Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll
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* A portion of the Who’s performance became the first publicly shown footage from Rock and Roll Circus when it was included in the 1979 documentary The Kids Are Alright.
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* Years later, in 1986, another Dick James writer, Elton John, finally succeeded in having a similar contract voided by the British courts.
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* Chris O’Dell’s excellent and moving memoir Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved includes some of the best and most insightful reporting I found on Apple and is the source of several anecdotes in this chapter.
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* Lennon’s bass part is so poorly played that at least one Beatles historian, Ian MacDonald, has wondered if it wasn’t an act of out-and-out sabotage. See Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records in the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
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* The promoter’s life and work have been examined in several books, including his own Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out and Dean Budnick and Josh Baron’s Ticket Masters.
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* In their subsequent suits against Klein and ABKCO, the Rolling Stones would attempt to void this letter—unsuccessfully.
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* Breaking with tradition and picking a Harrison song may have been Klein’s way of getting under McCartney’s skin. If that’s what he was trying to do, it apparently worked; some years later, during an appearance on the American television show Larry King Live, McCartney repeatedly referred to the Harrison song as “Something in the Way She Moves.” The opening line of Harrison’s “Something,” it was also the title of a song on James Taylor’s debut album for Apple, which—whether McCartney intended to do this or not—reinforced suspicions that Harrison had filched at least the inspiration for the song if not the song itself. But then, there was a lot of that going around; the A-side, “Come Together,” led to charges that Lennon had lifted that song from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” Klein would later say that Lennon, in conversation, was frank about using other people’s songs as a jump-off point for compositions and reminisced about how Dick James had even offered him pointers when he was a young songwriter on how to avoid stepping over the line into plagiarism.
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* In subsequent years he would back off this charge and say he had been upset and “a little silly.”
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* Fourteen years later, Cox finally surfaced and said that he and his family had joined a charismatic Christian cult in Los Angeles, the Church of the Living Word. He added that Kyoko had changed her name to guard her privacy and did not wish to have a relationship with her mother. For details, see Jim Calio, “Yoko Ono’s Ex-Husband, Tony Cox, Reveals His Strange Life Since Fleeing with Their Daughter 14 Years Ago,” People, February 3, 1986.
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* Klein duplicated the dishes from the film’s feast at an opening-night party at the Four Seasons restaurant.
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* “Stop Breaking Down,” recorded and copyrighted by bluesman Robert Johnson in 1937 as “Stop Breaking Down Blues,” would later be part of a lawsuit between the Johnson estate and Klein that included a second Johnson song covered and claimed by the Stones, “Love in Vain.”
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* At the time, most record companies sought a free-goods allowance of 10 to 15 percent—meaning the artists weren’t paid for 10 to 15 percent of the records the label manufactured.
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* Klein also had another Rolls-Royce of Lennon’s, this one painted with psychedelic designs by the Dutch art collective the Fool. It sat in Klein’s garage in the Bronx, rarely driven and used primarily by Klein’s children and their friends for make-out sessions. In 1977, Klein gave the car back to the Lennons, who donated it to the Smithsonian Institution as a tax write-off. After John’s death, the Smithsonian auctioned the car for $2.3 million.
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* Such borrowings and elaborations constitute the provenance and history of popular songs. Jagger and Richards’s composition almost certainly owes its inspiration—not to mention its chorus—to a traditional gospel song, “This May Be the Last Time,” recorded by the Staple Singers in 1955. Fortunately for the Stones, the Staple Singers weren’t managed by Allen Klein.
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