However, anyone worried that Palmer’s film focuses only on music nerds can rest easy. Love’s greatest virtue is the emphasis it gives to performance. Palmer included such haunting scenes as blues great Victoria Spivey, near the end of her life, all dressed up, hunched over a piano and singing “Black Snake Blues” in a tiny, strange room crowded with pictures and cardboard boxes. Even iconic footage becomes transformed through editing into something deeper, more profound: The now-legendary live broadcast of the Beatles singing “All You Need Is Love” in 1967 gains added resonance, thanks to the film’s revelation that the band passed up playing at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival to prepare for it. It also helps that the director got an unprecedented degree of access for his film, with figures such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tina Turner and Roy Rogers sitting for candid interviews, and some even helping with the script: The writing credit for the episode on musicals goes to none other than Stephen Sondheim.

It’s telling that Palmer chose the subtitle The Story of Pop Music, because his film definitely seems to have a narrative thrust. (It’s also worth noting that alongside his storied career as a music-doc auteur, Palmer has made several excellent musician biopics, including the English miniseries Wagner and Testimony, which explores the life of Shostakovich). Watching the episodes in succession, one marvels at the epic arc that leads from Scott Joplin’s virtual invention of the popular hit in 1899 with “Maple Leaf Rag” to the explosive power of celebrity enjoyed by musicians in the 1960s and ’70s. In each case, artists needed audiences to make their work truly come alive: Joplin brought a young boy to dance along at his first audition, and the Beatles were ignored by the media until their fans began making themselves heard. It only makes sense, therefore, that the opening image of the entire series is of fans peering through the windows of a car, attempting to see an unknown, off-camera celebrity. The tale of popular music, as Palmer tells it, is the story not of musicians or listeners, but of the unpredictable emotional exchange that occurs between them.

There is, of course, a time-capsule quality to All You Need Is Love, since it came before the worldwide emergence of punk, new wave and a host of other now seemingly indispensable genres. In its own way, this makes Palmer’s film more revealing. Made at a time when the Summer of Love was still a recent memory and Elvis was alive, it maintains a wide-eyed fascination with the transforming power of music—a quaint notion, perhaps, in our current age of irony. But how else could anyone make such an ambitious, wonderful work without this earnest belief in the power of art to change the world?

All You Need Is Love is available May 13, 2008 ($99.95).