538
RICHARD POIRIER
even while ·the word "love" is being stretched out in choral back·
ground. And like the ambiguous language of "Baby You're a
Rich
Man," the phrasing here sounds comfortably familiar - if you
had
love you could do anything. Except that isn't really what the
lyrics
imply. Rather, the suggestion is that doing, singing, knowing, seeing
have in some sense already been done or at least that we needn't
be
in any particular sweat about them; they're accepted as already
within the accustomed range of human possibility. What has not
been demonstrated to anyone's satisfaction, what hasn't been tried,
is
"love." "Love" remains the great unfulfilled need, and the historical
evidence for this is in endless musical compositions about it.
Far
from suggesting that "love" will solve everything, which would
be
the hippie reading of "all you need is love," the song allows most
things to be solved without it. Such a nice bit of discrimination issues
from the music and thence into the lyrics. Interestingly enough,
the
lyrics were meant to be simple in deference to the largely non- Eng–
lish-speaking audience for whom the song was especially written and
performed on the BBC worldwide TV production of "Our World."
"Normally," the Beatles' song publisher Richard James later ob–
served, "the Beatles like to write sophisticated material, but they were
glad to have the opportunity to write something with a very basic
appeal." But so was Shakespeare at the Globe, and we know how
unsophisticated
he
could be. The simplicity is entirely in the initial
repetitions of title line and the word "love," a verbal simplicity first
modified by the music and then turned into complications that have
escaped even most English-speaking listeners.
Lennon and McCartney's recognition through music that
the
"need" for love is historical and recurrent is communicated to
the
listener- by instrumental and vocal allusions to earlier material. The
historical allusiveness is at the outset smart-alecky - the song opens
with the French National Anthem - passes through the Chaplin
echo, if that's what it is, to various echoes of the blues, and boogie–
woogie, all of them in the ·mere shadings of background, until at
the
end the song itself seems to be swept up and dispersed within
the
musical history of which it is a part and of the electronics by which
that history ·has been made available. The process begins by a recur–
renee ·of ·the .'Ilove; love, l(we" phrase, here repeated and doubled
as on a stalled record. It then proceeds into a medley of sounds, frac-
