I thought it might be interesting to some to hear the crazy story of Allen Klein & his company ABKCO (Allen and Betty Kline Company), which still holds the rights to some spaghetti westerns and many famous music bands of the 1960s (such as the Kinks, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and Mick Jagger’s famous girlfriend Marianne Faithful, whose publishing rights he gained along with the pre-1971 Rolling Stones catalogue when he managed them).
He also managed the Beatles in their final years.
The company was primarily involved in the music industry, but funded Spaghetti Westerns as a side venture. (To be fair, since this summary will be mentioning Klein’s ruthless tactics, it should be noted that the company is now managed by Klein’s son Jody, who seems to have a different approach to business).
Allen Klein treated the music & films he owned (via ABKCO) like a rare commodity, and thought they would only appreciate in value if kept rare (even long after the CD came out, many ABKCO owned hits of the 1960s were only available on Vinyl, because Klein would refuse deals to press CDs if he didn’t keep the overwhelming majority of the earnings and kept total control. Letting others profit from “his” works felt like a personal defeat to him).
He also held back some works out of pure spite, as his confrontational/litigious nature often led to feuds with studios and the talents he managed.
ABKCO holding the rights to “Blindman” is probably part of the reason why it still has no BluRay release, and why Jodorowsky’s works such as the Acid-Western “El Topo” were unaccessible for 30 years until Arrow managed to negotiate a 4K release (when the decades-long feud between Klein and Jodorowsky finally ended).
But let’s start at the beginning:
When I asked AI for a summary, the first sentence it came up with was “His journey from a motherless kid in a New Jersey orphanage to the most feared man in rock-and-roll is a masterclass in accounting and contract manipulation.”
(I wrote this article myself, I just used AI to help gather sources and will note whereever I quote AI).
After serving in the army, Klein started an accountant, but quickly realized the music industry was cheating their often naive young stars out of the money they were worth. So he approached rockabilly singers with the offer to audit their labels, in exchange for a cut of the money he recovered for them. Soon he was seen as a saviour by artists, and as a threat by industry executives.
He then approached Soul icon Sam Cooke (who was being exploited by his record label), but RCA Records refused to let him audit them.
So he created a company, Tracey Ltd (named after Cookes daughter), which leased Cooke’s future work to RCA for 30 years. However, the contract was set up so that Klein was actually the company’s owner, and Cooke an employee of his manager.
When Cooke got shot and killed in 1964, Klein bought out the remaining rights to Cooke’s catalogue from Cooke’s widow (these were the first permanent assets of future ABKCO).
He then flew to London, where he found UK artists of the British Invasion era were making very little money due to horrible contracts and high taxes.
He ended up renegotiating the contracts for bands like The Animals and Herman’s Hermits, resulting in massive cash advances, and convincing the bands to put them in NY bank accounts held by his company, and paid them in small increments over 20 years. This gave him the capital for his next, ultimate coup.
In 1965, the Rolling Stones’ young manager Andrew Oldham brought him in to help negotiate with Decca Records.
Over the next few years, Klein slowly pushed Oldham out. By the time the Stones realized what was happening, Klein had used complex contracts to transfer the master recording and the publishing rights of all their 1960s hits (from Satisfaction to Brown Sugar) directly to his company. They fired him in 1970, but after many lawsuits, he ended up walking away with their entire 1963-1971 catalogue (including hits like “Brown Sugar” or “Satisfaction”).
(Note: the last few sentences are a shortened summary of AI output).
In 1968, he bought Cameo-Parkway Records and merged it’s assets into the newly founded ABKCO Industries. John Lennon was impressed with his working-class demeanour and insisted on hiring him, to which Ringo Starr and George Harrison agreed, but this was the actual legal reason for the breakup of the Beatles, as Paul McCartney refused to work with Klein (having been warned by Mick Jagger not to get involved with Klein). The Beatles fired Klein in 1973, but ABKCO took a 20% cut of their earnings in their final years, and by the time he left all the band members were suing each other.
George Harrison had series of particularly bitter court battles with Klein that lasted until 1998, because Klein used knowledge gained during his time as Harrison’s manager to sue him for “unconscious plagiarism” for his single “My Sweet Lord”. During one of these lawsuits, a judge noted how “disgusting” Klein’s practices were.
BTW, George Harrison thus funded (and also played a cameo) in “The Rutles - All you need is cash” written by & starring Eric Idle (the former Monty Python comedian) and co-written/starred by Neil Innes (the Monty Python’s songwriter, often called “the 7th Python”), which parodies the story (i.e. the “Beatles Anthology” documentary) and the musical style of the Beatles brilliantly, and has guest appearances from Mick & Bianca Jagger, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Paul Simon of Simon & Garfunkel, Monty Python Michael Palin, Gwen Taylor, and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones playing a “Hell’s Angel”.
In this film, John Belushi brilliantly plays “Ron Decline”, who’s clearly supposed to be Allen Klein, the manager “so feared his employees would rather commit suicide than meet him”.
You can find the film on YouTube btw, and also the much weaker sequel, “Can’t buy me lunch” aka The Rutles 2.
Tony Anthony was ABKCO’s in-house movie star, and Klein used ABKCO’s deep music-industry pockets to fund and co-produce almost all of Anthony’s major projects. This included his signature “Stranger” Spaghetti Western trilogy (“A Stranger in Town”, “The Stranger Returns”, and “The Silent Stranger”), as well as his avant-garde 1971 drama Come Together. And “Blindman” of course. (Note: The last 2 sentences are taken from AI).
”The Silent Stranger” was actually shelved for 7 years after it’s completion, because of a fallout between MGM and Klein. MGM held back “The Silent Stranger” to spite Klein.
Klein in turn had a fallout with Alejandro Jodorowsky, and shelved his works out of spite for about 30 years (films like “El Topo” were hopelessly lost to the public until Arrow re-released them in 2009).
”Blindman” seems to be the last remaining victim of this “hoarding” tactic.
When the Stones’ “Satisfaction” was blasted during the climax of the mediocre 80s Schwarzenegger action flick “Raw Deal” (which looks cheap today, but wasn’t cheap to produce), film critics at the time even joked that DEG (Dino DeLaurentis production company) likely spent more money securing the rights to “Satisfaction” from ABKCO than they did filming the actual action scene. (Note: 2nd half of sentence is AI generated).
My conclusion: In retrospective, Klein’s approach to treat the art he held rights to as a rare commodity backfired, as the astronomical fees he demanded to licence the hits he held the rights to for films or other media mostly resulted in them being replaced with more reasonably priced music (unless the song was crucial to have, as in the aforementioned Raw Deal, where the song is an integral part of the scene). Hollywood may pay the price for a prominently placed Rolling Stones song in a movie, but probably much less likely for 1960s one-hit-wonders.
And once a hit is forgotten because it never gets played anywhere for licensing reasons, it’s much harder to attract new generations to the music of yesteryear’s artists than when you can’t find them on various “hits of the 1960s” compilation CDs, or hear them in various movies (like “My Generation” by The Who, or the Monkees “I’m a believer”, which are so often played in various movies that they’ll never be forgotten).
Same goes for movies: when a film has been lost for 30 years, the old fan base has largely forgotten it, and a new fan base would have to be built from scratch.
So by the time the son brought in a new approach, many tracks that were once famous hits were no longer relevant.
Examples of Artists/Songs that suffered this fate (AI generated list):
Chubby Checker (The Twist, Let’s Twist Again, Limbo Rock)
Bobby Rydell (Wild One, Volare)
The Orlons (The Wah-Watusi)
The Dovells (Bristol Stomp)
The Tymes (So Much in Love)
? and the Mysterians (96 Tears)
You can probably find a lot more interesting details if you read up on the story of Klein/ABKCO, but since this is such a crazy story with so many big names involved, I thought it’s worth to bring it to the attention of anyone potentially interested.
And since ABKCO was also closely tied to Tony Anthony and his Spaghetti Westerns, I thought this would be a story worth posting here (as the company did produce some Spaghetti Westerns).
I apologize if I got anything wrong (if I did, please feel free to correct me, and let me know if you want me to edit this text to correct it).
I hope this was interesting to someone, and I can strongly recommend the Rutles film to any fan of the Beatles, the Monty Python’s, or old-school British humour (it’s a criminally underrated gem that is largely unknown/forgotten, as it was just a TV film - an NBC/BBC co-production). John Belushi’s appearance as “Ron Decline”/Allen Klein is absolutely hilarious, and Neil Innes’ parodies of Beatles music were so close to the original that John Lennon rightly warned them they’d get sued over their “Get Back” spoof “Get up and go”. Yoko Ono’s portrayal is extremely funny too (the term “destructo-art” fits her “singing” perfectly).