Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Unable to connect with the Beatles, the Stones didn’t stay long. Cruising back to Manhattan, they made the unhappy discovery that the ship’s radio wasn’t working. The only record onboard, a Vinton single, “Long Lonely Nights,” was played over and over again until an exasperated Jagger couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m tired of this goddamn record,” he said, getting up and turning off the player. “I don’t give a shit if he is on the boat with us!”

  For Klein, the most lasting memory of the evening was the self-confident, almost blasé reaction the band had to seeing the Beatles play a fifty-thousand-seat stadium. “The Stones were not impressed with the Beatles at Shea,” he said with a mix of surprise and admiration. “They were never in awe.”

  The Beatles remained Klein’s white whale, his longed-for prize and validation. Yet it was increasingly clear to the industry that with or without the Beatles, Allen Klein and Company was already the vanguard management firm. Allen had moved his offices to the Time-Life Building in midtown and begun to manage the British singer and songwriter Donovan. And when Ray Davies of the Kinks needed someone to renegotiate and improve that band’s recording and publishing deals, Peter Grant steered Davies to Klein. Though gimlet-eyed and proud of it, the twenty-two-year-old rocker had never met anyone like Klein. He had no idea what to make of him.

  “You got talent?” Klein barked upon being introduced.

  When Ray didn’t respond, Allen turned it up a notch. “Oh, come on, let’s cut this phony humble act. Of course you got friggin’ talent—so much so that you’re making Reprise Records and Louis Benjamin at Pye a goddamn fortune,” he said, naming the American and British labels for which the Kinks then recorded.

  Marty Machat acted as the foil, and Klein and the attorney put on a show for Davies, enumerating precedents, plotting strategy for taking on the labels and all but guaranteeing their capitulation. The plan, in a nutshell, was a variant of a Klein favorite: threaten to break the contracts and force a renegotiation. In this case, Allen and Marty would tell Pye that the contract was void because Davies had been a minor and had not received proper legal representation, and they would threaten to sue; they would tell Warner that its contract was no good because the Pye contract that supplied them with Kinks records for America wasn’t going to hold up. The scheme would have the added bonus of getting the two labels sniping at each other.

  When Davies asked Klein what he should do, Allen told him to just go home, continue to work, and leave the rest to them.

  It was obvious to Davies that Allen counted on the dishonesty of the record companies—and perhaps, for that matter, on the dishonesty of everyone. “I will succeed,” he recalled Klein telling him, “because I believe all men are born evil. That’s how I stay in business and that is why we will win. So don’t worry.” A few months later, Davies sat with Allen in the penthouse suite of the Hilton in London while he negotiated simultaneously with Pye and Reprise, and what Ray saw chilled him to the core. “To say that he bullied them into a new deal with the Kinks would be an understatement,” Davies said. “Doing deals was Klein’s passion as well as his living.” Allen’s tactics were so abrasive and alien to the British business establishment that Davies’s own solicitor fled the suite in tears—and Klein was on their side.

  Klein relished his pugnacious and foul-mouthed reputation, playing it for all it was worth. His clients loved that Allen scared the hell out of music executives, so he advertised himself as trouble. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, a Christmas card to friends and associates declared, for I am the biggest bastard in the valley.

  It wasn’t all an act; he could be a terrific and terrifying bully, and not just with opponents he sought to intimidate but with the people who worked for him. Machat, who received a monthly retainer of six thousand dollars as well as a piece of the deals he worked on, took the brunt of the abuse.

  Attorney Eric Kronfeld, who began his career as Machat’s junior associate, initially viewed Klein as “the devil personified,” largely because of the way he casually and continually humiliated Machat in meetings. “Marty would say something and Allen would just look at him and go, ‘Shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re an idiot.’ Literally.”

  No one was immune or exempt from abuse until Allen’s son, Jody, joined the company in 1985, and even though Allen didn’t savage him, he looked to be choking back the insults. Michael Kramer, who first joined his uncle Allen’s company as a gofer and later became ABKCO’s in-house attorney after Allen put him through law school, eventually had to quit and go out on his own.

  “I love my uncle but he had demons,” Kramer said. “You couldn’t tell him anything, you didn’t know anything.” After Allen sent Michael to MCA to get information about a new contract for Bobby Womack but forbade him to say anything or even acknowledge questions from label executives—“Just keep your fucking mouth shut”—Kramer finally decided he’d had enough. Uncle Weasel might have put him through law school and given him a career, but the price demanded in return could never be paid. Michael resigned and opened his own law practice.

  Predictably, Kramer’s departing raised his stock in his uncle’s eyes and precipitated an all-out love offensive. Allen dreaded being alone, couldn’t personally fire an employee, and had a particular terror of familial abandonment. His first response was vindictive; he doubled the salary of Michael’s secretary so she couldn’t follow him. But he was soon insisting that employees consult Kramer on any and all legal questions. “All of a sudden I’m a genius,” Michael said. “Anybody in the office says something, it’s ‘You don’t know—call Michael.’” Over the next eight years Michael refused Allen’s multiple entreaties to return to the company, telling Klein he preferred to have him as his uncle rather than his boss. But in the early nineties, when Klein was in a difficult legal wrangle with Bertelsmann Music Group over Sam Cooke’s masters, Michael agreed to come back and help solve the problem.

  The honeymoon ended in the very first meeting with BMG. “We’re talking and I say something and Allen cuts me off. ‘Shut the fuck up. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’ About five minutes later, the same thing: ‘You’re an idiot. Shut your fucking mouth.’” During a break in the meeting, Kramer took Klein out into the hall and finally laid the issue to rest. “Allen, you’re my uncle and I love you,” he said. “But if you ever talk to me like that again I’m going to beat you so badly you won’t be able to get up.”

  Paradoxically, many who bore the brunt of Klein’s abuse felt they understood him, even while cowering through the boss’s outbursts. He was clearly obsessed: obsessed with being one step ahead, obsessed with knowing more than anyone else, obsessed with winning. Allen didn’t go into a meeting thinking he’d simply bully an adversary and bluff his way through the negotiation—although he certainly could and did. He prepared tirelessly. “No one could read a contract like my uncle,” Kramer said. Allen pored over documents, learning and looking for angles, then entered meetings with the knowledge that after he finished the bullying, he would inflict the real damage by being far better prepared than the opposition.

  It wasn’t just contracts and documents that concerned Allen; he thought about business strategies incessantly and could be doggedly single-minded. Andrew Oldham’s wife, Sheila, found him obsessive, bright, persuasive, and nearly impossible. “The whole time Allen Klein was with the Stones he was trying to get the Beatles interested in him,” she said. “We used to spend days and days and days when Allen would just talk and talk and talk . . . It was all the psychological things: ‘Well, if you did this, they would do that and if you did something else . . .’ How to get it right.”

  He seemed to have no off switch. Klein frequently strategized in the shower, where it was his habit to argue both sides of an issue out loud.

  The notion of managing the Beatles had become an obsession for Klein. They were the best, he was the best—nothing else made sens
e. It was difficult not to wonder if Klein had pursued Donovan as a client in some measure because he knew the singer was friendly with them. Anyone Allen did business with—whether an artist like Ray Davies or a producer like Mickie Most—had to hear how he was going to get the Beatles. Klein was so sure of himself that he bet Mickie’s wife, Christina Hayes, ten thousand dollars that he would become the Beatles’ manager within the year.

  That was an awful lot of money for Allen to bet on what sounded like a long shot. Christina couldn’t resist. “We shook on it,” she recalled. “And Mickie went white.”

  The Kleins and the Mosts were friends. They vacationed together; the Mosts stayed with the Kleins when they came to New York. Still, as far as Christina was concerned, this bet was at least as much business as friendship—and when it came to being a businessman, Allen wasn’t as unfailingly gracious and generous as he was as a friend.

  Mickie was pleased at the way Allen renegotiated and enriched his contracts, but Christina said Mickie was disappointed in later years when additional payments never materialized. “Mickie used to say, ‘He’s the brightest man in the music business.’ But he also used to say, ‘Why can’t he be one hundred percent all right?’” She made it a point to remind Allen of the bet.

  She needn’t have worried. In London, the first time she saw Klein after she’d won, he handed her a shoebox stuffed with ten thousand dollars. “What do you say we go thirty thousand on a year’s extension?” he asked. There was no way she would do that; the smaller bet had been harrowing enough, and if Allen was ready to triple it, he probably was going to get the Beatles. Still, Allen got a bit of his own back. After handing over the money, Allen took Christina out to dinner, but she quickly noticed that the limousine wasn’t headed in the direction of the restaurant. “He knew I have a middle name that I hate,” she said. “And we drive by Piccadilly Circus, and going round and round on the news ticker is ‘Christina Winifred Hayes.’”

  It wasn’t just the Beatles that made him obsessive. When wooing a new client, Klein would obtain and very nearly memorize every item on the artist he could find, from press clips to contracts. “He had an amazing memory,” said former ABKCO employee Paul Mozian. “It was a gift. Just the way he thought and could put deals together on the fly. He always had in-house counsel when I was there but did the crafting and the thrust of the deals himself.” But beyond that, there was something about Klein’s thought processes that was so idiosyncratic as to be nearly bizarre. When he was formulating ideas, particularly in office-strategy sessions, they often came out jumbled and difficult to decipher. The only thing clear was that Allen’s mind was racing, entertaining and trying to express several trains of thought simultaneously. It was sometimes impossible to keep up with him, particularly when he was working through a problem or a plan. Attorney Gideon Cashman compared it to chasing a grasshopper.

  “Flashes would go off in his mind and send him in different directions,” he said. “So there’d be no continuity. I had to pay the closest attention to him—and if my attention lagged I was a dead duck. Then he’s fourteen blocks ahead on some other point, having skipped three other parts. I wouldn’t know where the hell I was and have to fake it.” As much as it frustrated listeners, the gap between what went on in Allen’s mind and his ability to explain it frustrated him more than anyone. It was clearly a source of his rage.

  “Allen would get very angry and shake his hands—not his fists, but his hands—and his eyes would roll practically in a temper; his voice would be more a shriek than a scream,” said Beverly Winston, Klein’s assistant in London. “I think that a lot of the time he lost his temper out of frustration, because his mind worked faster than anybody else’s. Like, Why can’t you see? The reason you couldn’t see was because he was ahead of himself and hadn’t explained it properly.” Whether he and his colleagues were plotting a negotiation, hammering out a contract or a proposal, or discussing how to woo a client, the issue was examined over and over and over again until Klein was convinced that he was in control of as much as possible. In negotiations, the process frequently went on and on, which sometimes led the other side to grow impatient and play its hand but just as often frustrated Allen’s own people. Harold Seider, Klein’s in-house attorney for several years, said Allen frequently avoided decisions so the negotiations dragged on longer. Recalled Seider: “I used to send him memos saying, ‘What do you want to do?’ And they would sit there. Eventually I sent him a memo that said, ‘Please check the appropriate box: yes, no, maybe.’ Never even did that.”

  Putting Allen’s contracts and proposals on paper could be just as daunting as negotiating them. When a contract or deal was being worked on, normal business hours went out the window. If Allen wanted you around, you didn’t leave, even if it meant working twenty-four or even thirty-six hours straight.

  “He would have you do things a thousand ways,” said Emily Barrata Quinn, one of Klein’s former assistants. “No computers—typewriters. We were forever cutting and pasting and retyping.” She and Allen’s other assistant, Reggie Golodik, often worked late into the night. “I gained about fifteen pounds because Allen placated us with dinner orders from any restaurant we wanted.”

  Still, in the rare instance he met a similarly far-thinking opponent, Klein proved just as happy to make a bed as rumple it. Clive Davis had been negotiating and socializing with Klein for several years as a CBS Records attorney before becoming president of the company. In that latter role he was primarily concerned with modernizing the roster and making Columbia the leader in the rock world. Klein had just the kind of clients Davis was looking for, and Donovan proved a key signing for both the executive and Columbia’s sister label, Epic. “We never had an argument,” said Davis, who met George Harrison at Klein’s home in Riverdale. “We were always direct with each other and accepting of the fact that we had separate objectives. We clicked. Our dealings were very professional and not at all confrontational. He was very effective and very successful in relating to independent-thinking artists.” Indeed, after Klein replaced Ashley Kozak—an associate of Brian Epstein—as Donovan’s manager, Donovan called him a major factor in both his commercial and artistic success. “What did I want?” asked Donovan. “I wanted the music heard and marketed. I don’t know how Allen contacted Ashley but it was the best thing that could have happened to me.” In fact, Klein owed his introduction to Donovan’s music to Peter Grant, who played him a copy of “Catch the Wind,” just one in a string of folk-inflected singles that included “Universal Soldier” and “Colours” with which the singer/songwriter was beginning to make his mark. Friendly with the Beatles (a fact unlikely to have escaped Klein’s notice), Donovan was becoming increasingly ambitious and experimental in his work. He envied the band’s relationship with their producer George Martin and was searching for a similar association, someone who could help him expand the parameters of his music. Klein suggested Mickie Most.

  While Klein set about renegotiating Donovan’s existing recording contract with Pye in the UK and moving him from the small Hickory Records to CBS in the United States, Most took Donovan into the studio to see if they could come up with a single. After listening to the songs Donovan had been writing, he suggested hiring John Cameron, a young Cambridge graduate, as an arranger. Together, Most and Cameron provided Donovan with just the kind of support and broader context that Martin, an arranger as well as a producer, had given the Beatles. The first track they completed was “Sunshine Superman.”

  Most knew it was a hit. More than that, he knew it would be a big record for Donovan, one that would redefine him as far more than a folksinger. A classic summer anthem, it was also something new and unique: a psychedelic pop record propelled by bright percussion and a funky-sounding harpsichord. Knowing that Klein was in the midst of negotiating new deals and that they would have to sit on the record for several months, Most fretted that other artists would hear the song before it was released, mimic its unique sound, and beat them to the punch. “Listen
,” Mickie implored Donovan, “please don’t play this record for Paul McCartney.”

  Donovan couldn’t wait to hear what the Beatles thought of his latest record and refused to follow Most’s advice. Whether history proved the producer prescient is debatable but he certainly knew who the competition was. In America, where Epic released “Sunshine Superman” in July 1966, the record went to number one. But in the UK, where contract negotiations held up its release for another six months, it got only to number two. In the interim, the Beatles had a pair of UK number ones, “Paperback Writer” and “Eleanor Rigby.”

  Most also remained a Klein client, although he no longer required as much attention. At Allen’s urging, Mickie had taken advantage of British tax laws favoring income on one-time capital gains and sold the masters and recording contracts of several acts, including the Animals and Herman’s Hermit’s. The buyer was Klein.

  Klein’s holdings were becoming as impressive and productive as his client roster. Along with the Most recordings, he owned or had an interest in Sam Cooke’s records and publishing as well as a growing number of other copyrights purchased from clients like Jocko Henderson. With the addition of the Rolling Stones, Klein was clearly a player and a power in the business. He liked that—but not for the usual reasons. “He didn’t sweat about money,” said one friend, employee, and collaborator, producer Julian Schlossberg. “Money wasn’t a god to him. He just didn’t want anyone to screw around with him.”

  More to the point, he didn’t want anyone to leave him again—ever. The legacy of his orphanage childhood was the abhorrence of solitude. Allen simply could not be alone, and now he had the power to make people stay.