Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Jim Shea /From the collection of Susan Markheim

  Swinging from the heels. Playing softball with the ABKCO team in Central Park, 1979. As captain, starting third baseman, and owner of ABKCO, Klein was the leadoff hitter—every inning. At the company’s employee basketball games, he took every free throw.

  John Lennon’s admiration for Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripped-out psychedelic Western, El Topo, led Klein to distribute it and then finance its follow-up, The Holy Mountain. The two fell out when Jodorowsky backed out of directing an adaptation of the sadomasochistic bestseller The Story of O, and Klein punished Jodorowsky by keeping his films from being shown for over twenty years. The two reconciled shortly before Klein’s death in 2009.

  As business manager for both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Allen Klein may have been the most powerful player the record business ever produced. Complex and contradictory, he was an aggressive artists’ advocate who sometimes left his clients believing he’d taken too big a piece. “He was charming,” said an associate. “And he was ruthless.”

  8

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  Rock ’n’ Roll Circus

  IN THE EIGHTEEN MONTHS since Klein had taken charge of the business affairs of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham had continued as their manager and producer. And that was exactly as Klein wanted it. Indeed, when the band severed ties with Easton, Brian Jones—who didn’t get along with Oldham—suggested to Allen that he, Allen, become the manager. Klein wanted none of it.

  “Oldham managed the Stones,” he said. “I managed Oldham. That was the deal. I did not want to manage the Stones. I didn’t want the obligation. And I couldn’t do it.” Klein believed he had good ears for a pop tune and rarely hesitated to offer suggestions to Sam Cooke or Bobby Vinton, but he recognized that the Stones were not in his musical comfort zone and that he had nothing to contribute creatively.

  On a personal level, he had great affection for Keith Richards and respected Charlie Watts. The others he could do without, particularly Bill Wyman, who kept a close eye on his money and liked to complain. Klein, gauging that Richards and Jagger were calling the shots in the band and that Wyman would never transcend his status as a late addition who’d been hired because he had a professional amplifier, treated him as an incidental member of the Rolling Stones. After Jagger and Richards bought homes with funds obtained literally overnight from Klein, Wyman wanted to do the same, and he stewed while Klein made him wait months for the money. As for Mick Jagger, he and Klein were wary of each other from the start.

  “Jagger—I spent some personal moments with him but I didn’t want to get involved,” Klein said. “I always wanted Andrew to be there. I didn’t want to spend the time. I mean, that’s a full-time job. Keith—he was easy. He didn’t demand a lot of time. He was gentle, kind, really terrific.”

  In the studio, Oldham sought to remain a factor in the group’s music. But his inability to bring real technical and artistic know-how to the recording process, as engineer Glyn Johns or arranger Jack Nitzsche might, made Oldham less valuable as the band became increasingly sophisticated and self-assured. More pointedly, he was distracted by his own drug use and his quest for success and celebrity, unable to take an accurate read of his shrinking role and changing status. In the early days, the Stones had needed the press-corps Svengali with a mile-a-minute rap as their hip cheerleader and coconspirator, but no more. And there was a growing sense within the band that they didn’t need to generate publicity anymore; in fact, they needed to avoid it. Their outlaw status, so helpful in launching their career, was starting to feel like a burden. Watching the ever-increasing, ever-evolving mainstream acceptance of the Beatles—the perpetual yardstick of creative and cultural success for any band at the time, particularly the Stones—the group wondered if they’d made a mistake. “There’d been a big change around November 1966 where in some ways the Beatles were allowed to come back and retire [from touring] and flaunt their wealth and drive around in Rolls-Royces and go to the Prime Minister’s house,” said Oldham. “The Rolling Stones were not.”

  Jagger in particular seemed to be chafing under the relationship. Once close to Jagger, Oldham now seemed to spend every moment with the singer either arguing with him or placating him. The launch of Andrew’s own recording career via the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra and of his own label, Immediate Records, gave him new creative platforms, not to mention a separate path to continue to pursue fame, fortune, and excess. Though Oldham still knew precious little about making records, he and partner Tony Calder did have an eye and ear for the right artists; the Immediate roster included singers Rod Stewart, Chris Farlowe, P. P. Arnold, and Nico as well as numerous seminal bands such as John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Small Faces, the Nice, Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, and Savoy Brown. And if his relationship with the Stones and Mick Jagger remained precarious, perhaps Immediate could provide the rapprochement; aside from giving Oldham another outlet, it also supplied Jagger and Richards with additional income by way of covers of their songs, with Chris Farlowe’s version of “Out of Time” reaching number one in the UK.

  But the relationship between Oldham and the Stones would soon take a ruinous turn.

  On February 12, 1967, a small army of eighteen policemen descended on Redlands, Keith Richards’s recently purchased home in Sussex. The raid came just as Richards and several others were coming down from an LSD trip. The contraband recovered was modest: there were a couple of roaches around the house; Jagger had a few amphetamines purchased from a druggist in Italy; and a friend, Robert Fraser, had heroin. But it was enough to get them hauled off to jail, and the tabloid News of the World made a meal of the bust, reporting with particular gusto that Marianne Faithfull, fresh out of the shower, had greeted the police clad only in a fur rug.

  Though the men were released on bail, it immediately became apparent that the government was serious about bringing a case for jail time against Jagger and Richards. It was an obvious call to arms for Oldham, who had to know that at moments of crisis, a manager proves his worth by taking charge. It was his job to devise a strategy, hire the proper legal and public relations firms, and defuse the situation. Instead, he abandoned his clients and fled to America.

  “I was out of there,” Oldham admitted. “I was already not dealing with a completely full deck, but if you have five policemen in your house, you’ve got a good reason to think you’re going to end up in jail. So I left the country.” It fell to Klein to pick up the slack. He flew to London and huddled with publicist Les Perrin as well as Joynson and Hicks, the Stones’ solicitors, to select a barrister for Jagger and Richards’s court case.

  Allen suggested the band leave the country to get away from the press, and they took off for an extended stay in Morocco. The situation had become even more complicated when News of the World incorrectly attributed a prior drug incident involving Brian Jones to Jagger, who demanded a retraction and threatened the paper with a defamation suit. Richards came to believe that Jagger’s threat against the tabloid worked heavily against them, as the paper’s best defense would be their conviction on the drug charges, and he later suggested the newspaper conspired with prosecutors in a “stitch up.” Whether this was true or not, Jagger, Richards, and Fraser were all convicted at trial in June and sentenced to prison: Jagger for three months in Brixton, and Richards and Fraser for a year and six months, respectively, at Wormwood Scrubs.

  As incredible as the episode was, its least likely feature may have been the identity of their eventual savior. The day after sentencing, William Rees-Mogg, an editor at the conservative London Times, published a scathing essay decrying the thinness of the case and the injustice and idiocy of the sentences. Inspired by Alexander Pope, the editorial, entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?,” caused an outcry and forced the court to vacate Jagger’s and Richards’s sentences.* Jagger, said to be devastated by the sentence, wound up spending three nights in prison, all of them, reportedly, in the infirmary. Ri
chards spent only one night in prison and said he was treated well by his fellow inmates, but he was nonetheless relieved to be out. He soon turned wryly philosophic. “The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight,” he said. “I’ve been playing up to it ever since.”

  The day Jagger and Richards were released from jail, policeman Norman Pilcher, who’d already busted Donovan for drugs and would later target George Harrison and John Lennon, arrested Brian Jones for marijuana possession. Klein sent Perrin to bail him out and that evening invited Jagger, Richards, and Marianne Faithfull to his penthouse suite at the London Hilton to celebrate their release. Allen was at first stunned and then enraged when a package delivered to his suite for Marianne proved to contain a small box with a false bottom from which she produced a ball of hashish. Klein grabbed it from her, flushed the hash down the toilet, and tossed the box off the balcony. He couldn’t believe it—Jagger and Richards had just gotten out of jail!

  “You people are stupid!” he snapped.

  Marianne just pouted. “You didn’t have to throw it away.”

  The Beatles and their friend Donovan were spending the last week of August at Bangor University in North Wales studying transcendental meditation at a retreat with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. On Wednesday, August 23, the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, called to say he would join them the following Monday, August 28. But on Sunday, Epstein’s body was discovered in his Sussex home, his death later ruled an accidental drug overdose. He was thirty-two, and his passing left the Beatles shocked and rudderless. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” Lennon would later say. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared.” Allen Klein heard the news of Epstein’s passing on the radio Sunday evening, driving alone across the Henry Hudson Bridge to his home in Riverdale. “I got ’em!” he said aloud.

  With Epstein gone, Allen knew the Beatles were facing a rat’s nest of financial and contractual problems, the kind that only a few people had the ability to sort through. And while it would be more than a year before Klein actually became involved with the Beatles, there was something to his sense of inevitability. As he himself would ask, who else was there? The Beatles would comb the British financial world, in vain. And in the music business, the alternatives to Klein were either unavailable or unsatisfactory. Frank Sinatra’s attorney, Mickey Rudin, was certainly savvy enough to handle the group, but he was unlikely to be comfortable in their milieu. The Beatles knew Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, but the insular and affected Grossman already had a stable of artists and liked the world arranged to his own tastes, so it was doubtful that he would take on such a monumental task. Robert Stigwood, a rising force in management with the Bee Gees and Cream, had already been in and out of a brief and ugly partnership with Epstein and the Beatles; he wouldn’t cross that bridge again.

  No one wanted or needed to manage the Beatles as much as Allen did. His deepest secret wasn’t that he used creative and questionable ways to make money off his clients; indeed, given the right audience, he was likely to crow about that. His secret was that he would have managed the Beatles for nothing. Klein saw handling them as final and irrefutable proof that he was the best.

  For all the ingenuity and work that Klein brought to the pursuit of money, money was not an end in itself, or even how he kept score. He didn’t like losing it—he stopped playing the stock market after dropping a million dollars on National Video—but he always spent it lustily. And once he and his family were secure, money became a tool for vindication. Professionally, he needed to be acknowledged as the best and brightest in the game. In his private life, he had to be adored.

  Bluff and rough in battle, even downright nasty, in other situations, Klein wore his hunger for approval on his sleeve and waved his generosity like a big red banner. Once Allen had made it, no one out with him ever paid for a meal, a cab, an evening’s entertainment, an airline ticket (first class, of course), a hotel suite, or a vacation again. He had to pay.

  “He was probably the largest spender I ever met,” said his friend and attorney Leonard Leibman, recalling a time when Klein discovered a key in his jacket pocket for a suite at the Plaza Hotel that he’d used once three months earlier and forgotten to check out of. “He would have jets waiting on runways for three days. And you never saw a bill when you were with Mr. Klein.”

  Producer Julian Schlossberg attended the Cannes Film Festival with Klein in 1973, and on the way there they stopped in Rome to screen versions of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula,* which Klein was considering releasing in America. When they missed their subsequent flight to Nice, Allen chartered a private plane rather than wait several hours for the next commercial flight. “And he did it without fanfare,” said Schlossberg. “It was fun to be with a guy like that.”

  In return, Klein expected to have everything his way. There was an ABKCO softball team; Allen played third and led off every inning. There was an ABKCO basketball team; Allen took every free throw, despite the presence of two employees who’d attended college on basketball scholarships.

  Money was for making life pleasant, indulging whims, and skipping lines. A season-ticket holder for the Knicks and Rangers, Allen habitually tipped the lot attendant at a garage across from Madison Square Garden to park his Rolls-Royce by the entrance so he wouldn’t have to wait to retrieve it. One night when Betty parked the car, Allen was miffed to discover it wasn’t waiting for him at game’s end. He walked to the head of the cashier’s line and snatched the ticket from the man about to be served. “You paid for dinner,” Klein said in a loud voice. “I got this one.” He pushed the man’s ticket, and his own, into the cashier’s cage along with a hundred-dollar bill.

  In London, Allen used Alf Weaver, who’d driven Frank Sinatra, as his chauffeur. It was Weaver’s responsibility to settle Klein’s bills. When dining out, Allen and his guests would simply rise and leave after eating; Weaver would then come in and pay.

  Allen was fond of London’s exclusive gaming clubs, although he was an embarrassment to anyone who ever placed a wager. Klein’s modus operandi was to take a few guests and simply bet hunches, and a night of gambling usually ended as quickly as it began. After betting and losing several thousand dollars playing the same number at the roulette wheel four or five times, he would wander away in search of the free dinner the clubs served.

  Klein’s approach to fine dining was just as casual. “Allen didn’t know wine but he did know price and he always went to the bottom of the list,” said Michael Kramer, who recalled one dinner at Le Gavroche in London when he and Peter Howard, ABKCO’s UK attorney, dined with Allen, Betty, and their two youngest children, Jody and Beth. “He ordered a ’45 Lafite-Rothschild. This is when the Rothschild ’45 and ’61 are the wines and it must have been two thousand dollars. Peter is a wine person, and for him this is like Bo Derek is going to come to the table naked.” The bottle was decanted and allowed to breathe. Allen signaled the sommelier to pour for everyone, including Jody and Beth, who quickly surmised it was excellent for gargling. In short order, the decanter was knocked over, and the wine spilled all over the table. “I think Peter was fighting the urge to suck the tablecloth,” Kramer said.

  Klein worked hard for the Stones. Aside from all the financial administration, ABKCO was responsible for a wide range of functions, including manufacturing and promoting the Stones’ records, dealing with radio stations, hiring publicists, handling advertising, coordinating and supervising American tours, and overseeing the design and manufacture of their record sleeves. He was more than glad to have Oldham as a buffer. Unfortunately, it was increasingly clear that the relationship between Andrew and the band was barely extant. Jagger and Richards didn’t forget that he’d cut and run at their most vulnerable moment. When the Stones returned to the studio after the drug trial to begin work on a new album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, something had clearly changed.

  Previously focused and bus
inesslike in sessions, the band now came to the studio without tunes or a set agenda. Instead, they ran tape endlessly, experimenting or just noodling around. Oldham, who was contractually obligated to pay all recording costs, suspected the band members were out to bankrupt him and force his resignation.

  “Suddenly they weren’t arriving in the studio with songs,” he said. “There’s actually nothing to do. Three weeks this is going on—and three weeks in the sixties was a very long time. I was bored and had no idea what I was doing there. They had spent eighteen thousand pounds. You couldn’t spend eighteen thousand pounds on a Rolls-Royce regardless of what you put in it!”

  His suspicions were correct; the band believed Oldham had little left to contribute and were out to dump him. “His box of tricks was exhausted,” Richards said. By comparison, Jagger was continuing to grow; if anything, he was just beginning to hit his stride. Over the coming decades, the singer’s focus and increasing sophistication, both artistic and financial, would become a primary driver of the Rolling Stones’ ever-expanding popularity. He no longer needed or wanted Oldham—or anyone, for that matter—to tell him who the Rolling Stones should be or what they should do. “There was something between Mick and him that couldn’t be resolved that I can only speculate on,” Richards said. “They were falling out of sync with each other. Mick was starting to feel his oats and wanted to test it out by getting rid of Oldham.” Jagger never denied it. While allowing that the band was taking too much LSD during those album sessions, he admitted that much of the dithering was simply “to piss Andrew off because he was such a pain in the neck.” Said Jagger: “We wanted to unload him [and] we decided to go on this path to alienate him. Without actually doing it legally, we forced him out. I mean, he wanted out anyway. We were so out of our minds.” Klein, however, saw a more straightforward reason why the singer wanted to be rid of Oldham. “What bothered Jagger was that Oldham was making five times as much as him,” he said.