The clever guy who tricked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones | Culture

January 26, 1969. John Lennon and Yoko Ono visit Allen Klein at his suite from London’s Dorchester Hotel. They are eager to meet the abrasive New Yorker who has worked financial miracles for the Rolling Stones. That evening, Klein is sensitive and pulls all the right strings: he grew up an orphan (like John), he knows the Beatles’ discography inside out, he is respectfully curious about Yoko’s art, he is prepared to bust his butt for her interests. Within hours, the couple are seduced: John begs him to manage his affairs; Yoko even agrees to type the document. certifying the agreement.

A great salesman, Klein has detected the weak points of his visitors: he has been developing this nose for years. An accountant by training, he begins working for Bobby Darin, Bobby Vinton and other singers who are dissatisfied with the settlements of their record companies. During his audits, he discovers that the music industry is an expert in sleight of hand. It pays what it wants, although it would not need such tricks: legally, with the usual contracts, full of deductions, the artist only receives crumbs.

This needs to change, Klein decides. He tries Sam Cooke, the sublime voice of soulIn 1963, Klein tells RCA that Cooke will not record again unless his contract is renegotiated. It smacks of blackmail, but it works: RCA agrees to sign a producer, Tracey (like a daughter of the artist), who will deliver Sam’s next songs, and who also recovers everything previously recorded; no one imagines that those tapes will be worth millions.

In reality, Tracey Ltd. belongs to Klein and Cooke is ultimately his employee. He never discovers this: he is murdered in late 1964, after an encounter with a prostitute who specialises in robbing her clients. Klein turns to the singer’s family and gets the grieving widow to sell him the publishing rights to the deceased’s compositions – once again, diamonds at a bargain price.

The following year, Allen repeated the trick with the Rolling Stones. Their managers, Eric Easton and Andrew Loog Oldham, exploited them badly. But there were ways out: the contract was full of irregularities. Klein went on a war footing to the top brass at Decca Records, who could not afford to lose the Stones: to their eternal dismay, the company had rejected the Beatles in 1962. Klein copied the strategy at London Records, Decca’s American subsidiary. Double victory: he managed to improve the quintet’s conditions and extract advances of several million dollars.

And here we see the (bad) arts of the scorpion. If they collect this amount in one go, the Stones will be subject to the punitive taxes of the Labour government. Better, Klein explains, to divide it into annual payments. To this end, he sets up an American company, Nanker Phelge (pseudonym used by the Stones for their collective compositions). As the years go by, once Easton and Loog Oldham disappear, Klein takes over all the recording and publishing rights: in 1970, when the Stones break with his band, he is forced to leave the club. business manager, They discover that their names do not appear in the statutes of Nanker Phelge. And Klein is relentless: He even claims several songs as his own included in Sticky fingers and Exile on Main St.the first releases on the Rolling Stones Records label.

The millions generated by the group do not remain stationary: Klein plays hard on the stock market and even tries to take control of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the historic Hollywood studio. His wet dreams are in the cinema: he invests in B-movies and in an expensive production called The Golden Greekabout the pairing of Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. Acquires the distribution of The mole and another film by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Let’s go back to 1969. With Lennon’s backing, Klein believes he has a clear path to the Beatles. He is wrong: Ringo Starr and George Harrison follow John’s lead, but Paul McCartney is betting on his wife’s family. These, the Eastmans, have the worst references about Klein. McCartney, accustomed in recent times to piloting the ship, swears that he will never work with this upstart and, surprisingly, announces the break-up of the Beatles. In the following years, battalions of lawyers will fight over the group’s treasure.

And Klein? In his own style, he continues to scare the big corporations. In 1984, he discovers that a key sequence of Only witness features Harrison Ford and Kelly McGuillis dancing with Wonderful Worldby Sam Cooke. Paramount has forgotten to ask permission; Allen gets a six-figure check and reaffirms to his children: this music business is big business.