“ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE”, distinct for its inclusion in the world’s first real-time international telecast (Our World), its all-star ensemble and the fact that it was written to order for the event, also carries the distinction of being the fastest Beatles single ever produced, written at the end of May, 1967, completed in the studio on June 25 and released on July 7. It was the Beatles’ 18th #1 single.
The song was conceived purely as a write-to-order exercise to accommodate the telecast, and though its release as a single was inevitable, it wasn’t approached as an opportunity to expand the band’s artistic horizons. All the same, some progressive elements, now engrained in the band’s thinking, crept into the mix.
Released in late June, in the wake of Pepper, the song became the anthem of the Summer of Love.
The Writing
In May 1967, the producers of the first international telecast-by-satellite, Our World, approached Beatles manager Brian Epstein about having the band represent Britain in the show’s parade of nations. A contract was signed on the 18th.
The conceit of the appearance would be that the world was being permitted into the Beatles’ inner sanctum as they recorded their latest hit. John and Paul entered into a friendly competition to write the song to be used during the broadcast. John won, “All You Need Is Love” being chosen for the simplicity of its theme, which was thought to be both universal and easily understood by an international audience. Paul’s effort, “Your Mother Should Know”, quickly fell by the wayside.18
The simplicity of John’s lyric is in keeping with his later solo works, “Power to the People” and “Give Peace a Chance”. “I like slogans,” he said. “I like advertising. I love the telly.” The producers of Our World actually specified that they preferred that the Beatles “keep it simple, so that the viewers of the world will understand.” This John certainly did.
It’s hard to imagine a simpler song.19 The preamble is “Love, love, love”, repeated three times. The verses are literally algorithmic, “There’s nothing you can [verb] that can’t be [same verb, past tense]”, the verbs being do/done, sing/sung, make/made, save/saved, etc. There are the slight variations isn’t for can’t be and nowhere for nothing, but these don’t disrupt the algorithm. The third phrase in each of the three verses is a counterthought – Nothing you can [verb] but you can [profound concept in less than 10 syllables] - followed by the self-mocking refrain, It’s easy!
And if the verses are simple and algorithmic, the chorus are less complicated than a nursery rhyme:
All you need is love, x3; same line, rearranged.
Slogans, indeed...
The Music
On its face, the music is as simple as the lyrics. Once again John is composing in G and alternating it with its relative minor, and doing little else, as he’d done repeatedly on Pepper. He defers to its V chord as he wanders into the chorus, which likewise defers to the V (a D) until the third pass of the title, which serves up the only really interesting changes – G-B-Em-Em7, itself only a minor variation of the verse – then to the only occurrence of C (odd, for a song in G) and back to G.
The chorus melody is almost self-satirizingly simple: a monotone D for the entire first half, then two chromatic steps to E and a drop to B, with the Love is all you need a simple two-step walk-down back to G. Three-year-olds can sing this song.
The overall structure of the song is likewise very simple, John’s usual verse-refrain / chorus, repeated several times. No middle-eight, and the solo break that George takes (itself the very flower of simplicity) rides over a repetition of the verse. The result is
Verse - Verse – Chorus – Solo – Chorus – Verse – Chorus – Chorus - Coda
George, aside to Paul, on first hearing John’s demo of the song: “Well, it’s certainly repetitive...” Nothing to see here, folks. Even George’s solo is mostly half notes.
Except...
As with “Good Morning Good Morning” on the recently-released Sgt. Pepper, John simply struck empty beats from this measure or that. Much of the song is in 7/8, for no better reason than that the lyric runs out of syllables.
“John has an amazing thing with his timing – he always comes across with very different time signatures, you know... ‘All You Need is Love’, it just sort of skips a beat here and there and changes time. But when you question him as to what it is he’s actually doing, he really doesn’t know. He just does it naturally.”
There’s argument among musicologists as to whether the first half of the verse is in 7/4 or alternating bars of 4/4, 3/4. “Although the song represents the peak of the Beatles' overtly psychedelic phase, the change in metre during the verses is the sole example of the experimental aspect that typifies the band's work in that genre. The main verse pattern contains a total of 29 beats, split into two 7/4 measures, a single bar of 8/4, followed by a one bar return of 7/4 before repeating the pattern.”20
Then there’s that magical coda.
The run-off of the song, which lasts over a minute21, is arguably more interesting than the song itself. Everything but the kitchen sink was tossed in, making that section of the song – and the telecast to come – a party in itself.
It was Paul who went to George Martin and just threw it wide open, letting the producer know that they wanted a long coda on the song and they weren’t all that particular about what was in it.
“I did a score for the song, a fairly arbitrary sort of arrangement since it was at such short notice,” said George Martin. “The mixture I came up with was culled from the ‘Marseillaise’, a Bach two-part invention, ‘Greensleeves’, and a little lick from ‘In the Mood’. I wove them all together at slightly different tempos so that they all still worked as separate entities.” Martin subsequently had difficulties when it was learned that his quote from ‘In the Mood’ represented a copyright infringement22.”
The Recording
The first session took place on June 14, 1967 – not at Abbey Road, but at Olympic Studios. With John on harpsichord, Paul on bowed bass, Ringo on drums and George sawing away on a violin, they generated a 10-minute backing track.
Returning to Abbey Road on June 19, they shortened the song by six minutes, adding some barrelhouse piano courtesy of Martin and a banjo part by John.
Then there was that anything-goes outro. Martin brought in two trumpets (one of them David Mason of “Penny Lane” fame) playing the Bach F-major two-part invention; two tenor saxophones for ‘In the Mood’, and two cellos plus four violins for ‘Greensleeves’.
He had brass parts doubling the melody on the ‘Marseillaise’ intro, and added an accordion and two trombones to the chamber orchestra, then proceeding to prepare two separate mixes: one backing track, to which the Beatles and their all-star entourage would perform during the Our World broadcast; and the actual singles track. The latter would receive a dubbed drum roll from Ringo during the “La Marseillaise” quote (it wasn’t his first; he’d put one in ‘Mr. Kite’ on Pepper), plus a re-recording of John’s lead vocal.
The Our World International Telecast
The big night of the Our World telecast was June 25. It went down in the cavernous Studio One at Abbey Road, with an overflow crowd of orchestra, technicians, and rock royalty guests.
The biggest challenge for Martin, in charge of the whole affair, was to stage a scene for the world audience that appeared to be the Beatles recording their latest single live, which is what had been promised. But the producers of Our World had emphatically said No to a backing track; “The idea of the live satellite broadcast, they reminded Martin, was to demonstrate how spontaneous performances were transmitted across the globe,” wrote Bob Spitz. “A backing track violated the spirit of the event.” Martin pushed back, making sure Brian Epstein made the backing track a condition of the Beatles’ participation. The producers backed down. The live broadcast would include the Beatles singing and playing live, but they’d be playing to the already-finished, picture-perfect backing track. Martin and the Beatles wanted to convey the spirit of the song to the world, but behind the scenes they were leaving nothing to chance.
The live chorus was composed of perhaps the most celebrity-ridden session guests in history, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Graham Nash, Keith Moon, Patti Harrison, Marianne Faithfull, and Gary Leeds. Some sources say that Eric Clapton, Brian Epstein and Paul’s brother Mike were also there.
Bob Spitz described the scene in picturesque manner in The Beatles: The Biography:
“Studio One, the big hangarlike facility at Abbey Road, was crammed with ‘flower-waving crowds of Beautiful People,’ who were oblivious to the battalion of sound technicians and camera operators struggling to put the final touches on the historic transmission. One can only imagine the difficulty they had in adjusting the contrast for the cameras: to complement the carnival atmosphere, the guests were dressed to the nines in flamboyant, brightly-colored customer that clashed with the inflated latex globes and vivid balloons floating above the fixtures. Giant displays of exotic flowers radiated against the garish backdrop. The Beatles themselves gave off a fuzzy flush in their Technicolor garb: Paul, looking debonair in a double-breasted white sport coat draped over a shirt he had hand-colored the night before; George, decked out in an orange paisley jacket whose design and texture resembled an Aubusson carpet; Ringo, swathed cosmically in a silk, suede, and fake-fur outfit designed by the Fool that looked left over from the Crusades. “It was so bloody heavy,” he recalled. “I had all this beading on, and it weighted a ton.” Only John, doleful and glassy-eyed, turned up in a smart-looking banker’s dark pin-striped suit that seemed as outrageous for its elegance as for its posting on John Lennon.”
For all the chaos, per the Spitz account, the Beatles totally owned the moment:
“In all the turmoil, between miscues and mischief, the Beatles performed ‘All You Need is Love’ to the world without a hint of disorganization. They sat perched on barstools placed directly in front of the guests, appearing as cool as only the Beatles could under such hot-house circumstances. John, Paul, and George seemed impervious to the do-or-die situation, synching their voices beautifully, perfectly, to the backing track. The prerecorded music no longer mattered – if it ever did.”
Contrived? Certainly. Stage-managed to within an inch of its life? Absolutely. Utterly at odds with what they’d been contracted to do? Without a doubt. And yet...
“What had once promised viewers a glimpse of the Beatles during a standard recording session had evolved into a production of epic proportions,” according to Spitz. “Once they committed themselves to appearing, once they’d gotten involved, it became necessary to stage a spectacular event befitting their spectacular mystique.”
Progressive Elements
Orchestral instrumentation/experimental timbres
Though not nearly as heavy as the orchestral parade of “A Day in the Life”, the instrumentation on “All You Need is Love” was considerable – and deliciously varied, focusing on solos and folding in an accordion. It was a truly progressive configuration, eschewing the proper balance and structure employed on the former tune. And Martin did it for the most progressive of reasons: to create an unprecedented musical texture.
Unusual time signatures/ rhythmic experimentation
The debate over whether the verses are in 7/4 or 4/4- 3/4 time obscures the value of John’s decision to drop the beat: the entire point of the melodic structure of the verses – which is as complex as the chorus is simple – is to undergird his blurting-out of his fortune-cookie lyrics in conversational style:
“Quickly moving triplet- and sixteenth-note rhythms five the verse melody the pace of everyday speech,” wrote John Stevens, “and Lennon manages to spew out all of the ideas and concepts expressed into a single bar.” It’s remarkable, when you consider phrases like this...
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known
...tumbling out of his mouth in four beats. That’s a time signature innovation and a rhythm experiment combined – and for the vocal, not an instrument.
Exotic instruments
We suppose it might have been exotic for Paul to play an upright bass with a violin bow, or for George to gamely tackle a violin, or to bundle an accordion in with a chamber orchestra; but no really out-there instruments made it into the mix, nothing like a sitar or a tamboura.
Instead, we consider that Martin repurposed them. By setting up teams of instrumentalists to take off in the coda, all diverging from “All You Need is Love” into their respective quotes, creating a chaotic musical milieu in the process, we can see a metaphor emerging: if each musical persona were an actual person, we’d have the very diversity and heterogeneity that the song itself radiates toward its audience.
Playing the studio
It wasn’t the first time musicians had performed live with a backing track, and it wasn’t the first live performance broadcast from a studio; but it was the first time a backing track had been used under musicians performing live who were, in turn, adding live recording to a prerecording.
Postscripts
Our World was seen by 400 million people in 24 countries. The telecast lasted six hours.
“It is a wonderful, beautiful, spine-chilling record. It cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything.” ~Brian Epstein
“While it may reference ‘Yesterday’ and ‘She Loves You’, ‘All You Need is Love’ eschews the egocentric bliss of romantic love to extol the anticupidity of caritas,” wrote Kenneth Womack, “a divine and spiritually minded love for all humanity.”
“‘All You Need is Love’ will forever remain one of Lennon’s outstanding contributions to the pop music genre,” wrote John Stevens. “The song is a milestone in pop history.”
When Al Gore, former US senator and vice-president, married his wife Tipper, they used “All You Need is Love” as their recessional.
Ironically, after the release of “All You Need Is Love”, John would not be the composer of another Beatles single A-side for a full two years.
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