All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words: Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by the Beatles and Their Inner Circle

by Steven Gaines and Peter Brown

Book Overview

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An oral history of The Beatles from never-before-seen interviews.

All You Need Is Love is a groundbreaking oral history of the one of the most enduring musical acts of all time. The material is comprised of intimate interviews with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, their families, friends and business associates that were conducted by Beatles intimate Peter Brown...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250285011
• ISBN13: 9781250285010
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Underwhelming, for completists only.

The premise sounded great. After all, "The Love You Make" from 1983 is still after all these years an incredible read. Perhaps it's been surpassed in some ways by the multitude of biographies and other works over the years, which are more in depth or more accurate, etc. But the original book is still a very important piece of the Beatles puzzle. So, I was excited to find out that the original interviews were going to be published. Well, I've finished the book and my main thought is, "That's it?" Sure, there are interviews from just about everybody in here, but why are they so short? Where's the rest? Did some of their tapes go missing and this is all that's left? There are some very interesting bits in here, to be sure, the usual musicians sleep around stuff, some more explanations about the various business dealings and so on, Dick James' defense of his selling the catalog in 1969 was interesting. There is much time spent from multiple interviewees regarding India, Maharishi and that whole episode. Not a worthless book but I just expected a lot more. There were a few grammatical errors as well. The author has a bad habit of repeating information in places. At least 1 sentence ended with a misspelled word. Sometimes I got the impression that interview questions were mixed into the text of the interviewee by accident, as if the person listening to the tapes couldn't tell voices apart. And sure enough on page 298, you'll see a rogue "[inaudible 00:11:33]" that someone forgot to remove from the text. This shows that the authors were using a service like Rev to transcribe their audio tapes or something similar. Who knows how many mistakes crept into the text in this book? Very poor proofreading. This could've been much better with some real attention and care. It comes off as kinda trashy and slight and sloppy. But if you're interested in more details about some of the various famous Beatles stories, you'll find that here.