All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words: Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by The Beatles and Their Inner Circle

“Do Beatles fans really want to revisit this painful, bitter, divisive time in the life of the band who otherwise gave the world so much joy?”

It’s hard to come up with anything new or even insightful about The Beatles. Everything about them has been dissected any number of times until one would think there is nothing more to discover.

Maybe there isn’t, but Peter Brown, the ultimate Beatles insider—best man at John and Yoko’s wedding, best mate of Brian Epstein—decides here that he’s going to try one more time. Here, Brown and Steven Gaines, his co-author on a decades’ old book The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of The Beatles trot out the raw interviews done for their previous book.

Back in the late ’70s, when these interviews were conducted, Brown had the trust of The Beatles and their inner circle and had unprecedented access to them. The problem, as becomes apparent quickly, is that these interviews are dated. Done just before John Lennon was assassinated, the bulk of the talk revolves around the band’s breakup and the infighting around their Apple label.

Even for a diehard Beatles fan, it’s more than a little tiresome.

Brown has interviews with all The Beatles except for John, and that leaves a giant hole to fill. Brown and Gaines interview Yoko Ono not long after John’s death but, as usual, we must accept her word for what John was thinking just before the murder. Can we trust that what she says is true? Place your bets.

But there are some nuggets such as when Gaines asks Paul if he remembers Francine Schwartz, the American woman he had a brief affair with. Francine was in the wrong place at the right time—in bed with Paul when Jane Asher, his first serious girlfriend, decided to pay a visit. That was the end of Paul’s relationship with Jane, and she famously has never said a word about it again. She might be the only person in the Beatles circle not to have written a book about the lads.

On the flip side, Schwartz did write a book called Apple to the Core so when Gaines asks Paul if he remembers her, Paul does a double take: “Oh, I remember her. How could I forget?”

There’s also a doozy of a story from Ringo who turns out to be the best interview in the book. Ringo regales his interviewers with the time, at the height of The Beatles touring and fame, that he snuck out of an Indianapolis hotel to drive a police car with two officers along for the ride. Ringo was going so fast that another patrol car began chasing them and somehow, he eluded them.

Then the cops’ fulfilled one of Ringo’s fantasies—he drives the patrol car around the Indianapolis speedway. The officers wanted to continue the party and Ringo, then a party boy who counted wild man Keith Moon as his best friend, went off with the cops for three days to their ranch. When he finally got back behind the drum kit, he says his legs stopped working and he had to be hospitalized.

One of the saddest parts of the book comes when Gaines tells George that he’s going to interview John when he returns to New York. Of course, he never does. George is obviously still sore at John for unresolved issues.

He tells Gaines: “You’ll probably think [John] is a piece of shit, you know? He’s so negative about everything.”

The talk turns to George’s memoir I, Me, Mine. He says Paul called him and told him he liked it, but John never said a word. Other interviews with John reveal that he did read George’s book and hated it because John was barely mentioned, and he was hurt.

Do Beatles’ fans really want to revisit this painful, bitter, divisive time in the life of the band who otherwise gave the world so much joy?