Seymour Was a Punk Rocker

He signed one of the 20th century’s greatest rock bands immediately upon hearing them for the first time in a rehearsal room—they did 17 or 18 songs in 20 minutes and he had a 103-degree fever—and then, six years later, inked one of the century’s defining pop stars hours after hearing a single song on a Walkman in his room at Lenox Hill Hospital—he had a heart condition and she said, “Just tell me what I have to do to get a f***ing record deal in this town”—and if that’s all you knew about SEYMOUR STEIN, if all Seymour Stein had ever done was deliver the RAMONES and MADONNA to the masses, you could be confident about these two things: He had two of the greatest ears in the history of the record business, and the rest of his body sometimes struggled to keep up.

But those ears led that body around the world for the better part of Seymour Stein’s glorious 80 years on this earth, more than three-quarters of which he spent in the music business. Like the time he read a short blurb about DEPECHE MODE, a band he’d never heard of, in a British music weekly early one New York morning and decided to get on a Concorde to London that day so he could see the band that night. He signed them, too, of course. Or the time he flew in the opposite direction, Paris to Memphis, to see the REPLACEMENTS, who he’d already signed, at their PLEASED TO MEET ME album release party. "He was wearing a tuxedo jacket with little Playboy bunnies all embossed over it,” JIM DICKINSON told Replacements biographer BOB MEHR. "I don't think he'd been asleep in a week. The first words out of his mouth where 'Where's the coke?'"

He was brash, brilliant and benevolent (with maybe a small asterisk next to “benevolent”), and as rock and roll as many of the artists he signed (and/or licensed), which also included, for example, TALKING HEADS (who he offered a deal the day after seeing them fill in for a missing opening band at CBGB; they made him wait 11 months before saying yes), RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS, the DEAD BOYS, the PRETENDERS, PLASTIC BERTRAND, ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN, the CURE, the SMITHS, ICE-T, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, REGINA SPEKTOR and countless others.

He never waited around for anything. He got his first two jobs in the biz when he was in his teens—first at KING RECORDS, where he met SYD NATHAN, who became his first mentor and told his father, “Seymour's got shellac in his veins,” and next at BILLBOARD, where he played a role in the birth of the HOT 100 singles chart in 1958, when he was 16. He was said to know the words, chart positions and everything else there was to know about pretty much every song ever and was unafraid to sing them, his own musical talents notwithstanding.

He’s often said to be one of the last of the great record men, a compliment that reflects the unfortunate fact that in his glory days most of them were in fact men while also being unarguably true. “Intense -Wickedly Funny-a little bit Crazy And Deeply intuitive,” Madonna wrote on her Instagram Monday. All qualities that the job requires, along with this: “Seymour’s taste in music was always a couple of years ahead of everybody else,” GARY KURFIRST, the late Talking Heads manager once said. His style was act now, worry about the consequences and the money later. And if some of the moves didn’t quite pan out numbers-wise, well, the world still got to hear the Ramones. And Madonna. That one panned out.

RIP, and condolences to MANDY.

Magic Man

The career of the great Japanese composer RYUICHI SAKAMOTO ranged from the pioneering techno of the Yellow Magic Orchestra to his orchestral scores for films by the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, with stops in between for pop songs, cross-cultural fusions, classical pieces, ambient soundscapes, ringtones, videogame music and acting. “The big theme of him is curiosity,” his collaborator Carsten Nicolai once said. “When the Tower Records shops still existed,” Sakamoto told Film Score Monthly in 2010, “I had a lot of complaints from the people at the shops, because they didn’t know which CD should go to which box.” And if he liked the food in your restaurant but not your music, he might just take over the music supervision.

Rest in Peace Also

RAY SHULMAN, bassist/violinist for 1970s British prog-rock band Gentle Giant. Shulman founded the band (and its predecessor, Simon Dupree & the Big Sound) with his brothers Derek and Phil, and was one of its principal composers... MICHAEL LEON, a longtime label exec at A&M, Arista, SBK and EMI, and a key player in the early years of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation... Up-and-coming Houston rapper BTB SAVAGE, murdered in an apparently targeted drive-by shooting... FRED LIVINGSTON JR., a fan who was killed when the roof of the Apollo Theater in Belvidere, Ill., collapsed during a Morbid Angel show Friday night. The band directed fans to a GoFundMe page for their "brother in metal."

Etc Etc Etc

TANYA TUCKER, PATTY LOVELESS and songwriter BOB MCDILL have been voted into the COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME... (Seymour Stein, by the way, was one of the founders of the ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME. Hint hint nudge nudge)... Weeks after an awkward interaction with judge KATY PERRY, who she accused of “mom-shaming” her for being a mother of three, AMERICAN IDOL contestant SARA BETH LIEBE wowed the judges with her performance of the POLICE’s “ROXANNE” and then walked off the show—saying she’d rather return to her children rather than go on with the competition... LAINEY WILSON, JELLY ROLL and KANE & KATELYN BROWN were the top winners at the CMT MUSIC AWARDS... GLASTONBURY gets a permanent reprieve... BILLBOARD’s top music lawyers.