The Beatles Make History With ‘All You Need Is Love’: A Minute-by-Minute Breakdown
On June 1st, 1967, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, boosting the sales of vintage military uniforms and further cementing their status as the biggest rock group in the world. Two weeks later, they started work on their next omnipresent musical event: participating in the Our World TV show on June 25th, employing Earth’s newly constructed satellite technology to deliver a live global broadcast from locales as far-flung as “Takamatsu and Tunis.”
The Beatles agreed to perform a new song as the representatives of the United Kingdom. “It was the first worldwide satellite broadcast ever,” Ringo Starr said years later. “It’s a standard thing that people do now, but then, when we did it, it was a first. That was exciting – we were doing a lot of firsts.”
Engineer Geoff Emerick remembered, “I don’t know if they had prepared any ideas, but they left it very late to write the song. John said, ‘Oh God, is it that close? I suppose we’d better write something.'” Paul McCartney proposed his composition “Hello, Goodbye,” which got released as a single five months later, but the group opted instead for John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love.” They started recording the song on June 14th, with Lennon on harpsichord, McCartney on double bass with a bow, George Harrison on violin (for the first time in his life!) and Starr on drums.
The Beatles did 33 takes on June 14th, picked take 10 as the best, and in the following days, overdubbed vocals, piano (played by producer George Martin) and banjo (Lennon), plus guitar and some orchestral passages. Only on June 24th, the day before the broadcast, did they decide that they would release “All You Need Is Love” as a single – meaning that the world would be watching them cut their next record.
The tone of Our World was serious and stately, with announcers making pronouncements such as “art bears witness, as always, in the heart of man.” Segments – all live – included an interview with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, an appearance by Pablo Picasso, a rehearsal for Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet and footage of Spanish fishermen and Japanese construction workers. The two-and-a-half-hour broadcast was estimated to reach 400 million viewers around the world, in 24 different countries. The Soviet bloc countries dropped out of the program a week before its broadcast, in protest of the Six-Day War, in which Israel was victorious over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
Preceding the Beatles was a segment from Lincoln Center in New York City: conductor Leonard Bernstein, smoking a cigarette and rehearsing a Rachmaninoff concerto with pianist Van Cliburn. At 8:54 P.M. London time, Our World cut to the Abbey Road studios – about 40 seconds earlier than expected. Producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, stressed about the high-pressure live mix they were about to execute, were downing a couple of shots of Scotch when they got the word that they were about to go on the air. They scrambled to hide the bottle and glasses under the mixing board.
A BBC cameraman made his way past some helium balloons and swooped in on the Beatles, running through “All You Need Is Love” while sitting on stools, with a small audience sitting on the floor listening. An announcer said, “This is Steve Race in the Beatles’ recording studio in London, where the latest Beatle record is at this moment being built up. Not just a single performance, but a whole montage of performances. With some friends in to help the atmosphere, this is quite an occasion.” The Our World producers had balked at the Beatles wanting to play to backing tracks, saying that the whole point of the show was to document live events, but Martin had insisted on it, saying, “We can’t just go in front of 350 million people without some work.”
The Beatles played for about a minute, simulating a rehearsal or a rough take, and then the broadcast cut to the control room. Martin interrupted the Fab Four (and how many people on the planet would dare to interrupt a Beatles performance?), saying on the intercom, “I think that will do for the vocal backing very nicely. We’ll get the musicians in.”
“Great, great,” Lennon replied.
While the tape rewound, thirteen orchestral musicians found their seats and McCartney shook his shoulders to loosen up. Race filled time, saying, “There’s several days’ work on that tape. For perhaps the hundredth time, the engineer runs it back to the start, to yet another stage in the making of an almost-certain hit record. The supervisor is George Martin, the musical brain behind all the Beatles’ records. There’s the orchestra coming into the studio now, and you’ll notice that the musicians are not rock & roll youngsters. The Beatles get on best with symphony men.” Note how as late as 1967, the institutional voice of the BBC was trying to make the Beatles more palatable by claiming their affinity with classical musicians.
“Here we go,” Martin told the band. “Here comes the tape.”