A reputation for toughness goes a long way in the music business. Allen Klein’s Christmas card came with the inscription: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, ’cause I’m the biggest bastard in the valley.” Seven years after his death at the age of 77 and fifty since he came to prominence as the business manager of first the Stones and then the Beatles, his reputation reverberates. Even the Stones’ first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who sold his stake in the band to Klein in the late Sixties when he thought they were past their peak, still refers to him as “Allen Crime”, and Oldham was on good enough terms to turn up to Klein’s memorial service in 2009.
Fred Goodman’s biography was written with the co-operation but not the approval of Klein’s family and his company ABKCO. Although the book neither glosses over his run-ins with the law – one of which led to Klein spending two months inside in 1979 for failing to report income from selling promotional records – nor averts its eyes from the many cases where his sleight of hand was a bit too sleight for the artists he was supposed to be representing, it also recognises the services he performed for them, which were significant.
Klein didn’t know anything about music but as a bookkeeper he was familiar with the smell of cooking. He had the forensic skills to detect where record companies were short-changing their detail-dyslexic artists; he supplemented these skills with the kind of heavy manners that made firms’ lives uncomfortable unless they paid up. For Klein, a contract was merely a starting point, a royalty statement just an opening offer. He drilled down to the detail, demanding sight of invoices, delivery notes, lists of breakages, all the little tricks that the companies used to chisel performers out of pieces of their already small slice of the pie.
One of his early clients was Sam Cooke, for whom he won a very lucrative record deal. Less than a year later, in 1964, Cooke was dead and Klein was unexpectedly in control of copyright in the likes of “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Wonderful World”, which ultimately proved a licence to print money. When Klein saw a rough cut of the Harrison Ford movie Witness in 1984 and realised the barn dance sequence would have to be reshot if the producers couldn’t get “Wonderful World”, he demanded and got $200,000 for the use of that one song, thereby triggering the sync-rights gold rush that rages to this day. He was, as Goodman puts it, “the first hardball player in a slow-pitch league”.
Hired by the Rolling Stones in the mid-Sixties, he secured sums for them which the more successful Beatles, managed by the painfully naive Brian Epstein, could only dream about. Because this was the era of 90 per cent taxation on royalty income in the UK, he invested the Stones’ money in US companies so that they could reduce their tax liability by drawing income over a longer period of time.
The bands did not fully grasp that these companies were in fact controlled by Klein, an oversight they rued for the next fifty years. “Don’t take 20 per cent of an artist’s income,” he told an associate. “Give them 80 per cent of yours.”
The Stones ceased to be represented by Klein in 1970 but ABKCO controls their Sixties material to this day. This has turned out to be the bit worth having. When the Verve made the mistake of sampling a violin part from an orchestral cover of a Stones song on their 1997 hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, they had to settle with Klein. The deal was that the band’s frontman and songwriter, Richard Ashcroft, sign over all his rights in the song for a mere thousand dollars. ABKCO took the rest of the revenue away. “I was very bad today,” Klein said blushingly to a friend, after the deed was done.
Klein represented only three of the four Beatles. This was the great sadness of his career. It was Paul McCartney’s refusal to have any truck with him that made the band’s split so bitter. When Klein took over, after Epstein’s death, he couldn’t believe how little money they had made. He’d hoped they would remain together. “He had a contract to manage the affairs of the Beatles. Unfortunately, there were no longer any Beatles to manage,” Goodman writes. Nonetheless they prospered as solo artists and in 1971 George Harrison’s single “My Sweet Lord” became a worldwide hit. After a court decided that the song had been plagiarised from an old Chiffons tune, “He’s So Fine”, Harrison had to pay damages in the region of $2m to the publisher, Bright Tunes. Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ, as people in the business never tire of saying. But the Harrison case had a further twist. By the time of this settlement, in 1981, the three Beatles had ditched their manager and Bright Tunes had a new owner: Allen Klein, always more far-sighted than the acts he managed.
Klein went to school in Newark, New Jersey, with Philip Roth – and through Goodman’s book you can imagine him as a character in one of Roth’s novels, returning to its mean streets in limos with his illustrious clients, still driven by having been rejected by his father as a boy, winning in business by dint of an extraordinary capacity for hard work, prevailing on the tennis court simply by refusing to be beaten, and delighting in walking out of the most expensive restaurants without paying. (His driver would come in to settle the bill.)
Goodman has worked this ground before, in his book The Mansion on the Hill, which describes how the ragged-trousered troubadours of folk rock became rich beyond dreams of avarice during the CD boom. Unlike most people who write about the music business, he is not naive when it comes to the numbers. It’s difficult to know who are the winners and the losers in music. Artists are either poorer than you’d think, or richer than you could possibly imagine. Klein may not quite have shaped rock’n’roll as the book’s subtitle boasts, but he raised the expectations of the tiny handful of performers lucky enough to get to the very top. Every time a star uses a moment in the sun to move on to a better deal than anybody else – from Sam Cooke to Taylor Swift, it’s all the same – they get there through a door first wrenched open by Klein, the biggest bastard in the valley.
David Hepworth’s “1971: Never a Dull Moment” will be published in April by Bantam Press
Allen Klein: the Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock and Roll by Fred Goodman is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (302pp, $27)
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This article appears in the 03 Feb 2016 issue of the New Statesman, Putin's war