Talk:Allen Klein/Archives/2016

Navbox for Groups and individuals managed by Allen Klein
What was wrong with the Navbox that I created for Groups and individuals managed by Allen Klein? Is there a better way to do it? Strawberry4Ever (talk) 12:35, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
 * All the code for the navbox does not go into the article. The idea for navboxes like these is to create it in one spot, but use in multiple articles.  That way, if you change the navbox for any reason, it automatically gets updated in all the articles.  An example is the navbox People associated with The Beatles, already found in the article.  Click on the wikilink I gave and you can see how and where the navbox was created.... Mostly, it is copying what you already created into template space.  After you create it, you can add the navbox into any article that you think should have it.  Bgwhite (talk) 00:09, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. That's more ambitious than what I had in mind because I just wanted a Navbox in the Allen Klein article, but what you're suggesting makes sense because there would also be references to the Navbox in the articles for each of Klein's client. I'll work on it as time permits. The other question is whether I need footnotes to justify the inclusion of each group or individual in the Navbox. I'll try to make sure that each of them is mentioned in the Allen Klein article, with suitable reference to Goodman's 2015 biography of Klein, which is where I got the lists of musical acts and producers. I'm also thinking of adding a list of people for whom Klein acted as an accountant but not as business manager, e.g. Bobby Darin.
 * Oops, I forgot to sign my last update. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 14:56, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Year that ABKCO was founded
The Allen Klein (until today) and ABKCO Records articles both say that ABKCO was founded in 1961. The only reference that I can find for that statement is on manta.com. The 2015 Goodman biography of Klein says that after Klein purchased Cameo-Parkways Records in 1967 he renamed it as ABKCO. Cameo-Parkways purchased Allen Klein and Company, which Klein had created several years earlier. Unfortunately Goodman doesn't always give precise dates, but the chronology appears to be something like this:


 * 1957: Klein is hired by Joseph Fenton and Company and is fired four months later
 * 1957 or a little later: Klein creates Allen Klein and Company
 * circa 1957-1961 Klein owns 85% of the Allen Klein, Newfield and Weinberg partnership, which ends after three months
 * circa 1957-1961 After the end of the partnership the firm goes back to being Allen Klein and Company.
 * 1960 accountant Joel Silver joins "the company". It's not clear whether this means the partnership or Allen Klein and Company
 * 1967 Allen Klein purchases a controlling interest in Cameo-Parkways Records
 * 1967 or 1968 Cameo-Parkways Records purchases Allen Klein and Company
 * 1967 or 1968 Cameo-Parkway Records is renamed as ABKCO

Maybe the way to resolve the discrepancy is to say that Allen Klein and Company, which later became part of ABKCO, was incorporated in 1961, and before that it was a sole proprietorship. This is just a guess, though. I think it's safer to say that ABKCO was founded in the 1960s without giving a specific year, unless someone can find a reference with more precice dates. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 21:35, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Edits referencing 2015 biography
I am concerned that this article has had significant edits that are entirely centered around a single (at this writing, brand-new) biography, Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, And Transformed Rock & Roll. by Fred Goodman. This is not to say that the biography is not well-written, and it is not to say that this article would not benefit from a certain amount of citable material from that biography, but it is to say that this article now overwhelmingly relies on a single source. Any thoughts on this situation? KConWiki (talk) 21:11, 26 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Agree with your concerns. The article comes off as slick PR. The tags are deserved. Jus  da  fax   12:06, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I've made what I hope are improvements to the section on The Beatles, adding references to two other books: The Beatles Anthology and "Lennon" by Ray Coleman Strawberry4Ever (talk) 20:13, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm also adding obituary references which were removed by the June 21, 2015 edit and trying to give a more balanced view of Klein, both good and bad, from the Goodman biography. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 21:00, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I've finished editing the article based on Fred Goodman's biography and incorporating some other sources. In your opinion can these tags be removed:


 * I'm not sure about . I removed detail which was there in July 2015 but I added detail in other sections. What do you think? Should some of the added detail be pruned? Strawberry4Ever (talk) 04:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I'd say it's better, enough so to pull the tags. The tone still rankles me in spots, but not nearly as much. I don't mind the length, as this is a complex bio with many facets. My thanks! Jus  da  fax   02:05, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments, . What parts of the article do you think can be improved for tone? Strawberry4Ever (talk) 12:55, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The sections on the Beatles and the post-Beatles breakup have unencyclopedic moments, in my view, but it's not enough to keep from pulling the tags at the start of the article. Jus  da  fax   02:35, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I'll try to tighten up those sections at some point. Thanks again for your thoughts. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 04:27, 28 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I've removed the tags and made changes to the two sections that you mentioned in an attempt to improve the tone. What do you think? Do you still see problems? Strawberry4Ever (talk) 15:40, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Extensive Reliance on Positive Source
This article almost exclusively relies on one source, "Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll", which was written with the help of Klein's son and is, to put it mildly, a very rose-colored look at Klein's relationship with the Beatles and the Stones. It's well documented (specifically in the book "Beatles vs. Stones", by John McMillian, and in several other sources such as and ) that Klein swindled the Stones of their pre-1971 catalog and put their $1.2M advance into a shell company, which only he had access to, requiring the Stones to beg for funds. It took six years for the Stones to get this money back - and then they found out that Klein hadn't paid their taxes for the past five years. And this is just one example.

I always hate people who come to a page and say "this sucks" and hopefully that's not what I'm doing. The article doesn't need to be rewritten, as its well done and informative, but there at least needs to be some additions and revisions because right now the article violates Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines in several different ways. Comments? Ckruschke (talk) 14:15, 1 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke


 * As Fred Goodman says in the acknowledgements in his book Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll he made the book with the help of Klein's son Joel [Jody] and was given extensive access to records at ABKCO but he made it clear that he'd tell the entire truth as he found it, not just the parts that made Allen Klein look good. Unfortunately the first versions of the Wikipedia article which used Goodman's book extracted only the positive parts of the book and for the most part left out the negative. I've tried to restore balance. If you want to see the difference, do a show history and diff the article before I made my first edit in December 2015 and what it is now. Maybe I didn't go far enough in showing how Klein took advantage of his position as business manager of major rock groups to enrich himself. I agree that it would be good to bring in material from other sources. I was only able to work with the sources that I had. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 14:31, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Regarding your statement that "Klein swindled the Stones of their pre-1971 catalog and put their $1.2M advance into a shell company, which only he had access to, requiring the Stones to beg for funds. It took six years for the Stones to get this money back - and then they found out that Klein hadn't paid their taxes for the past five years." Most of that information is in the Rolling Stones section of the Allen Klein article, although not in those terms. Based on what I've read, I don't think it's fair to say that Klein "swindled" the Rolling Stones out of their pre-1971 catalog. That's what the Stones claimed, but the court did not agree. I do think it's fair to say that the Stones were taken advantage of by their business managers, first Andrew Loog Oldham and then Allen Klein. Apparently that was fairly common in the 1960s. The Stones lost (or never had) the rights to their songs because of the contract they signed with Oldham and his partner, Eric Easton. Oldham forced Easton out and Klein bought Oldham's rights to the songs. The "shell company" was a tax shelter. If the Stones had been given their $1.2 million dollar advance in cash they would have had to pay 90% taxes on it. By spreading the payments over a period of years they only had to pay tax on the money as they received it and it would be taxed at a lower rate. Of course Klein hadn't paid the Stones' taxes&mdash;that was the whole point. I agree that Klein should have paid the money to the Stones when they asked for it. Apparently he liked to toy with people. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 16:13, 1 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the comments, gentlemen. My point was not to argue the merits of the claims - which has been and will be debated ad nauseum so you and I can't really add much to the discussion - it was concerning the NPOV of the article and I appreciate your open minds. So I'll pull germane quotes/sentences from the Beatles vs. Stones book (which I happen to own) and other non-commentary articles from the time (such as the Rolling Stones article from '75 that I cited) to simply add a little bit "of the other side of the coin" as well as further commentary. If you feel the items I add unduely cast a bad disparaging light on Klein, I don't mind discussing. Just looking to add balance and not trying to trash the dead. Ckruschke (talk) 19:11, 1 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke


 * Fair enough, . Just to clarify, I wrote both of the previous comments. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 19:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Right. My bad... Ckruschke (talk) 19:33, 1 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke


 * Regarding the changes you made to the lead section, second paragraph: I agree that something should be said there about the "years of litigation", especially between Klein and the Rolling Stones. I think some of the detail which you added there should be moved to the Rolling Stones section. The statement "Klein's involvement with both the Beatles and Rolling Stones would lead to ... accusations from the musicians that Klein ... stole the publishing rights to their songs" applies only to the Rolling Stones, not to the Beatles. Regarding the money held by Klein and the Stones' 1971 tax exile, this is what Fred Goodman says in his book Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll on pages 201-202 and 231:

Under the original management agreement, Easton and Oldham owned the Rolling Stones' master recordings and leased them to Decca. In the United States, those rights were leased to Decca's American subsidiary, London Records. When Klein came into the picture, he created an American company, Nanker Phelge Music, to house those rights, which were then leased by Nanker Phelge to London Records for the term of the contract. The American company was supposed to allow the Stones to repatriate their U.S. income without paying the ruinous British taxes on foreign income by taking it out through a similarly named extant British company, Nanker Phelge Ltd.&mdash;although that company had a completely different function and nothing to do with master recordings. Ultimately, Klein's scheme failed to impress the Inland Revenue, who said it would still tax the money at the foreign rate of approximately 90 percent&mdash;disastrous for the band, since they were guaranteed at least $1.25 million from London Records. Klein came up with paying the musicians' American guarantee through Nanker Phelge in twenty annual installments in order to reduce the taxes. As he had done with Sam Cooke, Klein explained to Oldham and the Stones that this would be recognized as a legitimate arrangement only if it was an outside corporation; if it wasn't, they would be taxed at once. Though the Stones would later claim they had no idea that they didn't own the company, this doesn't appear to be the case. In a 1968 letter to a record company, Jagger referred to Nanker Phelge Music as a firm owned by Allen Klein.*

* In their subsequent suits against Klein and ABKCO, the Rolling Stones would attempt to void this letter&mdash;unsuccessfully.

...

As discussions continued throughout the spring it also became apparent that whatever the Stones had said and would later say regarding Nanker Phelge and the notion that they'd been hoodwinked, Loewenstein was simply on a mission to get as much money out of Klein as he could, as soon as he could. The real issue was that the Stones had already earned $2 million in royalties over the $1.2 million guarantee, but Klein was entitled to hold the money back for another fifteen years, ostensibly for tax purposes but also because it gave him the chance to play with someone else's money. The Stones had decided to move to France and take advantage of the drop-out year available under British tax law, and they were eager to collect as much income during that time as they could. By deducting money Klein had already advanced to the Stones as "loans," both sides agreed that the band would receive $1.2 million as a settlement of all American record royalties earned up to that point. Jagger and Richards dropped the challenge to ABKCO's publishing rights, and the band pledged not to rerecord any songs they'd cut for Decca for at least five years, essentially a ban on live albums, so as not to dilute the value of the Stones albums ABKCO manufactured.
 * Based on this, I think it's fair to say that Klein took advantage of his position as the Stones' business manager to enrich himself, and he may arguably have misled the Stones about what they were agreeing to. He should have given the Stones their money when they asked for it. I don't think it's fair to say that he "neglected" to pay their taxes for five years. The whole point of setting up Nanker Phelge Music and spreading payment over 20 years, at least ostensibly, was to reduce the Stones' tax liability because they'd only have to pay tax on the money when they received it. For Klein to have paid taxes on the money each year would have defeated the purpose. The Stones' new financial advisers found a different way of sheltering the money from Britain's 90 percent tax rate on foreign earnings&mdash;the one year tax exile outside of Britain. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 22:24, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Strawberry4Ever - thanks for your viewpoint. However, my point in all this is that Goodman's book is skewed to the side of Klein pretty dramatically and the article needs another viewpoint to restore the NPOV of the article. Specifically about the taxes, Klein can say that the arrangement with Nanker-Phelge North America was done in order to save the Stones from income tax, but the opposite story has continually come out from the Stones themselves - they had no idea the shell company was being set up, they had no idea they needed to ask "mother may I" to get a penny of that money, and the 20 year pay back plan essentially lengthened their "legal arrangement" with Klein from five years to 20 - forcing them to continually litigate in order to release older material and get paid royalty fees.
 * I'm fine with softening the edges of what I've put in (and yes, its a misprint that Klein tried to get the Beatles song - whooops...), but McMillian's book is, in my opinion, a better source for the discussion as it is heavily referenced from many different sources (the footnote section is 45 pages long) while Goodman's book has essentially one source, ABKCO and its principals. At the very least, the two books should be on equal footing.
 * I'll re-edit the lede a little and you can let me know what you think. As far as your comment that the parts about the Stones are not lede worthy, I guess my viewpoint is that the lede is supposed to summarize the text and with an issue that was litigated more than a dozen times it seems like that's a major part of the story about who Allen Klein was. The millions and millions he made off the Hot Rocks album (from which the Stones didn't see a dime of the album sales and then had to fight to get the royalty payments from the songs that were used) alone makes the issue lede worthy. Ckruschke (talk) 16:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke
 * As a final note, I know you've done the majority of the heavy lifting on this article and I respect that. I'm not trying to tell you the article is awful or take over. I think an uninterested third party often helps to even our articles out a little and hopefully that's what you see me doing. I was just going to put in some notes in the Beatles section and then probably call it good as my book doesn't talk about anything else from Klein's life.Ckruschke (talk) 16:45, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke
 * I absolutely agree that it was good to bring in another source to promote a neutral point of view. I just don't understand how the Rolling Stones, or McMillian, could blame Klein for "neglecting" to pay the Stones' taxes for five years between 1966 and 1971. If Klein had paid the Stones' taxes for those years, instead of receiving $1.2 million in 1971 the Stones would have received $120,000&mdash;the net after paying taxes at a 90 percent rate.


 * Have you read Goodman's book? I don't think it's as pro-Klein as you're suggesting. Except for the claim that Klein neglected to pay the Stones' taxes, Goodman covers all the points that you mentioned. Unfortunately I don't have access to the "Beatles vs. Stones" book so it's hard for me to resolve discrepancies between the two books. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 23:20, 5 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that Klein's motives were as altruistic as either he or Goodman's book states. Considering the Beatles vs Stones book says (and is sourced from three other books) that the Stones were unable to pry a dime of this money out of Klein - something for which they were unaware would happen when they signed the contract - and meanwhile Klein invested the $1.2M in GM stocks and made a mint off the interest, it appeared (to me) that it was a gigantic money-making scheme on Klein's part. However, that's just my opinion.
 * I'm in the same boat on the book - I also haven't read Goodman's book and don't have access to it. All I have is several reviews saying it's a "puff piece" and a somewhat equal amount saying it's "great journalism". It would be interesting to find similar passages in the two books and examine the bibliography to see how the viewpoints differ. But that would be a somewhat academic exercise.
 * Honestly the only reason I even did this was I visited this page after reading about him in the BvS book looking for more info on the man and I saw that the ref list was 80% from one book. Since the viewpoint was markedly different in the BvS book than what was reflected on this page, I just thought I'd add in some additional commentary to even out the POV. Now that I'm done and don't have plans on any more editing on this page, I don't see much of a difference, but I think the ref list looks a little better so that someone else won't come along and think the same thing as I did. Ckruschke (talk) 18:07, 10 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke
 * If I can't find Beatles vs. Stones at my local library I think I might buy it at some point. It sounds like an interesting book, and it would be easier to resolve disagreement between the two books if one person had access to both of them and could compare them page by page. Better yet would be to find a third book to break the tie. Until then I'll just leave your edits alone. I do agree that adding more sources is a good thing. I was trying to do that with my previous edits, and adding references to Beatles vs. Stones is a further step in the right direction. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 18:18, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. I think my adds are pretty benign when considering the total content on the page and the book is well sourced, but I don't have a problem with you corroborating them. I'd offer to send you my book, since I won't read it again, but my mom is a major Beatles fan so I'm going to send it to her to read. Ckruschke (talk) 19:47, 10 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke