"Breaking up is like knocking over a Coke machine," Jerry Seinfeld once observed. "You can’t do it in one push. You’ve got to rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over."
I was reminded of Seinfeld’s law when watching Get Back, Peter Jackson’s gruelling documentary about the making of the Beatles’ Let it Be album. Breaking up a band is indeed hard to do. But a well-executed demise can be vital to a band’s long-term reputation. Many a supergroup has ruined a perfectly good breakup by reforming when its members are about ninety, or when the lone survivor from the original lineup is a haggard bassist whose lawyers had the acumen to secure the naming rights ... [READ MORE]
