With the makings of a backing track in hand, George and the bandmates planned to continue refining “All You Need Is Love” on the evenings of June 20 and 21 in Studio 2. But those sessions would be abruptly canceled when the specter of real life interrupted George’s breakneck effort to bring the Beatles to the finish line for the Our World telecast. With George and Judy expecting their first child later that summer, they had also chosen that very week to relocate from their tiny flat on Manchester Street to a house of their own off of Hyde Park Crescent. Reflecting on that period, George later wrote that “most of us look back on 1967 as a great vintage year, the year of Sgt. Pepper. It was more than that for me, as it had great highs, it is true, but also it had a dark side.” For George, that dark side first revealed itself, only faintly at first, on Friday, June 16, when his father Harry took ill and was hospitalized in Wimbledon with chest pains. Visiting his father that weekend, George recalled that “he certainly looked strong to me. We chatted, and he joked about getting better.” With reassurances from the duty nurse that his father would shortly recover, George went so far as to reassure his sister Irene, who was on vacation, that she needn’t rush back to London on their father’s account; he was going to be just fine. Before heading off to Abbey Road to resume work on “All You Need Is Love” on Monday, June 20, George recalled telling his father, “‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ But when I arrived on the Tuesday morning, the nurse stopped me. ‘Your father died in the middle of the night,’ she said.” Felled by a myocardial infarction, Harry had died in his sleep on the eve of what would have been his eighty-third birthday. For George, “it was a desperate shock. He had seemed so well.” But even still, George soon realized that “he did manage to have the last laugh on me.” When George returned to Wimbledon to retrieve his father’s effects, “the nurse handed me his watch and some personal belongings, including his Post Office savings book.” And that’s when he took a closer look at his father’s savings account: “Looking through it, I noticed there was an entry every week for all the money that I’d given him as an allowance, and it was all still there, untouched. I was so overcome I just burst into tears. I thought, ‘You old devil!’”25
While Martin was away on family business, Emerick and Lush worked in the Studio 3 control room, where they prepared remixes of the Olympic Sound rhythm track for “All You Need Is Love.” An acetate of the second remix was delivered to BBC broadcast director Derek Burrell-Davis in advance of the June 25 telecast. By the evening of Friday, June 23, all hands were on deck in Studio 1 to rehearse “All You Need Is Love” for the simulcast, which was now fewer than forty-eight hours away. In addition to the bandmates and George’s production team, a thirteen-member orchestra was in evidence. Years later, George would remember that he “did a score for the song, a fairly arbitrary sort of arrangement since it was at such short notice.” As with the Beatles themselves, George wasn’t leaving anything to chance in terms of the orchestra, who were on hand to record their own backing track. The players included four violinists, two cellists, two saxophonists, two trombonists, two trumpeters, a flügelhornist, and an accordionist. Beatles session veteran Sidney Sax served as leader, while David Mason made his fourth appearance at Abbey Road on the Fab Four’s behalf. For his performance on “All You Need Is Love,” he played the same trumpet that he had used back in January for “Penny Lane.” During the three-hour session, George led the players through ten performances of the score, which was captured in a series of four-track-to-four-track tape reductions for reference purposes.26
In the middle of the Friday evening rehearsal, Brian interrupted the proceedings to hold an impromptu meeting with George and the bandmates in the Studio 1 control room. Brian was taken with the idea of releasing “All You Need Is Love” as a single to take advantage of Our World’s status as a truly global event, to cash in on what could be the greatest and most visible pop-song debut in the history of the record business. As Geoff later recalled, “John, of course, was keen—it was his song, after all—and it didn’t take much effort to talk Paul into it, either, since he knew the value of the massive publicity they would be receiving by virtue of the broadcast, thereby guaranteeing huge record sales.” As always, Brian was keen on promoting new Beatles product at every possible juncture. For George, the idea of releasing “All You Need Is Love” as a single was a no-brainer. But his overriding concern at this point was ensuring that they didn’t fall flat on their faces in front of a worldwide television audience. He had spent the balance of the past month observing the Beatles loafing their way through one drug-addled session after another. For his part, he could never understand why they felt the need to give themselves over to any of their drug inducements of the moment, whether they be amphetamines, marijuana, or acid. To George’s way of thinking, the Beatles were the most ingenious recording artists he had ever met, and they simply didn’t need psychotropic or other enhancements to heighten their creativity.27
On the eve of the simulcast, George and the Beatles convened at Abbey Road at two in the afternoon for a press call in which more than one hundred journalists and photographers flooded Studio 1. It was an unprecedented moment in Martin and the Beatles’ five-year collaboration, which had taken place almost entirely behind closed doors. In the early afternoon, the BBC technical personnel conducted a rehearsal, blocking their camera angles for the Beatles and the session players. By this juncture, George had decided to remain in the control room in order to ensure that the backing track went off without a hitch, so he recruited Mike Vickers to serve as conductor. During the rehearsal, Burrell-Davis announced that he would be mounting a TV camera in the control room to capture George and his production team at work during the Beatles’ performance. As Emerick later recalled, “An obviously pleased George Martin turned to Richard and me and said, ‘You two had better smarten yourselves up—you’re about to become international TV stars,’ which had the effect of making me even more nervous! But we were both into clothes at that point, and during a break, Richard and I excitedly discussed what we were going to wear. He owned a loud, stripey jacket that he thought would strobe in the cameras, so he planned on donning that, just for a joke. In the end, though, he was only seen in the broadcast for the briefest of moments. I opted for a simple white shirt and tie. I knew that it would simply be too hot in that control room, especially on a warm summer night, to consider wearing a jacket.” After the BBC team concluded their business that afternoon, the band and the orchestra held a three-hour session in which they recorded four additional takes of “All You Need Is Love.”28
When the moment of truth arrived on Sunday, June 25, George and the bandmates were as ready as they could possibly be under the circumstances. Another round of rehearsals got underway at two o’clock that afternoon in Studio 1, with George supervising several rehearsal takes with the Beatles and the orchestra poised in front of the BBC cameras, which were ready and waiting for the big event scheduled to begin in just under eight hours. George Martin was joined in the booth by his usual production team of Emerick and Lush, along with the BBC’s Martin Benge. During the rehearsals, John and Paul broke into giggles on more than one occasion. During the play-out section, John had begun trying out a series of non sequiturs, variously singing bits from “She Loves You,” “Yesterday,” and, strangest of all, “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” At one point, McCartney got into the act, ad-libbing “I believe you, Johnny!” as Lennon practiced the first verse of “All You Need Is Love” for the cameras, which, like the audio, was linked by a series of cables with a mobile broadcasting unit in the Abbey Road parking lot. From there, the signal would beam across five continents through the auspices of the Early Bird “space booster” and Lana Bird and ATS/B satellites. The Our World program itself was conceived as a goodwill mission to unite a troubled world gripped, as it was, by geopolitical strife in those Cold War days. And for one evening at least, it would largely succeed, with Our World enjoying an audience of some four hundred million peo
ple—even without the participation of the Soviet Union, which dropped out, predictably, at the last possible moment.
During the rehearsals, the BBC took a page out of Martin’s book and prerecorded the sequence in which the Beatles engage in a mock recording session. The preamble clocked in at roughly two minutes, with BBC host Steve Race narrating the events inside the studio, including images of Martin pretending to supervise the recording of a vocal track. With the orchestra seated in Studio 1, Race observed that “the Beatles get on best with symphony men.” Meanwhile, Lush simulated the act of rewinding the rhythm track, while Lennon and McCartney engage in studio banter, including Lennon singing the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” as McCartney jokes with their producer, whom he refers to as “Uncle George.” But it was all a charade for the cameras, of course. Through Martin’s careful planning, the only authentic aspects of the evening would be Lennon’s lead vocal, McCartney’s bass, Harrison’s guitar solo, and the orchestral accompaniment. Starr’s drums had been prerecorded as part of the basic rhythm track. Ringo was perfectly capable of keeping time that evening, but George knew that the Beatle’s drums would inevitably spoil the sound via leakage. Everyone was dressed to the nines, with Martin donning a white linen jacket for the occasion, the orchestra adorned in formal evening wear, and the Beatles done up in their hippie finery. Even though the band’s performance would be broadcast in black and white, the room was brimming with colorful streamers and placards. The only thing more colorful was the audience of friends and relations, including such rock ’n’ roll glitterati as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Pattie Boyd, Mike McGear, Jane Asher, and Graham Nash, among others.
As if everyone’s nerves weren’t already on high alert, the Beatles’ Our World segment actually commenced about forty seconds earlier than planned. At 9:36 PM, the BBC transmitted the pretaped Beatles “recording” session, and at 9:38 the live feed was launched, startling George and Geoff, who were downing much-needed shots of Scotch whisky. “There was a big panic to hide the bottle and the glasses,” Emerick later recalled. “We were shoving them under the mixing console!” For Martin, the tussle with the shot glasses was quickly overshadowed by an unexpected technical glitch:
To cap it all, at the last minute, just before we were due to go on the air, there was a panic call from the producer, sitting outside in the control van. “George, I’ve lost contact with the cameras in the studio. They can’t hear me. Can you relay my instructions to them?” So, apart from worrying about the vast audience who were going to be watching me, and worrying about the sound we would produce, and worrying about the orchestra in the studio, which Mike Vickers was conducting, I had, at the moment of truth, to worry about linking the TV cameramen to their producer. It became so complicated that I was on the verge of hysterical laughter. I remember thinking: “If we’re going to do something wrong, we might as well do it in style in front of 200 million people.”
And with that frame of mind, Martin called the session to order, Vickers took up the baton, and the whole shebang finally got underway for better or worse. But any fears that George and his production team held were decidedly short lived. Incredibly, the Beatles’ (mostly) live performance of “All You Need Is Love” went off without any further hitches, with the assembled friends and family merrily singing along with the chorus. When Burrell-Davis yelled “cut!” a member of the assembled glitterati gleefully shouted, “Happy new year, everybody,” as Harrison attempted, futilely, to pick out the notes of “La Marseillaise” on his guitar.29
Before they went home that evening, George and the Beatles put the finishing touches on the “All You Need Is Love” single. By the time that the studio had cleared out, with BBC personnel and the bandmates’ guests having departed, John was raring to go. From his place in the studio, he called up to his producer in the booth, “I’m ready to sing for the world, George, if you can just give me the backing.” After Lennon corrected a few flubs during his lead vocal, Ringo also replaced the tambourine part that he played during “La Marseillaise” with a stirring snare roll. That same day, Epstein telephoned his old friend and business partner Nat Weiss in New York City and proclaimed, “All you need is love. Love is all you need. Tell Capitol Records Monday morning, that’s the single. That says it all.” On Monday evening, George supervised a mono mixing session for “All You Need Is Love” in the Studio 2 control room. In the process, he treated Lennon’s vocal with a dose of ADT to give it more texture. With “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” having been selected as the B-side, the Beatles’ first singles release since February was ready to go into production. On July 7—Ringo’s twenty-seventh birthday—the “All You Need Is Love” backed with “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” single was in the hands of British consumers. “Funnily enough,” George later remarked, few listeners among the Beatles’ massive fan base ever “realized the single was any different to the TV version of the song.” Within a fortnight, “All You Need Is Love” topped the UK charts, and “the roll,” which had been short-circuited by Humperdinck’s “Release Me” earlier in the year, was back on with a vengeance. Meanwhile, back in the United States, “All You Need Is Love” conquered Billboard’s Hot 100 within a matter of weeks.30
For George, “All You Need Is Love” and the Beatles’ Our World performance had made for another career milestone, not to mention a makeshift anthem for the Summer of Love. As his old friend Lionel Bart later remarked, “One knew that the whole world was seeing things together for the first time ever. The Beatles sang a song of love and it was good.” Marking the band’s fifteenth UK single, “All You Need Is Love” was the first time, oddly enough, that George received a production credit on one of the Beatles’ seven-inch discs. In those days, producers and engineers were rarely acknowledged on LP sleeves and liner notes, much less the records themselves. But George’s experience with “All You Need Is Love” wasn’t all sunny optimism and smooth sailing. “Unfortunately, there was a sting in the tail for me,” he later wrote. “I was being paid the princely sum of £15 for arranging the music and writing the bits for the beginning and ending, and I had chosen the tunes for the mixture in the belief that they were all out of copyright. More fool me. It turned out that although ‘In the Mood’ itself was out of copyright, the Glenn Miller arrangement of it was not.” In short order, EMI was asked for a royalty by Miller’s estate. “The Beatles, quite rightly I suppose, said: ‘We’re not going to give up our copyright royalty,’” George later recalled. “So Ken East, the man who had by then become managing director of EMI Records, came to me and said: ‘Look here, George, you did the arrangement on this. They’re expecting money for it.’” Martin was understandably aghast when East announced that EMI expected the Beatles’ producer to pay the royalty out of his £15 fee. But in contrast with early 1964, when he stood by, sour-faced, as EMI denied him his holiday bonus, George wasn’t giving in to the record conglomerate’s miserly ways. With the producer not giving an inch, EMI ultimately settled with the Miller estate, leaving Martin with yet another bitter taste in his mouth after dealing with the company for whom his records had netted a king’s ransom and then some.31
With the manifold anxieties of Our World fading into George and the bandmates’ rearview mirror—and the sheer exhaustion of recording Sgt. Pepper only just beginning to ebb—the group and the brain trust agreed to take a much-deserved holiday for the rest of July and much of August. After all, they planned to conduct principal photography for the Magical Mystery Tour television movie in the fall, and with “All Together Now,” “It’s All Too Much,” and “Only a Northern Song” in the can, they were ahead on compiling their new recordings for the Yellow Submarine cartoon feature. For George, the break was a blessing, affording him with more time to spend with Judy, who expected to give birth to their first child in August, as well as to catch up on the backlog of AIR recordings that he desperately needed to produce.
David and Jonathan, the duo for which George held such high ho
pes, faltered yet again with their “She’s Leaving Home” backed with “One Born Every Minute” single. With Martin having produced the A-side, Vickers chipped in for “One Born Every Minute.” But in spite of the duo’s obvious talent—and a cover version of a tune from Sgt. Pepper, no less—David and Jonathan had clearly begun to lose their way. Vickers produced their follow-up single for AIR, “Softly Whispering I Love You” backed with “Such a Peaceful Day.” Like its predecessor, “Softly Whispering I Love You” failed to crack the UK charts. Indeed, the only place that David and Jonathan seemed to be able to muster an audience was Australia, where “She’s Leaving Home” and “Softly Whispering I Love You” charted at numbers ninety-three and twenty-three, respectively. A final single released in June 1968, “You Ought to Meet My Baby” backed with “I’ve Got That Girl on My Mind,” failed to chart in any marketplace, proving the sobering truth that David and Jonathan had truly run their course. As the decade wore on, Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway would try their hand as a newly minted act, the Congregation, before settling into a world-beating career as the composers behind “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” and “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” which were both massive international hits and cemented the duo’s name as Ivor Novello Award–winning songwriters.
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