ReviewBook review: uneven portrait of rock'n'roll svengali Allen Klein

When Apple introduced its new streaming music service at its annual developers conference last month in San Francisco, the tech company made sure to have the rapper Drake on hand to lend the announcement a bit of sizzle. But Drake wasn't the star of Apple's presentation, which focused on Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue, two of the many executives who have stepped into the spotlight as the record industry struggles to remake itself for the digital age.

Today such visible string-pullers - think also of Justin Bieber's manager, Scooter Braun, or Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek - wheel and deal before a public that's been trained (in large part by the spread of consumer-media box office reporting) to regard itself as a kind of amateur pundit class. Yet it wasn't always this way, as veteran music journalist Fred Goodman reminds us in Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll.

A rough-edged but charismatic player who at one point managed both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Klein worked in shadows that are hard to imagine now, when Taylor Swift's feud with Ek over what Spotify pays artists makes it to the cover of Time magazine.

Fifty years ago, what happened behind the scenes generally stayed behind the scenes, and that lack of transparency, Goodman argues, might have enabled the creative accounting that in some cases left Klein making more money than his clients.

This isn't to say that Klein, who died in 2009, lacked an appetite for recognition - or that Goodman lacks sympathy for his subject. The author, a former Rolling Stone editor whose previous books include Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr, Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis and The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce, roots his story in Klein's grim upbringing in Depression-era New Jersey. (His mother died when he was less than a year old, and his father sent him to live in an orphanage at the age of four.) For Klein, Goodman writes, success "came down to having the things he'd missed as a child: companionship, a sense of worth, and power over his own life".