Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Dumbfounded, Kelly and Townsend looked at each other and said nothing.

  Klein smiled. “Now I’ll have a cup of tea.”

  Klein’s tactics were as much a revelation to Myers as they were to the record executives. “That was the first time I heard those immortal words,” he said. “‘You may or may not have a contract.’ I have uttered them myself many, many times since.” Though Laurence ultimately followed Klein’s lead, it took him a while to really appreciate the leap Allen had made. “Allen told us, ‘Your two artists are keeping MGM Records alive.’ I mean, it sounded ludicrous. This is MGM we’re talking about—MGM! But the Animals and Herman’s Hermits were the only records they had that were hits; MGM had nothing. You don’t realize how powerful you are. And that was a huge revelation. There was nothing for us to be sort of humble about. We’d thought we were very lucky to get our product out with huge EMI and MGM. And it suddenly dawned on us that actually, they were quite lucky to get the product from us. That was a sea change in thinking, and it spread.”

  One of the quickest ways to improve an English producer’s income was to sever the American rights from the British contract, ensuring that American royalties would not be paid at a reduced foreign rate. Back in New York, Klein renegotiated the American recording agreements for Most’s bands. Though they were all with MGM Records, he set up a series of other opportunities in the States, particularly at CBS, where Allen and Clive Davis negotiated deals for several acts soon to be recorded by Most, and at RCA, where Mickie was offered his pick of artists to produce, including Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley. Mickie thought producing Presley was a no-win proposition—“He’d done the best stuff he was ever going to do and there was no way I was going to be able to make records as good as those”—but he was eager to work with Cooke and later told an interviewer that he’d been traveling to New York to meet him when he’d heard the singer had been killed in Los Angeles.

  Sure enough, when Klein sat down again with Most and Myers, he was able to present a package of firm offers that could earn them a million dollars. As per their initial discussions, Most readily agreed to make Allen his American business manager and allow Allen’s company to make and administer deals for his records in America. Allen formed a pair of companies, Inverse and Reverse, to funnel Most’s recordings to MGM and CBS, respectively. That meant Allen got his fee off the top directly from the American record companies and not from Most.

  One of the ways Allen had been able to get to the magic figure of a million dollars was by building extensions and options into the renegotiated deals; they now ran far longer, and monies would be advanced at several points over the years rather than all at once. Paradoxically, the deals ran for so long that by the time they ended, they weren’t particularly good. But when Klein struck them, they were so far out in front of other arrangements that Most was delighted and Myers became convinced Klein was a genius. In fact, Allen had again stood standard practice on its head. On Denmark Street, the hub of London’s music business, Mickie Most’s big score and the loud, ingenious Yank from New York who’d gotten it for him were the hot topic.

  5

  * * *

  “People Keep Asking Me If They’re Morons”

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM was looking for a deal.

  It was the spring of 1965, and London, following two deadly gray decades in which it had fought and won a brutal war for its life only to nearly succumb to its depressed aftermath, awoke to find its fresh, eye-popping popular art and culture scene was transforming the city into the tastemaking hub of the world. And Oldham, as co-manager of the Rolling Stones, was at the kaleidoscope’s paisley center. He had just turned twenty-one.

  The deal Andrew was hunting this morning was with an American publisher, Kags Music, that owned a song the Stones had recorded, “It’s All Over Now.” Written by Bobby Womack and originally recorded by his group the Valentinos for Sam Cooke’s SAR label, the R&B record had been introduced to the Stones by the ubiquitous Murray the K. The New York disk jockey had suggested it could be a hit for them, and he’d been right. Though it got only to number twenty-six in the U.S., the record was the band’s first number one in England. Oldham was hoping to use the Stones’ success and growing popularity to pay reduced royalties to the songwriter and publisher, a frequently employed gambit. Indeed, Elvis Presley’s infamous manager, Colonel Parker, wouldn’t greenlight the recording of a song unless the singer shared in the publishing income. Andrew didn’t have that kind of leverage; the Stones weren’t Elvis, and since their version of “It’s All Over Now” was already a year old, there was no question of refusing to record the song without preferential terms. Still, if you didn’t ask, you didn’t get. Like any good manager, Andrew was never shy when it came to asking.

  A fashion plate, Andrew was a young man with tremendous taste and no self-control. “I still can’t go by a watch shop without going into a dither,” he admitted. He was looking forward to the meeting, which was at the outrageously expensive breakfast room of the Hilton where a plate of eggs cost seven pounds, about what a secretary made in a week. Yet he dawdled at the windows of the little gift shops off the hotel’s marble lobby, daydreaming as he ogled overpriced jewelry. The Stones were really taking off; they toured Great Britain like fiends and their debut album had gone to number one there, staying on the charts for over a year. Yet they remained more rumor than fact in America, where other British Invasion bands, like Herman’s Hermits, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Animals, and the Dave Clark Five, formed the bulk of the Beatles’ rear guard. The Rolling Stones were still small potatoes in massive, all-important America. “We didn’t mean shit,” said Oldham. Yes, the money they all wanted was starting to come in, but only in little waves. Their tsunami was still somewhere out on the ocean, far from landfall. With a sigh he left the jewelry store and went into the breakfast room. It wasn’t difficult to spot the right table: J. W. Alexander, Sam Cooke’s partner in Kags Music and SAR Records, was the only black man in the restaurant. He wasn’t alone, though, and he and his companion rose as Oldham approached and introduced himself.

  J. W. smiled and nodded toward the other man. “This is our business manager, Allen Klein.”

  Klein didn’t show it, but he was surprised. Allen had assumed that he was going to be meeting Eric Easton, the agent who was the Rolling Stones’ other manager and who was said to handle most of their business arrangements. Klein didn’t know anything about Oldham. He sure as hell was young, he thought.

  Chatting over breakfast, Andrew soon came to the point: the Stones had done well with “It’s All Over Now,” producing an unexpected payday for Kags, and deserved a rebate.

  “Why?” asked Klein. “Your record blocked us from having a hit with the Valentinos. I should charge you double.”

  It was soon apparent to Oldham that the only thing he was likely to get that morning was breakfast. Still, it was a thrill to meet Cooke’s partners, and he began to pepper them with questions, first about the late singer and then about the American music business.

  To Andrew’s way of thinking, the British record industry was hidebound and moribund. The culture gap between the music and the street scene that fed it on one side and the old farts at the record companies that he relied on to market the Stones on the other was maddening and almost unbridgeable. Indeed, Oldham’s guile, cheek, and extraordinary self-assurance had frequently been his chief weapons in forcing the business to take notice of the Rolling Stones, and it had impressed the band. “He was smarter and sharper than the assholes that were running the media, or the people running the record companies, who were totally out of touch with what was happening,” Keith Richards said.

  It wasn’t like that in America, Andrew knew. He’d been to the States with the Stones, and he’d worked briefly with Bob Dylan and his hip and unorthodox manager Albert Grossman when they were in London. But his most lasting impression had come from befriending the brilliant American record producer Phil Spector, who had given Oldham a crash cour
se in the business. Aside from having prodigious studio talents, Spector was a hard-nosed entrepreneur who knew the ins and outs of the music-publishing and record industry, and he exerted dictatorial control over the careers of his performers. Oldham idolized him.

  Andrew told Allen and J. W. that, like Spector, he was starting his own independent record company, something of a rarity in Britain. He and his partner, Tony Calder, were calling it Immediate Records. But as he talked, it became clear to the others that Oldham had a lot on his plate at the moment; the Stones’ recording contract with Decca was about to expire, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do. Oldham didn’t mention that Easton had negotiated the band’s initial Decca contract, nor that he and his partner were on the outs. The Stones were only just beginning to hit their stride commercially, and now they had to stay on the charts and continue to make hit records. In that regard, the record company was key.

  “To keep the thing going is basically what everyone is about,” Andrew recalled. “Keep it going. We have places to go, we have things to do. We definitely are in trouble in America from the point of view that we have absolutely no vinyl licks at all. And all the people that we kind of sneer at in England are all doing very well.”

  Andrew was particularly worried that if Easton negotiated the next recording contract, he would be cut out and finished as co-manager of the Stones. The longer he talked to Allen Klein about what Klein had done for Mickie Most, Sam Cooke, Bobby Vinton, the Dave Clark Five, and Bobby Darin, the more he believed he’d chanced upon his lifeline.

  “I can’t handle this thing with Eric Easton—and I’ve got to find somebody who can,” Oldham recalled thinking. “Those kinds of people did not exist then. It wasn’t ‘There are five people I can go to.’ What Allen did was not done; he was in the business of repelling all boarders. I just happened to walk into the Hilton and meet him. That’s it.”

  Oldham had Klein’s full attention. Allen suspected he wasn’t hearing the whole story and that Easton was likely holding some big cards, but he was nonetheless impressed by Oldham, whom he’d been ready to dismiss as a kid. “He was a sharkster,” Klein recalled with admiration. “He wanted to make money. I thought at the time, and I say it now, if he and I were the same age at the time we met, he would have kicked my ass.”

  But they weren’t. Klein, who already knew how to reel in a fish and which bait worked best, didn’t say anything about the Rolling Stones. Instead, he offered to work with Andrew on Immediate, suggesting he could negotiate an arrangement for him with a British company and help line up a distribution deal for the label in America, probably with CBS Records. In fact, the company’s annual convention was coming up in Florida the next month. If the two men went together, Allen would introduce Andrew to Clive Davis, with whom he’d already negotiated several deals, as well as anyone else he wanted to meet.

  Oldham was delighted and ready to bite. But Klein gave the reel one more crank before setting the hook.

  “So, Andrew,” he said. “Are you a millionaire yet?”

  Oldham wasn’t born within a mile of a million dollars. London in 1944 was a grim, war-weary city; Andrew’s most striking childhood memory was coming home one evening to discover the woman he and his mother, Celia, shared an apartment with dead in the kitchen, her head in the oven.

  Celia Oldham, an Australian of mixed English and Jewish heritage, was a bookkeeper by trade but a nurse during World War II. That was how she met an Army Air Corps lieutenant from Texas, Andrew Loog; he was killed in action over the Channel six months before Celia gave birth to a boy. Twenty years later, the son she named Andrew Loog Oldham would get his first look at the home state of his presumed father when the Rolling Stones played four poorly conceived, poorly paid “teen shows” with trained monkeys as their opening act at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio. But in postwar London, any wide-open spaces were likely to be marked by rubble, and whatever roaming Andrew undertook was in his head. He wondered, for example, if his mother’s longtime lover—a successful and married Jewish businessman who helped to support them—was actually his father. The two of them did have the same ginger hair.

  A mama’s boy, Andrew had a hyperactive mind given to soaring flights of fancy. At eight, he sneaked into the local cinema to see Moulin Rouge and got his first proof that there was indeed a life of color and romance somewhere. He emerged movie mad and somewhat barmy.

  By the time he was ten, Andrew was decidedly odd and precocious. A good deal more sophisticated about clothes and fashion than most grown men, he already had pronounced and unusual tastes. He was a rabid fan of stars and glamour, and at an age when most boys were clipping photos of footballers, Andrew idolized the actor Laurence Harvey and the American singer Johnnie Ray. In later years Oldham would suggest that Ray, both a heartthrob and gay, was the forerunner of rock singers like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Freddie Mercury, performers whose androgyny made them sexually attractive to women yet nonthreatening to men. True or not, the same could be said of Oldham, whose infatuation with Ray bordered on the bizarre; reading that the singer used a hearing aid, Andrew took to wearing one. When he discovered Elvis Presley, he was thrilled not just by his music but by his look and his clothes, particularly that pink-striped jacket with the black velvet collar. As far as Andrew was concerned, Elvis was great, and “as attractive as Natalie Wood.”

  In 1956, the basement of London’s tiny 2i’s coffee bar in Soho was earning a reputation as a hub for skiffle and the nascent rock scene. There, on a makeshift eighteen-inch-high stage in a room that could barely accommodate fifty, the members of the first generation of British rockers, including Jet Harris, Cliff Richard, and Vince Taylor, made their mark. Show-business impresarios and idol makers Jack Good and Larry Parnes trolled for marketable hunks there, launching a bevy of faux rockers with suggestive names, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, and Vince Eager, among others. It wasn’t just a place to check out rock and measure the emerging scene—it was the scene, and the only school in town. Mickie Most worked at the 2i’s as a singing waiter; Peter Grant was the bouncer. Oldham, just twelve, hung around so much that they started handing him odd jobs. Like Most and Grant, Oldham was as fascinated by the process and milieu—you certainly couldn’t call it a business—as he was by the music. The scene was exciting and alive, like Moulin Rouge only here and now, and he needed to understand it and participate. Unabashed and forward, Oldham was the kind of kid who didn’t know he was a kid. He had no trouble talking his way backstage at a Shadows show. He knocked on the door of Shirley Bassey’s home, not to meet the singer but to get pointers from her husband and manager, Kenneth Hume, who wound up inviting him in for tea. Andrew was fourteen going on forty.

  One place Oldham didn’t fit in was a classroom, and although his mother repeatedly attempted to see him properly educated, sending him to a succession of English boarding schools that she couldn’t afford, Andrew was tossed out of all of them, the last one when he was sixteen. He landed on his feet as a gofer at Mary Quant’s Bazaar, the King’s Road boutique that, along with John Stephen’s Carnaby Street shops, was the epicenter of a London fashion revolution.

  Though Oldham’s career had yet to come into focus, he couldn’t have picked a better teacher than Mary Quant. Just twenty-one years old when she launched Bazaar, Quant was as young as the consumers she served. She was in tune with them, designing and selling miniskirts, white plastic boots, tight ribbed sweaters, knit leggings, and shiny plastic raincoats, and a great advocate of affordable fashion. Along with her husband and business partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, Quant took youth marketing in new and surprisingly lucrative directions, creating not just shops but designer fashion lines that catered to young buyers; by the mid-1960s, Mary Quant would be a worldwide brand. When the teenage Oldham showed up at Bazaar’s back door looking for a job, he was already so much of a fop that he carried a silver-topped cane, and he was so cocky he simply assumed they would hire him—and he was right. Yet he kept his mouth shut and eyes
open enough to learn.

  To Andrew, fashion, film, and music were all of a piece, all expressions of the same attitude and chance: a London coming back to life, a hope that the possibilities and excitement seen in America’s movies and heard on its rock ’n’ roll records might also be had in Britain. He came to view Quant’s empire, built on what he later poetically dubbed a “cockney-Chanel non-uniform uniform,” as one of pop culture’s first achievements; her style, sensibility, and enterprise built a bridge between the American birth of rock ’n’ roll and the coming of Britain’s Beatles. Helping, hustling, and making contacts, Andrew augmented his income and education with evening jobs, waiting tables at Soho jazz mecca Ronnie Scott’s as well as at the late-night Flamingo Club, a jazz turned R&B venue on Wardour Street regarded as a melting pot for music and fashion. He imagined he might make a career for himself as an emcee and impresario of rock shows and picked the stage name Sandy Beach.

  Regardless of what he was up to at any particular moment, Oldham, like Klein, was actually becoming both the pitchman for a coming world and an indefatigable promoter of himself as its prophet. Allen sold himself with numbers, knowing the client’s greed would do the rest; as a would-be style guru, Andrew had a harder sale to make. Few saw the cutting edge of a just-emerging pop culture, let alone recognized its power, but Andrew had a finely honed eye and the temerity to believe that someday soon, everyone would see the world his way.

  In 1961, Oldham took an assistant’s job at an old-line London public relations firm, Leslie Frewin and Associates, promoting a chain of staid men’s shops he wouldn’t have been caught dead in. Nonetheless he learned enough about PR to start offering himself as a freelance publicist to people and projects that did appeal to him, and he convinced a dancer on the weekly pop-music TV show Cool for Cats to become his first five-pound-a-week client.