In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Elliot Mintz was a major presence in Los Angeles, first on radio and then television, doing interviews for KPFK (90.7 FM), KLAC (570 AM), KMET (94.7 FM) and KLOS (95.5 FM) and KABC Channel 7. He interviewed everyone from Timothy Leary to Groucho Marx to Jack Nicholson.

And then in 1971, he interviewed Yoko Ono. The artist and wife of John Lennon was so taken with Mintz she began calling him daily. Eventually, Lennon joined in and Mintz became an inextricable part of their lives until Lennon was murdered in 1980.

Mintz recounts those years in his new memoir, “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me,” an intimate look at the couple in those years. It is joined on bookshelves by “The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2,” by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, which covers 1974-1980.

Mintz grew up an Elvis Presley fan, who became more interested in Lennon through his peace activism, while Kozinn was a lifelong Beatles fan — he has written books and taught courses and hosted a radio show on the subject. So the books cover these two intertwined subjects but from a very different perspective.

Mintz and Kozinn spoke recently by video about their books and their endlessly famous and fascinating subjects. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q Elliot’s book is intimate, while Allan’s is filtered through an enormous amount of research and interviews. Are there any similarities or overlap beyond the subject matter?

A Mintz: Allan is a scholar and musicologist and personal observer of the history of the Beatles.

I’m not a musicologist and I can’t sing or play guitar. What I did with my book was give the reader a first-person look at what life with John and Yoko was like for the better part of 10 years.

Kozinn: I loved Elliot’s book and had him on my radio show, “Things We Said Today,” last week. I’m an outsider looking in and need someone like Elliot as a source for research. Working on this book I wrote to Elliot and asked questions while trying to determine the last time John and Paul saw each other in person. If anybody knew, it would be him. So they’re different kinds of books but I think both kinds are really needed — you need someone who was there and can tell you what happened, and you need someone to be able to step back to evaluate the relationships and how the music came together.

Q Lennon and McCartney are so well-known, their lives and personalities so well-chronicled. What do you each hope readers discover in your books?

A Mintz: After we had a disagreement where John was not particularly kind, he once said to me, “I want you to keep in mind that I’m not always the ‘Imagine’ guy.” He spoke his mind and sometimes he spoke his mind a little too loudly when he had too much alcohol in him. I was sometimes the recipient of that verbiage and it hurt. But it was also very helpful in reminding me that he was not just the “Imagine” guy or the househusband doting over his newborn son, he was one of us. He was human.

But also between 1975 and 1980, John was not a Howard Hughes figure locked in the bedroom at the Dakota at Yoko’s bequest. His life was devoted to (son) Sean.

Kozinn: I think the two books reveal that they were very different kinds of people. One of the big differences was professional. Elliot has a scene in his book where John and Paul are together (a Christmas lunch in the late 1970s) where Paul asks if John has been working and John says no and Paul says, “Well, I’m always working.”

This book starts in 1974. Paul is producing a record for his brother Mike, with Wings as the backing band. Then Paul holds auditions for a new drummer, then takes everyone to Nashville to work the band in, then he goes back to London to start working on “Venus and Mars,” then he goes on vacation in Jamaica but he’s writing more for the album and comes up with this idea to make a film for Wings, so he decides he wants to meet (science fiction writer) Isaac Asimov to discuss it, so he does. That’s just the first year of the book.

If you read the book, you think, “Wow, this guy goes on an awful lot of vacations, but every time he does he comes back with a bunch of songs. He’s never totally off.”

John was able to step back from that and say, “Music isn’t the most important to me right now. Raising Sean is.”

Mintz: Paul was everywhere back then with his music. John had mixed feelings about it. He was delighted that Paul was doing so grand but there was a tinge of jealousy that John wasn’t on the concert stage amidst this adulation Paul was receiving.

But the Beatles had played 1,400 concerts. You finish the concert, you’re back at the hotel packing the bags; you’re back on the plane; you’re landing someplace else; different time zones. Who can handle that besides Paul … Mick Jagger. That’s what John wanted out of.

Kozinn: John did have 10 CDs worth of demos made when he was raising Sean. He was always doing something with music, he just wasn’t interested in doing it publicly then the way Paul was.

Mintz: But many of those demos were more like musical doodles. Although he did have 10 or 20 songs from that time. Once I walked in and he was at the piano writing a song about Tennessee Williams. But these songs didn’t seem like major commitments in his life. It just didn’t drive him for that period.

Q When John was on his “Lost Weekend” separation from Yoko, Paul spoke to John at Yoko’s behest about getting back together. Around that same time, John and his girlfriend May Pang made plans to visit Paul in New Orleans where he was recording “Venus and Mars” but then John got back with Yoko and didn’t go. Do you ever wonder what that visit might have led to?

A Kozinn: He really was planning it because he wrote to (Beatles publicist) Derek Taylor and said, “I’m going to go down to New Orleans with the Maccas.” The rest of Wings and Paul’s managers were all hoping John wouldn’t come because they felt that it would distract Paul.

Paul had every song for the album in order all ready to go. So he knew exactly what he wanted that album to be, yet he was obviously open to the possibility that John would come down and they would do something else. So it’s a tantalizing idea.

Mintz: I wonder if they had gotten back into a studio just one more time and started doing what they did at the beginning, how it would’ve changed perhaps the landscape of contemporary music.