by Fred Goodman
School wasn’t in session very long; It Had to Be You opened May 10, 1981, at the John Golden Theater and ran barely a month. The final debut of the 1980–1981 Tony Award season, the play left New York Times theater critic Frank Rich feeling he’d worked one night too many. “I’m afraid the season didn’t end with a bang or even a whimper,” he wrote, “just an attenuated yawn.”
Undeterred, Klein turned next to a play by a heavyweight, the groundbreaking American dramatist Edward Albee, whose most successful and frequently performed plays were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Zoo Story. But the play Klein produced, The Man Who Had Three Arms, might have been the nadir of Albee’s career, and it closed after two weeks. The only person who seemed to be getting fat on Klein’s theater career was Frank Rich, who had another opportunity to deliver some of his most withering zingers. According to Rich, the play, which was directed by Albee, didn’t add up to the sum of its parts; he found it by turns insulting, misogynistic, and a painfully embarrassing spectacle—“a temper tantrum in two acts.”
Retreating from the Great White Way, Allen and ABKCO had nothing to show for their troubles except a financial crunch. The company had steady-earning assets in its recordings and music-publishing catalogs but little in the way of new revenue streams. But two angels were about to appear on the horizon: compact discs and Sam Cooke.
As the new vice president of A&R at RCA Records, Gregg Geller had his work cut out for him.
It was the spring of 1984 and Geller, who until recently had been at the far more successful Columbia Records, arrived at a label that, if not moribund, was certainly second tier. Unlike CBS, Columbia Records’ owner, which viewed Columbia as a valuable and integral part of the company, the RCA Corporation, a major military and government contractor, was a little embarrassed to be in the record business. Indeed, RCA’s corporate executives gave the impression that they were less concerned with the company’s profit picture than they were with making sure that the label did not sign anyone too weird and raise eyebrows in Washington. As a result, RCA, which had once vied with Columbia to be the top American recording company, was now a music-industry also-ran. Geller, however, was no corporate hack; he was in it for the music and wanted to change the label’s culture and reputation.
Near the top of his to-do list was searching the company’s vaults for historic and overlooked material. As Geller was leaving Columbia, another executive, Joe McEwen, had tipped him to a rumor among R&B aficionados about an extraordinary unreleased live album by Sam Cooke that was gathering dust at RCA. While poking around, Geller found the 1962 tapes for a project dubbed One Night Stand. When he listened to the tapes, two things were immediately apparent. First, Geller knew why the album had been shelved: at a time when Cooke was achieving pop and crossover success with white listeners, this was something completely antithetical, an R&B show for a black audience in a Miami nightclub. Second, it was an extraordinary performance—incendiary, gripping, and raw. This wasn’t the Sam Cooke of “Cupid” and “Everybody Likes to Cha Cha Cha”; this was Sam Cooke sweating and steaming and ripping it up. Geller knew right away it would turn a lot of heads, cast Cooke in a different light, and intrigue a new generation. He had to put it out.
When Geller said as much to his boss, he was told flatly that wouldn’t be possible. “There was a laundry list of issues with Allen Klein, who controlled Sam’s recordings,” said Geller. “And RCA hadn’t been able to get anywhere with Klein or put out anything by Sam Cooke since 1970. However, they said if I wanted to try and talk with him, please feel free.”
Geller was filled with trepidation. He had never dealt with Klein but had heard the stories and rumors about the record-industry robber baron who’d broken up the Beatles, conned the Rolling Stones, and been imprisoned and disgraced for selling promos. But those Cooke tapes were mesmerizing. He took a deep breath and made an appointment to see Klein.
As Gregg was an emissary of RCA, Klein met him coolly. RCA executives didn’t know what they were doing and usually got it wrong, and Klein had twenty years’ worth of examples to prove it. Clearly, Geller was just the latest in a long line of clueless RCA automatons, and Allen began questioning the nervous executive, first generally and then with increasing specificity, about what he wanted and how he thought it should be done. The interrogation lasted five hours. In the end, Klein agreed to let Geller move forward with a live album.
“I had to prove over and over that I had only altruistic and music reasons for doing this,” recalled Geller. But the more he talked to Klein, the more the executive was convinced that Allen was asking the right questions. “I’m sure he had financial concerns as well, but it became clear that his first concern was for the music.”
Over the subsequent months, Klein would prove very demanding—and impressive. “Allen’s attention to detail was phenomenal—we had to get every jot right,” said Geller. “It was endless hours on the phone but you ended up sort of loving the guy. I saw that there is a reason artists gravitate toward him: he loves to do battle. And if he’s doing battle for you, you’re in great hands. For me, the lesson was ‘Don’t believe the hype.’ He was just from an earlier era in the business.”
The resulting album, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, was immediately hailed as one of the great live albums and drew comparisons to James Brown’s classic album from the same period, Live at the Apollo. Just as Geller had hoped, it was a strong seller and sparked a renewed interest in the singer.
Its follow-up, a twenty-eight-song retrospective entitled Sam Cooke: The Man and His Music, was a huge worldwide success. In the United Kingdom, where Klein had licensed the song “Wonderful World” to Levi’s for an ad campaign, the recording—twenty-six years after its initial release—was reissued as a single and went to number two. In short order, Cooke was selling millions of records throughout Europe.
A shot in the arm for ABKCO, the album seemed the prescription for a reinvigorated and happy relationship between Klein and RCA. That did not turn out to be the case. Cooke’s resurrection spurred RCA’s foreign affiliates to assemble and release their own albums, despite not having the rights to do so. It wasn’t hard for Klein to show that RCA had violated its agreement, and he wrested back the rights to release Cooke’s recordings. “There was a reason Allen was so difficult for record companies to deal with,” said Geller, who left RCA in 1987 and was hired by ABKCO as a producer. “They were frequently wrong.”
A more lasting impact on ABKCO came from CDs. The audio compact disc, co-developed by Philips and Sony and introduced in 1981, would bring profound changes to the record business. In its first decade, the format ushered in boom times; with a suggested list price of $15.98, it effectively doubled the price of albums while making vinyl albums obsolete. Not only were new albums suddenly twice as expensive, but many fans purchased much of their old record collections in the new format. It was found money for the business, and the major labels became flush with cash.
For ABKCO, the emergence of CDs held out a great deal of promise but also a practical problem. With the technology exclusively owned and tightly held by Philips and Sony, demand far outstripped production capabilities. There were only a handful of manufacturing facilities worldwide, and record companies had to queue up; an independent like ABKCO was at the back of the line. It wasn’t until late 1986 that ABKCO was finally able to release its thirteen Rolling Stones albums on CD, simultaneously with the later albums on Rolling Stones Records, which were then distributed by CBS Records.
For Klein, the coordinated CD program meant the start of a détente with the Stones. Their last legal tussle, two years earlier, had been a result of Allen’s propensity to drag his heels on royalty payments, something Allen’s lawyer Gideon Cashman believed Klein did just to annoy Jagger. In 1984, Jagger and Richards had brought a suit to break their publishing agreement, stating that the company had failed to pay royalties in a reasonable and timely manner, which constituted material breach. The case was essentially tossed
out when the Stones’ financial adviser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, admitted on the stand that he and Klein frequently made friendly hundred-dollar bets over when the royalties would be paid. The judge, seeing no reason to treat the situation as a material breach, encouraged both sides to reach a settlement. “Obviously, if the guy was betting with Allen, it’s not a serious thing,” said Cashman. “But Allen lost his ability to diddle them as much as he would have liked.”
As it had in the past when the Stones’ albums were on London, ABKCO continued to handle the manufacturing and sell finished goods to the American record distributor, which at this point was PolyGram. Again, that meant ABKCO’s profit margins were unusually high, and the proliferation of CDs lifted ABKCO out of its financial crunch.
“What the fuck are we even doing here?”
It was just before Christmas of 1984 and Allen Klein sat with Michael Kramer in an otherwise empty midtown Manhattan screening room. They’d received an urgent but cryptic call from Paramount Pictures the night before saying it was imperative that Klein come and screen an upcoming film.
Without anyone giving them a word of explanation, the lights went down and the screen lit up. The film, starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, was entitled Witness. Ford played a lawman guarding the only witness to a brutal Mob murder: a young Amish boy. Though the man is an outside and unwelcome presence in the cloistered community, he and the boy’s mother, McGillis, are soon attracted to each other. Klein, however, wasn’t interested in the plot. “What the hell is going on here?” he muttered to Kramer every few minutes. “I don’t get why we’re here!” An hour into the film, the clouds suddenly parted.
Alone in a barn with the mother, the detective turned on the radio. A sound-alike recording of Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” was heard in the background. “Oh!” Klein exclaimed, immediately surmising that the producers had neglected to apply for a sync license.
Klein had long complained that film licenses for music were vastly underpriced. But a song playing in the background of the scene was considered incidental use, so it was in Klein’s interest as the song’s co-publisher to make an easy and reasonable deal—maybe charge the studio a couple thousand dollars—and not force the producers to dub in another song. But when Ford began to sing along with the tune, Klein sat up in his chair and his eyes got large. Soon the actor was whirling McGillis around the barn in an illicit embrace, and the strains of “Wonderful World” became an integral part of the scene. The situation had just changed, and radically: If Klein didn’t give permission to use the music, the song couldn’t just be stripped out; the whole scene would have to be reshot. And clearly, Witness was done and about to be released. He had Paramount by the balls! A wide-eyed Allen turned to his nephew. “I don’t fucking believe this!” According to Kramer, a deal worth over $200,000 was struck.
As with the five-dollar royalty he’d gotten on the album The Concert for Bangladesh, an extraordinary situation allowed Klein to cut a deal that, while unique, demonstrated that studios could pay artists significantly more money than they usually did. By the end of the decade, the popularity of MTV made Hollywood eager to exploit popular music, and licensing and synchronization fees went wild; almost every record company had a vice president whose sole job was developing soundtrack opportunities. Films with seven-figure music budgets were not uncommon. Said Kramer: “The eighties and nineties turned out to be a good time to be Allen Klein.”
In early 1988, Klein’s estranged former attorney and crony Marty Machat developed a bad cough that he couldn’t shake. A heavy smoker, Machat was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and died just a few weeks later, in March. Allen, who hadn’t spoken with Machat since refusing to include him in his dealings with the Beatles nineteen years earlier, heard of Machat’s passing from Gregg Geller. Klein responded to the news with a thoughtful, faraway look that Geller read as sadness and introspection. Two days later, when Geller learned that Klein was now managing Phil Spector—whom Machat had represented—he wasn’t so sure he’d interpreted that look correctly.
If mutual need was the determinant, it was an ideal match. Klein had become an industry outcast. His only client was the singer/songwriter Bobby Womack, and his steamroller negotiating skills and encyclopedic knowledge of the music business were largely wasted, applied solely to promoting and exploiting the recordings and publishing held by ABKCO. He needed a big-ticket, brand-name client—preferably one with problems for him to solve. Spector more than fit the bill; like Klein, the legendary producer had played himself to the industry’s margins. His reputation for brilliance remained, but that legacy wasn’t enough to erase an equally well-known propensity for paranoid and erratic, sometimes threatening behavior. No one who visited Spector’s home knew what to expect: ABKCO’s Al Steckler recalled dropping by unannounced with George Harrison—for whom Phil had produced both All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh—and being chased away with a shotgun blast. Spector hadn’t worked in years, his last productions having been late-seventies albums by Leonard Cohen and the Ramones that ran counter to fan expectations and received mixed reviews. But he did have business problems that cried out for resolutions.
His biggest difficulty concerned his publishing company, Mother Bertha Music, which held his share of the copyrights on songs he’d written or cowritten. Administration was handled by another publishing company, Trio, which was formed and controlled by the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, with whom Spector had sometimes cowritten. Trio, in turn, was administrated by a large, global publisher, Warner/Chappell Music. Warner/Chappell collected and paid Trio, which then paid Spector through Mother Bertha. But Spector complained to Klein that he wasn’t being paid properly. “Warner was paying his share to Trio and they were not paying him,” recalled attorney Don Zakarin, who worked with Klein and handled the Trio dispute. “It was a lot of money.”
Bringing a case in federal court, Klein and Spector wanted to break the agreement with Trio, license directly to Warner/Chappell, and then co-administer with Trio. When Zakarin explained to Klein that a win in court could get them only the money they said they were owed and not co-administrative rights, Klein said he wanted to settle the case and seek those rights some other way.
Zakarin thought this a dubious strategy; he couldn’t see how they could get more in a settlement than they could through a win. But he was wrong—Klein had recognized that the real deep-pocket target, the one with the most to lose, wasn’t Trio but Warner/Chappell. “I think Warner’s put pressure on Trio to get this done,” Zakarin said. “They were embarrassed and concerned it could blow up into something involving other subpublishers if it were heavily publicized.” And it didn’t help Warner/Chappell’s case when their executive vice president and general counsel Don Biederman made an embarrassing gaffe in depositions.
As was his habit when he took depositions, Klein rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but he didn’t introduce himself to Biederman when he arrived. Biederman recognized Zakarin and a court stenographer but didn’t know the two others present, Klein and his English solicitor Peter Howard. Used to peppering his counsel with notes during hearings and depositions, Klein wrote furiously as Biederman answered questions and constantly handed notes to Howard, who read them and passed them to Zakarin. Biederman, assuming Peter Howard was Klein, was at first distracted and then annoyed by the stranger scribbling madly every time he answered a question. Eventually he lost his patience. Jumping up and pointing a finger at Klein, he angrily bellowed, “Okay, who the fuck are you?”
When he was told of his error, an apologetic Biederman slumped back into his chair as if he’d been shot. He approached Klein at the next break and immediately began exploring a settlement. Klein and Spector got the administrative agreement they’d wanted all along. Marveled Zakarin, “I’d never seen that done before, where you got more in a settlement than you would in an outright win.”
Klein had another odd win practically fall into his lap courtesy of t
he British rock band the Verve.
As Allen’s constant companion and longtime employee, Iris Keitel didn’t have to guess how he would react to a particular proposition or problem. When Jazz Summers, the manager of the British group the Verve, called in early 1997 to say the band wanted to get publishing clearance for a sample, Iris handled the situation. She told Summers that someone from the record company had already phoned and tried to low-ball ABKCO with an offer of 15 percent. “I’ve told him to fuck off, Jazz,” she said. “We don’t like people stealing our music. I’ve spoken to Allen. We’re not going to agree to this.”
Indeed, Klein was ultraprotective. ABKCO was happy to support writers who wanted to collaborate with other artists, but he saw sampling as a dilution of a work’s viability and didn’t want to encourage people to use samples and then negotiate retroactively.
That was precisely what the Verve’s musicians were trying to do. In this case, the sample, used in a song entitled “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” was taken from an instrumental version of the Rolling Stones song “The Last Time” that had appeared on an album by the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra. The Verve had cleared the rights to sample the recording from Decca Records, but they hadn’t thought about getting permission for the underlying composition until after the fact. The irony was that the segment lifted from the Oldham recording didn’t sound a bit like the original Stones song, and the arranger who’d written the riff, David Whitaker, wasn’t even listed as a composer. As it stood, the credits for “Bitter Sweet Symphony” were shared between Verve vocalist Richard Ashcroft and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. But the record couldn’t be released without the permission of Jagger and Richards’s publisher, ABKCO Music.