ABKCO Records

• 1. Introduction

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  ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. is an American independent record label, music publisher, and film and video production company, and its name hides a joke. The letters stand for Allen & Betty Klein and COmpany. Allen Klein, the founder, liked to say they meant A Better Kind of COmpany. Whether the company earned that description is the question that runs through this story. ABKCO owns or administers rights to music by many famous acts. It also has a reputation as infamous, because of its management contracts and the lawsuits Klein brought, which persisted until his death. How did one business gather so many catalogs, and why did so much of its history end up in court?

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• 2. Klein's Empire

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  In 1961, a business manager named Allen Klein started a firm called Allen Klein & Co. Klein, who lived from 1931 to 2009, specialized in music clients. Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke were among his early accounts. Later he went on to manage the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

  In 1968, Klein created ABKCO Industries as an umbrella company. It covered management, music publishing, film, television, and theatrical production. Later that same year, the company bought the Cameo-Parkway Records catalog together with a manufacturing facility. ABKCO then used that plant to produce records by several of its own artists, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The catalog that came with the purchase would soon become a sore point for record buyers.

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• 3. The Cameo-Parkway Vault

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  Chubby Checker had to go back into a studio and record "The Twist" again. The reason was a licensing policy at ABKCO that kept original versions of songs off compilations. Several original artists faced the same problem. They re-recorded their hits so that bargain-basement oldies LPs could include them.

  The Cameo-Parkway label carried recordings by Checker, Bobby Rydell, the Orlons, the Dovells, Question Mark & the Mysterians, the Tymes, and Dee Dee Sharp. ABKCO sat on the entire catalog, and many fans criticized the label heavily for it. The original recordings stayed unavailable until 2005.

  Jody Klein, the president of ABKCO, is credited in liner notes with finally getting those recordings released. He partially owns them. He also oversaw an extensive remastering of the 1960s recordings of the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Herman's Hermits, and Sam Cooke.

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• 4. Catalog and Distribution

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  Marianne Faithfull, Dishwalla, and the Kinks sit on the same roster as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Herman's Hermits, and Sam Cooke. ABKCO owns or administers the rights to all of them. Its work today centers on compilations and reissues. It also places its master recordings and publishing properties in films and commercials.

  Until 2009, ABKCO also administered Philles Records and its master recordings. That label produced hits by the Righteous Brothers, the Ronettes, and the Crystals. The arrangement ran through a licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing, which had owned the Philles catalog since the mid-1990s.

  Today ABKCO Records is distributed by Universal Music Distribution. That company also controls distribution of the Rolling Stones' post-ABKCO catalog, through Polydor Records and Interscope Records.

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• 5. The Beatles Contract

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  In January 1970, the Beatles signed a music publishing management contract with ABKCO Industries. The relationship did not last. After the contract was terminated, ABKCO sued the group.

  The suit was resolved in 1977, when the Beatles paid ABKCO $4.2 million. Other lawsuits between ABKCO and the Beatles continued for at least another decade. One of them involved a George Harrison song and a hit by the Chiffons.

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• 6. Harrison Versus ABKCO

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  The case of ABKCO Music, Inc. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd. began with a complaint from Bright Tunes Music Corporation. Bright Tunes owned the rights to "He's So Fine" by the Chiffons. It argued that George Harrison, acting through Harrison Interests, had borrowed from that song when he wrote "My Sweet Lord."

  ABKCO was managing work released by Harrison, along with other Beatles material. That made it a defendant. After years of negotiation, ABKCO made a successful motion to acquire Bright Tunes and all of its copyrights. ABKCO then started a new lawsuit against Harrison Interests over the same two songs.

  The court ruled that Harrison had committed copyright infringement, and he paid damages. The court also found ABKCO guilty of breaching its fiduciary duty. It had bought Bright Tunes while holding intimate knowledge of Harrison's defense. The earnings from that acquisition were to be paid to Harrison Interests with interest. Both sides appealed, and the appellate court upheld the district court's decision.

  Harrison had his own way of commenting on the company. During 1970, he demoed his song "Beware of Darkness" for Phil Spector. He jokingly changed one line to "Beware of ABKCO." The song later appeared on his first post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass. A 1994 bootleg album of the session took the joke as its title.

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• 7. Samples and Sound-alikes

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  The Verve's song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" samples the Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of "The Last Time," a Rolling Stones song. ABKCO sued the Verve over it. In May 2019, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards handed back to the Verve the rights to all future royalties from the songs. By then they had split ties with ABKCO Records.

  In July 2008, ABKCO filed a lawsuit against Lil Wayne for copyright infringement and unfair competition. The target was "Playing with Fire," a track on his album Tha Carter III. ABKCO said the song was obviously derived from the Rolling Stones' "Play with Fire," a song whose rights it owns. As a result, "Playing with Fire" was removed from the online track listings of the album.

  Courtrooms were not the only place ABKCO's rights mattered, because the company also holds some unusual film properties.

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• 8. On Screen

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  Alejandro Jodorowsky's early films are among the rights ABKCO controls, including Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.

  The label has released soundtracks for a long list of films. They include Joy, Safety Not Guaranteed, Our Idiot Brother, Fast Five, The Worlds End, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. It has also released the soundtracks for the films of director Wes Anderson, starting with The Darjeeling Limited and continuing onward. On television, it has released soundtracks for Big Little Lies, Boardwalk Empire, and Californication.

  In 2020, ABKCO served as a production company on Regina King's film One Night in Miami. Sam Cooke is a central character in that film.

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