Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  London, August 1969

  A Foundling’s Tale

  Allen Klein and Company

  Sam Cooke

  The Yiddish Invasion

  “People Keep Asking Me If They’re Morons”

  The King of America

  ABKCO

  Photos

  Rock ’n’ Roll Circus

  The Prize

  With the Beatles

  Mr. Popularity

  Some Time in New York City

  A Sport and a Pastime

  No Sympathy for the Devil

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2015 by Fred Goodman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Goodman, Fred.

  Allen Klein : the man who bailed out the Beatles, made the Stones, and transformed rock & roll / Fred Goodman.

  pages cm

  “An Eamon Dolan Book.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-89686-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-547-89689-2 (ebook)

  1. Klein, Allen, 1931–2009. 2. Sound recording executives and producers—Biography. 3. Rolling Stones. 4. Beatles. I. Title.

  ML429.K58G66 2015

  781.66092—dc23

  [B]

  2015007138

  v1.0615

  Jacket design by Brian Moore

  Jacket photographs © C. Maher/Getty Images (Allen Klein); John Downing/Getty Images (the Beatles); Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images (the Rolling Stones)

  Lines from Bob Dylan’s “License to Kill” copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music.

  Quotes taken from conversations with Allen Klein used expressly by written consent of ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. All rights reserved.

  For Jeffrey Ressner and Eddie Karp

  The devil is a spirit that is neither good nor evil; he is considered to be the guardian of most of the secrets that are accessible to human beings and to have strength and power over material things. Since he is a fallen angel, he is identified with the human race, and he is always ready to make deals and exchange favors.

  —PAULO COELHO, THE PILGRIMAGE

  Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool

  And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled

  For man is opposed to fair play

  He wants it all and he wants it his way.

  —BOB DYLAN, “LICENSE TO KILL”

  PROLOGUE

  London, August 1969

  EVERYONE IN THE WORLD wants to be a Beatle. Everyone, perhaps, except the Beatles.

  Their musical and cultural impact is nearly unimaginable and unlikely to be duplicated soon. Not merely famous and successful, the Beatles have transcended music and caused listeners around the world to take a fresh look at their own possibilities and expectations. For that they are adored—not in the manner of pop or film stars but as saints, the fathers of nations, or any unspoiled signs of hope and possibility are adored. But while they may be a light to the world, the Beatles are also a deeply troubled business partnership. They have complicated problems they are unequipped to handle, many as broad and unique as their success. When no road maps exist, who will drive the car?

  Until two years ago the driver was Brian Epstein, their manager. But he died at thirty-two of an accidental drug overdose. A gifted impresario and earnest advocate, Epstein had recognized the diamond in the rough, overseen its cutting and buffing. But he was nowhere near as visionary in business. His deals for the band were consistently substandard—not just for the biggest and most influential group in the world, but for any group. Still, he had helped the Beatles to become stars, which was as much as they’d dreamed of at the start, and they had trusted him. Though shocked by the unexpected tragedy of Brian’s death, John Lennon instantly foresaw a second calamity. “We’ve fuckin’ had it,” he told himself.

  Since then, the group’s finances have grown increasingly precarious. Attempting to run their own affairs, the Beatles formed Apple Corps, a move that now looms as a disaster. Conceived in a burst of optimism and largesse as a new kind of creative company for a new kind of world, Apple is wide ranging, ill conceived, and out of control. Caught in a vise of Epstein’s inferior and poorly paid contracts on one side and the folly of their own making that is Apple on the other, Lennon saw bankruptcy ahead. But now—finally!—after years of not knowing where to turn, Lennon has found his man in Allen Klein.

  Blunt-featured and barrel-chested with a full head of dramatically dark, pomaded hair, Klein doesn’t share his clients’ flair for fashion. He prefers sneakers and sweatshirts to paisleys and Nehru jackets. But while Klein doesn’t look like the most powerful and controversial player in the music business, he is in fact a ruthless and brilliant businessman given to bold talk, bolder strategies, and a confrontational style that ranges from brusque to insulting.

  Klein has been making regular forays to London, selling himself to producers and artists and battling the business practices of record companies, music publishers, and booking agents when no one else would. He is more interested in results than rules. “Don’t talk to me about ethics,” Klein says dismissively. “Every man makes his own. It’s like a war. You choose your side early and from then on, you’re being shot at. The man you beat is likely to call you unethical. So what?” He is an obsessive chess master who keeps opponents on the back foot with a painstakingly constructed game of seemingly endless litigation, negotiation, and obfuscation. To the hidebound, class-conscious record executives and press of 1960s Britain, he embodies every cliché of ill breeding and grotesquerie that can be conjured by the phrase New York Jew, and they detest him. Yet what most upsets the establishment is that he is right.

  For more than a decade, Klein has been arguing—vociferously and alone—that rock and pop artists are grossly underpaid, that the industry infantilizes them in order to cheat them. Though a brawler by temperament, he is an accountant by training, a gimlet-eyed skeptic decoding the record industry’s rules and ledgers and rewriting them in the artists’ favor. Because of Klein, his clients—most notably Sam Cooke and the Rolling Stones—have taken once-unthinkable giant steps, reaping bonanzas and gaining creative control over their work and careers. In 1965, when the Beatles were still receiving a royalty of a penny a record—split four ways—Klein negotiated record deals for the Stones worth over two and a half million dollars. This did not escape the notice of either Lennon or his partner Paul McCartney. Lennon is a big fan of Klein, but McCartney doesn’t like him; he finds Klein abrasive, and he knows that Klein demands an outsize share and habitually finds creative ways to cut himself a piece of an artist’s holdings and career.

  John, otherwise suspicious of businessmen, has a special bond with the up-from-the-streets Klein. He loves that he comes on like gangbusters. Allen doesn’t confine himself to beating up adversaries; an adviser in a business lousy with professional handholders and toadies, he’s the pistol-packing, face-slapping tough guy from an old movie. Lennon is ready to give Klein carte blanche; Allen will be the answer, the bulwark and savior—the gunslinger they so desperately need. George Harr
ison and Ringo Starr agree, and in the spring of 1969, Allen Klein becomes the Beatles’ business manager.

  For Klein, who has yearned, strategized, and schemed for years to manage the Beatles, it’s more than sweet. It’s validation. Like everyone else in the world, Klein wants to be a Beatle—just not for the same reasons. Now he is the undisputed master of the music business, managing the affairs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He may be more powerful and transformative than anyone before or after him in the music industry. For him, money alone has never been proof of that—he likes it, wants it, and spends it lustily, but doesn’t use it to keep score. It is the work, the groundbreaking deals that only he can conjure, that tells the tale.

  He certainly has his work cut out for him now. The Beatles’ affairs are a mess, an unwieldy, seaweed-slippery anchor chain that defies movement let alone unwinding. Management contracts, publishing and record deals—everything is twisted together and problematic. Just dismantling and restructuring Apple could keep him busy for a year. It has already kept him away from his Broadway office and in London for months. And he still has to find the Beatles’ money—it shocked him to see how little they actually had—if he wants to make this work and prove himself peerless. Who could fail to appreciate that?

  Keith Richards, for one. It’s a busy and challenging time for Richards and his fellow Rolling Stones. They have a new producer, Jimmy Miller, and a new lead guitarist, Mick Taylor, to replace the undependable and drugged-out Brian Jones. For Jones, it proved the end; just a few weeks after Taylor took over, Jones was discovered drowned in his pool. But the Rolling Stones have found another gear. Their first album with Miller, Beggars Banquet, is at least as good as anything they’ve ever done and a great deal more ambitious and professional than their previous work. Their first session with Taylor resulted in the single “Honky Tonk Women,” an enormous hit on its way to topping sales charts around the world. The Stones are rolling like never before.

  Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ original co-manager and image guru, brought Klein onboard in 1965 to renegotiate the band’s contracts and help put them over the top in America. When Oldham and the Stones later parted, Klein reached an understanding with singer Mick Jagger: Allen, who steers clear of the band’s creative decisions, oversees business in the States; the Stones—meaning Jagger—handle the creative and business ends in London.

  Mick is becoming increasingly sophisticated and hands-on regarding the Stones’ business, and though he will later characterize Klein as “very much ahead of his time,” he and Allen are growing wary of each other. But Richards is another story; he is the only member of the band whom Klein feels genuine affection for. For his part, the guitarist considers Oldham’s hiring of Klein to be his savviest move, and he credits Allen with helping the band understand and conquer America, turning the Stones into a global attraction. If there’s a Klein stalwart in the band, it’s Keith. But not today.

  The band, having recently played an enormous free concert in Hyde Park for 250,000 fans, is planning an American tour, its first in three years. “Honky Tonk Women” is climbing the charts, and the Stones are completing a new album, Let It Bleed, for Christmas. The band, with a transfusion of new blood from Taylor and Miller, sounds fantastic. It’s time for the Stones to get back out there, back on the road in the States. America is Klein’s responsibility, and the group needs him.

  It’s impossible for him to take on that responsibility, he tells them. Can’t Keith understand that he’s up to his neck in Beatles business?

  Richards couldn’t care less what happens to the Beatles, who had stopped touring years earlier—and Klein should know it.

  “Allen,” he says, “only one of us is a working band.”

  Klein reddens. It’s a rare moment of embarrassment. Richards has a right to expect him to deliver, a right to believe in himself and his band over everything. But having come this far, achieved his prize, Klein is too intent on the Beatles to be of any use to the Rolling Stones.

  But he’ll make it up to them later. There isn’t a situation he can’t get out of, a deal he can’t rewrite, a judgment he can’t reverse, a client or a woman he can’t bring around.

  That’s who he is; that’s what he does.

  1

  * * *

  A Foundling’s Tale

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN the dramatic grounds; he may have been impressed that George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst were renting it. Whatever the reason, Allen Klein wanted the house.

  Practically, buying it made more sense than moving back to New Jersey; if he wasn’t in London, Allen was either in his midtown office or out with clients late into the night, and he was unlikely to ever find his way home if it meant crossing the George Washington Bridge. He could certainly afford it now—although his not having money rarely kept him from getting what he wanted. The year was 1966 and the price was a stratospheric one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  It was a regal house—a rich man’s house—on a wooded, meandering estate road in the exclusive and surprisingly bucolic Riverdale section of the Bronx. Set back from a cliff, stone walls rose behind tall, weathered stockade fences hiding a front lawn as long and green as a fairway and a view from the property’s western edge that is more than picturesque; it is violent and indomitable as only nature can be, and to a degree one rarely associates with New York City: two hundred feet below, the wide and seething Hudson River floods in and out with the tides, while a mile across, on the Jersey side, the towering red wall of the Palisades climbs forbiddingly skyward.

  To the surprise of everyone, not least the in-laws who had been propping him up financially, Allen has become wildly successful. Allen Klein and Associates, his small accounting and business-management firm, rocketed into profitability two years earlier, first with Sam Cooke and Bobby Vinton and then with a string of British rock acts that included the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Lulu, and the Kinks and culminated in the Rolling Stones. Later, when Allen manages the Beatles, the front doorbell will chime the chorus of “All You Need Is Love.” But if Klein is feeling mischievous, as he often is, he will call his home “the house that Jagger built.”

  And build it they did. Allen and his wife, Betty, immediately made many improvements: terraced garden, back patio, swimming pool. And, of course, the bathrooms. There had been three when they bought the house; now there were eleven, including two in the new pool cabana and one for each of the six bedrooms. It was a subject of some ribbing from friends and guests—“Jesus, Allen, what the hell have you been eating?”—yet the bathrooms and their privacy were the most important part of the house for Allen.

  The earliest homes Allen could remember were with his grandparents. When Allen was born, in December 1931—the youngest of four children and the only son—his mother, Rose, brought him home to the Newark apartment of her in-laws on Springfield Avenue. The Jewish Newark of the thirties revolved around two south-side neighborhoods: Weequahic and the working-class Clinton Hill, where the Kleins lived. “Weequahic was mainly the upper-class Jews,” said Allen’s sister Naomi Henkle. “Weequahic High was the Jew school. If you were Jewish and had fifty cents in your pocket, you went there. It was upper crust.” The Kleins weren’t upper crust. Allen’s father, Philip, was a butcher.

  Taciturn and distant, Philip Klein was a perplexing man whose most lasting impact on Allen was to make him feel unloved. Family legend had it that Philip was playing cards when Allen was born. “You have a king to go with your three queens,” the doctor dryly informed him. It was Allen’s paternal grandfather, Sam, a rabbi and mashgiach, or kosherer, who took an interest in him and became a substitute father figure.

  “I really loved my grandfather,” Klein recalled. “He was a different sort of a guy. He didn’t speak much—and only Hungarian and Yiddish. But he was so good. He worked six and a half days a week, dressed in a black suit with a top hat, and would bless the meat and check to see the way that they killed the animals. He worked until
he was eighty-one. That was one thing he taught me: he gave me a work ethic. He walked home one day, said he wasn’t feeling well, and went to lie down. He never got up again. He was also learned and he took no shit from my grandmother. She was a farbissineh”—Yiddish for an embittered, sullen person—“and never smiled.” Allen remembered his grandparents’ apartment. It was around the corner from a cemetery and next door to a four-lane bowling alley operated by the Moose Lodge. What he didn’t remember was his mother.

  Allen’s parents, Philip and Rose, lived a hard and precarious life. Sent to America at the age of thirteen, Philip had risen to the occasion, earning enough money to bring over his sisters and his parents. He gained his American citizenship by serving as an MP during the First World War. But it was Rose, who’d arrived in America as an infant, who taught Philip to read and write English. She bore him four children and was his partner and coworker in a butcher shop. “I think she really carried her weight,” Allen said. Ill during her final pregnancy, Rose died of cancer at thirty-two, when Allen was nine months old. Her passing was a blow to the family and sent Allen’s life careening in unforeseen directions. When the butcher shop succumbed to the one-two punch of the Depression and the loss of Rose’s help, the Kleins could no longer afford their own apartment. After her death, Philip worked at Reinfeld’s, a market in Spring Valley, New York, owned by a cousin. But a full-time job and four children was more than he could handle. He relied on his two older teenage daughters, Esther and Anna, to keep an eye on three-year-old Naomi, but Allen was problematic. Barely a year old, he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, Joe and Anita Brown, and their daughter, Helen, in their apartment on Newark’s South Nineteenth Street. Delighted to care for Rose’s baby, they doted on Allen.