ABKCO Records
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ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. is the successor company to a business that was founded in 1961 as Allen Klein & Co. Allen Klein was then a business manager specializing in music clients including Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke and, later, managed The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. ABKCO Industries was founded in 1968 as an umbrella company involved in management, music publishing, film, TV and theatrical production. (The acronym stood for "Allen & Betty Klein and COmpany," although Klein would often joke that it stood for "A Better Kind of COmpany.") Later that year, Cameo-Parkway Records was acquired by ABKCO, bringing the legendary Philadelphia label’s decade-long run of hits into the fold.
Today, ABKCO is home to catalog assets that include recordings by Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, The Kinks as well as the Cameo Parkway label, which include the original master recordings of by such artists as Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, The Orlons, The Dovells, Question Mark & The Mysterians, The Tymes and Dee Dee Sharp. ABKCO administers Phil Spector Records and its master recordings including hits by The Righteous Brothers, The Ronettes, The Crystals and others. ABKCO also controls the rights to Alejandro Jodorowsky's early films, including Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain, all of which were recently released in a boxed set by ABKCO.
The label had been heavily criticized for keeping the Cameo-Parkway material unavailable until 2005, which affected the later careers of Rydell and Checker.
The company’s music publishing division comprises over two thousand copyrights including songs composed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and other composers. ABKCO also administers several publishing catalogs including Phil Spector's Mother Bertha Music.
Today ABKCO is active in the release of compilations and reissues from its catalogs, film and commercial placement of its master recordings and music publishing properties. As of late 2006, the day-to-day affairs of the company are reportedly being overseen by Jody Klein, due to the ill health of his father, Allen Klein.
ABKCO successfully sued The Verve over their song "Bitter Sweet Symphony", which samples an Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra recording of "The Last Time" by The Rolling Stones.
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[edit] Cultural references
"Beware of Darkness" is a song by George Harrison that featured on his first post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass. When he was demoing this song for Phil Spector during 1970 he jokingly changed one line of the lyrics to "Beware of ABKCO". This later became the name of a bootleg LP containing the recordings from that session.
