Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  With his accounting business slow, Klein hit on the idea of setting up racks in supermarkets to sell hit singles. Dubbing the operation Top Twenty, he made a deal with a New Jersey supermarket chain and tried to raise his profit margins by trading Craft’s records, which he got at a discount, to record wholesalers in exchange for the hits he needed. Unfortunately, Warwick didn’t produce enough hits of its own to sustain the scheme.

  More promising, Craft took a shine to Klein and introduced him to potential music and film clients. When singer Eddie Fisher started his own label, Ramrod Records—Ramrod was Fisher’s pet name for his wife at the time, Elizabeth Taylor—it was administered by Warwick. Hoping to get Ramrod as an account, Allen volunteered to deliver legal papers to Fisher and even bought a new tie in case he ran into Taylor. He didn’t meet the actress or land the label, and Ramrod, which released just one record, had an even shorter life than the Fisher-Taylor marriage. But Allen was developing a keen interest and appreciation for the way an emerging group of independent film producers did deals.

  Ever networking, Klein had moved his offices to 729 Seventh Avenue, just north of Times Square. The building was known for its street-level club, the Metropole, where drummer Gene Krupa had been the featured performer before it devolved into a strip club, and the upper floors at 729 were a bustle of film-related businesses. Allen Klein and Company’s new offices were shared with Bernie Kamber, a press agent and Runyonesque Broadway habitué who liked and took an interest in Klein. “Bernie wasn’t a client but he was like a father to Allen,” said Adrienne Faillace. Kamber’s clients and friends included George Burns and Joe DiMaggio but at that moment his hot client was actor Burt Lancaster and Lancaster’s cutting-edge company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions.

  In the early fifties, Lancaster and Harold Hecht, his agent, teamed first with Warner Brothers and then with United Artists in what would prove to be groundbreaking artist-production deals. Unlike the other major motion-picture companies, United Artists was not a studio; it did not make films, only financed and distributed them. That meant backing wasn’t tied to an agreement to use UA’s soundstages and other facilities, spelling greater autonomy—and potential profits—for independent producers. To top it off, the producer maintained ownership. If a producer could line up the stars, the director, the editor, and the writer, it was the best deal in town, as Hecht-Hill-Lancaster demonstrated in 1955 when their UA-distributed film Marty—made for $330,000 and grossing $4 million—won numerous Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It spelled a sea change in Hollywood; according to film historian Tino Balio, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster opened a floodgate and washed away the final remnants of the already antiquated studio system. By the following year, many of Hollywood’s top actors, including Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, and Robert Mitchum, had followed Lancaster’s lead into production deals with UA. The ripples from Hecht-Hill-Lancaster’s big splash were felt even in the shallows. In 1961, when Klein took a job for a few weeks as the accountant on a low-budget independent film being shot in Miami, Force of Impulse, he’d already digested the lessons of independent production espoused by Kamber: If you could make the product yourself, all you needed was a distributor—and you didn’t bargain away any rights beyond that! It seemed a straightforward formula, and Allen was eager to try his hand at it.

  With Force of Impulse, Klein believed he’d found a team that could make the product for him. Directed by Saul Swimmer, the film was coproduced by Peter Gayle, whose financing came from a family business in New York’s garment district, and Tony Anthony, one of the film’s stars. The following year, Klein produced his first film. Originally shot in Florida as Pity Me Not but released as Without Each Other, it starred Anthony and was directed by Swimmer. Despite Allen’s best efforts—he took the film to Cannes, screened it at his own expense, and then placed an ad in Variety claiming it had been selected as the Best American Film at Cannes, a nonexistent honor—the movie never found a distributor and was a nearly total loss. But the relationships it led to proved lifelong, with Allen producing several films, from romantic comedies to spaghetti Westerns, that starred Anthony, and Swimmer getting the nod to direct both the forgettable Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter starring Herman’s Hermits and the historic documentary film for The Concert for Bangladesh.

  The failure of Without Each Other didn’t dampen Allen’s belief in Hecht-Hill-Lancaster’s independent model; it simply brought home the fact that to make money, you had to sell something worth buying. He would shortly take the lessons he’d learned from the movies and apply them to the music business in ways no one else had.

  3

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  Sam Cooke

  NEW YEAR’S DAY 1963 found Allen Klein with little to celebrate. Despite Klein’s growing reputation in the music industry as the man to hire if you wanted to uncover hidden money or give your record company agita, his own balance sheet was far from impressive; the company desperately needed more clients, and Without Each Other was a never-to-be-recouped stinker. Nor was that film his only expensive lesson.

  For years, Klein had hoped to land work from Betty’s uncle Marvin Kratter, the real estate executive. Kratter, a CPA and an attorney, was just the kind of high roller Klein aspired to be; his large home in Riverdale, complete with swimming pool, was very much like the one Allen would eventually own. Kratter was also a scrapper. Following an early failure—Kratter went bankrupt in the forties with an Arizona dude ranch—he returned to New York and grew wealthy nearly overnight organizing real estate syndicates. He owned, at various times, Knickerbocker Beer, the Boston Celtics, New York’s St. Regis Hotel, and a pharmaceutical company. But nothing in the way of work trickled down to Allen. Five years after forming Allen Klein and Company, Klein was still on the outside with his nose pressed up against the candy-store window; Kratter wouldn’t use him. The real estate magnate did, however, have a little inside dope for him.

  Recalled Klein: “He came to me and said, ‘Allen, I got this stock tip for you. Crescent Petroleum.’ I said, ‘Really? What is it?’ ‘Don’t worry, buy it.’ I said, ‘I don’t have the money.’ ‘I’ll loan it to you.’”

  Thus encouraged, with Kratter’s loan, Klein bought twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of the Canadian company’s stock—and then watched it die. “As soon as I bought the stock it went into the toilet,” he said, adding that he subsequently came to believe he was buying shares that Kratter was dumping. “And he started bugging me for the money. It was incredible pressure.”

  Mortified, Klein confessed his problems to his in-laws. His mother-in-law called Kratter in high dudgeon, but in the end, his father-in-law paid the debt. It was an indication of how much Klein wanted a big score and of how poorly he was doing. He had a young daughter, Robin, and a second child on the way, and he was feeling the pressure to succeed even more acutely. He didn’t know where that success would come from—only that he had to have more clients. When one of them, R&B disk jockey Douglas “Jocko” Henderson, dropped by a few days into the new year with a business proposal, Allen was all ears.

  Henderson, with daily shows in both New York and Philadelphia, was one of the most influential and successful radio personalities, black or white, in the business. Unlike Klein, the immigrant butcher’s son, Henderson grew up in a solid family of Talented Tenth professionals. Both his parents were educators in Baltimore, and Jocko’s decision to go into radio rather than teaching had been a sore point. But Henderson certainly didn’t lack initiative; after a year on Baltimore radio, he moved to Philadelphia and became a star with Jocko’s Rocket Ship Show, first on R&B station WHAT and then every weekday afternoon on WDAS. The records he played and his own trademark rhyming patter—“Eee-tiddly-ock, this is the Jock. And I’m back on the scene with the record machine, saying ooh-pop-a-doo, how do you do?”—became the city’s soundtrack and transformed its host into the emcee of the streets and an early influence on the first generation of rappers. In the late fifties, Jocko added a New Y
ork show. Both shows were broadcast live, which necessitated daily train trips between Philadelphia and New York. Whatever the strain, though, it made Jocko a key player in two of the country’s biggest radio and record markets. He was savvy enough to seize his opportunities.

  With few exceptions, radio stations didn’t pay lavish salaries to their deejays, and certainly nothing commensurate with the profiles of many of the medium’s stars. But that notoriety and the disk jockey’s role as tastemaker were fungible commodities. Payola—bribes given to deejays by record companies in exchange for airplay of their songs—was widespread until 1959, when Congress held hearings condemning the practice in general and scapegoating pioneering rock jock Alan Freed in particular. Freed ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial bribery, yet when he died just five years later—an industry pariah and a broken man at forty-three—payola was still alive and well.

  Disk jockeys remained hugely important to record labels and artists, and there were still many ways for an enterprising radio star to capitalize on his position. Good fees might be earned emceeing concerts; it wasn’t unusual for a disk jockey to be paid as much or more than a performer for some appearances. Jocko, with a popular daily broadcast and a big following, frequently hosted shows with top R&B artists at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, where he made a dramatic entrance riding a rocket hung from wires. Record companies had other ways of showing their gratitude as well. Wand, Scepter Records’ sister label, which boasted the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick, and the Isley Brothers, packaged its greatest hits into albums for the disk jockey as Jocko’s Show Stoppers and Jocko’s Rocket to the Stars. Henderson also received publishing interests in some of the label’s biggest hits, including “Baby, It’s You” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Following the lead of another Philadelphia disk jockey, Dick Clark, who avoided Freed’s fate by unloading his holdings in a variety of music-publishing and record-manufacturing interests, Jocko eventually sold his Scepter songs. The subsequent and current owner of those rights is Betalbin Music, the first music-publishing company started and owned by Allen Klein.

  They came from different worlds, but each man recognized a kindred soul and admired the other’s savvy and hustle. Henderson respected Klein’s quick, aggressive thinking and nonpareil ability to ferret out funds, and Klein appreciated Henderson’s intelligence, ambition, wit, and taste, and their mutual admiration ultimately blossomed into real friendship. For his part, Allen knew he wasn’t in Jocko’s class; the disk jockey and his wife, a teacher, were bright, sophisticated, and urbane. On one occasion, Allen and Betty, along with her parents, stopped by the Hendersons’ West Philadelphia home, and a surprise snowstorm forced them to spend the night. “Jocko was so elegant,” said Klein. “He was a great tennis player, a great golfer. He had built a brand-new house that was really nice, and their furnishings and cutlery were all better than ours. Jocko’s house was whiter than mine.”

  The pitch Jocko now brought to Klein was intriguing. While Henderson had his Apollo shows in New York, he had nothing going in Philadelphia. Indeed, a rival disk jockey, Georgie Woods, was mounting successful R&B shows in Philly at the Uptown Theater. Jocko, eager to plant a flag in his home market, had heard that the State Theater, at Fifty-Second and Chestnut, was available but needed work. Would Klein be his partner?

  Though America continued to be defined by de facto segregation, partnerships between blacks and whites were not unusual in the music business; cultures and commercial interests overlapped as much or more than in any other industries, and the field was certainly ahead of the country as a whole. Klein, who had black clients throughout his career, never indicated that it was an issue, nor that he was particularly progressive, although he became a regular supporter of the United Negro College Fund. His behavior simply reflected the business; it didn’t matter whether you were from the North or the South or if you were black or white—you limited your opportunities if you had a problem dealing across racial lines.

  To Allen’s way of thinking, the value of Jocko’s offer wasn’t the theater or ticket sales—it was the chance the shows would provide him to meet and woo artists for Allen Klein and Company. And considering how eager many of them were to make Jocko happy, it certainly wouldn’t hurt his prospects to be introduced as Jocko’s partner. Allen quickly agreed to the deal. Repairs to the State proved costly (after coughing up money for a new water tower, Jocko started to refer to the theater as Big Mouth), but the two were ready by March with a ten-day run featuring several Scepter acts: Dionne Warwick, the Shirelles, Chuck Jackson, and Tommy Hunt. Also on the show was a New York girl group, the Crystals, as well as the Valentinos, a family band from Cleveland. Initially a gospel group dubbed the Womack Brothers, the Valentinos had only recently scored their first pop hit, “Looking for a Love.” They were signed to SAR Records, a California label owned by the singer Sam Cooke, and one of the band’s members, Bobby Womack, played guitar in Sam’s touring band. It was Cooke who would be headlining the State’s debut show.

  The singer and the disk jockey had known each other for some time—and Cooke owed Jocko. Originally a gospel star with the Soul Stirrers, Cooke and his then-producer Bumps Blackwell had reached out to Henderson in the fall of 1957, when the singer was looking to cross over to the pop world. According to Jocko, they rang his doorbell unexpectedly—at four a.m. That prompted Jocko to answer the door with a gun tucked in his bathrobe. “I said to myself, what the hell is this?”

  “You don’t know me,” said Cooke, “but we think we have a hit.” The record they played for him, “You Send Me,” was an obvious smash, and you didn’t have to be Jocko Henderson to realize its potential. Though recorded for the small Keen label, it would become Sam’s first pop hit and his only one to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Three weeks after knocking on Jocko’s door, Sam was performing in one of the disk jockey’s Apollo shows.

  Since then, Cooke had remained a fixture on both the pop and R&B charts. He was hard-working and earnestly interested in success; during an appearance on the popular television music show American Bandstand, when host Dick Clark asked Cooke what caused him to switch from gospel to pop, he smiled and gave a direct answer: “My economic situation.” At that point, the performer whose career Sam most hoped to emulate was Harry Belafonte. Though best known for Calypso-flavored pop hits like “Day-O (the Banana Boat Song),” Belafonte was comfortable singing just about anything and never hesitated to perform folk, show tunes, blues, or standards, achieving a level of success and critical acclaim rarely enjoyed by black artists to this day. For Cooke, who had broken out of gospel, the idea of being limited to R&B—or any slice of the pop market—was anathema. He’d learned a lot in his still-young career, about both the business and his craft, and he consciously sought to succeed simultaneously in the black, white, and teen markets. But Cooke was more than simply savvy and seasoned; he was easily as much of an artist as Belafonte, wholly convincing whether he was singing about God in heaven or Cokes in the icebox. He was capable of conveying a wide range of emotions, and he was a commanding performer whose feel for a song—usually one he’d written—was as true and unquestionable as a heartbeat.

  None of which Allen Klein knew. Yes, he had an inkling of Cooke’s career and certainly didn’t question Jocko’s choice of him as their first headliner. But it wasn’t until rehearsals that Allen, parked in the State’s otherwise-empty upper balcony with his pregnant wife and young daughter, was able to connect the man to the music.

  “I heard the voice, and I said, ‘Oh, I know that! I know that!’ His voice was incredible. And I watched him the entire week. I was impressed as hell.”

  When Jocko later introduced the singer to Klein, Allen was atypically bashful; he was intrigued by Sam and more than a little in awe of him. The man had it all: brains, talent, taste, good looks, and a breezy confidence that Klein took as charisma. Whatever else motivated Allen Klein, he was earnestly smitten with Sam Cooke, captivated by his presence.


  “I looked up to Sam Cooke,” he said. “I was amazed. He was a little older than me, like a year. But he knew so much more than I did. It was easy to believe in someone. I would believe in him.”

  Loyal to his partner, Jocko was not shy in singing Allen’s praises to Sam. “I don’t know what Jocko said but he certainly talked me up pretty good,” Klein recalled. It wasn’t the first Cooke was hearing of him; Lloyd Price had already told Sam about his accountant in New York who had a special talent for putting the fear of God in record companies and for finding money. Cooke had been eager to meet him.

  For perhaps the only time in his life, Klein undersold himself. Indeed, he largely stayed out of Sam’s way, talking instead to the singer’s road manager through most of the first week’s engagement. “I was very reserved. I certainly was not pushy, just trying to get a fix on his ambitions and attitude.” But at the end of the run, Cooke came to talk with Klein, complaining about the way he was treated as an artist and a man.

  At first blush, most of Cooke’s concerns appeared to be with his record company, RCA. He did not believe the executives were giving him a straight accounting. “I’ve been calling and calling and calling and I never get a call back,” he told Klein. Allen urged him to keep at it—he found it hard to believe the label would ignore an important artist—and to think specifically about what he wanted from Klein. They agreed to speak again the next month.

  In April, Klein contacted Cooke, and the singer was on tour but eager to see him. The two met in Tampa, and Sam said he still couldn’t get RCA’s head of A&R, Bob Yorke, to return his calls. Allen urged him to give it one more shot, and he did, but that, too, proved futile. “Well, what do you think?” Cooke asked. Replied Klein: “I think they’re treating you like a nigger, and that’s terrible, and you shouldn’t let them do it.” Years later, Klein would tell Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick that he hadn’t intended to speak so plainly. “Sometimes, you know, you just say things—I didn’t plan that, I just spit it out.”