NEW YORK — Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and extremely profitable founding father of Sire Information who helped launch the careers of Madonna, Speaking Heads and lots of others, died Sunday at age 80.
Stein, who helped discovered the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame Basis and was himself inducted into the Rock Corridor in 2005, died of most cancers in Los Angeles, in line with an announcement from his household.
Stein was born in New York Metropolis in 1942. As a youngster he labored summers at Cincinnati-based King Information, James Brown’s label, and by his mid-20s had co-founded Sire Productions, quickly to grow to be Sire Information.
He was obsessive about the Billboard music charts from childhood and was recognized for his deep data and appreciation of music. He would show an astute choose of expertise in the course of the Nineteen Seventies period of New Wave, a time period he helped popularize, signing file offers with Speaking Heads, the Ramones and the Pretenders.
“Seymour’s style in music is all the time a few years forward of everybody else’s,” Speaking Heads supervisor Gary Kurfirst advised the Rock Corridor across the time of Stein’s induction.
His most profitable discovery occurred within the early Eighties, when he heard the demo tape of somewhat recognized singer-dancer from the downtown New York membership scene, Madonna.
“I preferred Madonna’s voice, I preferred the texture, and I preferred the title Madonna. I preferred all of it and performed it once more,” he wrote in his memoir “Siren Music,” revealed in 2018, the identical 12 months he retired. Stein was hospitalized with a coronary heart an infection when he first discovered of Madonna, however was so keen to satisfy that he had her dropped at his room.
“She was all dolled up in low cost punky gear, the form of membership child who appeared absurdly misplaced in a cardiac ward,” he wrote. “She wasn’t even desirous about listening to me clarify how a lot I preferred her demo. ‘The factor to do now,’ she mentioned, ’is signal me to a file deal.’”
Sire artists additionally included Ice T, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, the Replacements and Echo and the Bunnymen, together with the more-established Lou Reed and Brian Wilson, who recorded with Sire later of their careers.
Stein was married briefly to file promoter and actual property government Linda Adler, with whom he had two youngsters: filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of mind most cancers in 2013. Sidney Stein and his spouse divorced within the Nineteen Seventies and years later he got here out as homosexual.
“I’m past grateful for each minute our household spent with him, and that the music he dropped at the world impacted so many individuals’s lives in a constructive method,” Mandy Stein mentioned in an announcement Sunday.
