Tony Palmer's series, All You Need Is Love, is a big, beautiful mess of a documentary. Tracing the story of popular music or purporting to, this collection of 17 episodes on five DVDs is probably the best film about music you'll ever watch. The difficult thing that can't change is how the Seventies were a transitional time for music. The musicians of the previous decade were dead or disenchanted for the most part by the time All You Need Is Love came out. The fascinating portraits of older jazz and blues musicians would be impossible to recreate since they're almost all dead by now. The newer breed of rockers are cast in a skeptical light, more music theater than art. Palmer almost always keeps himself out of the picture, but it's impossible as a modern viewer to not see some of what is captured here as very dated, a product of its time. Even with these flaws, All You Need Is Love is a defining work of art and dedication. Like any attempt on an epic scale, one expects there to be some bumps and bruises; Palmer's classic isn't immune to this rule, but manages to stay at a distance from any judgment and manages to give the viewer an unadulterated slice of what life for musicians is like. Being "behind the stage" certainly isn't all glamour and it is comforting to find out that every era apparently had its Britney Spears celeb on his or her way to the ultimate train wreck. Along with the film's incredible ability to candidly portray a wide variety of musical visionaries, the history behind popular music comes to life in All You Need Is Love. Speaking from the perspective of someone that sat through his fair share of Music 101 courses in college, it's a monumental feat to both educate and entertain viewers while addressing almost 200 years of music, and without losing a significant amount of depth and detail.

The format of All You Need Is Love is simple, with about four episodes contained on each DVD. The first episode is a digest of everything in the series, a one-hour rundown on the upcoming episodes. Each episode covers a distinct form of music and has a theme. The theme is often connected to the social or political context behind the music and the musicians. Especially considering that over 20 years has passed between the creation of this film and its current DVD release, we expected more in the way of special features. Sure, the proof is in the pudding, but a few behind-the-scenes or features would have been nice. It would be especially interesting to know how modern musicians featured at a young age in All You Need Is Love now relate to the performances and comments they made at the time... The 16 episodes cover African roots, Jazz, Blues, Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, The Musical, Swing, Rhythm & Blues, Country Music, Folk, Rock, The Beatles, "Sour Rock," Glitter Rock, and New Directions. The titles chosen by Palmer for the later episodes betray a little disappointment he seems to have in the direction that pop music took with bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Kiss, and others. It's not overt, but the impression is that everything around this music is just theatrical. Looking back, it's impossible to imagine groups of the 90's and beyond existing without the influence of the 60's and 70's. Palmer was a visionary in his goal to document all this musical history, but if he failed to fully appreciate the music of his own time, he wasn't much different than any of us that lack crystal balls.

A sad but necessary element woven through these episodes is historical context. Since the stories are told largely through a filter of American and Western popular music, the specter of racism, poverty, and drug use pervades the series. The roots of rock, jazz, and the blues are tied so strongly to African-American heritage and that heritage includes atrocities. Palmer doesn't gloss this over, but he doesn't play it so strongly that you feel he has an agenda. He has a wonderful talent for not editorializing with the camera or in the editing room. An example from one of the first episodes is the inclusion of both Amiri Baraka and Tina Turner. Baraka makes a fairly wild but probably accurate statement about the country needing a socialist revolution. Turner makes a wilder and grossly inaccurate statement about Africans as "lazy people," and caps this off by saying that she found her visits to Africa very boring. Eh? It's a special quality of All You Need Is Love that allows the viewer from almost any idealogical viewpoint to take meaning away rather than be told what to think. All You Need Is Love is a great experience for anyone with a curiosity about music and everyone with a passion for some form of popular music. The broad range of topics, personalities, time period, and individuals in the film make it unique among anything of its type. Even with recent updates to various parts of this, as in Ken Burns' "Jazz" series, All You Need Is Love stands out as a piece of art that attempted to explore and possibly help people understand modern Western music. Palmer's awareness that understanding is tempered by opinion and perception made him an incredible director and helped All You Need Is Love avoid becoming just another period piece or biopic on musical stars of the seventies.