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FRED & ALLEN: AUTHOR GOODMAN TALKS ABOUT HIS NEW ALLEN KLEIN BIOGRAPHY

Fred Goodman—who authored 1997’s Mansion on the Hill, the definitive work on the most transformative and colorful era in music biz history, and his 2009 portrait of a high-profile failure, Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis—tackles a truly notorious subject in his recently published biography, Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

In Goodman’s book, Klein comes off as a highly complex character, a sort of Jewish precursor of Tony Soprano—thug-like, intimidating, always looking for an angle and out for a buck at any cost, but also a fully human guy capable of great generosity and fiercely protective of his clients—even as he was getting filthy rich off their backs. Klein, who died in 2009 at the age of 77, is a huge figure in music-business annals, and Goodman demonstrates once again that he has few, if any, rivals in his line of work, as he once again brings his subject fully and fascinatingly to life.

The author recently came to L.A. for a publication party at the home of one of his biggest (figuratively speaking) fans—Irving Azoff—but was gracious enough earlier that day to accept Bud Scoppa’s offer to buy him lunch. A conversation ensued; here are some of the highlights.


Klein is your first non-living subject. Did that make researching this book more difficult than your previous ones?
Yeah, but I didn’t have great access with Mansion on the Hill. Really, none of the principals spoke to me. I had a conversation with Jon Landau on background, but then he decided he wasn’t gonna have anything to do with the book. So I was left to do it around them—which is fine. You get something just as interesting. But this one was totally different because Allen’s not alive, but he left this tremendous footprint in terms of lawsuits, contracts and that kind of stuff. When they opened up the ABKCO archives, it was unbelievable.

How did you get access?
Jody Klein
, Allen’s son, came to me a couple of years after he died, and I didn’t know Jody at all. So he said, “I read Mansion on the Hill and I read your book about Edgar Bronfman. A lot has been written about my dad, some of it true, some of it not true. If you’re interested, I’ll open up all of the archives, you can decide for yourself and let the chips fall where they may. I just want somebody who knows something about the business say what it was and what it wasn’t.” And that was it—I mean, Jody Klein never read this book until it was in type. He had absolutely no editorial input at all. And he was great about it. He took me out to a warehouse in New Jersey and said, “OK, here it is.” There were skids full of documents; it was overwhelming. Because Allen was litigious—he loved to go to court.

So you literally got your hands dirty doing the research.
I just stood there thinking, why am I doing this? He was in court with The Rolling Stones for 18 years. And at the beginning, before he goes into court, his attorney draws up a history of his relationship with The Rolling Stones, and the thing was 190 pages long. This is the preamble to going to court at the beginning of an 18-year lawsuit; it just goes on and on and on. But, if you do what we do, and somebody gives you access to the contracts of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, all the litigation and all the letters back and forth—and you basically get to hear what they said when the door was closed—that’s the school nobody goes to. You can’t say no to that.

Wow, so it really started with Jody—
—comin’ out of the blue. Yeah.

Were you looking for a project?
I had just finished up the Bronfman book and didn’t know what I was gonna do next. It just kind of fell into my lap.

Can you estimate how many people you talked to?
Lots. Most of what my work was going through the court records and contracts, sorting them out and making a timeline. The other thing is, Allen used to have lunch with [music writer and longtime MTVN producer] Bill Flanagan, who was writing a novel, and he had a notion that by talking to Allen, he could get a good idea of this entertainment lawyer that he wanted to write about in his novel. And he taped like 50 hours of conversation talking about Allen’s career—never published, all given to me by Jody. That was great, because Allen did the Playboy Interview, but other than that, there’s not much out there. But then, I talked to a lot of people who worked with him over the years.

And it was really interesting, because, if you grew up when we did, everything you heard about Allen Klein was bad. He was the guy who broke up The Beatles and robbed The Rolling Stones—that kind of thing. And you know because you’re in the business that it’s gonna be more complicated than that, right? But to talk to somebody like Marianne Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend at the time and was also managed by Andrew Loog Oldham [pictured below] and came under the same deal as the Stones… I asked her what it was like be managed by Allen, and she said, “Well, the first thing that happened was my royalty went up from 2% to 12%.” Because guys like Andrew gave really bad deals. And the irony is, Allen wound up owning what Andrew had owned because he bought out Andrew. So you see where the guy everybody thought was this hip guy— The Rolling Stones’ style guru, which he was—he’s the one who was making these questionable deals. In fact, Allen makes him give some of the royalty points back. Because he was double-dipping. He was talking half of their royalties and then taking a 25% commission on the 50% royalty they’re still getting. So Marianne said to me, “There are only two people I liked recording for: Chris Blackwell and Allen Klein. Because they both ran their own operations; if you needed anything, you picked up the phone and called them, and it got done right away.”

So he managed to convince his clients that he was taking good care of them, including—for a while, at least—The Beatles and The Stones.
Yeah, he got results—that was the deal. I think he always felt like he could juggle these things, but at the end of the day it’s The Beatles who really captivated him, and over time Jagger got disenchanted with him.

In a sense, at least in the honeymoon stages of these relationships he has with his clients, he’s a kind of Robin Hood figure.
Klein used to say he was Robin Hood, but a guy who used to work for with him says in the book, “Yeah, he said he was Robin Hood, but he kept the money himself.” But it’s complicated, because he was a very sophisticated guy. At a certain point, people start to go, “Wait a minute—I’ve been had.” But he is a tremendous advocate for the value of the artists. He’s the guy who’s going into the record companies and saying, “Look, you’re not getting’ any more records until you change the contract.” And he’s the one saying to guys like Mickie Most, “You’re making pennies; the record company’s making dollars—we’ve gotta do what we can to reverse this formula.” He was a great accountant, and he knew all the tricks. So it’s really a progression, from auditing record companies to doing contracts for Sam Cooke to then becoming really the scourge of the record business—the guy no record executive wants to see.

Once again, truth turns out to be stranger than fiction.
One of the things that’s really fascinating is that Allen’s the guy who’s taking artists from pennies to dollars, right? And we’re back to that—we’re back to pennies for artists. So where’s the Allen Klein of today who’s gonna take artists back to dollars?

Jimmy Iovine?
Well, so far he’s only taken one artist back to dollars [laughs]. But Jimmy’s certainly got the ambition and the head for it.

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