STEPPING UP by Mick Jagger

“Who would take on the Herculean job of extracting the poverty-stricken Stones from the jaws of such a plausible, street-wise accountant who knew all the angles and appeared to have locked [them] up for years?’ [asked Bill Wyman, Stones bassist].

Jagger would. On July 30 he formally announced that the Stones had terminated their agreement with Klein, who therefore had ‘no authority to negotiate’ on their behalf. Two years of litigation followed. In 1971 the group filed suit for $29 million in New York, claiming Klein had exploited his position for ‘his own personal profit and advantage’. There was an additional dispute concerning a compilation LP, Hot Rocks, Klein claiming the tracks were his, the Stones theirs. The whole thing, says Wyman, was ‘very ugly. . . The signs were that the suit would be lengthy and exhausting. . . we had two options—of taking Klein to court and spending two years in litigation with enormous legal costs and having our money frozen—or settling with him for what I thought was a ridiculously low figure.’ Eventually the Stones, to who Wyman believed ‘Klein owed a minimum of $17 million’, agreed on $2 million. On May 9, 1972 they announced ‘settlement of all outstanding difficulties after 36 hours of continuous negotiation in a New York lawyer’s office.”