A Prince Among Stones (11 page)

The very next day I was in Hyde Park for what was definitely
not
a quiet affair: the Stones' outdoor concert, where Mick, clad in the same milkmaid outfit he had worn to the White Ball, read extracts from Shelley's
Adonaïs
in memory of Brian Jones, whose body had been found early in the morning of the day of the White Ball. Not quiet, but not yet deafening. In these early days the noise levels at the concerts I had been to were not overbearing, nor impossible to bear.

The noise phenomenon only hit me when the band started playing in the larger venues where they overcompensated for the size of the venue; that is they overcompensated for the people in the good seats.

I had entered what, to me, was an alien world. However, I never felt uncomfortable. On the contrary, I felt excited at seeing such a magnificent phenomenon. There was no doubt about it, the Stones in performance were most impressive. I certainly thought so at Hyde Park and when I had first seen them live in the West End. Above all I had noticed how professional they were.

It was that afternoon in Hyde Park that Mick and I discussed how easy it would be for him to manipulate the huge crowds. I was reminded of this potentially destructive power when I heard about the tragic event at Altamont later that same year, when a young man, Meredith Hunter, was killed, even though that incident had been provoked by the involvement of the Hell's Angels as security guards.

For the first time I was made aware of the extraordinary power of the band's music and in particular of Mick's charisma. I was struck by the way that he was able to project himself on to a mass without any enormous skill in the disciplines usually required for a singing career. He had none of the technical expertise of the brilliant singing stars I admired – Tito Gobbi or Boris Christoff, say. I realised that what Mick had was ‘star quality'. That was the phrase I had been searching for.

5

 

 

‘I know how men in exile feed on dreams'

 

Aeschylus

 

 

 

As I started examining the intricacies of the music business I felt something of the pioneer spirit. For a while there was nobody else taking on a similar role to the one I was undertaking for the Stones. Shortly afterwards, of course, other groups of professionals emerged, who could also see the way the entertainment world was changing.

These were the lawyers. Lee Eastman and his son John, who represented Paul McCartney after the Beatles' break-up, were both entertainment lawyers (Paul met his wife Linda Eastman as a direct result). Jim Beach, the long-time manager of Queen, also started out as a lawyer. It was a predictable path: the small groups who turned into the big bands were obliged to find good lawyers, who then scented profits and transformed themselves into managers, in precisely the way Allen Klein, a qualified accountant, had spotted the chance, realised it was enormous and exploited the opportunity with not just the Rolling Stones, but also the Beatles.

It was Mick who had introduced Klein to John Lennon a few weeks before I met Mick. After we had spoken he rang Lennon back and said, ‘I've rethought it and I've gone to this other person. I think you should do the same because I'm not happy about my introduction of Klein.' But it was too late.

I met Allen Klein in London during the early days of working through the Stones' documents. I had to be extremely careful with him because I was well aware that everybody around me thought that I was getting into a situation where the risk was greater than the potential reward.

Klein was equally careful with me. He was very wary indeed, and I think that shortly after we met he realised that in some way or other he, too, was at risk. He came across as oily, but at the same time aggressive. I soon realised that with anything he said, there was no reason why one should either believe or disbelieve it.

Mick found it a lot harder to deal directly with Allen Klein. He felt very aggrieved, that Klein had acted improperly, and that he, Mick, had been made to look a fool. There was one frightening incident in the Savoy Hotel when Mick started screaming at Klein who darted out of the room and ran down the corridor with Mick in hot pursuit. I had to stop him and say, ‘You cannot risk laying a hand on Klein.' In retrospect I thought it was probably a good idea that Keith had not joined us on that occasion.

Essentially the band were handcuffed on the one side by their contract with Allen Klein and on the other to Decca Records, and my job was going to be to allow them to escape, Houdini-like, from both with the minimum damage. There was no question of renegotiating the contract with Decca. The challenge was how to get out of that contract, because they had no freedom to go to any other record company. Decca had rights over works ‘created in whole or in part'. There was hardly any room for manoeuvre.

However, the contract with Decca was completely normal. What was abnormal was the contract they had with Klein, as we discovered in due course.

Having read about the Beatles and Northern Songs, and how they had made a substantial amount of money selling the copyrights in their songs, which clearly had a value, and after giving careful thought to the tax implications, I decided that examining the Stones' financial affairs would be ideal work for an intelligent set of financial advisers, which essentially is what Leopold Joseph was.

I also realised that if a way could be found to get through and past the lack of transparency and the dodgy business practices which surrounded the touring business, there was a lot of money to be made, although at the time the artists were making no money out of touring.

However, it seemed obvious that the artists who could make money were the ones who performed well. And I had seen enough of Mick and the Stones to realise that performance was their forte. The potential for money was there. It was not going to disappear. The trick would be to make sure the money went to the performers, not the promoters. I resolved to tackle that issue as soon as the immediate knotty legal issues were resolved.

The group's documents arrived – in truckloads. I persuaded my colleagues and company lawyers to look at all the documents for no charge. This, I have always thought, was one of the most remarkable deals I have ever negotiated.

At this stage my contact with the Stones was with Mick, acting on behalf of the group. The rest of the band would not have wanted to be involved. They rarely had anything to do with the business side. I met the others and we all understood each other, since they were very pleased with what I was doing on their behalf. However, even though Keith lived just down the road from Mick at 3 Cheyne Walk, I did not meet him for quite a few months after I had started analysing the situation.

In fact, since I was always keen to do these things in what I thought was the correct way, I had asked each of the others to come to my office, but I could not get Keith for months. This disturbed me. I got rather annoyed and wrote him a stiff letter, essentially saying, ‘Since I gather the intention is that we should be working together, I think it is important to meet.'

Finally he did turn up, and I was as impressed by him as I had been with Mick, though in a completely different way. I had an intuition about Keith, which I might have been hard pressed to articulate at the time.

I saw that Keith was in a way – and I hesitate to say this – the most intelligent mind of all the band. Certainly he had an aura about him, like Mick a
je ne sais quoi
that would be exhilarating to be involved in. His aura to me was that of generations of travelling circus folk, like Sleary's Circus in Dickens'
Hard Times
: entertainers but also with something of the pilgrim.

The other band members made less impact on me. Bill Wyman struck me as a perfectly normal, rather ordinary young man. In the early stages I thought – wrongly – that he had a certain financial intellect and wanted him to take on the role of the financial scribe within the group. I hoped he would become the Stones' calculating machine so that our discussions would be more straightforward, but I soon saw that was not possible.

Charlie Watts was diffident, charming, basically a nice man with a strong artistic talent, with his jazz and his draughtsmanship. Mick Taylor was good-looking in a conventional way, which none of the others were. He had been brought in to replace Brian Jones, whose death had somewhat complicated matters from my point of view, because all the contracts involved him. Consequently I had to deal with the solicitor looking after the Stones' affairs, Guy Berger, a good, honest man but who was somewhat out of his area of expertise since he had no experience or understanding of what we now call the rock business (but which in those days we wouldn't have known what to call).

I looked for a firm of solicitors who would understand the business. I was doing some work for the publisher George Weidenfeld at the time, and I discussed with him which lawyers he thought might be appropriate. He recommended a Hungarian lawyer, a senior partner at Theodore Goddard, who at once grasped the issues, but said, ‘I'm not the right partner to deal with this, but I do have two fellow partners who are both excellent, one for commercial undertakings, and the other on tax matters.'

The first stage of my involvement was a question of analysing the Stones' contracts, by going through every single document, which I did with the assistance of the two partners at Theodore Goddard. After reviewing a few of the basic documents I realised why the Stones would not have received the money which Mick had questioned at our first meeting. It would have gone to Klein and therefore they would have depended on what
he
gave them, as opposed to what the record company or the publishing company did. They were completely in the hands of a man who was like an old-fashioned Indian moneylender, in other words somebody who takes everything and only releases to others a tiny sliver of income, before tax . . .

There were, not surprisingly, no statements of accounts from Allen Klein. The only way to work out what had gone to whom was by meticulously going through all the computations which were included in the mass of papers that their old solicitors and accountants possessed. Of course, they had reviewed all the papers that they received from Decca and from Andrew Oldham and ticked them. One had to realise that they had never been truly informed as to the risks that they'd be running as the creditors of a buccaneering American accountant.

The role of the band's previous advisers was not an issue. They simply were not aware either of the potential profits that the Rolling Stones could generate or the abnormality of the contracts that they had signed with Decca, Oldham and Klein.

It took eighteen months, indeed until 1970 when the Stones' existing contracts came to an end, to work through the stacks of papers. The contracts for the recording and publishing of the Stones' music would have to be renegotiated, debts repaid pursuant to the Allen Klein agreements, and money had to be found for the tax they owed – 83–98 per cent on their income – and for which no provision had been made.

As I took stock of the evidence from reading all the documentation and papers, and from what I had learnt and understood of the overall situation, I now had to decide how to resolve what was clearly a rats' nest of complications, and how to untangle the relationship between the Stones and Decca, and between the Stones and Allen Klein. Otherwise forward progress was going to be impossible.

During all of this time I was working, and working hard. Analysing the Stones' financial situation was highly detailed, painstaking, fastidious work and for me somewhat uncharted territory. In the days before word processors, faxes and e-mails, documents had to be typed from the start and then retyped again and again. Indeed, even this does not encompass the fact that many different documents had to be sifted apart so that the real basis of what the Stones had made and what the manager had taken could be shown.

But I had found something that interested me and that was the lawsuits. Perhaps because I possessed the mind of a lawyer, even if I had never entered the profession, it amused me to see what one could do and what one couldn't do and whether the lawyers made sense or whether they didn't.

Many years later we found ourselves staying as guests in the house near Grasse belonging to our friend Tom Parr, a decorator (which he preferred to the term ‘interior designer') who had set up a partnership with David Hicks before joining Colefax and Fowler. Herbert von Karajan's man of business was there for lunch, and I remember saying to Josephine, ‘Ah, how I wish that I had his job, and he had mine. I would be so much happier looking after Karajan than rock stars.' Josephine tartly replied that I was quite wrong, ‘Nonsense. You would mind if Karajan had a bad performance, but you couldn't care less if now and then they perform badly. It is far easier for you not to be involved except for keeping an eye to see that they follow their new guidelines, rather than getting upset if they goof onstage.' It was a perceptive remark of hers, and quite true.

To progress the situation for the Stones, I had to find both American and English lawyers to work with since much of the business with Allen Klein had been carried out under American law. The bulk of the significant recording documents were with London Records, the US subsidiary of Decca. Simultaneously we were having to deal not only with our solicitors in London for the contract with Decca itself but also with both the American and British lawyers for the Stones' relationship with Klein, London Records and the various publishing issues.