Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  From start to finish, The Concert for Bangladesh was an on-the-fly triumph, going from conception to performance to worldwide recognition in a few months. Or, rather, it was a triumph with one glaring exception: though the film and album raised more than fifteen million dollars through sales, it would take over a decade for the lion’s share of that money to be disbursed.

  Harrison didn’t pick a charitable organization to receive the funds until after the concert. And though he then made his choice promptly, selecting the U.S. Fund for UNICEF over the Red Cross and other organizations in a matter of days, the fact that the project wasn’t initially constituted as a dedicated charity, that UNICEF wasn’t involved in the staging of the show and that the money was funneled through Apple, led the IRS to insist the funds were actually taxable income. As a result, more than ten million dollars was held back while the issue was argued.

  As an artist, Harrison couldn’t reasonably have been expected to anticipate this problem. The finer points of tax liability, however, is precisely the kind of knowledge a business manager is expected to have—or acquire. Yet Klein would prove surprisingly unprepared.

  A month after the Concert for Bangladesh, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City. Living at first at the St. Regis Hotel, the couple jumped into America with both feet: Lennon released what would prove his most successful solo album, Imagine, just ten days after arriving.

  Coming so closely on the heels of the spring defeat in the McCartney case, the success of both Harrison’s Madison Square Garden concerts and Imagine, which sold two million copies in the U.S., were much-needed boosts for Klein. To hell with McCartney. “My Sweet Lord,” released as a single by Harrison nine months earlier, was an enormous worldwide hit, well on its way to being the most performed song of 1971, and now Lennon was about to top the American charts. Klein had the Beatles that mattered.

  He also had what he most desired: the imprimatur and validation of John Lennon. As far as John was concerned, Klein was real—“Allen’s human, whereas Eastman and all them other people are automatons,” he told an interviewer the week he arrived in New York—and Klein reinforced John’s sense of their camaraderie by ferrying him and Yoko out to Newark in a limousine to show them the orphanage and the streets and playgrounds where he’d grown up.

  John, Yoko, and Allen were an unlikely trio. Whatever affinity Lennon felt for Klein’s working-class roots, they lived in very different worlds. “There were fundamental levels on which they couldn’t communicate,” said Dan Richter, who worked for John and Yoko and dealt frequently with ABKCO. He recalled visiting the office with John and Yoko to discuss a proposal from Jonas Mekas to mount a festival of their films only to have Klein unable to talk about anything other than the expensive custom molding a carpenter had just installed in his office. Still, if Klein sometimes left John and Yoko at a loss, they were delighted to have found him. “John and Yoko were not money people at all and he was very excited about Allen for the first year or two. Allen was a hard hitter who played hardball and I never felt he was dishonest.”

  Allen was pleased that his opinion mattered to John, and he made a habit of speaking plainly and without deference to him. A few months before Lennon moved to New York, Klein had visited John’s hotel room and listened as Lennon sat in bed with Ono and strummed an unrecorded older composition, “On the Road to Marrakesh,” that he’d written in India in 1966. When John sang the song’s second line, “I was dreaming more or less,” Klein made a face.

  “That’s just terrible,” he said bluntly. He called the line tacky and dated and suggested it wasn’t up to John’s current standards.

  “Well,” Lennon shot back, “maybe you can give it to Bobby Vinton.”

  But the next day when Klein visited the couple again, Lennon showed that he’d taken his advice. “I was dreaming of the past,” he sang, “and my heart was beating very fast.” Overnight he had updated the idea and completely rewritten the song as “Jealous Guy.”

  As he had from the beginning, Klein remained attentive to Ono, showing her respect as both an artist and Lennon’s full partner. Yoko was locked in a bizarre and emotionally taxing custody battle for her young daughter, Kyoko, with her previous husband, photographer and aspiring filmmaker Tony Cox. Klein had traveled with the couple as they pursued Kyoko to the Spanish island of Majorca, where Cox was studying mysticism; more recently, Ono and Lennon had gone to the Virgin Islands where a judge had awarded Yoko custody of the girl, whereupon Cox disappeared with her. Later, Cox and his current wife, Melinda Kendall, were found to be living in Houston, and Michael Kramer would accompany John and Yoko in a vain pursuit through Texas. At that point, Cox, Kendall, and Kyoko simply vanished, leaving Yoko distraught.*

  Ono was an enigma to Beatles fans—what, for example, were those who came to see John perform with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto supposed to make of Yoko caterwauling from inside a white body bag? But that was precisely the point to Ono, who was a central figure in the neo-Dada Fluxus movement begun by composer John Cage, her friend and mentor. And although Fluxus existed on the avant-garde fringe a million miles from Beatlemania, she was established and well regarded in that world before she met Lennon. “The Beatles were fantastic,” said the cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, who had been Ono’s roommate and the performer in Yoko’s controversial Cut Piece, in which the audience was invited to scissor away her clothing, and had gained notoriety herself as “the topless cellist” arrested for performing Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique at New York’s Film-Makers Cinémathèque in 1967. “But a hundred years from now, it’s Yoko Ono the world’s going to remember, and not John Lennon or the Beatles.”

  Professionally, Yoko was eager to have her work seen. Jim Harithas, director of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, met Ono and Lennon at a gallery in New York and offered to turn the entire museum over to her for a monthlong show. “Very few women were getting shows and I thought she was a significant member of a very important movement,” he said. Dubbed This Is Not Here, the show was punctuated by Ono’s subtle and self-deprecating sense of humor (tagged a conceptual artist, she preferred the shortened term con artist). The exhibit featured her installations and pieces as well as screenings of her films, many codirected with Lennon, such as Fly, a twenty-five-minute short depicting the film’s star crawling on a naked woman; Erection, a punning time-lapse record of a construction site; and Up Your Legs Forever, a collection of bare-legged portraits panning from the toes to the waists of approximately three hundred well-known men, including composer Cage, author Tom Wolfe, folksinger Utah Phillips, actor George Segal, music journalist Al Aronowitz, TV host Dick Cavett, filmmakers Jonas Mekas and D. A. Pennebaker, Village Voice columnist Howard Smith, painters Larry Rivers, Peter Max, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, and Allen Klein. Also featured in the exhibit was a gallery of pieces solicited from like-minded artists; Andy Warhol contributed a video, Frank Zappa displayed the Volkswagen that Ono had filled with water, and Phil Spector donated a Beatles souvenir cup on which Paul McCartney’s image had been crossed out.

  Although the Everson wasn’t exactly the Prado, it was a major event for Syracuse—and for Ono and Lennon. The show opened on October 9, John’s thirty-first birthday, and the couple reportedly harbored hopes that a private preshow birthday party might be the occasion of a Beatles reunion, which, if nothing else, signaled that Ono wasn’t a factor in their dissolution. “Definitely, the idea was there,” Harithas said. “I think they tried to get them all.” In the end, Ringo was the only other Beatle to make the trip, and he joined Lennon and Ono at the Syracuse Hotel for a birthday party that also included Phil Spector, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman. Hoping to tie the event to their bed-ins and agitation for peace, Lennon had ABKCO create souvenirs with the slogan War Is Over! “John said, ‘We need to bring things to Syracuse we can sell,’” recalled Steckler. “‘Make up T-shirts and towels—best quality you can get.’ So thou
sands were made—and hundreds sold. The rest were just dumped.” It wasn’t unusual for Ono and Lennon to spend money on projects they never finished. As part of the move to New York, Lennon had the recording studio at his English home in Ascot disassembled and shipped to him. It sat unclaimed and ultimately rusted at Kennedy Airport.

  Back in Manhattan, Klein continued to show his support and woo Ono. When art dealer Ivan Karp at the OK Harris gallery in SoHo mounted an auction of Yoko’s work, Allen sent his assistant Paul Mozian with instructions to bid up the prices. “I bid so high we had to buy some things,” Mozian said. At first, Klein was annoyed—“I didn’t tell you to buy things!” he thundered—but when Yoko later saw her pieces hanging in ABKCO’s offices, she was very pleased, and Paul was off the hook.

  Lennon’s intense relationship with his wife—they were virtually inseparable—was a subject of fascination around the office. And because John was open and candid, people felt they could ask him very personal questions. On one occasion, Jackie Kennedy, her sister Lee Radziwill, and John and Caroline Kennedy had come by to watch a recording session, and Yoko had subsequently left with them, so Al Steckler found himself alone in the studio with Lennon. He couldn’t resist the opportunity.

  “You’re with Yoko twenty-four/seven,” Steckler said. “How do you manage that?”

  “She makes me think,” Lennon said. “I’m always thinking when she’s with me.”

  When John and Yoko moved out of the St. Regis Hotel and into an apartment on Bank Street in the West Village that they’d sublet from Joe Butler, the drummer for the Lovin’ Spoonful, Michael Kramer was a frequent guest.

  “I always had really good pot,” Kramer said, “and I’d get a call around four p.m. from Yoko, which was about when they woke up, asking me to come down to the house to see them. Meaning, ‘Come get us high.’” Arriving one afternoon, he was surprised to find Yoko on her way out.

  As Kramer sat on the bed and smoked dope with Lennon, his curiosity got the better of him. “I had to ask the Barbara Walters question,” he said. “‘Why Yoko?’”

  Lennon was surprised. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “John,” Michael said, “you could have any woman in the world. Why her?”

  Lennon shook his head. “Once,” he said. “I can have any woman once. After you fuck them you’re not a Beatle anymore.”

  Nonetheless, Lennon didn’t always acquiesce to Ono’s wishes, as his refusal to appear with her at the Concert for Bangladesh had shown. One afternoon when Yoko and Lennon were at the ABKCO offices, Harrison appeared, and the two former band mates were pleasantly surprised by the coincidence and glad to see each other. Noticing Harrison had a guitar with him, Lennon grabbed one of the instruments he kept in the office, and the two began to play together. When Yoko tried to join in and sing along, John asked her to stop. When she didn’t, he picked her up bodily and carried her out of the room.

  Lennon and Ono’s private life could be unorthodox (during a period when John and Yoko were living apart, an ABKCO receptionist, May Pang, became Lennon’s Ono-sanctioned concubine), but Klein’s private life might have had even Lennon and Ono scratching their heads. Though married and unwilling to get a divorce, Klein was obviously romantically involved with one of his employees, Iris Keitel. The two couples were frequently together for both business and socializing. One evening they went out to dinner, then returned to Keitel’s apartment in midtown. After a few minutes, there was a knock at the door; it was Allen’s wife, Betty. Sensing a scene they wanted no part of, John and Yoko excused themselves, went into Iris’s bedroom, and closed the door. But Allen did them one better: he simply left, leaving his wife and mistress to yell at each other with John and Yoko trapped in the bedroom.

  One Saturday night Kramer took Lennon to the Elgin Theater for the midnight screening of El Topo, an underground psychedelic spaghetti Western from South America. Lennon loved it and raved about the film to Klein. Allen decided to buy the film and put it in general distribution.

  “Why is Klein interested?” asked ABKCO attorney Harold Seider. “Because John loved it. Klein is a great panderer to the artist. A terrific salesman. When we were negotiating [for the film], Allen said, ‘I want to pay top dollar.’ So we overpaid.”

  Klein did more than that; he produced and financed Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s next film, The Holy Mountain. A drugged-out Dadaist fantasy revolving around a Christ-like figure whose excrement could be turned into gold, the visually overloaded picture cemented Jodorowsky’s reputation as the enfant terrible of the cinematic avant-garde.

  Klein, always interested in being in the movie business, began to look at arthouse films. In 1973, he would acquire the American rights to La Grande Bouffe, a scatological farce concerning four friends who eat themselves to death.* Initially, Jodorowsky and Klein got along famously. ABKCO sent the director a plane ticket so he could come to New York and attend the Concert for Bangladesh. When Jodorowsky arrived at Kennedy Airport, there was a limousine waiting, and, he recalled, a beautiful sari-wrapped woman in the back seat. “Of course I fucked her,” the octogenarian surrealist said wistfully. But the relationship with Klein turned acrimonious with the next project. Klein wanted him to film the sadomasochistic bestseller The Story of O. Jodorowsky took Klein’s money, then announced he wasn’t a pornographer and wouldn’t make the movie. Furious at being played, Klein yanked both El Topo and The Holy Mountain from distribution. Neither film would be shown again for over twenty years.

  Though he was eager to spend ABKCO’s money on El Topo and other projects to impress Lennon, Klein worried about the three Beatles’ finances. With the appointment of a receiver by the British court, Apple’s income from the Beatles no longer passed through ABKCO. Until a settlement on the dissolution of the partnership could be reached, the Beatles received a limited monthly stipend. In the interim, Klein advanced the three Beatles large sums of money—ultimately more than a million dollars—as loans. He was particularly concerned about Lennon and Ono. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told Steckler. “Yoko’s spending a fortune on these projects and John doesn’t really have it.”

  The ABKCO creative director was well aware of Ono’s artistic and financial habits. In the last week of November, he’d received an angry call from a director at the Museum of Modern Art.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” the incensed official asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Steckler said.

  “There’s an ad in today’s New York Times for a Yoko Ono exhibit at MoMA. Only there isn’t any.”

  Steckler quickly dialed Yoko, who told him that there was, indeed, a MoMA show. “It’s in my head,” she said.

  “Well,” Steckler said, “MoMA is pretty upset.”

  “They shouldn’t be. It’s just a conceptual act.”

  Steckler called the museum to explain. “Well,” the director said, “what about the calendar? People are asking us for it.” The newspaper ad had said a one-dollar calendar “filled with photographs from the event itself” was for sale in conjunction with the exhibit.

  Steckler headed over to the Bank Street apartment and found Yoko eager to make good on the ad. “We’ll make a calendar,” she said. Throwing herself into the project, she hired a London fashion photographer and had ABKCO fly him to New York on a first-class ticket and put him up at the Plaza Hotel. Two weeks later, when Steckler received the results, he discovered the photographer had spent the entire time in New York taking pictures of door locks—perhaps a sly comment by Ono on the museum’s inaccessibility to her as a venue. The photos were taken to Queens Litho, the printer ABKCO used for record jackets. Each one-dollar calendar cost eight dollars to produce.

  In his single-minded pursuit of the Beatles, Klein had given the Rolling Stones short shrift. Whether it was irony or payback, his split with the Stones was proving as time-consuming as managing them.

  Initially frosty to each other—the Stones had simply informed ABKCO by lette
r in the summer of 1970 that they would no longer be working with the company—Klein and the band had nonetheless continued to deal with business issues as they came up. Most notably, the band still owed at least one album to London Records, even though Jagger had already made a deal sans Klein for their own label through Atlantic. ABKCO’s creative director, Al Steckler, suggested they fulfill the old contract with a two-record anthology. “I wanted to put together something that was a history, not just singles,” he said, “and Allen said, ‘Speak to Jagger.’” The result, Hot Rocks, would become one of the Stones’ bestsellers.

  It would also turn out to be a bone of contention. Hot Rocks was released by London for Christmas 1971, more than six months after Rolling Stones Records debuted with Sticky Fingers, and ABKCO soon found it had unexpected competition when the Stones, via Atlantic, pressed up their own copies of Hot Rocks. ABKCO quickly sought a preliminary injunction barring Atlantic from selling the album.

  Over the previous months, the Stones had grown far more aggrieved and aggressive regarding Klein. Nearly a year after terminating their relationship with him, they sued Klein over the Nanker Phelge agreements. Three months later, in October 1971, they also sought to break their publishing contracts with ABKCO. “There was no rancor before that,” said Kramer. “They signed with Atlantic and then started questioning the validity of the old artist agreement with Andrew Oldham that Allen bought.”

  Though the Rolling Stones were not a party to ABKCO’s Hot Rocks suit against Atlantic Records, the same lawyers who were representing the group against ABKCO, Allen Arrow and his litigation specialist, Peter Parcher, were defending Atlantic. In this case, Klein’s selection of attorney Max Freund to represent ABKCO proved fortuitous: he and the trial judge, Jacob Markowitz, had attended Harvard Law School together.