Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  At a loss, Summers let his record company take a whack at it. Ken Berry, the head of EMI Records, came to New York and called on Klein. He played Klein the completed Verve album, Urban Hymns, which EMI’s Virgin label was betting would be a big hit. And “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was its obvious lead single. So Allen could appreciate how imperative it was that he grant a license.

  “There’s no sampling of our music,” he said. “We just don’t believe in it.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said the head of EMI Records.

  Klein let a day or two pass before calling Berry. He realized EMI and the band were in a bind, he said, and he was willing to make an exception to his rule and grant a license—if Ashcroft sold ABKCO his rights as lyricist and the company became the sole publisher of “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” The bargain was made; Richard Ashcroft was paid a thousand dollars.

  The deal was as unsparing as any in Klein’s career; he held all the cards, played them, and raked in the pot. When music photographer Mick Rock happened to call Klein that day to see how he was, it was obvious to him that Allen was enjoying himself. “I was very bad today,” he said.

  The album did, in fact, become a hit, and the sampled riff in “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was a stadium-ready crowd pleaser that would prove extremely popular for use at sporting events. ABKCO actively exploited the composition, licensing it to be used in commercials around the world for various products, including Nike shoes and Opel automobiles. When the band decided the song was being overexposed and overused, they declined to license the original recording for any more commercials. As the publisher, ABKCO instead commissioned its own recordings for commercial use. To date, “Bitter Sweet Symphony” remains one of ABKCO’s best-earning compositions. For Klein, the old lion, it was the chance to linger over one last big kill. For Jagger and Richards, “Bitter Sweet Symphony” produced both a payday and a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year—pretty good, considering they had nothing to do with it and it didn’t sound anything like what they’d actually written.*

  Spector and Klein were an oddly matched pair, two deposed Napoleons wandering the fringes of the music business as if on a shared Elba. Spector was unpredictable, to say the least; during one visit to his home, Klein and Peter Howard weren’t allowed to leave until they convinced Spector they were about to plow the Beverly Hills Hotel limousine through the locked driveway gate. Nonetheless, Spector became one of Klein’s frequent companions, socializing with him and Iris and sitting through the couple’s fiery arguments over Allen’s staunch refusal to divorce Betty.

  “They used to have some bitter fights, Allen and Iris,” Spector said. “She wanted her man and wanted to be married to him. And he was not about to give up his children and wife and that relationship. It made no sense to anyone but Allen, but that was Allen. We would be in the car and he would be driving and arguing with her at the same time. We’d be scared to death that he’d hit a car.”

  Mostly, however, Klein wanted companionship, someone to climb into the limousine with him at night and drive out to Newark. “He always talked about his childhood,” said Spector. “Always. Always talked about growing up in the home. Always talked about his sister. Always talked about the poverty . . . the loneliness . . . the lack of guardianship. As often as he could, as much as he could. He must have told me the story a thousand times if he told it to me once.”

  Still fighting his lifelong battle against silence and pauses, Klein suffered from not having enough to do. Ever eager to play the host and dictate the agenda, he now became a cross between Uncle Allen and Santa Claus. When Mick Rock had a massive heart attack and required quadruple-bypass surgery, Klein had him moved from a hospital in Staten Island to the care of his own Manhattan cardiologist at Beth Israel and paid the photographer’s medical bills. Rock would later joke that the doctors at Beth Israel’s cardiac unit used heroic measures to save his life because they were afraid Klein would stop contributing to the hospital if he died, but he told Allen he didn’t know how to begin to thank him. Klein waved him off. “You’re my ticket to heaven,” he said. Klein sent Andrew Oldham to the same doctor and Andrew, when not ruminating on how he’d given away a kingdom to Klein, could be counted on to be Allen’s houseguest or traveling companion—on Allen’s dime, of course.

  Most days at the office, Klein would grab a secretary, head uptown to Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet market and temple to all things smoked, pickled, and creamed, and return with several hundred dollars’ worth of choice goodies for everyone. Hosted days off—picnics and visits to Klein’s Hamptons beach house—became a regular part of the ABKCO culture.

  Diagnosed with diabetes at forty, Klein dutifully took his prescribed medications but made no other concessions to the illness in his lifestyle. His favorite meal remained the Italian at Jimmy Buff’s in New Jersey: two deep-fried hot dogs jammed into a giant bun along with a greasy, oozing handful of onions, peppers, and fried potatoes, and he delighted in either wowing or horrifying others with meals at the ramshackle stand, preferably as the last stop on a narrated tour of Newark covering his old neighborhood playgrounds and the cemetery where his parents and grandparents were buried.

  Now in his sixties, the man who once sent out Christmas cards billing himself as the biggest bastard in the valley evinced a softer, gentler Klein.

  “There are three phases in the life of many successful businessmen,” observed Laurence Myers. “The stages are dishonorable, honorable, and honored. The first phase is when you’re struggling and you’ll do whatever you have to do and you’re as dishonorable as you have to be to establish yourself. And then, when you’ve got some money, it becomes very important to be known as honorable: ‘That man’s word is his bond—you don’t have to worry about anything.’ And in the last stage you want to be honored. If you’re in the toy business, you want to be chairman of the Toy Federation; if you’re in the music business, you want to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Allen’s life very much followed that. I was with him in the dishonorable stage. I’m not preaching or disapproving—I learned!”

  Some who knew the industry intimately saw little reason for Klein to be ostracized. “I really liked him,” said Irving Azoff, who has managed dozens of acts since the early seventies, including the Eagles, and who, while head of MCA Records, negotiated with Klein to sign Bobby Womack. “He really cared about his artists. He cared about Bobby and he still cared about Phil Spector long after Phil turned into a joke. Maybe he took too big a piece—I don’t know. But in those days, everybody took too big a piece. He didn’t strike me as any more mercenary than Ahmet Ertegun or any of the guys from that era.”

  Indeed, Klein became one of the largest financial supporters of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; though a small company, ABKCO bought more tables—at ten thousand dollars apiece—for the hall’s annual induction dinner at the Waldorf Astoria than most major record companies. His postdinner parties held in Waldorf suite 37A with Spector as cohost but Allen picking up the tab were lavish and legendary blowouts, a must-attend event for both musicians and executives.

  Maybe Klein intended his support and high profile to remind the Hall of Fame members that he’d played a key role in modernizing the record business, or maybe he hoped the table packed with friends and clients like Bobby Womack, Lloyd Price, Andrew Oldham, and the family of Sam Cooke demonstrated that he was hardly a pariah, but in any case, he was knocking on a locked door. It wasn’t because of his tax conviction; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honors musical achievement, music’s culture, and music’s facilitators, and it hasn’t balked at welcoming producers and label presidents who ran dodgy businesses or abused, underpaid, or outright robbed performers. The organization’s indifference to an honoree’s actions in the wider world is best evidenced by the continued inclusion of Spector, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989 and remains there today despite his 2009 conviction for murder. But while Klein was certainly a music-industry professional and artists’ advocate, he was never
a member of the flock—he was the lone wolf terrorizing it. Indeed, he was a constant antagonist who made his money and his contribution to the business by shifting the balance of financial and artistic power away from the labels and toward the creators. Once he started that shift and demonstrated the leverage of the artists, it was only a matter of time before his confrontational tactics (and his ability to charge clients a steep fee) would be undercut by a new class of more conventional managers, attorneys, and financial advisers. “Allen couldn’t do anything now,” observed Laurence Myers. “Because everyone is aware and advised by people who are aware. There’s no deal that could be done only by Allen Klein.” Klein became passé, a victim of his own success.

  It was no surprise that the business didn’t remember Klein warmly, but it was surprising that he seemed to hope it would. He was, after all, the hard-nosed realist who’d dismissed business ethics as a canard and whose calling card was the ability to outthink an opponent and then get under his skin. Doing that well is no prescription for popularity.

  Of course, pissing off the two most popular rock stars in the world, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, didn’t help him, either.

  Klein refused to believe Yoko Ono really wished him dead. Even at the moment she spoke so bitterly, he would not accept it. “You’ll never lose me as a friend,” he recalled telling her. And indeed, the relationship continued. Jann Wenner, a friend of Ono, said it wasn’t unusual for him to run into Klein at her apartment.

  As always, it was impossible to say whether it was a matter of altruism or self-interest. Klein thought of himself as someone who came through in the clutch—he liked to say he was a foul-weather friend. And he clearly felt a duty to and bond with Ono. At the same time, he never stopped being Allen Klein, business manager and salesman supreme. No matter how much the industry ignored him, he was always on the comeback trail.

  The Rolling Stones’ early catalog and songs remained far more valuable than anyone had initially imagined, and they proved Allen’s greatest tool for relevance. As an administrator, Klein was serious about protecting the integrity of the work, as he had been with Cooke. There was no creaming or discounting of the Stones’ music, no eye-rolling licenses for commercial use. “He was so conscious of not diluting their potency,” said Kramer.

  When he saw a possibility for a worthwhile project, he went after it. As part of an earlier settlement with the band, Klein had acquired the album and video rights to The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. It had been easy for the Stones to give up the rights, since the film didn’t actually exist. After they’d decided not to air it on television, editing had never been completed. The original tapes had been scattered all over England and forgotten. But in the 1990s, Klein’s daughter Robin, who’d begun what would eventually become her career in 1979 by snagging a job as an editing assistant on the concert film No Nukes, started scouring London for the missing tapes. She found some in the possession of the Who, some in the Stones’ warehouse, and much of the rest sitting in Ian Stewart’s garage. For a lost performance by Marianne Faithfull, Robin uncovered and substituted a sumptuous crane-shot performance of “Something Better” done for French television. The search and reconstruction of the film took her six years. While only a modest moneymaker, the resurrected Rock and Roll Circus would prove both a labor of love and a fascinating document. Though Jagger had reportedly shelved the film over fears that the Who had upstaged the Stones at their own gig, he needn’t have worried. The Who’s performance in the finally realized film is indeed explosive, and appearances by others, particularly John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, and Taj Mahal, range from historically interesting to moving. But the Stones, who perform tracks from Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, more than justify their slot at the top of the bill. The film’s most extraordinary and revealing performance is by Jagger; watching him seduce and force his will on the audience—singing, crawling, beckoning, commanding—you know that there are no accidents of fame.

  By the nineties, Klein and the Stones had finally settled into a livable arrangement. Like a divorced couple who’ve learned to set aside animosity and lingering bitterness when the children need something, they negotiated partnerships and agreements. In 2002, the band toured and marked their fortieth anniversary with a two-CD forty-song collection, Forty Licks. The first twenty numbers were culled from the ABKCO-controlled catalog, a deal that required real give-and-take to achieve. The Stones’ catalog was ABKCO’s lifeblood, and this compilation was just the kind of one-shot alternative to buying the original albums that Klein had always avoided. Yet its value to the band and to their tour—and to the Stones’ continuing viability—was obvious. When Allen’s son, Jody, suggested a five-year payment formula that approximated what ABKCO expected to lose on catalog sales over that period, everyone found it far-thinking and reasonable. Everyone except Allen, that is, who seemed miffed to have the solution proposed by someone else, even if it was his son.

  Having suffered a series of heart attacks of varying severity—one was misdiagnosed as indigestion—Klein was clearly slowing down, relying more on Keitel and Jody in negotiations. In 2003, when Apple Computer was launching its iTunes store, Steve Jobs came to see Klein. Having failed to make a deal with the Beatles, he wanted to debut the store with the music of the Rolling Stones. Klein, the guardian and hoarder of catalogs, had philosophic and economic arguments against unbundling, the selling of individual tracks rather than full albums. But eventually he recognized that downloads, paid or unpaid, were a reality; data from their distributor suggested that hundreds of thousands of Stones tracks were being shared online every day. A year after Jobs’s approach, Iris and Jody negotiated a multiyear revenue deal with iTunes, placing the Stones and ABKCO among the handful of traditional artists and record operations who made meaningful money online. But the need for ABKCO to be more than a one-man operation became more pressing in 2004, when Klein, attending the Grammys where ABKCO won an award for the Sam Cooke documentary Legend, broke his foot and required surgery. Never the same afterward, he was subsequently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Peter Brown was a long way from punching a cash register in the Epstein family’s Liverpool furniture store.

  The former Beatles aide-de-camp and Apple director moved to New York in the early seventies to work for music and film mogul Robert Stigwood, then became a partner in Brown Lloyd James, an international public relations firm that polished the reputations of some of the world’s most controversial rulers and dictators. Among its clients were Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, the government of Ecuador, and the wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the firm’s work has been criticized as “distinctly against the ethical tenets of modern public relations” by the chairwoman of the Public Relations Society of America.

  Nonetheless, Brown had adapted well to life in New York. He lived on Central Park West—it had been during a visit to Brown’s apartment that John Lennon and Yoko Ono discovered a sublet in the building next door, the Dakota—and liked to lunch at Michael’s, the midtown restaurant popular with music, film, and publishing executives. It was here that a dining companion informed Brown that Allen Klein had died.

  The news surprised him. Brown had never liked Klein and had taken pains to portray himself as a vigilant soldier protecting the Beatles and their Apple employees from Klein’s barbaric onslaught. Still, he was taken aback, and this was the first he’d heard of it. Brown spied attorney Allen Grubman at an adjoining table and was sure he’d know if it was true.

  More than anyone else in the music business, Grubman occupied Klein’s old spot as the empire-building wildcatter who changed the rules and who was regularly hired by superstars in search of top-of-the-market recording contracts. But unlike Klein, the label antagonist, Grubman wouldn’t bite the hand that fed him. His innovation was to not fight with the record companies; he always argued for a rich contract, but executives knew Grubman wanted to make a deal, and he rarely advised a client to switch labels. As for his own payd
ay, Grubman, like Klein, recognized his innovations and successes gave him the clout to seek unorthodox and lucrative arrangements with his clients. Rather than set a fee in advance of negotiations, Grubman preferred to talk money after he’d obtained a new contract for the client. Not coincidentally, that was almost always the moment the artist was happiest, and if, as with Klein, the value of the newly secured contract quoted by Grubman was actually a blue-sky number based on extensions, options, and other bonuses that were possible rather than guaranteed and that couldn’t be truly assessed for years—well, that was the way the business worked, right?

  Turning to Grubman’s table, Brown asked, “Did Allen Klein die?”

  Grubman shrugged. “I don’t think so,” he said, and he nodded across the room. “He’s sitting over there. But why don’t you ask him?”

  Later, on his way out, Klein ambled past Brown’s table. Dressed in a tracksuit, he nodded a silent greeting, but Brown wasn’t sure Klein actually recognized him.

  Allen Klein died July 4, 2009. Yoko and Sean Ono Lennon came to the funeral to pay their respects, offering particular support to Allen’s long-term companion, Iris, whom Yoko had come to know well. After decades of being dragged out to the cemetery in Newark by Allen, his friends were surprised to find he was to be interred in a plot in Queens he’d never mentioned.

  At a memorial service a few weeks later, Allen’s wife, Betty, sat on one side of the room, Iris on the other.

  The only former client to attend the service was Andrew Loog Oldham, who spoke emotionally to those who had gathered, saying the Rolling Stones were destined to be successful but wouldn’t have been as big without Allen. He recalled their travels together: swimming in Taormina, golfing in New Orleans, playing cards in Paris and tennis everywhere. He called Klein both his father and the elder brother who annoyed and hurt him but was also always a friend. “We knew each other for forty-four years,” Andrew said, “and for many of those, he treated me better than I treated myself.” Still, in the years to come, Oldham couldn’t quite stop referring to his nearly lifelong friend and tormentor as “Allen Crime.”