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Re: John , Paul and Klein
Posted by **backbeat** on Jun 7, 2013 at 10:42:45 AM:
In Reply to: John , Paul and Klein posted by **murray** on Jun 7, 2013 at 5:11:03 AM:
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* You reckon John ever admitted to Paul that Paul was right about Allen Klein?
John Lennon about Allen Klein
Klein did well for The Beatles at first, and even McCartney must have been impressed when the American manager manoeuvred EMI into granting them the biggest royalty rate any artists had ever been paid at that time.
But, even for Lennon, the love affair with Klein did not last. Although it was Klein who put him together with Phil Spector for the Imagine album, a few years later all of the Beatles were united in a legal battle to sever their connection with him.
Lennon couldn't resist the chance to put his feelings about him into a song: Steel And Glass. 'Your teeth are clean, but your mind is capped, You leave your smell like an alley cat,' he sang.
Exactly how much of Klein's reputation was earned and how much was exaggerated only the artists he represented and their accountants will know.
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JOHN: "Well, when I'm not talking about it, I think about it occasionally. I mean, it's on my list of lawsuits. I was just talking about it with Yoko last night-- there seems to be an awful lot of lawsuits involved with rock and roll."
Q: "There's Allen Klein, right?"
JOHN: Yes, that's about twenty-- He's suing me, and Yoko, and all the ex-Beatles, and everybody that ever knew them! And he's suing me individually, me collectively, any version of me you can get hold of is being sued. But immigration is the important one-- the others are all just money, somehow a deal will be made. Immigration, that's the one. I mean, if they can take Helen Reddy, they can take me..."
Q: "Would you want to become a US citizen?"
JOHN: "I'm too involved with this to think about citizenship. I'd prefer to do a P. G. Wodehouse. I found out before he was knighted that he was living here (America), and I thought well, that's cool. Nobody thinks P. G. Wodehouse is not English. He was English until his last breath and he lived on Long Island. And that suits me fine. I'm English but I want to live here. And the funny thing about America is that there's almost no such thing as American. You go on the streets and everybody's Italian or Irish or Israeli or English or Jamaican or Nigerians... and if you go out into the sticks you've got the German group or the Dutch group and the names tell you which race dominates. It's just a pack of Europeans living here with Africans, Indians, and Asians thrown in. Thousands of Chinese, Japanese... It's like the old gag about the melting pot."
"I always liked Liverpool and London-- places like that had alot of different races living in them. You could go to Soho and see all kinds of races on earth and I like that, but there's even more of a mixture here. My ideal is to be able to travel, that's the thing I really miss most. I miss England, Scotland, Wales, all that sentimental stuff... but I also miss France, Holland... Germany I haven't been to for years. I'd like to go to South America. I've never been. I'd like to be based here, and just travel."
Q: "Do you ever think you'll be so overcome with all the legal hassles that you'll get like Lenny Bruce and become obsessed with learning the law?"
JOHN: "No. I got obsessed with the politics for awhile... but law is, well... I could never take it that seriously. At a certain point I would just see the funny side of it and say fuck it. The worst that happens with most of these lawsuits is that they'll take more money off of me, and the worst that would happen with immigration is that I'd have to move."
Q: "Where would you move? I've heard rumors of Canada."
JOHN: "No. They always say that because whenever I go to Canada the Canadians as me if I like Canada, So I say yes, I like Canada-- I like Montreal and Toronto. I don't know the rest of it-- and the next minute they say I'm going to live there. And they always ask, 'Have you ever thought of living here?' Well, every country I've ever been to I've thought, 'Could I live here...'"
Followup Messages:
- Re: John , Paul and Klein - **pycb** - Jun 8, 2013 at 6:46:49 PM
- Re: John , Paul and Klein - **backbeat** - Jun 7, 2013 at 11:06:29 AM
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Last updated on Jun 8, 2013