It’s easy to assume that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were joined at the hip when working on The Beatles’ classics. While they eventually fractured in one of the most acrimonious breakups in rock history, McCartney always remembered Lennon as his old friend whom he could always rely on to complete his musical bits and add his own sonic spice to every single song. Even though McCartney had a hand in writing Lennon’s masterpieces, there were elements of ‘All You Need is Love’ that never really clicked with him.
Throughout the back half of the 1960s, though, the band were already spearheading a new movement without even realising it. After leaving the road because of how out of hand everything was getting at their shows, the band took their foot off the gas as the world was entering into the countercultural movement.
Once they reconvened at Abbey Road Studios, Sgt Pepper would become the cornerstone of the psychedelic movement, as the band started toying around with every studio oddity they could get their hands on. While the experimentation started on Revolver, this was the first time the band utilised every element of their sound, including making a lavish concept and fanciful tunes that turned the idea of an album into high art.
While it’s a musical crime that a song like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was kept off the album, the band had more classic singles at hand when working on the Our World broadcast. Being one of the first worldwide radio broadcasts, Lennon penned ‘All You Need is Love’ as a sweet message to the world, saying that it’s easy to go through life with love on your side.
Any musician can take that single chorus line in any direction they want to, but Lennon’s verses are a lot more complex than one would think. Borrowing from the Eastern teachings and his trademark sense of wordplay, Lennon’s verses are full of contradictions, saying that there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
McCartney was on the same page for the most part, but one of the final lines of the verse really stumped him, recalling in Many Years From Now, “The chorus, ‘All you need is love’, is simple, but the verse is quite complex; in fact I never really understood it, the message is rather complex. It was a good song that we had handy that had an anthemic chorus”.
McCartney wasn’t the only one having a hard time internalising the song. When talking about performing the track, even George Harrison remembered having a hard time dealing with the song’s irregular sense of timing, constantly switching between common time and different measures of waltz time depending on where the words line up.
For a song this complex, it went down like a charm on the live broadcast, becoming the unofficial anthem for The Summer of Love and reminding the entire world what can be done if we lead with love instead of hate. Macca may still perform the song on rare occasions live as a tribute to his old mate, but given the lyrics Lennon wrote down, understanding the subtle parts of the song has turned out to be anything but easy.
