Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  When Andrew looked over the band’s stark first photos, shot against the brick and mortar of the Thames Embankment and on London street corners and back alleys, his heart sank. Even with Stewart gone, the band lacked glamour. In fact, the black-and-white prints made them look downright scruffy, although nowhere near as menacing as they seemed to hope. Didn’t the Stones get it? Hadn’t they seen how handsomely a few minor concessions to mainstream tastes were paying off for the Beatles? God, even parents were starting to take to them! It struck Andrew as ironic; the Beatles were working-class toughs before Epstein applied a bit of polish and made them ditch the leather jackets and smile for the camera. And what did Andrew have? A group of nice middle-class boys who’d make a bland pop record in a second if it got them on the radio but who dressed and carried on like they’d just been paroled from Borstal. The situation frustrated and depressed Oldham. Then it inspired him.

  He should have seen it from the start: The world already had its Beatles—why should the Rolling Stones join their growing army of imitators? Though a chance meeting between Andrew and his former clients led to the Stones recording a tune by Lennon and McCartney, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” as their second single, Andrew soon became enamored of the notion that the Rolling Stones should do more than just avoid imitating the Beatles; they should become the anti-Beatles. “The Beatles looked like they were in show business, and that was the important thing,” Oldham said. “And the important thing for the Rolling Stones was to look as if they were not.” The Stones were perfectly capable of being smug and obnoxious—Keith nearly started a fistfight on the set of the television show Thank Your Lucky Stars when he baited an Irish band in matching blue uniforms, calling them cunts and “the Irish fucking navy”—but they were still about as dangerous as Coca-Cola and just as eager to be sold. Rolling up his sleeves, Oldham began looking for any excuse to portray the Stones as hooligans.

  Newspapers were eager to follow Oldham’s lead, readily reporting that the band members were unkempt, dirty, and out to upend the empire. Moaned the Daily Express, “They look like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom.” Even the music press, which should have known better, was more than obliging. In an issue of Melody Maker that also featured an article speculating on just how much longer the Beatles would continue to interest fans now that they had been around a whole year—which spoke volumes about the life expectancy of pop acts and the world in which Oldham and his clients were trying to make their way—Ray Coleman filed an early report of life on tour with the mangy Stones headlined “Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Rolling Stone?” Coleman led with the shocking news that, aside from not wearing matching outfits onstage, the band didn’t even bother checking themselves in mirrors because “hair-combing is rare.”* When refused the use of the restroom at an East London gas station on a late-night drive home from a performance, they relieved themselves outside, leading to court dates, fines of five pounds apiece for Jagger, Wyman, and Watts, and a bumper crop of headlines for Oldham. The Evening Standard’s savvy pop reporter Maureen Cleave clearly saw the method in Oldham’s madness, noting both Jagger’s tenure at the London School of Economics and Watts’s prior career as a graphic artist and then playing along tongue-in-cheek by accusing the band of doing “terrible things to the musical scene—setting it back, I would say, by about eight years.” For good measure, she let Andrew run wild. “They don’t wash that much and aren’t all that keen on clothes,” he told her. “And they don’t play nice-mannered music. People keep asking me if they’re morons.” The strategy proved artful, slyly subversive, and massively appealing; it turned the fame equation on its head. Supposedly, you succeeded in entertainment by sitting up straight, being nice, and behaving yourself. The Rolling Stones zealously aspired to play music that was serious, authentic, and in revolt against almost anything heard or seen on radio and television, yet they were as earnestly interested in commercial success as any other entertainers were. An air of standoffishness and a feigned indifference to all the contradictions and compromises their position entailed soon came to define their persona. Oldham, in seizing and promoting the notion that the Stones were a very, very bad bunch of boys indeed, wasn’t conjuring an image out of thin air; they were disdainful and hostile toward the status quo. But through exaggeration and repetition, it became more than that—a crusade and a thumb in the eye. Oldham played a huge role in making the world notice the Rolling Stones, and the strategy succeeded so well that, at least in its early days, the band was more famous for being infamous than for their music.

  “There’s a theory that Andrew Oldham saw us from the start as wild rebels,” said Wyman. “That is not so. Andrew never did engineer it. He simply exploited it exhaustively . . . And we listened to Andrew because he had made things happen: he said he’d get us on radio and TV and concert tours, and he had.” Easton, who was booking the band furiously—they had a gig, and sometimes two, virtually every night—was also a hit, particularly with Wyman. Five or six years older than the other Stones (a fact then kept from fans), he didn’t find the agent nearly as off-putting as the others did. They were inclined to gravitate toward Oldham, their contemporary and coconspirator, and before long Andrew had replaced Brian Jones as Jagger and Richards’s flat mate.

  The band remained far behind the British Invasion pack in the U.S., but they were bona fide stars at home. A four-song EP featuring “I Wanna Be Your Man” released in January 1964 went to number one in the UK, as did the Stones’ self-titled debut album four months later. It topped the charts for twelve weeks.

  Success bred new challenges for the Stones. Material was quickly emerging as one of the band’s biggest problems; they couldn’t possibly sustain a career just rerecording hits by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Buddy Holly. Oldham remained unsteady in the studio (Easton was forced to step in and produce several tracks when Andrew simply didn’t show up), but he dutifully scoured the American music scene for appropriate songs and unearthed not just “It’s All Over Now” but producer and songwriter Jerry Ragovoy’s “Time Is on My Side,” which had been an American hit for the New Orleans R&B singer Irma Thomas, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Down Home Girl,” which had been an American flop for another New Orleans R&B singer, Alvin Robinson. He found some nuggets, but the search was exhausting, and the band’s need for hits endless. The Rolling Stones had to have a new single for the market every twelve weeks, and Oldham lived in constant fear that the Stones were just one or two commercial missteps from losing their career; three months off the charts and no one would remember them. With the competition for outside material fierce, he saw just one answer: the Rolling Stones had to start writing their own songs.

  Jones was proving a versatile player on the band’s early recordings, adding slide guitar, dulcimer, keyboards, recorder, and marimbas and other percussion instruments, but he didn’t have it in him to become a songwriter. “Brian was loath to pay attention to anything but himself,” Oldham said. “He didn’t respect the pop-song structure and thought it involved little more than rhyming ‘Moon’ with ‘June.’ Mick and Keith knew there was more to it than that and appreciated how hard it was to keep things simple.” Andrew presented the pair with two pressing reasons for them to become songwriters: first, they were running out of good sources for material, and second, there was real money to be made in publishing. Royalties were paid to performers on recordings, but there was an additional stream of income for songwriters, who received payment not just for records sold but also for airplay and public performance. Every time the Rolling Stones had a hit, the songwriters got paid—why shouldn’t they be those songwriters? Mick and Keith got it right away.

  Still, it would require a leap; Richards had never thought of himself as anything but a guitarist. Songwriting entailed a different set of skills, and as far as he was concerned, it was like asking a carpenter to be a stonemason. Oldham encouraged him to think of himself more broadly. He wasn’t just a guitarist, he was a musician whose
band needed songs—and no one knew more about what they should sound like. With Jagger and Richards willing but unsure how to proceed, Oldham took control of the situation: he literally locked them in the apartment and told them that he was going to his mother’s for dinner and if they hadn’t come up with something by the time he got back, he wouldn’t let them out.

  “It was Andrew who really forced Mick and me to sit down and try it and got us through that initial period where you write absolute rubbish, things you’ve heard, until you start coming up with songs of your own. Andrew made us persevere,” Richards said. The first good results, a tune Keith and Mick titled “As Time Goes By” and that Andrew suggested revising and renaming “As Tears Go By,” was deemed strong enough to be recorded by Marianne Faithfull, a stunning blond girl Andrew had met at a party and gotten Decca to sign. A few months later, in early 1965, the Rolling Stones would record and release their first original single, “The Last Time.” It went to number one at home and, just as encouraging, cracked the top ten in America.

  Those American victories were still hard-fought and too far between. To the Stones, who’d found their musical roots in America, the country had always been the promised land, but the reality they encountered on their first tours proved even more exciting than they’d dreamed. Everything they saw in America, from Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater to the Sunset Strip and the deserts of the West, was spectacular. And the radio—twenty-four-hour rock, country, and soul stations at the push of a button! They found it all nothing short of amazing, particularly the chance to record at Chess Studios in Chicago. But conquering the nation was another story. After the UK, the scope and size of the United States felt awesome, the trail they should follow for success decidedly less well-worn. Struggling to break the band in America, Easton booked a series of short tours in 1964 with GAC in New York acting as the band’s agents. At the time, there was no established concert circuit for rock ’n’ roll, and agents often turned to wrestling promoters to organize their clients’ performances. The results were strictly catch-as-catch-can; the band sold out two shows in New York at Carnegie Hall but also found themselves playing fairgrounds and farm arenas and poorly attended shows in cities like Omaha. In Detroit, the Stones played for a thousand ecstatic fans, but it was hard to look out at the mostly empty fifteen-thousand-seat Detroit Olympia and be happy. They blamed Easton, whom they now felt wasn’t up to the job. “Once it got to America, this cat Easton dissolved,” said Richards. “He went into a puddle. He couldn’t handle that scene.” Perhaps most discouraging was their television appearance on The Hollywood Palace, a variety show. Most of the Stones’ three-song performance was left in the editing room, replaced by nasty jibes from host Dean Martin, who cracked that the band members didn’t have long hair, just small foreheads, and then introduced a trampoline act as the musicians’ father. “He’s been trying to kill himself ever since.” An angry and humiliated Jagger phoned Easton in London and blasted him for putting them on the show.

  Oldham was unlikely to be the target of the band’s ire; he was as much a peer and a coconspirator as he was their manager. Despite Andrew’s limits in the studio, the Stones trusted his taste, fed off his energy and enthusiasm, and recognized that he’d played more than a passing role in their growing fame. Andrew had strong opinions and a definite sense of style, and much of it rubbed off on the band, particularly Jagger. Onstage, the singer’s campy androgyny—a flick of the hips delivered with a roll of the eyes—was a page torn out of Oldham. Andrew “slung his fur coat around his shoulders and waved his hands a lot,” said Simon Napier-Bell, who managed T. Rex. “Jagger never used those mannerisms before Andrew took them on. It was Mick falling in love with Andrew’s campness.”

  Conversely, Andrew respected the Stones and was savvy enough to follow their lead and adopt their opinions. When the band decided to release a cover of a straight blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster,” as a single, Oldham argued furiously that it was a commercial mistake and that they should pick a pop tune instead. But when it became obvious the Stones weren’t going to change their minds, he did a complete about-face. Decca and Easton continued to object, but Andrew insisted they had to follow the Stones and that having a hit with a blues record would prove they were more than a pop band. With the help of the Stones’ fan clubs, Oldham mounted a big first-day buy, goosing sales of “Little Red Rooster” until the unlikely single entered the British charts at number one.

  Increasingly at odds with Easton, Andrew wasted no opportunity to bad-mouth his partner to Jagger and Richards. Yet it was becoming apparent that the biggest threat to Oldham’s position wasn’t Easton, but Oldham.

  Precocious, charismatic, and brilliant, Andrew was also insecure and manic, and he switched from confident euphoria to deep depression and self-doubt as quickly as if he were twisting a radio dial. And the more successful the band became, the more he worried and acted out. He was incapable of holding on to money, and it wasn’t unusual for Andrew to get on a plane and disappear to France, to Spain, to America—it really didn’t matter where. Vanishing was a dangerous habit for any manager, and the Stones—particularly Jagger and Richards—were proving to be quick studies as each success hiked their self-confidence. In the beginning, Andrew’s grasp of PR, his religious zeal for pop, and his worship of fame were a needed tonic, and he seemed like a magician who pulled press coverage and recording contracts out of a hat. But the longer they watched Oldham’s act, the better they recognized his bluster and misdirection.

  Like everyone else in the young rock business, Andrew was self-invented, and he had to search hard for maps and role models. Constantly trying on the different personas of his idols, he didn’t differentiate between their brilliance and their affectations. His youth, emotional insecurity, susceptibility to drugs, and faith in outrageous behavior as a tool for escaping a life of drudgery repeatedly resulted in ridiculous actions, and he evidently believed that the hipper you were, the more you should be able to get away with. Phil Spector might not get called out for his abominable behavior because he was a brilliant producer, but it seemed lost on Andrew that the abominable behavior wasn’t why Spector was a great producer. Indeed, as far as Ian Stewart could tell, Andrew was very confused and knew “nothing about music whatsoever. I mean, you can still be a record producer and not know anything about music,” he said, “but when Andrew started this producing bit, he was more interested in the image of Phil Spector, running around in big cars, with bodyguards, collecting money, and buying clothes. That’s how he thought producers should act.” Feeling the pressure to remain the enfant terrible, Oldham became more irrational and outrageous, his actions sometimes even thuggish. After all, it had worked for Don Arden. Oldham soon had custom cars, a hulking driver with a reputation as a bone breaker, and the well-earned CV of an obnoxious and out-of-control brat who nonetheless likened himself to Sergei Diaghilev. If that wasn’t enough, he found yet another badge of authenticity to grab in the outsize number of London pop and rock managers known to be gay. Though Andrew had married his teenage girlfriend, he strove to suggest, without actually saying it, that his sexual tastes were wide-ranging and that he fit the cliché of the gay manager. Indeed, years after his relationship with Jagger and the Stones ended, Oldham would continue to play a coy game of did-I-or-didn’t-I regarding his personal relationship with the singer.

  Easton, as unflinchingly middle class as any man who ever worked in the music business, could only scratch his head—but then, that was much of the point of Andrew’s behavior. “I think Andrew frustrated my dad,” said Paul Easton, who recalled the band’s road manager Mike Dorsey showing up at their house in Ealing after the first American tour and urging Eric to keep a tighter rein on Andrew. “He would disappear; he wouldn’t do the little things that needed to be done.” That Oldham was chugging his own snake oil and actively cultivating a legend as both a Svengali and a dangerous character didn’t bother the Stones—at least not yet. And if Andrew’s high jinks wer
en’t Easton’s speed, the band could certainly appreciate the joke, as long as it didn’t veer too close to home. But during the Stones’ first U.S. tour, while Andrew and the group were in Chicago to record at Chess Studios, Oldham had an emotional meltdown. He startled the band members by pulling a gun they didn’t even know he had.

  “Andrew was a lover of speed, but this time he was drunk too,” recalled Richards, who attributed the incident to Oldham’s marital problems. “He started waving a shooter around in my hotel room . . . Mick and I got the gun away from him, slapped him around a bit, put him to bed and forgot about it.” Perhaps they really did forget about it. After all, there were many moments when it seemed to them that Andrew Loog Oldham had been born for the music business. But as the Stones’ fame and ambitions grew, the question was whether Andrew could grow as well. By the following spring, when Andrew marked two years as the band’s co-manager, he was feeling far from secure. He was desperate to bolster his position by showing he was on top of the business, and eager to jettison Easton.

  Allen Klein was just the ticket. Oldham would continue to do what he always did, taking the pulse of the emerging scene in order to pitch and advise the Stones, while Allen handled the money and the business. If Andrew could keep it together, they promised to be a formidable team.

  6

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  The King of America

  ALLEN KLEIN SPENT his first week as Andrew Oldham’s new business manager hunkered down in his New York office listening to records by the Rolling Stones and poring over every contract, document, and letter pertaining to them that his new client could supply. The good news was there was a lot of room to improve their deals. But Allen wasn’t sure if what he had in his hands was the whole story. The quality of his information and the depth of his preparation were issues over which he endlessly fretted before any negotiation. Indeed, Klein had an axiom he liked to repeat to employees and associates: It’s okay not to know; what’s dangerous is not knowing what you don’t know.