Seymour Stein, report exec who signed up Madonna, useless at 80
NEW YORK — Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and extremely profitable founding father of Sire Data who helped launched the careers of Madonna, Speaking Heads and plenty 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 keeping with a press release by his household.
Born in 1942, Stein was a New York Metropolis native who as an adolescent labored summers at Cincinnati-based King Data, James Brown’s label, and by his mid-20s had co-founded Sire Productions, quickly to change into Sire Data.
Obsessive about the Billboard music charts since childhood, he was recognized for his deep information and appreciation of music and would show an astute decide of expertise in the course of the Seventies period of New Wave, a time period he helped popularize, signing report offers with Speaking Heads, the Ramones and the Pretenders.
“Seymour’s style in music is at all times a few years forward of everybody else’s,” Speaking Heads supervisor Gary Kurfirst instructed the Rock Corridor across the time of Stein’s induction.
His most profitable discovery occurred within the early Nineteen Eighties, when he heard the demo tape of slightly recognized singer-dancer from the downtown New York membership scene, Madonna.
“I favored Madonna’s voice, I favored the texture, and I favored the identify Madonna. I favored all of it and performed it once more,” he wrote in his memoir “Siren Track,” printed in 2018, the identical yr he retired. Stein was hospitalized with a coronary heart an infection when he first discovered of Madonna, however was so keen to fulfill that he had her dropped at his room.
“She was all dolled up in low cost punky gear, the form of membership child who regarded absurdly misplaced in a cardiac ward,” he wrote. “She wasn’t even curious about listening to me clarify how a lot I favored her demo. ‘The factor to do now,’ she mentioned, ’is signal me to a report 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 report promoter and actual property govt 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 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 optimistic approach,” Mandy Stein mentioned in a press release Sunday.