Interview for Playboy

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Not long ago, John Lennon and Yoko Ono decided that the walls in Allen Klein’s new offices needed decorating. The view out the windows was fine, even beautiful, 41 stories down to the Hudson River, and the floor plan of Abkco’s offices was interesting enough: labyrinthine hallways, through which a visitor literally needs a guide. But the shiny-yellow papered walls were boring. So John and Yoko began hanging golden records (over 100 of them, mostly albums) that the groups Klein has managed have picked up over the years. Down the first hallway are “Beggar’s Banquet,” “Let It Bleed” and “Out of Our Heads”–all 1,000,000 sellers by the Rolling Stones–and on a post at the end is “All Things Must Pass,” by George Harrison. “Let It Be” is just to the right, along with “Plastic Ono Band” and “McCartney” and “Ram,” and farther on are walls filled with shiny platters by The Animals, The Kinks, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Donovan and Bobby Vinton. On and on, until it’s possible for a visitor without sunglasses to go nearly blind from the glare by the time he’s led through a door into the corner suite that Allen Klein, rock ‘n’ roll’s only supermanager, occupies with a curious sort of magnificence.

Like so many of the rock stars he now represents, Klein has come a painfully long way. His childhood was pretty awful: He spent six years of it in a New Jersey orphanage and the rest with grandparents who had only the barest kind of income. After high school came the Army, and then, with the GI Bill and odd jobs, he worked himself quickly through Upsala College in New Jersey, graduating with an accounting degree. After toiling at one or two short-lived and tiresome accounting jobs, an old school friend began introducing him to performers like Bobby Darin, Connie Francis and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, and soon he began to offer to do audits for them to find out if their record companies were paying them the royalties their contracts called for. When he found a company shorting the artist–and he always did–he took a percentage of the difference as his fee.

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We taped most of the interview [in June] on the movie set [of Blindman, co-starring Ringo and Allen Klein], 30 miles from town in the hot Spanish desert. A small bad-guy part had been written into the script for Klein and all week he grew a light stubble in anticipation of the two days’ shooting that would become two minutes in the film. Between rehearsals and takes, Klein and I would scramble for Ringo’s air-conditioned trailer, to the tape recorder, my notebooks and some Spanish wine, which I sipped as he talked (Klein doesn’t drink). Ringo came along for two of the longest sessions, because he wanted to be out of the sun and because, as he said to Klein before we began, “I’d like to hear what you have to say, too.”

Ringo sat quietly as Klein answered questions about the business hassles, the lawsuits, the personal moments he’d had with the Beatles; but then, as I asked if he thought they would ever play together again and he hesitated before answering, Ringo came into the conversation for the first time.

“You must say yes, Allen,” he said, “because there’s no reason we shouldn’t all play together again if we want to.” Then he leaned toward the microphone on the table. “But don’t no silly d.j.s go putting it out that we’re thinkin’ of getting together, ‘cause we’re not. Still, there’s nothin’ stoppin’ us if we ever want to.”

Ringo talked about his first face-to-face meeting with Paul in many months, on a plane, on the way to Mick Jagger’s wedding [in May], and then said, “I love Paul, you know. I really do,” and for a moment, all the neatly printed legal statements I’d pored over, so formal, signed by all the Beatles, one against another, and entered in evidence in the English High Court, numbering the reasons the partnership should or should not be dissolved, seemed strange and distant. Even Klein, in Western gear, a prop holster and six-gun on his waist, the toughest, fastest wheeler-dealer in town, any town, sat there stuttering a moment when Ringo was finished. The drummer’s eyes were moist.

Klein and I taped all week and never got much closer to the complicated truth of the affair than at that moment.

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VETTER: Paul said in his affidavit that one of the reasons for the suit was that he was tired of having to get permission to do an album, that he felt his creative freedom was heavily impaired.

KLEIN: That’s bullshit. I don’t think he really meant that — if he said it, I think that was in an affidavit written by a lawyer to sway the judge. He didn’t have to get, and never really did get, any approvals on anything. What was made out to him as a big problem was whether or not the Let It Be album should come out in front of his own individual album. If he had asked them for it, if he had asked any of them, he would have had it. They love him, you know, they really do — no matter what. But Paul McCartney can and does do whatever he damn well pleases, from an artistic and creative point of view and from a business point of view. He just thinks differently about the democratic philosophy of partnership — this partnership in particular —than I do.

VETTER: If you were on Paul’s side, what would you tell him to do?

KLEIN: I’d tell him that if he wants to win, he’ll have to make the others believe that what he wants is reasonable. All he needs is for one of them to agree with him and it would be a 50-50 deadlock. I’d also tell him to go back to thinking for himself.

VETTER: Is there anything to prevent Paul from dealing directly with the other three Beatles?

KLEIN: Nothing. Not a damn thing except advice from the Eastmans. They think it might be bad tactically, that it might harm their position. I’ve certainly never stopped the boys from talking to him. In fact, right before the court action started, I had John and George and Ringo call him. It would have been so much simpler if they worked it out instead of the courts. But Paul’s attitude was, “If it takes two years, I can wait it out.” I still think it would be better if the four of them would just talk to each other about it. I’ve wanted that from the beginning. But getting together personally is their problem, not mine. If they were all to sit down around a table, and the truth were known to all of them, I think they could solve it in a minute. The sad thing, really, is that the Eastmans are using them as the ball and bat to fight me. A lot has gone down. I’m sorry they didn’t sit around a table and get it done in front. I think the airing of all this in public was an unnecessary waste of energy. It’s like a war where no one wins.

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PLAYBOY: When did it get nasty?

KLEIN: In the early part of 1970, the Eastmans told Paul that we were going to try to hold up the release of his solo album McCartney. We wanted the Let It Be album to come out at the same time as the movie, in May, and it didn’t make sense for Paul to release his album at the same time. A McCartney album is a Beatle album in the public’s eyes. And when you confuse them by bringing two out at the same time, all you do is hurt sales. The Eastmans told him that the film wasn’t really coming out, that we were using it as a ploy to delay his solo thing. Paul believed what they told him.

PLAYBOY: Why did the Eastmans think the film wasn’t coming out?

KLEIN: I don’t know. We’d been dealing with United Artists about a third film they said they were entitled to under the contract that Brian Epstein had negotiated with them. At that point, it was becoming troublesome, because U.A. was giving Ringo hassles about being in The Magic Christian and it was clear that they were going to withhold permission for any of the boys to be in other films until their agreement was met.

PLAYBOY: And you wanted Let It Be to be their third film?

KLEIN: Sure. Originally, the boys—mostly Paul, really, because it was his film—had intended it to be a TV film. But I had some of my people look at a rough cut and we decided it would work as a general-release motion picture. Then I showed the print to the boys and John, George and Ringo agreed. Paul didn’t like the idea, but he said, “You have a majority, so go ahead.” Then the Eastmans sent another of their famous letters, this one to United Artists, saying I didn’t have the authority to deal for Paul. They thought that would kill the deal, but U.A. loved the film and we finally signed it with a provision in the contract to cover the possibility of the Eastmans’ suing. Then Ringo went to ask Paul to hold the release of his solo album until after the Let It Be album came out, so there wouldn’t be confusion. Paul told Ringo that since there was no definite release date for the film, he was going ahead. Ringo told him that the release date was set and then Paul really let him have it. He said he was going to ruin Ringo, that he was going to talk to Rolling Stone and really get him. Incredible shit. Ringo was really down about it and he phoned me that night and said, “Look, Allen, it’s been ten years. Let’s just give him what he wants.” I said fine. So Paul’s album came out and then it really got petty. He put that tasteless self-interview into the British copies, saying that I didn’t manage him and, “My plan is to grow up,” and on and on.

PLAYBOY: Paul said later that although you and the other three had nothing whatever to do with his solo album for Apple, you put your company’s label on the cover.

KLEIN: Look, Abkco is a public company. I didn’t want the stockholders to think that we weren’t managing Apple anymore. I had to put that on there. He was making all kinds of confusing statements. You gotta protect yourself.

Going further

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