ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (Lennon-McCartney)
Lennon vocal, harpsichord, banjo; McCartney harmony vocal, string bass, bass guitar; Harrison harmony vocal, violin, guitar; Starr drums; George Martin piano; Sidney Sax, Patrick Halling, Eric Bowie, Jack Holmes violins; Rex Morris, Don Honeywill tenor saxes; Stanley Woods, David Mason trumpets; Evan Watknis, Harry Spain trombones; Jack Emblow accordion; Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Jane Asher, Mike McCartney, Patti Harrison, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, Keith Moon, Hunter Davies, Gary Leeds (and others) chorus; Mike Vickers conductor
Recorded: 14th June 1967, Olympic Sound Studios; 19th June 1967, Abbey Road 3; 23rd-25th June1967, Abbey Road 1.
Producer: George Martin. Engineers: Eddie Kramer/Geoff Emerick.
UK release: 7th July 1967 (A single/BABY YOU'RE A RICH MAN)
US release: 17th July 1967 (A single/BABY YOU'RE A RICH MAN)
I'll continue later. I have to shut down the comp.
One of The Beatles' less deserving hits, Lennon's
ALL
YOU
NEED
IS
LOVE owes more of its standing to its vocal historical associations than to its inspiration which, as with their other immediate post-
Pepper recordings -
MAGICAL
MYSTERY
TOUR,
BABY
YOU'RE
A RICH
MAN,
ALL
TOGETHER
NOW,
YOU
KNOW
MY
NAME (
LOOK
UP
THE
NUMBER) and
IT'S
ALL
TOO
MUCH - is desultory. Thrown together for
Our World, a live TV broadcast linking twenty-four countries by global satellite on 25th June 1967, the song is an inelegant structure in alternating bars of 4/4 and 3/4, capped by a chorus which, like its B-side,
BABY
YOU'RE
A RICH
MAN, consists largely of a single note. The order in which groups recordings of this period were issued concealed the slapdash atmosphere in which they were made and to some extent disguised the sloppiness on show in
ALL
YOU
NEED
IS
LOVE (a false impression reinforced by the razzmatazz surrounding it). The fact was, though, that The Beatles were now doing willfully substandard work: paying little attention to musical values and settling for lyric first-thoughts on the principle that everything, however haphazard, meant
something and if it didn't - so what? Their attention to production, so painstaking during the
Pepper sessions, has likewise faded. (The engineers at Olympic, where the backing track was prepared for the TV broadcast, were shocked by the carelessness with which the mixdown was made.)
Drog-sodden laziness was half the problem. In Lennon's case, this was complicated by his oscillating confidence, which had him either wildly overestimating The Beatles ('We're as good as Beethoven') or flatly dissmissing them (and art in general) as a 'con'. The rest of the trouble sprang from the ethos of 1967 itself - a passive atmosphere in which anything involving struggle, conflict, or diffilcuty seemed laughably unenlightened. 'It's
easy' - the half-ingenious, half-sarcastic refrain of
ALL
YOU
NEED
IS
LOVE - expressed both this starry-eyed mood and The Beatles' non-evaluative attitude to their music in the dazzling light of LSD. All you had to do was toss a coin, consult the
I Ching, or read a random paragraph from a newspaper - and then start playing or singing. Anyone could do it, everyone could join in. ('All together now . . .')
During the sessions for ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, Harrison insisted on playing violin, an instrument he'd never previously touched.
The communality of the hippies, like that of the 17th-century nonconformists to whom they looked for precedents, was essentially egalitarian. There was little room in this outlook for 'special' individuals and thus (theoretically, at least) small scope for artistic genius. Creativity was merely the childlike play of the imagination; we were all artists. When The Pink Floyd made a TV appearance to promote their extraordinary second single 'See Emily Play', they were surrounded by a kaftan-clad crowd of beatific followers resembling fey emissaries from somr future Eden. Shortly afterwards, The Beatles repeatzed the trick by performing ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE knee-deep in garlanded hangers-on, going one better by having them all sing along.
If the lotus-eating delusion of an egalitarian life of ease was seductive, its concomitant worship of benign chance was positively enervating. During the chaotic sessions for IT'S ALL TOO MUCH, the group filled several tapes with instrumental ramblings to which they never later returned, although they were presumably under the impression that they were doing something worthwhile at the time. By mid-1967, their enthousiasm for 'random', which had begun as a sensible instinct for capitalising on fortuitous mistakes, was starting to degenerate into a readiness to accept more or less anything, however daft or irrelevant, as divinely dispensed. Lennon's lyric for ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE shows the rot setting in: a shadow of sense discernible behind a cloud of casual incoherencethrough which the author's train of thought glides sleepily backwards. The various musical quotations
The 'Marseillaise', a Bach two-part invention, Greensleeves, and Glenn Miller's 'In The Mood'. (The last was still in copyright and The Beatles later made an out-of-count settlement with its publisher.)
- collaged onto the backing track by George Martin, working to The Beatles' offhand instructions - are in the same vein, if more to the point, underlining an ambiguity implicit in the orchestra's blowsily derisive rejoinders to the chorus. The presiding spirit of ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE nonetheless has more to do with comfortable self-indulgence than redeeming self-parody.
During the materialistic Eighties, this song's title was the butt of cynics, there being, obviously, any number of additional things needed to sustain life on earth. It should, perhaps, be pointed out that this record was not conceived as a blueprint for a successful career. 'All you need is love' is a transcendental statementz, as true on its level as the principle of investment on the level of the stock exchange. In the idealistic perspective of 1967 - the polar opposite of 1987 - its title makes perfect sense.
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yesterday put all their albums in the car and are listening to them one after the other 
George and John's stuff 
I also had the liberty to look at your profile,and saw you're from the era. Ever been to a concert or seen John live? 
You're nearly as old as my mom (there - 9th July '48, it's in two days, today's Ringo's) who's nearly as old as my dad (there - 19th Jan '47) AND you're a day ahead of me (here - 29th July '73, I started when they finished)
when they came to Australia i was 14 my parents wouldn't even let me go to Sydney to meet their plane 
