’ was born as the band raced towards their rooftop finale
- The Beatles’ 15th day of “Get Back” rehearsals (January 24, 1969) saw the band finally lock in the now-iconic acoustic sound of Two Of Us — caught later in Peter Jackson’s Get Back.
- Behind the smiles, the “fifth Beatle” fantasy flared up again: Lennon championed keyboard wizard Billy Preston — while McCartney pushed back against expanding the band.
- The same session churned out a wild, loose improvisation that fed into ‘Dig It’ — the messy, stoned-sounding snippet that still divides fans today.
- It was all happening inside Apple Studios on Savile Row — with the pressure mounting for the rooftop performance just days away.
It looked like a band “getting back” to basics.
But inside Apple Studios on Savile Row, January 24, 1969 was a pressure-cooker day where The Beatles were juggling creative brilliance, fraying nerves, and a tantalising “what if” that fans still argue about today.
Because behind the guitars and grins sat a dangerous question:
Was Billy Preston about to become a real Beatle?
The ‘FIFTH BEATLE’ spark that wouldn’t die
By late January, the sessions had already gained a reputation for being tense, chaotic, and occasionally awkwardly intimate — four men trying to sound like a band while behaving like rivals.
Then came Preston — the dazzling keyboard player who’d walked into the story days earlier and instantly changed the temperature in the room. The band’s own circle has repeatedly described how his presence helped calm the atmosphere and focus the work.
Preston’s impact was so huge he became one of the very few outsiders ever credited on a Beatles record — the single Get Back famously billed as “The Beatles with Billy Preston.”
No wonder the “fifth Beatle” talk has followed him for decades.
And then: McCartney pushed back
But here’s the uncomfortable truth Beatles obsessives keep circling: even with Preston bringing the magic, the idea of making him a full-time member was always going to be explosive.
Why? Because by 1969, The Beatles weren’t just a band — they were a fragile ecosystem of ego, legacy and control.
So when Lennon’s camp floated the idea of Preston as something more permanent, McCartney reportedly resisted — wary of turning a crumbling partnership into an even more complicated one. (A neat little reminder that even “help” can feel like a threat when the stakes are this high.)
The moment they FINALLY cracked ‘Two Of Us’
And yet — amid the clashing personalities — something clicked.
According to detailed session histories, January 24 is the day they settled on the acoustic, folk-leaning arrangement of Two Of Us that most fans now consider definitive.
It’s the version that plays like a bittersweet road-trip — and, in hindsight, a painfully tender snapshot of a band trying to stay friends.
‘Dig It’: the chaos captured on tape
But this wasn’t all delicate harmonies and soft smiles.
The same day also fed into one of the strangest artefacts of the whole project: ‘Dig It’ — the loose, rambling jam that later appeared on Let It Be as a tiny snippet, while longer mixes circulated in other versions of the project.
It’s messy. It’s odd. And it perfectly captures the maddening contradiction of those sessions: genius and drift happening in the same breath.
Sidebar: Who exactly was Billy Preston — and why did he matter so much?
Preston wasn’t some random session hire.
He was a gospel-rooted prodigy turned elite collaborator — later hailed as a “musician’s musician,” and still widely nicknamed the “fifth Beatle.”
His contribution to Get Back was so notable that it earned him that rare co-credit — and modern retrospectives keep returning to the same theme: Preston didn’t just add keys… he added breathing room.
Sidebar: Why January 24 mattered
This wasn’t a random rehearsal date — it was part of the final sprint towards the band’s last, legendary live moment: the rooftop performance on January 30, 1969, also atop Apple’s Savile Row HQ.
So every take, every argument, every breakthrough carried that delicious, dreadful weight:
They were running out of time.
And everyone in that room knew it.
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