Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Unlike the situation with Cooke, little was expected of Klein in the way of strategy. On the contrary, Clark was the rarest of birds on the burgeoning British music scene: a hard-nosed businessman who recognized the financial value of his work, particularly his publishing, and who was firmly in control of his career. Promised 5 percent of the value of the deal rather than a continuing interest in Clark’s career, Klein would later characterize his work for Clark and Davison as “a money deal,” suggesting it wasn’t anything of significance. Though the relationship was brief, that wasn’t quite true.

  Epic and Clark had little trouble coming to financial terms; they readily agreed on a five-year contract with a guaranteed advance of $250,000. The figure was excellent. The rub was taxes.

  British income taxes at the time could be onerous, particularly on income earned abroad. If the Dave Clark Five took their $250,000 as a lump-sum advance, they would be taxed at a rate of approximately 90 percent, and possibly more. The idea of pocketing $25,000—at best!—was hardly appealing. However, British tax laws could be more reasonable when it came to money acquired abroad in other ways, including as capital gains or as interest on investments. The idea, it was explained to Klein, would be to maximize tax advantages by investing the band’s money in the U.S. and getting the payments over twenty years. Under that scheme, the band would eventually realize the full value of the contract.

  It was Klein’s first real exposure to Britain’s Byzantine foreign-tax laws, and it gave him what would prove to be extremely valuable insights just as a horde of British recording artists and their handlers started searching for ways to hold on to money earned in America. Just as significant, Allen immediately realized that the scheme left money on the table—or at least underutilized it. He estimated that Clark would need to invest only around $80,000 in preferred stock to get a payout of $250,000 over twenty years.

  Pondering his own commission in this arrangement, Klein projected that 5 percent of $250,000 invested over twenty years could net him $87,500. He just didn’t want to wait that long. Armed with those figures, Klein convinced Davison that he should be paid his fee immediately rather than over twenty years—although why Davison agreed to let that much principal out of the investment is baffling; perhaps he viewed Klein as his only chance to circumvent an immediate and draconian tax bill. For his part, Klein could argue that the band still stood to make significantly more than $250,000 over the life of the annuity. “The artist doesn’t get hurt at all,” he claimed. “And that’s how I made the deal and learned how to make money from the money.”

  With Vinton, Klein took the idea to “make money from the money” in a different direction; by investing recording and publishing advances, Allen guaranteed the singer greater income over the long run. “His idea was something that nobody was doing at that time,” said Vinton. “Instead of giving me one lump sum to sign with him, if you spread it over twenty years, he could get a larger sum. It sounded good to me that he could get me a million over twenty years—it sounded awful good.” When Bobby again expressed concern about already having a manager, Klein told him not to worry; he and Machat would take care of everything. “You sign with me and I’ll get you out of your contract with your other manager,” Vinton recalled being told. He agreed.

  If not a towering talent to rival Cooke, Vinton was certainly a polished professional with an impressive track record, and he was just the kind of well-rounded artist Allen wanted. It didn’t matter if the records were hokey or schmaltzy; Klein respected Vinton’s success and musical abilities. “When I was involved with Bobby Vinton, everyone used to laugh: ‘Sam Cooke and Bobby Vinton? How do you do that?’ Bobby Vinton was a college graduate with a music degree who played every instrument. He started as a bandleader. I gravitated to artists who were creators, who did it, because I couldn’t do it. I could be an appreciative fan, I might be able to help after I have my sense of things. But physically do it? I couldn’t.”

  Born Stanley Robert Vinton Jr. in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Bobby had been working professionally since grade school, playing clarinet in a band led by his father. With a degree in music composition from Duquesne University and an army stint as a trumpeter on his résumé, Vinton was signed to Epic Records as an instrumentalist—and initially flopped. It was only the fear of being dropped that led him to try singing. His first effort, 1962’s “Roses Are Red,” went to number one and stayed there for a month.

  The Jewish accountant and the singer dubbed the Polish Prince were an unlikely pair, one an unapologetic hustler, the other a guileless and unfailingly upbeat musician. Vinton was a devout Catholic and a family man who featured first his mother and later his daughter in his stage shows, and he relied on more than the best efforts of his record company and the machinations of Allen Klein for his success: before the release of a new single, he would visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to pray that the record would do well. “I pray to the Blessed Mother,” he said. “That’s been my secret when I wanted hit records, help, whatever.” Yet as different as they were, the two men grew close. Hard-working and serious about his career, Vinton had great admiration for Klein’s keen intelligence and even keener chutzpah, and he loved to simply sit in the office and take it all in, watching and listening as Allen conducted business and worked the telephone. “I was from a small town,” said Vinton. “I was a musician, a singer—the talent—I didn’t know about wheeling and dealing and the way show business minds worked. He was like a professor of life and deals. He was just so bright compared to anybody else. And if he wasn’t, he made you think he was. Yeah. He had the power of swaying everybody.”

  Vinton never doubted Klein. “I loved Allen Klein,” he said. “Five or six years he represented me. He worked hard and liked to make waves. He figured the more waves he’d make, the bigger he would become. We were very good friends, but he didn’t have too many friends in those days. All I did was defend him with so many people. They said, ‘Why would you want to be with that guy?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care what you think of him. He has my best interests at heart.’”

  Indeed, Vinton’s best interests and making waves were synonymous to Klein, who appeared to relish nothing more than raising Vinton’s profile by picking a fight. An otherwise flattering article about Vinton in Life magazine got Allen’s dander up when it characterized the singer as “the most successful unknown in show business.” Klein’s pugnacious answer to the left-handed compliment was to post a billboard of Vinton on Broadway that trumpeted BOBBY VINTON—BIGGER THAN LIFE!

  When Vinton’s engagement at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami drew disappointing crowds despite having children’s-television star Shari Lewis and her beloved hand puppet Lamb Chop as Vinton’s supporting act, Allen was furious to discover the hotel hadn’t bought any newspaper ads. Klein telephoned the Miami News and was told Fontainebleau owner Ben Novack was feuding with the tabloid. Allen’s subsequent full-page ad did more to castigate Novack than publicize the singer’s appearance: BOBBY VINTON THINKS THE MIAMI NEWS IS IMPORTANT EVEN THOUGH BEN NOVACK DOESN’T. The reviewer the paper subsequently sent weighed in with an unqualified rave. Said Vinton: “You know I was never going back there. So that’s another one off the list. But I love the guy in spite of it all.”

  Klein’s stunts could also backfire. When Vinton hosted the music variety show Hullabaloo in the spring of ’65, Klein, with the aid of an assistant, Iris Keitel, took the liberty of making wholesale changes to the singer’s cue cards just as the show was about to be recorded. The producer and director had a fit.

  Knowing taping was starting, Klein seized the initiative. “Let’s go,” he told Vinton. “We’re walking—put on your coat!”

  In a swift turnaround, the executives begged Klein and Vinton to stay, asking why they were upset.

  “You didn’t honor Bobby’s contract,” Klein fumed. Vinton was performing a half a dozen songs on the show, including two with another Klein client, Chad and Jeremy, but everyone else was supposed to be limi
ted to two numbers. Pointing to the show’s summary, Klein accused the producers of reneging on the agreement by letting another act, the Youngfolk, perform three songs: “Come Judgment Day,” “Skip to My Lou,” and “Segue.” It was explained to Klein that the last wasn’t a song but a camera direction, and order, if not sanity, was restored.

  Though Vinton would eventually host his own half-hour TV variety show in the late seventies—long after Klein had ceased to manage him—he believed Hullabaloo’s producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion were so mad that they effectively had him blackballed from television for five years. “I don’t know who they hated more,” he said, “Allen or me.”

  Whatever friendship Klein had with Vinton and Henderson, he eschewed handholding. “These performers aren’t children,” he said. “They’re not delinquents who don’t know what they’re doing. They’re grownups; they don’t need personal managers like a parent or a warden. But they’re not businessmen.” Frankly admitting he knew nothing about making records, Allen nonetheless believed that part of his job as business manager—a term he claimed to have coined—was weighing in on artistic decisions and offering opinions about the work. He was particularly keen on the subject of whether a song would or wouldn’t make a good single, and with an ear for melody and a remarkable memory for lyrics, he wasn’t shy about lobbying for one or denigrating another. But the broader strokes—what might be best for the artist’s career—were foremost in his mind.

  Allen was mesmerized by Sam Cooke’s talent and believed his future was unlimited. Cooke’s aspiration to be a complete artist, to work and succeed beyond category, had Allen’s wholehearted support. Klein’s faith in Cooke’s wide-ranging abilities and ultimate appeal was especially evident in the way he pushed the singer to pursue disparate goals. When Sam had something serious to say, Allen trusted that he had the vision and authority to succeed. Simultaneously, he pushed Cooke to refocus on his career as a mainstream nightclub singer, a lucrative area that had proven problematic and frustrating for Sam.

  One of Cooke’s few high-profile failures had been an appearance at the Copacabana in New York, the premier nightclub in the city and perhaps the country. The show had been poorly conceived—Sam, dressed in a tuxedo with a top hat and cane, was the opening act for Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen—and was poorly received; the club ended what was supposed to be a two-week engagement after just three nights. Though stung, Sam owned that the quick hook had been an accurate judgment: he hadn’t been ready.

  Returning to the Copa as a headliner and erasing the early humiliation became both a wish and a weight, as Cooke wanted to go back but feared another failure. Allen, certain that Sam could play for any audience in any venue, pressed him. “I thought it was essential that Sam return to the Copa and wipe out his memory,” he said. To counter the singer’s doubts, Allen, J. W. Alexander, and Joe D’Imperio took Sam to the club for a show by Nat “King” Cole. “I said, ‘It’s no big deal,’” Klein recalled. “‘You’re afraid of something you haven’t seen.’”

  Watching Cole seemed to do the trick. “He’s just shucking,” Cooke told Klein. “This is easy.”

  To make it happen, Klein first switched Cooke’s agent, moving him from Jerry Brandt at William Morris to Buddy Howe at GAC. Brandt—young, brash, and much hipper than Howe—was a true Cooke fan. But Howe, an old show-business warhorse and the founder and chairman of GAC, had the ear of Jules Podell, the Copa’s imperious impresario. It was the worst-kept secret in New York that Podell, a gruff-talking former bouncer, was a frontman for mobster Frank Costello. The loss of Cooke stung Brandt, who believed Klein had other motives for moving the singer.

  “Allen wanted a new relationship where he was the focus,” said Brandt. “Do you really think the William Morris Agency couldn’t get a Copa deal? GAC was a minor agency. Allen had to be the man.” Whatever the reason, Podell was uninterested in Sam at first; the singer wasn’t the only one who remembered his last Copa appearance. But Podell came around when Klein hired two press agents and convinced RCA to back the gig by buying many of the club’s tables in advance.

  Cooke continued to waffle in the weeks leading up to the show, and Klein pushed harder. “I decided to take a billboard in Times Square and embarrass him into it,” he said. The enormous picture of the singer was slugged SAM’S THE BIGGEST COOKE IN TOWN! Though Sam was tickled and the billboard proved a good promotional stunt for the Copa run, he remained nervous. It wasn’t his usual audience, and he fretted that he couldn’t perform his typical show.

  At Howe’s suggestion, a pair of warm-up gigs in the Catskills were booked for the preceding weekend. The first, at the Laurels Hotel and Country Club, was a disaster. The hotel happened to be hosting a firemen’s convention, and since the conventioneers were to be fed that evening at an outdoor barbecue, no food or drink was available during the performance. Worse, Sam ditched his own material for an ill-advised grab bag of pop tunes and standards ranging from “The Sheik of Araby” to “The Girl from Ipanema.” Though Cooke soldiered on tenaciously, most of the crowd wandered outside in search of dinner before the show’s end.

  Klein, who’d had a wisdom tooth pulled that morning, suddenly had a headache to match his sore jaw. He felt like a corner man whose champion fighter had suddenly forgotten everything that had earned him his title. When he got to Cooke’s dressing room, Klein did not mince words.

  “What the fuck did you just do?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to do it,” he said.

  “Stop trying to be someone else. All you have to do is your material.”

  The following night, at the Raleigh Hotel, Cooke revamped the show with the help of arranger and guitarist René Hall. Sam kept a fair number of standards, including “Frankie and Johnny” and “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” but refocused his performance on several of his hits. The high point was his handling of a pair of recent folk songs, “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The singer had found the elusive middle ground—the real Sam Cooke, but tailored for the dinner crowd. The Copa run proved a resounding hit both for Cooke, who cemented his reputation as an all-around performer and could now command big money dates in Las Vegas, and the club, which attracted a significant black audience for the first time. The Copa would soon host key nightclub appearances by several soul artists, among them Motown’s the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Martha and the Vandellas. If Sam Cooke didn’t transform the nightclub scene single-handedly, he certainly helped bring uptown downtown.

  Klein, perhaps nervous about having been so confrontational, picked opening night at the Copa to surprise Cooke with a Rolls-Royce, paid for by Tracey Ltd. Yet he clearly had a sense of Sam and was pushing him in appropriate directions. “He was trying to be what he wasn’t,” Klein recalled. “RCA wanted Sam Cooke to be Nat King Cole. Sam Cooke wanted to be Harry Belafonte. I wanted Sam Cooke to be Sam Cooke.”

  Cooke was never more himself than on his unsurpassed American psalm, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” As the Copa songs demonstrated, Cooke had been paying more than passing attention to the ongoing folk revival, and he was both moved and inspired by what he heard. Recalled Klein: “He said a black guy should have written ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I should have written ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”

  Though Cooke keyed off the same timeliness and urgency that invested Bob Dylan’s song, his musical roots weren’t in folk but gospel. The resulting record was more than timely; it was timeless. Like the civil rights movement for which it served as an anthem, “A Change Is Gonna Come” does not crumble in angry, bitter despair but rises like an angel on wings of grace and spiritual transcendence. It is another profound dream: the triumph of faith over brutality and ignorance. Shortly after the song’s release, the original recording was donated to an album benefiting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization closely associated with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

  Klein loved the song, not just for the message, but for what
it said about the messenger. Sam was clearly the rarest of popular artists, one capable of both entertaining and inspiring, and Allen took satisfaction and more than a little pride in the belief that he was helping to make it possible. When Allen heard “A Change Is Gonna Come,” he knew it would also change the way the world viewed Cooke. Cooke had an appearance slated for the following week on The Tonight Show, and Klein lobbied hard for Cooke to perform the song.

  Sam wasn’t so sure—and RCA was dead set against it. “RCA was nervous as shit about ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’” Allen said. “It was not being released as a single—the single was ‘Ain’t That Good News.’” When Sam had a television appearance, the plan was for him to perform one middle-of-the-road number—in this case, “Basin Street Blues”—and his latest single. Nonetheless, Klein argued vociferously that this was the moment to make a career statement, that that trumped the marketing of any single. Sam first dismissed the idea, saying he didn’t have the charts with him and that the Tonight Show orchestra lacked the proper instrumentation. But when Klein upped the ante by offering to pay for the additional musicians out of his own pocket, Cooke agreed.

  For Klein, who sat in the audience during the New York taping, it had to be a moment of intense satisfaction. Sam’s faith in him—his recognition that Allen could help his career—had been borne out. Even more satisfying, his insistence on “A Change Is Gonna Come” confirmed something about his own business style that Allen now believed even more fervently: he would make it by playing on the outer edges of the industry. Given the choice between taking the safe, well-worn path and following his gut—well, there was no choice.