SEYMOUR STEIN was an American entrepreneur and music executive born on this date (d: 2023); He co-founded Sire Records and was vice president of Warner Bros. Records. With Sire, Stein signed bands that became central to the new wave era of the 1970s and 80s. Are you a fan of Talking Heads? The Ramones? The Pretenders; how about Madonna? Then you have Seymour Stein to thank. He found and signed them all, end then some. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.
King Records owner Syd King approached Stein to work for him in Cincinnati, Ohio. Stein’s father was skeptical, but King told him “Your son has shellac in his veins Your son is good for one thing and one thing only, and that’s being in the record business. If you don’t let him in the music business, he will wind up delivering newspapers for the rest of your life. If you don’t want that on your conscience, you will let him come with me for the summer.” He started working for King, working there for two years as an intern, before joining the company in 1961.
Homesick he returned to New York in 1963 to work for Herb Abramson, but this was shortlived, lasting only three months. He then joined as an assistant to impresario George Goldner who had formed Red Bird Records with songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller in 1963.
Working there in the Brill Building he became friends with FGG Productions record producer Richard Gottehrer. Seeing that relations between Goldner and Lieber and Stoller were fracturing he decided to start a new venture. He founded Sire Productions in 1966 with Gottehrer, each investing ten thousand dollars into the new company, which led to the formation of Sire Records,
The label initially concentrated on licensing European releases with little success before breaking Dutch band Focus with their 1973 single Hocus Pocus. Gottehrer left the label in 1974 to concentrate on production, Stein then focussed on checking new acts in the New York Clubs and on his wife’s recommendation arranged for the Ramones to do a showcase, signing them in 1975. Other signings soon followed including Talking Heads, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, the Pretenders in 1980, and foreign punk acts The Rezillos and The Saints. Stein signed Madonna from his hospital bed after hearing her track “Everybody” in 1982.
Other acts signed by Sire include The Replacements, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, The Cure, Ice-T, Ministry, The Undertones, and Echo & the Bunnymen. In 1966, Stein had an opportunity to sign Jimi Hendrix, praising him for his original material, but ultimately decided against doing so after witnessing Hendrix smash his guitar on one occasion and argue with his friend, Linda Keith, on successive occasions.
Such was Stein’s influence in signing and promoting the new wave genre of music that he is sometimes credited with having come up with the name as an alternative to the term punk, which he found derogative. Believing the term “punk” would mean poor sales for Sire’s acts who had frequently played the New York club CBGB, he launched a “Don’t Call It Punk” campaign designed to replace the term with “new wave”. The term had previously been used to refer to the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s.
Stein was married to the music promoter and real estate executive Linda Stein and together the couple had two daughters. They divorced, on amicable terms, in the late 1970s. Stein never remarried. He revealed he was gay in 2017. Filmmaker Mandy Stein is his daughter. Stein’s elder daughter, Samantha, died as a result of brain cancer in 2013, at the age of 40. Stein published his autobiography, Siren Song: My Life in Music, in 2018.
Stein died of cancer at his Los Angeles home on April 2, 2023, at age 80.