Nice drumming on this song - not Ringo's! It was Paul, as Ringo had quit the Beatles at the time of recording.
I love the melody. I love the guitar parts, acoustic and electric. I love the bass line.
It's a serene little song that blooms by the end. Maybe the best song on the White Album.
There are almost no original Beatles recordings available to link online, so I did my own version.
The Beatles version has a quintessential melodic bass line from Paul McCartney, a sharp little drum part from Ringo Starr, and a small host of cool auxiliary instruments. Go check it out in full glory on the White Album.
I love the descending chord progression of the verses. I love the dreamy stomp of the chorus, with a soft vibrato on the vocals. And I geek out about how John Lennon embellishes the vocal over the final repeats of the chorus, adjusting creatively just enough to the two-beat half measures at the end of each repetition.
The lyrics flip some of the ideas of the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpense," first taking the king out of the counting house and putting him in the kitchen, then showing him in the garden, domain of the maid in the nursery rhyme. It wasn't five years later that John Lennon was fulfilling this vision in his own life, embarking on his period as a non-working househusband with Yoko Ono and his son Sean. He stayed out of the public eye for five years to focus on raising his young child. After essentially missing all of his first son Julian's childhood to pursue his career, he didn't want to make the same grave mistake again.
And then of course, to be more prophetic, the last verse is about a family seance to communicate with the dead. The kids of the story break up the session with their own voices, suggesting one of two things: Either the point is that the seance is nonsense, rightfully disrupted by the play of children; or maybe the children are themselves the incarnations of the lost, the voices of the dead left to carry on.
At least, they might be something approaching that if the dead, while they were here, took the time to pour themselves into their children's lives.
I explained a while back about the pressure John Lennon was under to produce a song for the first worldwide satellite broadcast, and how, improbably, "All You Need Is Love" just materialized out of the ether for those auspicious purposes.
Well, John wanted to go double or nothing after that.
A few years later, here comes Timothy Leary - the Timothy Leary - and Mr. Leary is ready to challenge incumbent Ronald Reagan for the office of governor of California. Leary had the Berkley Ph.D, the Harvard teaching cred, the cachet of running extreme psychedelic human experimentation programs that boiled over into disarray and personal grandiosity. So the populist appeal was there.
He just needed a song.
When Leary came to John Lennon for this campaign song, John knew he had his follow up to "All You Need Is Love" served up for him on a countercultural platter. Leary's slogan was "Come together, join the party." John's song would write itself. It would, except it didn't. Not really. He got together a nice little chorus, but there was nothing more to be proud of by the time Leary was imprisoned on drug offenses, ending his campaign.
And this is the natural order of things. Classic songs are not just produced on request, no matter what you think "All You Need Is Love" proved. Regardless of the reputation of the writer, songs are more likely to end up cast out into the heap of false starts than surviving to completion, much less ending up transformational.
But the songwriting persisted. Maybe Leary would get out of prison and ask for it? (He didn't. Leary instead opted to escape and spend the next few years as a fugitive in the care of arms dealers and other luminaries.) Probably that little germ of a chorus that John had was just too cool to give up on.
And when the final recorded Beatles album Abbey Road came out, there it was as the first track, "Come Together." The political aspects are basically gone; the verses are busy with crazy descriptions of maybe one person, maybe four, maybe four personalities in one body. The chorus seems to have the only lyric surviving from the Leary commission.
And what a nice little damned achievement the song turned out to be too. The chorus is short but obviously has its fantastic melody. And I like the verses a lot, that swampy bass line.
The real cool of this song for me is in the instrumental sections, the solo and the ending fade out. The pace is just perfect, the drums and bass putting down a great groove. Just great rock n roll. I love John in the ending, the ideal John, long hair, granny glasses, the white suit, following each "come together" with a sharp "yeah."
Timothy Leary had five wives.
Maybe the best song on the Abbey Road album.
John Lennon claimed the electric harpsichord part was inspired by playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in reverse. This is bull.
However, what is great about that harpsichord part is that it was played by the 5th Beatle, Sir George Martin. Coincidentally, like Beethoven, Martin progressively lost his hearing in his later years.
For an assignment as a senior in high school, I brought the lyrics for this song into my English class. It was during our section on Romantic poetry. The reading I did of Keats, Coleridge, and Blake in that class inspired me to major in English in college, where I would make poetry my primary study, lead the campus literary journal, win the campus-wide writing award, and graduate summa cum laude before being deposited into the real, class-gridded world without a single benefactor like an exiled space alien.
That day in high school, upon hearing these Beatles lyrics, about the crushing emotional impact of becoming conscious of the power and scope of natural forces, the redneck North Dakotan tough guy stuffed into the desk beside mine dismissed the Beatles as just a bunch of druggies. The Beatles did abuse drugs, especially John Lennon. Ironically, I agree that drug use is destructive to society, drugs of kinds both shunned and accepted. They are the source of debilitating paranoia and half-baked thinking in many, many minds today, not to mention unknowable carnage and squalor. They have no place in my life.
But it is undeniable that the lyrics to this song, along with the totality of the song, made my world larger. Like the other poetry from that class, this song expected more out of me than I had been giving.
Maybe eventually my old high school classmate got out of North Dakota, into the world a bit, and stopped flinching at the power of his own mind. But we all know he didn't. And he is the victor of this story.
Have you ever submitted a drawing or a photograph or something you wrote to a contest? Usually there's a theme you have to match, and it's all very rushed and forced, and in the end the arbiters of the contest just accept submissions that serve their preconceived narrative rather than celebrate challenging quality. I have succeeded seldom and been rejected most times in this business. The Beatles wrote "All You Need Is Love" under those kinds of circumstances (except their acceptance was guaranteed, which I'm sure did nothing to make it less unnerving) and just happened to produce a song of significance in world history.
They were commissioned to write and perform a new song for the world's first satellite broadcast - "Our World," which was kind of the Olympics and a TV variety show combined, with countries contributing segments to represent themselves. The Beatles were Great Britain at the time. With less than three weeks before the event, John Lennon began to write in earnest. He was still putting finishing touches on the song the day of the broadcast - to 25 countries and over 400 million people. They had just released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a few weeks before and could've been forgiven if they were a bit creatively spent.
Instead, John Lennon did something that became kind of a template for anyone creating content for worldwide consumption, keeping it extremely simple. He focused on one forceful idea, and he conveyed it in five words. Our international blockbuster movies do the same thing now (using about five words and 500 explosions).
Those are the iconic choruses of "All You Need Is Love."
The verses were much more complex, and I'm sure John took it as his right to say more in the verses if people were going to focus on the choruses anyway. ("Don't bore us, get to the chorus" mentality)
First of all, the verses are in a 7 beat, an anomaly then and really still today in popular music. The beat is slow enough that non music people probably do not notice.
The lyrics are a real work of art, full of both plain meaning and maybe not such plain meaning. His lines are sly repeating variations of the same grammatical format:
"There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung."
I have assumed Lennon omitted the word "otherwise" at the end of each line. As in, don't sacrifice love to spend your life doing things that can just be done by others. Careerists and perfectionists, relax, and realize that the more you strive, the more you are shutting out love.
But consider if there isn't an implied "otherwise" ending these lines.
It's most telling in the second verse:
"There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown."
It's not just that some other person probably knows all the things you know. It's hinting at the idea that knowledge itself resides in completeness elsewhere, beyond human minds. Not only that, but the daily act of seeing the world is not as me-centered as you think it: You are not seeing it - you are being shown it. Suddenly there are bigger spiritual implications.
He's not flashing Bible verses; He is hitting on a reality that many people suppress, religious and atheist: The world is being given to us, shown to us; it is being made available to our senses and reason to be discovered. Everything in front of our eyes is a message.
You can get the same ideas in-depth by reading Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason." John Lennon decided to hide glimpses of it in the 7-beat verses of his pop song on the world's first international broadcast. It's a hella-catchy song too.