A Beatles Tell-All Book Released 40 Years Ago — Here's Why Author Is Publishing Transcripts

fifty years ago, Stephen Gainesone New York Sunday Rock 'n' roll newspaper columnist lined up to ask Beatles John Lennon a question during a press event for the musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band On the Road. Gaines mouthed, “Hey, John, he sees Sgt. of pepper Does doing an Off-Broadway show make you feel old?'' Lennon responded strongly: “I don't need it to feel old, man. Next!”

It was a humiliating moment for Gaines and he left. Peter Brown, the Beatles' former day-to-day manager and organization president Robert Stigwood, who produced the show, noticed Gaines' frustration, invited him to a nearby saloon, and the pair became lifelong friends. Later, using Brown's connections, the duo spent much of the 1980s recording exclusive interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and members of the Beatles, such as Apple Corps. Neil Aspinall and publisher Dick James. The transcriptions became the basis for their best seller in 1983 The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles.

Reading like a “paperback pulp novel”, like Rolling rock stated, the book contains revealing claims such as Lennon's brief sexual relationship with the Beatles' late manager, Brian Epstein, and Lennon and Ono's journey through heroin addiction. When the book was released, McCartney burned it in his fireplace and his late wife, Linda, photographed the disaster. Now that Brown and Gaines have released the full transcripts of those 1980 interviews in a new book, All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words, which is out now Gaines says Advertising sign by phone from his home in East Hampton, N.Y., that the first book may have been “polarizing,” but it's based on conversations with reliable—and comfortable—sources, including a happy, chain-smoking McCartney.

Billboard: Why this book is coming out now, 41 years after it was published The love you make?

Stephen Gaines: I had the tapes in a bank vault for 40 years while we were trying to figure out what to do with them. I wanted full access to the tapes for historians, for the public. Petros and I, waking up after years, decided that we had to make a decision now. Publishers were interested. We didn't do it for the money, because there isn't a huge amount of money.

My favorite detail in the book is “Dali's Coconut” — a $5,000 gift Lennon commissioned for the Starr, in which surrealist master Salvador Dali created what looked like half a coconut lined with a sponge and “a long , curly black hair pulled from his mustache, he claimed, though I had my suspicions,” Brown writes in the book.

A young man who worked for the Beatles in New York, Arma Anton, came over from America because Dali wanted to be paid in cash and you couldn't bring cash, especially US dollars, from England. Went out with Peter Brown and Dalí and his wife Gala for dinner. When it was finished, Salvador Dali asked Arma Anton if he would like to go with him to a brothel. We didn't put it in the book because it had nothing to do with the Beatles.

The other weird thing was… the hair in the coconut. We don't know if Dali got this from his mustache or his pubic hair. John wanted so badly to give Ringo something special because Ringo felt so abused and [like] such a stranger and they did not appreciate his drum. When Peter showed it to John, the hair got wet, and the hair curled, or straightened, or—I forget what it did. John loved it so much. I forget what they gave Ringo. Ringo never knew about the coconut.

I was surprised by the bluntness of your questions, especially to McCartney: “Rock 'n' roll bands had a reputation for being bad on the road, like tying groups to bedposts and a fish. But you had to be single.”

It was one of the things I always wondered about. They were always painted like such angels. Then, of course, there was Hamburg [where the Beatles performed in Germany in the ’60s] and all the holly trees. It really shocked me that Paul said there were a lot of girls on the street. Why hadn't any of them come out?

Paul invited me and Peter to his house in Sussex for the weekend. Paul whispered to me, “Do you smoke weed?” I said, “Not since I've been here.” He said, “I'm not allowed to smoke in the house because of the kids and because I got arrested. Let's go out in my car and drive around and smoke a joint.” We got into his Mini, the fanciest Mini I had ever seen. He put a joint on the dashboard of the car.

The second link then fell around the wiper defroster slot. Paul said, “Oh, no, no, no, they'll find it, they'll pull me for a ticket and Linda and they'll find it! We have to get it out of there.” So we pulled over to the side of the road. We opened both doors to the car. He got some screwdrivers out of the hood and we started unscrewing the dashboard. His neighbors were walking down the street: “Are you having car trouble, Mr. McCartney?” “Oh, no, okay, that's okay, thank you very much.” We never found the compound. We screwed everything back up.

This was my experience at the interview: He was really shockingly impatient.

For decades, Yoko Ono said she broke up the Beatles, but the studio footage in Peter Jackson's documentary Come back suggests it was really about business — particularly for Allen Klein, whom Lennon wanted to hire as manager, while McCartney and others disagreed. All you need is love shows that all these reasons are true, as well as others.

The first thing was that Brian [Epstein] passed away. He was the glue that held the Beatles together. Then the guys got bored of each other. They couldn't go out on the street, they were the most famous people on earth, everything they did, every gesture, everything they said was blown up, and they could only see each other, and it created tremendous tension.

If the feelings behind them weren't so bad, maybe they would have solved these financial problems. There is a moment inside Come back when John and Yoko go to talk to Peter Brown. Peter says, “Allen Klein is here,” and John and Yoko say, “Oh, when can we see him?” Peter says, “He's in Dorchester [Hotel in London], you can see Allen Klein tomorrow.” What they do behind everyone's back is call Dorchester and see him that night. And it brainwashes them. It made everything worse. Collect on all crusts. It made the Beatles fight each other.

How did you come to this deal to co-write with Peter?

In 1980, I was broke, down and out and unhappy and miserable in New York. He lived in Laguna Beach in a penthouse on a cliff. He said, “You have to get out of New York. Stay here for a while.” It was great, and I said, “What about this book now?” He said, “Let's write a sentence.” Then it exploded. We got $250,000 for the hardcover rights, $750,000 for the paperback rights. It went on and on until we had almost $2 million in advances. The problem was that it was too honest, it was too direct, and Beatles fans weren't ready for it. But they are all grown up now. They are ready for All you need is love.