{"id":80561,"date":"2024-04-24T12:04:28","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T16:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/04\/24\/a-tell-all-beatles-book-came-out-40-years-ago-heres-why-the-author-is-releasing-the-transcripts\/"},"modified":"2024-04-24T12:04:28","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T16:04:28","slug":"a-tell-all-beatles-book-came-out-40-years-ago-heres-why-the-author-is-releasing-the-transcripts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/04\/24\/a-tell-all-beatles-book-came-out-40-years-ago-heres-why-the-author-is-releasing-the-transcripts\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tell-All Beatles Book Came Out 40 Years Ago \u2014 Here\u2019s Why the Author Is Releasing the\u00a0Transcripts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tFifty years ago, Steven Gaines<\/strong>, a New York Sunday News<\/em> rock \u2018n\u2019 roll newspaper columnist, lined up to ask the Beatles<\/a>\u2018 John Lennon<\/a> a question during a press event for the musical Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band On the Road. <\/em>Gaines blurted out, \u201cHi, John, does seeing Sgt. Pepper\u2019s <\/em>being made into an off-Broadway show make you feel old?\u201d Lennon responded acerbically: \u201cI don\u2019t need that to make me feel old, mate. Next!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tNew Book Featuring Unreleased Interviews With The Beatles Just Dropped & Is Already No. 1\u2026\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tIt was a humiliating moment for Gaines, and he wandered off. Peter Brown<\/strong>, the Beatles\u2019 former day-to-day manager and president of the Robert Stigwood Organization, which produced the show, noticed Gaines\u2019 dejection, invited him to talk in a nearby lounge, and the pair became lifelong friends. Later, using Brown\u2019s connections, the duo spent much of 1980 recording exclusive interviews with Paul McCartney<\/a>, Ringo Starr<\/a>, Yoko Ono<\/a> and Beatles insiders such as Apple Corps\u2019 Neil Aspinall<\/strong> and publisher Dick James<\/strong>. The transcripts became the basis for their 1983 best-seller The Love You Make: An Insider\u2019s Story of the Beatles.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tReading like a \u201cpaperback pulp novel,\u201d as Rolling Stone <\/em>declared, the book contains revelatory allegations such as Lennon\u2019s brief sexual relationship with the Beatles\u2019 late manager, Brian Epstein<\/strong>, and Lennon and Ono\u2019s journey through heroin addiction. When the book came out, McCartney burned it in his fireplace, and his late wife, Linda<\/strong>, photographed the destruction. Now that Brown and Gaines have released the full transcripts from those 1980 interviews in a new book, All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words,<\/em> which is out now, <\/em>Gaines tells Billboard <\/em>by phone from his East Hampton, N.Y., home that the first book may have been \u201cpolarizing,\u201d but it\u2019s based on talks with reliable \u2014 and comfortable \u2014 sources such as a jovial, weed-smoking McCartney.<\/p>\n

\n\tBillboard: Why put this book out now, 41 years after the publication of <\/strong>The Love You Make<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSteven Gaines: <\/strong>I had the tapes in a bank vault for 40 years while we tried to figure out what to do with them. I wanted there to be full access to the tapes for historians, for the public. Peter and I, getting up in years, decided we had to make a decision now. Publishers were interested. We didn\u2019t do it for the money, because there\u2019s not a huge amount of money involved.<\/p>\n

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\n\tMy favorite detail in the book is \u201cDal\u00ed\u2019s coconut\u201d \u2014 a $5,000 gift Lennon commissioned for Starr in which the surrealism master Salvador Dal\u00ed created what appeared to be half a coconut lined with a sponge and \u201ca long, curly black hair that he\u2019d plucked from his mustache, he claimed, although I had my suspicions,\u201d as Brown writes in the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tA young man working for the Beatles in New York, Arma Andon, came in from America, because Dal\u00ed wanted to be paid in cash, and you couldn\u2019t bring cash, especially in American dollars, out of England. He went out with Peter Brown and Dal\u00ed and his wife Gala to dinner. When it was over, Salvador Dal\u00ed asked Arma Andon if he\u2019d like to go with him to a whorehouse. We didn\u2019t put that in the book because it had nothing to do with the Beatles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other weird thing was \u2026 the hair in the coconut. We don\u2019t know if Dal\u00ed got that from his mustache or his pubic hair. John wanted so badly to give Ringo something special, because Ringo felt so maligned and [like] such an outsider and they didn\u2019t appreciate his drumming. When Peter showed it to John, they wet the hair, and the hair curled up, or straightened out, or \u2014 I forget what it did. John loved it so much. I forget what they gave Ringo instead. Ringo never knew about the coconut.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\u201960s Beatlemania to \u2018Now & Then\u2019: A Timeline of The Fab Four\u2019s Most\u2026\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tI was surprised at the bluntness of your questions, especially to McCartney: \u201cRock \u2018n\u2019 roll bands had a reputation for being bad on the road, like tying groupies to bedposts and f\u2014\u2013 them with a fish. But you guys were supposed to be celibate.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt was one of the things I always wondered about. They were always painted as such angels. Then, of course, there was Hamburg [where the Beatles performed in Germany in the \u201960s] and all the hookers. It really shocked me that Paul said there were lots of girls on the road. Why hadn\u2019t any of them come forward?<\/p>\n

\n\tPaul invited me and Peter to his house in Sussex for the weekend. Paul whispered to me, \u201cDo you smoke grass?\u201d I said, \u201cNot since I\u2019ve been here.\u201d He said, \u201cI\u2019m not allowed to smoke in the house because of the kids and because I\u2019ve been arrested. Let\u2019s go out in my car and we\u2019ll drive around and smoke a joint.\u201d We got into his Mini, the fanciest Mini I\u2019d ever seen. He put one joint on the dashboard of the car.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen the second joint fell down around the windshield-wiper defroster slot. Paul said, \u201cOh, no, no, no, they\u2019ll find it, they\u2019ll pull me over for a ticket, and Linda, and they\u2019ll find it! We\u2019ve got to get it out of there.\u201d So we pulled over to the side of the road. We opened up both the doors to the car. He got some screwdrivers out of the bonnet and we started unscrewing the dashboard. His neighbors were walking down the street: \u201cHaving car trouble, Mr. McCartney?\u201d \u201cOh, no, that\u2019s OK, that\u2019s fine, thank you very much.\u201d We never found the joint. We screwed everything back together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat was my experience in the interview: He was really shockingly forthcoming.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tHow to Watch The Beatles\u2019 \u2018Get Back\u2019 Documentary\u00a0Series\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tFor decades, Yoko Ono was said to have broken up the Beatles, but the studio footage in Peter Jackson\u2019s documentary <\/strong>Get Back <\/em><\/strong>suggests it was really about business \u2014 particularly regarding Allen Klein, whom Lennon wanted to hire as manager, while McCartney and others disagreed. <\/strong>All You Need Is Love <\/em><\/strong>indicates all these reasons are true, and others as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThe first thing was that Brian [Epstein] died. He was the glue that held the Beatles together. Then the guys were getting tired of each other. They couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the feelings behind them weren\u2019t so bad, they maybe would have solved those financial problems. There is a moment in Get Back<\/em> when John and Yoko go over to speak with Peter Brown. Peter says, \u201cAllen Klein is here,\u201d and John and Yoko say, \u201cOh, when can we see him?\u201d Peter says, \u201cHe\u2019s at the Dorchester [Hotel in London], you can see Allen Klein tomorrow.\u201d What they do behind everyone\u2019s back is call the Dorchester and see him that night. And he brainwashes them. He made everything worse. He picked at all the scabs. He made the Beatles fight with each other.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t10 Chart Records The Beatles Still Hold on the Hot 100 or Billboard\u00a0200\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tHow did you and Peter come up with this arrangement to write together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1980, I was broke and down and out and unhappy and miserable in New York. He was living in Laguna Beach in a penthouse on a cliff. He said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to get out of New York. Stay here for a while.\u201d It was glorious, and I said, \u201cWhat about that book now?\u201d He said, \u201cLet\u2019s write a proposal.\u201d 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, it was too honest, it was too direct and the Beatles fans weren\u2019t ready for it. But everybody\u2019s grown up now. They\u2019re ready for All You Need Is Love.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago, Steven Gaines, a New York Sunday News rock \u2018n\u2019 roll newspaper columnist, lined up to ask the Beatles\u2018 John Lennon a question during a press event for the musical Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band On the Road. Gaines blurted out, \u201cHi, John, does seeing Sgt. Pepper\u2019s being made into an off-Broadway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}