The Beatles have always been celebrated for their experimentation. After they retired from touring, pushing their recorded sound into new and exciting places was always their motivation, they allowed themselves unlimited creative space with no deadlines in sight. But experimentation doesn’t always mean futuristic new technology or groundbreaking revelations. Sometimes, it simply means looking at what’s around you and handling it with a different perspective. In the case of ‘All You Need Is Love’ and its unique drum line, it meant abandoning instruments entirely to get a bit more rustic.
Unique is perhaps the wrong word. Instead, ‘All You Need Is Love’ has a nonexistent drumline, as recording engineer Shelly Yakus discovered years later. While working on John Lennon’s 1973 record, Mind Games, he questioned the ex-Beatle about how certain sounds came about on their iconic songs. In the case of this Magical Mystery Tour track, it was revealed that what everyone had been hearing as drums was something else entirely.
“He goes, ‘I’ll tell you that there’s no drums on that song,’” Yakus recalled. Baffled, he replied, “How can there be no drums? I hear a snare drum?” But during the band’s most experimental period, their innovation also involved stripping things back to basics, where not even instruments would do. Instead, they simply wanted to make certain sounds, no matter what they used or how they did it.
Yakus recalled Lennon explaining, “He said, ‘It’s one of the Beatles holding an upright bass by the neck and Ringo hitting the strings on the upright bass with drumsticks and one of the other Beatles shaking a tambourine.’”
It was Paul McCartney holding the bass as he and Ringo Starr worked together on their drum and double bass hybrid sound. It’s unknown who the tambourine player was, but either way, this image of the band coming together to replace classic drums with a different approach to beat-making highlights the group at their absolute experimental and collaborative peak.
The result is a drum line that sits somewhat softly in the song. Beyond the opening drum roll, the beat is kept loosely in the background like a marching sound. It isn’t designed to hold attention but instead to be nestled in with the orchestra and harmonies. But when listening back with this knowledge, it’s easy to spot that it’s no typical drum sound as Starr came out from his post behind the kit to instead come up with a unique new approach.
Even Keith Moon, the famed and wild drummer credited on the track, isn’t playing properly. Instead, he’s playing with soft brushes on a hi-hit as the Beatles managed to tame the crazy player for one gentle track.
So while the Beatles’ experimentation is more often discussed in relation to their expansive opuses like ‘A Day In The Life’ with its tempo changes and adventurous makeup, simple stories like the band abandoning the drums are a perfect display of just how interested they were in making something new and different where typical instruments wouldn’t cut it.