Allen Klein: the true villain behind The Beatles’ break-up
There have been millions of think pieces over the years talking about how Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles. The whole world needed a scapegoat once the Fab Four decided that they weren’t going to make music together anymore, and listening back to how ugly things got, it’s not hard for people to turn to the one new person in the studio and pile on the misogynistic reasons why she should be blamed for everything. For everyone still on the Yoko Ono hate train, allow me to remind you that you’re focusing your anger on the wrong place.
First off, it was clear that The Beatles were going to be taking a break in some capacity anyway. As much as they could still play well together, it was clear that they were on different creative pages and needed to get that out of their system had they been able to work outside of the big Fab monster.
While they did start to flounder business-wise after Brian Epstein died, the fact that Allen Klein entered the conversation at all was really the first problem. McCartney had been warned by Mick Jagger not to go with Klein as their manager, and looking back on the heinous business dealings that he had done in the past, it wasn’t like that didn’t hold water.
Not only did he screw up The Stones’ affairs, but years before, his biggest success story was trying to make a quick buck off of riding the coattails of Sam Cooke, who seemed to be worth more dead than alive once he started to make a mint out of songs like ‘A Change is Gonna Come’.
So, looking at The Beatles starting to spiral, it doesn’t seem that far off to look at Klein as a predator eyeing his next prey. Since Macca could see through Klein’s business talk, his opposition to him led to his bandmates turning on him. They did have a point in that Klein could turn their business affairs around, but how the next few years played out led to some of the ugliest parts of the band’s history.
But how did Allen Klein wreck The Beatles’ career?
Since Klein controlled John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, seeing him bleed money from all of them felt increasingly manipulative. Aside from instigating the diss track battle between Lennon and McCartney by adding lines to ‘How Do You Sleep’, Klein did eventually take a piece of Harrison’s money for The Concert for Bangladesh, leading to ‘The Quiet Beatle’ getting frustrated for years making sure that the money went to the cause rather than filling his manager’s pockets.
And by the 1970s, it wasn’t long before The Beatles, who were still in his corner, realised they had made a huge mistake. Harrison had said how tired he was about the business dealings, rambling on for far too long, and by the time Lennon worked on Walls and Bridges, the song ‘Steel and Glass’ had been speculated to be about Klein, even using the same riff from ‘How Do You Sleep’ to go after him.
However, perhaps the biggest tragedy of Klein’s behaviour is keeping The Beatles’ breakup in limbo for years. Since the breakup paperwork stretched all the way to 1975, the members had no desire to come back together again, despite the fact that Lennon and McCartney seemed to be on good terms for the first time in years. At the same time, I pose the question to you: if you had money bled from you for years trying to get your life back on track, would the option of going back for more sound like a good idea?
Considering that all of the band members were cordial towards each other by the end, maybe they could have managed to stick the landing and make the great comeback everyone wanted. But all of it got buried by a businessman who claimed to give people everything they wanted and ended up only wanting to please himself at everyone’s expense. Kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
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