There are so many beautiful songs from The Beatles, in early times and “It’s Only Love,” is one of them. It does feel, however, like a transition point, even a bidding good-bye, given that it comes from the album Help! , near the tail end of their 1963-1965 run with the early Beatles style. That style was characterized by a marriage of rock n’ roll roughness with upbeat yet poignant-enough love-song , but the latter element was the key one. That is, the early Beatles had been most obviously about the celebration of young love: “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “I Feel Fine,” etc. But with this song we were given a view of love, of eros , to be precise, that manages to be both adult in its distance and ever-young in its heartache. It still has the feel of the early Beatles’ love-celebration mode, but it’s moving into something else.In his novel High Fidelity , Nick Hornby asks why people worry so much about sexy, violent, and perverse rock songs, and so little about the many more rock songs that luxuriate in beautiful sadness, usually a sadness fueled by love. Without question, “It’s Only Love” is one of those songs. We have not fully escaped the romance-peddling, although now it is occurring in a more adult mode, the mode that will become more typical of rock song. The 60s/70s Rock story of love-song is that the songster play with formula increasingly fades into the background, behind evocations of love’s intensity, evocations genuinely—if at times rather studiously—adult, but still, or even more so, prone to an Agathon-like idolatry of love, sex, and youth. And a certain proto-hippie intoxication with romance, poetically derived in part from the early Beatles’ ability to make young love seem the most important thing in the world, really did become identified with a purportedly better adult approach to life. I’ll leave you with this very 1966 statement from Marty Balin, in the liner notes of the first Jefferson Airplane album:”All the material we do is about love. A love affair or loving people. Songs about love. Our songs all have something to say, they all have an identification with an age group and, I think, an identification with love affairs, past, beginning, or wanting . . . finding something in life . . . explaining who you are”.
