Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  The mainstream record companies had their own in-house publicists, and with the exception of the respected music publicist Les Perrin, there were no models for an independent PR man in London, particularly when it came to cadging work from peripheral figures on a pop scene just starting to coalesce. Making the rounds of the few independent record producers in hopes of landing a project, Andrew found a mentor in artist manager Ray Mackender.

  Mackender, an insurance underwriter for Lloyd’s who’d worked with Cliff Richard, had abiding interests in both pop music and young men; he managed the beefy singer Mark Wynter and had helped guide him to a big UK hit with a cover of Jimmy Clanton’s million-selling American record “Venus in Blue Jeans.” Ray gave Oldham a job as Wynter’s publicist and showed him the ropes. “He taught me how to work,” Oldham said. “He gave me his press lists and contacts, his fire and agenda.” By keeping an ear open at record companies for news of visiting American artists in need of London press, Oldham snagged short-term jobs with a broad range of performers running the gamut from Little Eva to Bob Dylan. He may have worked only a week with Dylan, who was in London to perform in a BBC television drama, Madhouse on Castle Street, but it was a wonderful entrée, his version of Klein’s Bobby Darin story. It also gave Oldham a brief but intimate look at the then-close relationship between the iconoclastic yet savvy Dylan and his innovative and idiosyncratic manager Albert Grossman.

  Yet the American music man who had the most profound impact on Oldham was producer Phil Spector. One of pop music’s true geniuses, Spector was known for an over-the-top production style dubbed the “wall of sound.” His records were broadly drawn dramas of teenage romance that should have been bombastic kitsch but instead were earnest, heartfelt, and thrilling, glorifying rather than exploiting the subject; Spector’s singles were Romeo and Juliet at 45 rpm with all the sword fights, soaring hearts, family battles, and tragic defeats. In their scope, daring, and unapologetic sentimentality, the records were precisely the kind of grandiose creations that pierced Oldham’s overwrought heart. When he heard Spector was coming to London to promote one of his acts, he telephoned the producer’s New York office to say he could get him ink in the London newspapers. In fact, Oldham knew that the Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave already planned an article on Spector; Andrew simply made it his business to stand next to her at the airport when she met the producer’s flight. It worked—he was in.

  Mary Quant and Ray Mackender had schooled Andrew, but Phil Spector was his Harvard. Not only did Spector know how to make records, he also had a deep understanding of the recording and publishing businesses. And certainly just as important to Andrew, Spector had both style and a perverse sense of entitlement that fell somewhere between boorish and outright criminal. Behind it lurked a pervasive and nasty bitterness. Now firmly in control of his own career, Spector had learned his lessons the old-fashioned way, making early publishing and recording deals he’d come to regret—including his partnership with publisher Lester Sill in their company, Philles Records. Seemingly born with a chip on his shoulder and a bruise in his heart, Spector grew increasingly cynical and hard, the deals he offered artists as one-sided and exploitative as any in the business. He adhered to the tough, ugly business mantra Screw or Be Screwed.

  Spector delighted in acting bratty, and Andrew was soon doing the same. “Phil looked more like an act than most acts,” he recalled, “and behaved like one too. I had the opportunity to model myself after a perfect little hooligan.” But Oldham wanted to do more than adopt Spector’s habits and sunglasses—he had his ears open as well as his eyes. Spector counseled him to make sure he was firmly in the driver’s seat if he ever managed an artist. And, most important, Andrew should absolutely not use the record company’s studio or sign the act directly to a label. Instead, he should set up his own production company to maintain ownership of the recordings, pay for an independent studio, and lease the recordings to the record company. That approach, Spector assured him, would keep control in his hands and earn him a great deal more money than he’d make if the record company was in charge. Hanging out with Spector was exciting and eye-opening, but it was while Oldham was ferrying Wynter on an otherwise pedestrian trip to Birmingham in January of ’63 that he caught his real break—or, more accurately, had the prescience to see, hear, and seize an opportunity.

  The event was a taping of an episode of the pop TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars that featured, in addition to Wynter, the Beatles playing their just-released second single, “Please Please Me.” It was Oldham’s first exposure to the band. Though he would later wryly suggest he could tell in rehearsals that they’d be huge because “like Napoleon and Hitler they combed their hair forward,” he knew exactly what he was hearing. “There was nothing calculated about artists like Dylan and the Beatles,” he said more earnestly. “They were simultaneously omniscient and naïve.” After asking John Lennon who their manager was, Andrew was pleased to find Brian Epstein on hand, and he immediately pitched himself as a London publicist for the band. Dissatisfied with Parlophone’s efforts, Epstein agreed to give Oldham a try. “Brian gave me the job because at that point Liverpool was a long way from London and you didn’t make long-distance calls unless there was a death,” Oldham said.

  Dropping Wynter and Mackender for the Beatles and Epstein, Oldham set out on his own. He rented a desk for four pounds a week in the Regent Street offices of Eric Easton, an old-line showbiz agent.

  Oldham couldn’t have timed his relationship with the Beatles much better. The band’s first single, “Love Me Do,” had made a strong showing, getting into the top twenty; “Please Please Me” became their first unqualified hit, reaching number one in Melody Maker and New Musical Express. And although the Beatlemania juggernaut had yet to get up a full head of steam, Oldham got a glimpse of the madness to come. During a package show at a theater in Bedford (at which the Beatles were still second on the bill, below sixteen-year-old singer Helen Shapiro), Oldham stood alongside Epstein behind the orchestra seats and watched as the audience went into an absolute frenzy, shattering windows and making it impossible to hear the band. To Oldham’s mind, the future he’d longed for had arrived, and it was even more powerful than he’d imagined. “I heard the whole world screaming,” he said. “The power of the Beatles touched and changed minds and bodies all over the world. I didn’t see it—I heard and felt it.” Andrew did all he could to stoke the machine. The band had to be in London often and he ferried them around in cabs to print and radio interviews, yet he never really connected with them on a personal level. Unlike Oldham, they were tough, clear-eyed working-class kids from one of the hardest neighborhoods in one of England’s hardest cities, and they’d come to do business. Lennon, clearly the group leader, was particularly difficult to read, by turns sullen, abrasive, and charming, depending on his mood. Andrew, whose own natural mode was a camaraderie of thieves, kept himself in check—they were the clients, right? He focused on the job at hand, which was getting them as much press as possible. And if not the most important band in the world quite yet, the Beatles were still a hell of an entrée for Oldham. After dropping their names, he found it considerably easier to push his other acts as he made his ceaseless rounds of publications, clubs, and watering holes favored by journalists in a daily quest for ink.

  In the De Hems pub in Soho, Andrew cornered Record Mirror editor Peter Jones, seemingly to no avail. The next issue was full—no room for any of Oldham’s darlings—but Jones liked Andrew and was impressed by his unflagging energy and so gave him a tip: one of the Mirror’s writers had just filed a rave review of a show by an unsigned R&B band, the Rollin’ Stones, that the Record Mirror would publish in the coming week.

  The group had a steady Sunday-night gig at what was called the Crawdaddy Club when the band played there but was on all other nights simply the tiny potted-palm-studded ballroom of the Station Hotel in suburban Richmond. And though the band didn’t have a record deal yet, the review was unstinting in its praise, sugges
ting it was the vanguard of a new London scene. Jones thought Oldham might be the person to do something with them. “He was the young, hip youth about town—you couldn’t even really call him a young man,” Jones said of Andrew. “He had a lot of energy and hustle and I thought he might want to go hear them.” Richmond was the last stop on the London tube line, and Oldham wasn’t wild to drag himself out to the sticks on a Sunday evening; he later admitted he was more interested in buttering up Jones than in hearing the band. Nor was the stripped-down performance he witnessed—hard-charging, unadorned covers of Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, and Muddy Waters tunes—to his taste. Andrew preferred the more nuanced, pop-inflected R&B offered by Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector, and the Brill Building crowd. “It didn’t mean dick to me,” he admitted. But in the end it was the singer, not the song, and he found the band, and particularly vocalist Mick Jagger, mesmerizing—“authentic and sexually driven.” The jazz singer and pop chronicler George Melly would later suggest there was something more than a frisson of sexual excitement working its way up and down Oldham’s spine. It was the hot flash of the main chance, and Andrew was not going to blow it. “He looked at Jagger as Sylvester looks at Tweetie Pie,” Melly cracked. Andrew had no doubt he could do something with the band. What he couldn’t do was get them work—that required an agent’s license, and you had to be of legal age to get one. Indeed, any contract was thorny, since Oldham, Jagger, and guitarist Keith Richards were all minors.

  The answer, of course, was right down the hall. On Monday morning, Andrew popped into Easton’s office and begged the agent to come hear the band with him the following Sunday night with an eye toward booking and co-managing them. In Oldham’s recollection it wasn’t an easy sell—Easton had been loath to miss his favorite TV show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. But “he was in awe of what he saw,” said Easton’s son Paul, adding that both the band’s performance and the huge lines outside the Station Hotel convinced Eric that the act was well worth a shot. Easton and Oldham introduced themselves to guitarist Brian Jones, whom drummer Charlie Watts had identified as the leader of the band. Jones, along with pianist Ian Stewart, had organized the original rehearsals that drew in Jagger and Richards. Childhood friends from suburban London, Mick and Keith were a matched pair no matter how the deck was shuffled, but they shared a passion with Jones for electric Chicago blues and the music of pioneering rockers Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Sharing a flat in Edith Grove, the three had an almost messianic zeal about their band; they might be struggling now, but they were going to bring the true gospel to London—although Jagger, who had a small and much-needed stipend as a student at the London School of Economics, hedged his bets.

  “God, the Rolling Stones had so little work,” Jagger recalled. “I wasn’t totally committed—it was a good, fun thing to do—but Keith and Brian didn’t have anything else to do so they wanted to rehearse all the time.” Indeed, Jagger was the last to commit fully to the band, dropping out of school only well after they were launched—a move that still enraged his father, Joe, a teacher and college athletics coach.

  The consensus in the band was that Oldham and Easton could be a good team. Andrew was obviously someone who understood them; his Beatles association was extremely impressive. “He was our age and we thought he was good news for the group,” said bassist Bill Wyman. Easton, although ignorant about rock music, was an established and respectable agent, and it was essentially a done deal after the introductions. It was Brian Jones—as the band’s titular head and someone old enough to sign a binding contract—who came to Easton’s offices a few days later while the underage Jagger and Richards waited for him around the corner in a coffee shop. On May 9, Jones signed a management contract on behalf of the band with Jagger acting as witness. A short and straightforward document, it stated simply that Easton and Oldham would procure work for the band and represent them exclusively, a job for which they would receive 25 percent of whatever the band earned. Within the month, the group had also signed a production deal with Impact Sound, a company owned by Easton and Oldham, to record the Rolling Stones. Andrew hadn’t forgotten Spector’s admonishment; Easton and Oldham were going to own the band’s recordings and lease them to a record company. That kind of deal was increasingly common in the American record business, but it was still rare in Britain.

  With the Rolling Stones firmly in hand, Easton and Oldham had surprisingly little trouble getting Decca, one of England’s recording giants, interested. That had less to do with the managers’ faith in the band than with the fact that the label, and in particular its A&R man Dick Rowe, had come to rue passing on the Beatles. Decca was hardly alone in that regard; no one except George Martin’s little Parlophone had been willing to give the Beatles a shot. But because Parlophone was part of Decca’s archrival EMI, Rowe, who otherwise had an admirable track record as a producer and talent scout, had been hung with the unflattering sobriquet of the Man Who Turned Down the Beatles. Rowe had already heard George Harrison touting the Stones, so he was all ears when Easton came calling, and Rowe and Decca proved willing to take a flier on the band largely on its managers’ terms.

  Those terms looked terrific—for Easton and Oldham. Decca agreed to pay Impact Sound a royalty of 14 percent on a single by the Rolling Stones. But Impact Sound had guaranteed the Stones only a 6 percent royalty—meaning the managers pocketed more than half of any recording income after costs. On top of that, the management agreement gave Oldham and Easton a 25 percent commission on that 6 percent. The band, however, couldn’t have been happier: They were going to put out a record! And on Decca!

  Oldham bought a few hours at Olympic, one of London’s top studios, and produced two tracks with the band in early May. It was a case of the deaf leading the blind; Andrew was savvy enough to know what to ask for in a production deal but at a loss as to how to actually make records. Instead, he bluffed his way through, relying on the engineer to supply the technical know-how and the Rolling Stones to bring the noise. He huddled with them before the session, agreeing to record songs originally done by artists on Chicago’s Chess Records—Chuck Berry’s “Come On” and Muddy Waters’s “I Wanna Be Loved (but Only by You),” and then egged them on during the recording.

  “Andrew’s music input was minimal,” Richards said. “He wasn’t a natural in the studio, he was not very musical. He knew what he liked and other people liked, but if you said E7th to him, you might as well be saying ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ . . . That was the genius, I think, of Andrew’s method of producing, to let us make the records. And to provide a lot of energy and enthusiasm.” Rowe had enough reservations about the end product to summon the band to Decca’s studio and rerecord the songs himself—a move Andrew feared was a ruse to sidestep the production deal—but his results weren’t as exciting, and the original Olympic recordings became the Rolling Stones’ first single in June 1963.

  That first 45 revealed a good deal less about the Rolling Stones’ musical tastes than about Oldham and the band’s aspirations. “Come On” wasn’t an effort to capture the driving R&B sound of a Stones performance; it was an attempt to make something flat-out commercial, its Beatles-inflected bounce a bid for airplay. The strategy worked moderately well and it certainly didn’t hurt that Oldham was buying up as many copies around London as he could, a naked ploy to drive the record up the charts. The debut reached twenty-one, which was good enough to get a further recording commitment from Decca and help Easton book gigs. Though still largely confined to London clubs, the band was now performing almost every night. That didn’t mean they were proud of the record, though; Jagger ultimately deemed it “shit” and the band refused to play the song live. “It was nothing to do with what we were doing,” Keith Richards admitted. “I quite cold-bloodedly saw this song as just a way to get in. To get into the studio and to come up with something very commercial.” Having gotten this far, the band now had one overriding goal: to keep it going. Oldham felt the pressure as sharply as the musicians.

>   Although faking it in the studio, Andrew had a keen understanding of image and promotion and strong feelings regarding how the band should sell itself. More than that, he had a romantic but well-formed faith that fame was something valuable in and of itself and that pop culture was only just beginning to appreciate its own power. He was confident the Stones could succeed and that he could create a look and buzz around them and make them stars. He’d watched Mary Quant do it, had taken note of the way Brian Epstein had cleaned up the Beatles.

  Following Epstein’s lead, he outfitted the band in matching houndstooth jackets and set up photo sessions with fashion photographers. The Stones were having none of it; to Oldham’s horror, they “forgot” to wear the uniforms to the shoots. But then, Oldham was also having his own self-serving memory lapses: he’d neglected to tell pianist Ian Stewart about the photo shoots.

  To Andrew, the mature, square-jawed Stewart wasn’t teen-heartthrob material. Andrew told the others that Ian didn’t look right, and besides, six bodies were too many for fans to care about. Though Stewart was an integral part of the band and had been a driving force in its inception, the others readily agreed to jettison him, assuring Stewart that he would still play on their sessions, have a job as road manager, and “always be a Stone.” Like Oldham, the musicians had their eyes fixed firmly on success and seemed to feel no more than a soupçon of guilt over dumping Stewart; certainly no one spoke up for him. For his part, Stewart was stung and blamed Oldham. But he rightly saw Andrew as very much on the same page as the others and instrumental in their eventual success.

  “I honestly don’t like Andrew Oldham as a person,” Stewart said. “I just don’t like his attitude. He’s a brilliant guy, actually. And if it were not for him, I don’t think the Stones would’ve gotten to where they are now. They would have made it no matter what, but Andrew was very careful about the exposure and image of the group.”