Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, and Transformed Rock and Roll
By Fred Goodman
(Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

If you don’t know who Allen Klein is, you are going to find out all about this amazing modern music manager/deal maker in Fred Goodman’s richly researched hardcover Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, and Transformed Rock and Roll. Feel about Klein as you might, coming new to his story and suspicious of any man with this much power and influence, enjoying his exploits and brashness, there is no denying that Allen Klein was a force to be be reckoned with…even moving amongst powerhouses like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

What I appreciate here is Goodman’s nothing-left-unsaid-completely-impartial look at Klein and his rise (and certainly some falling) across a business that was still pretty much in its infancy. And even though popular musicians have weighed in about Klein aplenty, there is no ignoring the fact that this man laid waste to record companies, publishers and agents, championing artists all the way.

Surely, Klein made money here and he was quite lethal in doing so, but he was working for artists as much as for himself and got into the fray with his guts and brains to push, pull and demand what musicians at the time never even knew they were entitled to.

Read Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, and Transformed Rock and Roll and get yourself a much needed history lesson on a man as interesting as the musicians he worked for.