His young manhood, as Klein himself liked to recall, was one of almost Dickensian hardship, endeavour, and self-denial. He worked as a clerk for a firm of New Jersey newspaper distributors, at the same time holding down two or three other part-time jobs to pay for a course in accounting at the Lutheran Uppsala College. As he sat in class there, he would often be so exhausted that his head would drop forward onto his arms. Yet whenever the teacher posed a problem in mental arithmetic, he would still always be first to rattle out the answer.
After graduating from Uppsala he married his college sweetheart and set up as the newest and hungriest of Manhattan’s million-and-one accountants. His vocation made itself clear when he accepted a small retainer to handle the finances of Buddy Knox, a teenage pop idol who had a nationwide hit with “Party Doll” in 1957. Klein discovered that Knox’s record company had failed to pay a substantial part of what they owed him in royalties. An equally interesting discovery was the mixture of guilt and confusion on the faces of the label executives when Klein confronted them with these discrepancies. The upshot was that Knox received what he was owed and Klein received three thousand dollars in commission, enough to buy him and his wife, Betty, their first-ever new car.
Klein thereafter specialized in clients from the pop music world, making each the same bluntly seductive offer: “I can get you money you never even knew you had.” He would ferret it out in the same way he had for Buddy Knox, trapped in ponderously slow accounting systems, or in unpaid performance fees or miscalculated royalty returns. He would then confront the miscreant company in the role of avenging angel, threatening legal action or criminal prosecution if the deficiencies were not instantly made good. Even record companies who dealt conscientiously with their artists could not be sure that Klein wouldn’t find something to stretch them on the rack. “If a corporation is big, it has to make mistakes,” was his maxim. “There’s no big organization in the world that doesn’t have something to hide.”
The technique worked with spectacular success for the singing husband and wife Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, for Bobby (“Splish-Splash”) Darin, and most notably Bobby (“Blue Velvet”) Vinton, whom Klein approached at a mutual friend’s wedding and asked, “How would you like to make a hundred thousand dollars?” Within just a few days that very sum in ferreted-out fees and back royalties was paid into Vinton’s bank account. Among these grateful clients he became known as “the Robin Hood of Pop,” though Klein himself never claimed such dashingly altruistic motives. Despite his general orthodoxy in religious matters, he chose as his desktop motto a slightly amended version of Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for I am the biggest bastard in the valley.”
In 1964, he took over the affairs of Sam Cooke, a talented soul singer then riding high on the Twist dance craze. Klein negotiated an unheard-of one-million-dollar advance for Cooke from the RCA label, though unhappily the singer did not live long to enjoy it. A year later, he was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel while in the company of a lady other than his wife.
When the Beatles conquered America in 1964 Klein looked on with the same hungry, helpless eyes as a hundred other indigenous agents and managers. A couple of months afterward, on a trip to London, he called on Brian Epstein to offer Sam Cooke as a support act on the Beatles’ soon-to-follow second U.S. tour. During the meeting, with typical chutzpah, he also offered himself as their financial consultant, implying that the same huge sums in unpaid royalties could be pried from their record companies as from Bobby Darin’s and Bobby Vinton’s. Brian did not take the suggestion seriously. But Klein came away boasting that he would have the Beatles, even setting a deadline of Christmas 1965. Meantime, he occupied himself in sucking up other significant names from the so-called British invasion: the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan. and, finally, the Rolling Stones.
Klein’s acquisition of the Stones showed his unerring ability to spot the most vulnerable points in his prospective quarry. He had observed how the band’s young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, cast himself as a star equally glamorous as Mick Jagger, and also how much Oldham longed for wealth and status symbols to equal those of his one-time employer, Brian Epstein. Meeting Oldham in London in mid-1965, Klein’s opening gambit was, as usual, devastatingly simple. “Andrew,” he said, “whaddaya want?”
“I want a Rolls-Royce,” Oldham replied.
“You got it,” Klein told him.
The dazzled Oldham thereupon dropped his existing partner, Eric Easton, and hired Klein as his personal business manager, so giving the New Yorker effective control of all the Stones’ financial dealings. The move, as it happened, came midway through Oldham’s and Easton’s negotiation of a new contract for the Stones with Decca Records, one that as usual promised royalty payments only after the records had been sold. Klein weighed into the negotiations with all the tactics that had made him feared in New York. The upshot was that a stunned Decca found themselves agreeing to pay the Stones an advance of $1.25 million.
Following this apparent huge coup on their behalf, the supercilious, supercool Stones were as enraptured by Klein as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé ever had been. They were also impressed by his organization of their 1966 American tour and announcement of a three-movie deal aimed at making them just as big on the big screen as the Beatles. Not the least exhilarating feature of Klein’s management was a rumored direct connection with the underworld, which Klein himself always firmly denied while being obviously not displeased by it. One of his closest associates, a promotion man named Pete Bennett, dressed just like a mafioso in sharkskin suits and shades, and was given to patting his left armpit as if a holstered handgun were secreted there.
The Stones naturally were not slow to extol the achievements of their new miracle man to their good friends, the Beatles. That wonderful $1.25 million Decca advance in effect quite eclipsed the new contract with EMI that Brian Epstein negotiated for the Beatles early in 1967, and further complicated the always fraught relationship between Brian and Paul McCartney. Ironically, in view of later events, Paul suggested that Klein be hired to do for the Beatles what he had for the Stones. Rumors spread of an impending merger between Klein’s company and NEMS, negotiated by a so-called third man, which Brian angrily dismissed as “rubbish.”
By 1967, Klein’s control of the Stones was absolute and exclusive. Relations between the band and Andrew Loog Oldham, which had seriously declined during Jagger’s and Richard’s drugs trial, hit rock bottom as the Stones struggled to finish Their Satanic Majesties Request, the album intended to be their answer to Sgt. Pepper. One day, goaded beyond endurance by their slipshod playing and unfocused attitude, Oldham walked out of the studio, never to return. Klein subsequently bought out his management share for around one million pounds.
Brian’s death might have seemed the perfect moment for Klein to move in on the Beatles. Yet he continued to bide his time and watch from afar the confusion among Brian’s too many heirs apparent. Among the plans swirling round in late 1967 was an ambitious—and rather sensible—one whereby the Beatles and Stones would have shared the same UK front office and jointly financed their own recording studio at North London’s Camden Lock. Mick Jagger approached Peter Brown to see if he would act for the Stones, as he did for the Beatles, as ambassador, fixer, and social secretary. But Klein violently opposed the idea, and flew straight over from New York to scotch it. There was a meeting, also attended by Clive Epstein, when Klein struck Brown as “a rather hysterical, unstable person. Then he realized I wasn’t trying to take over the Stones, and calmed down a bit. As he walked out, he suddenly turned to Clive and said, ‘How much d’ya want for the Beatles?’”
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Klein’s reputation as a ruthless opportunist and wheeler-dealer was reaching new heights. He had recently acquired Cameo-Parkway, a record label once successful with Twist king Chubby Checker but now on the edge of bankruptcy. No sooner had Klein bought th
e label than its shares rose steeply in value, from three dollars to more than seventy-five dollars each. He was suspected of talking up Cameo-Parkway’s share price by inventing rumors of impending lucrative takeovers or mergers with larger organizations, like the British music firm Chappell. As a result, the New York Stock Exchange suspended dealings in Cameo-Parkway shares and ordered an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cameo-Parkway’s stockholders also began legal proceedings against Klein, enraged, among other things, by the $104,000 per year salary he had awarded himself as chief executive. Klein denied any wrongdoing. In the event, Cameo-Parkway was to make only one significant acquisition: the Allen Klein accounting company. Klein took himself over in reverse, naming the resultant entity ABKCO Industries (the “ABK” part standing for Allen and Betty Klein).
As 1968 drew to a close, and Apple stood revealed as a bottomless financial pit, Klein’s dream of winning the Beatles seemed as far away as ever. The Rolling Stones had extolled his genius to them time after time, without result. He himself had put in a telephone call to John Lennon, but John could not be bothered to accept it. They had also met briefly, in December 1968, when John and Yoko took part, with Eric Clapton, The Who, and other pop luminaries, in the Stones’ Sgt. Peppery Rock ’n’ Roll Circus film. But Klein, surprisingly, made no attempt to capitalize on the meeting, and John barely glanced at the tubby little man with his unfashionable greased-back hair, cardigan, and pipe.
Not until the following January did Klein’s moment come—when he picked up Rolling Stone, the new intelligent music paper named after his first supergroup protégés, and saw the story splashed all over it. John had said that, if the Beatles carried on spending money at their present rate, he’d be “broke in six months.”
• • •
With Paul McCartney, the need to breathe was scarcely more important than the need to perform. It was a need that transcended mere vanity and his love of his own bewitching, beguiling, melodic power. He would sing and play for as many, or as few, people as happened to be there when the impulse came that was as natural as breath. Once, on a car journey with Derek Taylor, he stopped in a Bedfordshire village and played the piano in a village pub. He would sing softly through the dark to the girls on watch outside his house. Late in 1968, he and Linda spent a week with friends in Portugal. His hosts noticed a phenomenon unchanged since a decade ago on Forthlin Road, Liverpool. Even in the lavatory, Paul could not stop singing and playing his guitar.
Paul had always felt that by giving up road tours and retiring into album work, the Beatles had broken faith with the public to whom, fundamentally, they owed everything. So he began arguing with renewed persistence after the White Album was finished. He had lately—at Linda’s encouragement—grown a dark, bushy beard. It might have been a keen and determined young schoolmaster who sat in the Apple boardroom, urging the other three that their next project together ought to be a return to playing live concerts.
The chief deterrent, as Paul himself acknowledged, was simple stage fright. It had been more than two years since the Beatles last faced an audience together. In that time, only John had given anything like a live performance, in the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus film. He had also appeared at the Alchemical Wedding, a Christmas rally of Britain’s hippies, mystics, and dropouts, though that merely meant sitting with Yoko inside a plastic bag on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.
Paul kept up the pressure, reminding them of stage fright successfully overcome in the past. Hadn’t it been the same when they suddenly took a step up from Liverpool and Hamburg clubs to the grandeur of Leicester’s de Monfort hall? And when they had made the quantum leap from the London Palladium to Shea Stadium? John and Ringo seemed persuadable but not George. Nothing, he said, could make him go back to the witless screaming and frantic running of the Beatlemania years. Paul agreed that going back on tour in the old way would be unendurable. They would play only a few, carefully selected live dates; perhaps only a single one. “But we’ve got to keep that contact somehow. And it’s what we do best.”
In the end, they agreed on a compromise. Rather than giving a live performance, they would make an album that was like a live performance—an album shorn of all studio artifice, reliant only on their abilities as singers and musicians, simple and powerful and honest enough to reach back over the years to their original, punching power in the Cavern Club. To underline the point, they went to George Martin—now a freelance producer, soon to launch his own independent AIR studios—and asked, or rather begged, him to work for them again. It was their obvious sincerity rather than any fee that persuaded Martin to put his new career on hold and try to re-create the spontaneity and honesty of the Please Please Me album. “They said they wanted to go right back to basics,” Martin says. “They wouldn’t use any overdubbing. They’d do the songs just as they happened.”
The simple resolve of four musicians, however, was now subject to the complexities of Apple Corps, and its still unused subsidiaries, Apple Films and Apple Publishing. It was decided that the making of the album must be made into a film, and that film and record sessions should be described in an illustrated book to accompany each album. The climax of the film would be the live performance Paul wanted, at a location still to be decided.
The arrival of a film crew, led by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, gave additional scope to Paul’s ideas. At one point, with Lindsay-Hogg’s encouragement, he proposed giving the concert in a Tunisian amphitheater; at another, he suggested making the whole album live in Los Angeles. George vetoed both suggestions as “very expensive and insane.” Another of Paul’s schemes was to record at sea, onboard an ocean liner. George objected that the acoustics would be impossible and that, anyway, they’d need two liners rather than one. As the argument flew back and forth, John was heard to mutter, “I’m warming to the idea of doing it in an asylum.”
The project’s working title—symbolic of their desire to rediscover their roots—was Get Back. At John’s suggestion, they even posed for a photograph looking down from the same balcony as on the cover of their first chirpy, working-class LP.
Rehearsals began on January 2, 1969, at one end of a cavernous soundstage at Twickenham film studios. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s camera crew were already in position to film Mal Evans, the perennial roadie, carrying in amplifiers and cymbal stands, and Paul testing the grand piano, still in his hobo-ish tweed coat, a half-eaten apple before him on the polished lid.
The cameras ran on as Paul, each morning, strove to make the other Beatles forget their dismal surroundings, the unaccustomed daylight playing, and the constant, numb-fingered cold. His resemblance to a schoolmaster grew, even as the class grew more plainly recalcitrant. “Okay—right. Er—Okay, let’s try to move on.” He went and sat with George, as with a backward and also stubborn pupil, tracing with his arm the sequence he wanted George to play. “You see, it’s got to come down like that. There shouldn’t be any recognizable jumps. It helps if you sing it. Like this—”
Resentment was not yet in the open. Paul worked conscientiously to provide a falsetto counterpoint to John’s “Across the Universe.” John played chords as instructed to a pretty little Paul tune that would one day become “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” They even, spasmodically, enjoyed themselves. John got up, and Yoko did not follow him: Paul and he sang “Two of Us,” burlesquing like teenage Quarry Men. When George played over “I Me Mine,” a new song in turgid waltz time, Paul and Ringo tackled it gamely. John and Yoko, two white-clad figures in gym shoes, waltzed to it together across the cable-strewn floor.
As well as the new material, they continually ran through old songs from Liverpool and Hamburg: the Chuck Berry and Elvis and Little Richard songs they had always played to warm up before performing or recording. They even resurrected a Quarry Men song, “The One After 909,” written by John and Paul on truant afternoons in Jim McCartney’s sitting-room with the Chinese pagoda wallpaper and the Liverpool Echos piled under the dresser. “We always hat
ed the words to that one,” Paul said. “‘Move over once, move over twice. Hey, baby, don’t be cold as ice…’ They’re great, really, aren’t they?”
Whatever glow these memories awoke soon died again in the cold and general discomfort. Nor did playing the old songs seem to bring the new songs any nearer to satisfying Paul. “We’ve been going round and round for an hour,” he complained wearily at one point. “I think it’s a question of either we do it or we go home.”
As Paul talked to George, a row started. “I always hear myself—annoying you,” Paul said. “Look, I’m not trying to get you. I’m just saying ‘Look, lads—the band. Shall we do it like this?’”
“Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play,” George cut in. His voice silting with resentment, he continued: “Or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”
At lunchtime on January 10, George said he had had enough. He was tired of being “got at” by Paul. He was quitting the Beatles, he said. He got into his car and drove home to Esher.
It was a temporary flare-up, and recognized as such. George knew, and the others did, that he could never resign with an album half-finished. And, sure enough, when a business meeting took place at Ringo’s a few days later, George turned up as usual. Work on the album resumed after Paul promised not to get at George or try to teach him the guitar. And, they all agreed, they had had enough of Twickenham studios. They decided to move straight into their own studio—the one that Magic Alex had been designing and assembling in the basement of the Apple house.
George Martin had already visited the basement but found the studio unready, lacking a console. It could be made fit for recording only by silencing the air conditioner, which thumped and wheezed in the corner, and by bringing in heavy consignments of rented sound equipment. This done, the Beatles and their film crew tried again. Billy Preston, a gifted American performer who was George’s protégé, joined the sessions as organist. What with the film crew, and this or that friend and acolyte, there was scarcely room in the basement to move. Yoko sat by John, as always, reading or embroidering. When Paul arrived—managing to make an entrance even through that narrow basement door-way—he brought Linda’s little daughter, Heather, riding on his shoulders.