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NEW YORK — Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and hugely thriving founder of Sire Records who assisted released the professions of Madonna, Speaking Heads and numerous many others, died April 2 at age 80.
Stein, who aided located the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Basis and was himself inducted into the Rock Hall in 2005, died of cancer in Los Angeles, according to a assertion by his family.
Born in 1942, Stein was a New York City indigenous who as a teenager worked summers at Cincinnati-centered King Data, James Brown’s label, and by his mid-20s had co-founded Sire Productions, quickly to develop into Sire Records.
Obsessed with the Billboard tunes charts because childhood, he was acknowledged for his deep information and appreciation of new music and would confirm an astute choose of talent for the duration of the 1970s era of New Wave, a phrase he helped popularize, signing record discounts with Speaking Heads, the Ramones and the Pretenders.
“Seymour’s flavor in music is generally a couple of yrs ahead of anyone else’s,” Speaking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst instructed the Rock Corridor about the time of Stein’s induction.
His most profitable discovery transpired in the early 1980s, when he listened to the demo tape of a minor regarded singer-dancer from the downtown New York club scene, Madonna.
“I favored Madonna’s voice, I preferred the sense, and I preferred the title Madonna. I preferred it all and played it once again,” he wrote in his memoir “Siren Song,” posted in 2018, the identical yr he retired. Stein was hospitalized with a coronary heart an infection when he initial acquired of Madonna, but was so eager to meet that he experienced her introduced to his space.
“She was all dolled up in low-cost punky gear, the type of club kid who appeared absurdly out of area in a cardiac ward,” he wrote. “She was not even intrigued in hearing me reveal how much I preferred her demo. ‘The factor to do now,’ she explained, ‘is signal me to a file offer.’”
Sire artists also involved Ice T, the Smiths, Depeche Method, the Replacements and Echo and the Bunnymen, alongside with the much more-set up Lou Reed and Brian Wilson, who recorded with Sire afterwards in their professions.
Stein was married briefly to document promoter and genuine estate executive Linda Adler, with whom he had two youngsters: filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of mind cancer in 2013. Seymour Stein and his wife divorced in the 1970s and a long time later on he arrived out as homosexual.
“I am over and above grateful for just about every minute our spouse and children invested with him, and that the new music he brought to the environment impacted so many people’s life in a positive way,” Mandy Stein claimed in a assertion Sunday.