by NEW YORK (AP) — Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and successful founder of Sire Records who helped launch the careers of Madonna, Talking Heads and many others, died Sunday at age 80.
Stein, who helped found the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, died of cancer in Los Angeles, according to a statement from his family.
Stein was born in New York City in 1942. As a teenager, he worked summers at Cincinnati-based James Brown’s label, King Records, and by the age of 20 had co-founded Sire Productions, soon to become Sire Records.
He was obsessed with the Billboard music charts since childhood and was known for his deep knowledge and appreciation of music. He proved to be an astute judge of talent during the New Wave era of the 1970s, a term he helped popularize, signing record deals with the Talking Heads, the Ramones and the Pretenders.
“Seymour’s taste in music is always a couple of years ahead of everyone else’s,” Talking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst told Rock Hall at the time of Stein’s induction.
His most lucrative discovery occurred in the early 1980s, when he heard the demo tape of a little-known singer-dancer from the downtown New York club scene, Madonna.
“I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel and I liked the name Madonna. I liked everything and played it again, ”she wrote in her memoir“ Siren Song ”, published in 2018, the same year she retired. Stein was hospitalized with a heart infection when he first learned of Madonna, but he was so eager to meet her that he had him brought to her room.
“She was all dressed up in cheap punky clothes, the kind of club girl who would look absurdly out of place in a cardiology ward,” she wrote. “She wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked her demo. ‘The thing to do now,’ she said, ‘is to sign me to a record deal.’
Sire’s artists also included Ice T, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, The Replacements and Echo and the Bunnymen, along with the more established Lou Reed and Brian Wilson, who all recorded with Sire later in their careers.
Stein was briefly married to record promoter and real estate executive Linda Adler, with whom he had two children: filmmaker Mandy Stein and Samantha Lee Jacobs, who died of brain cancer in 2013. Sidney Stein and his wife divorced in the 1990s. 1970 and years after he came out as gay.
“I am beyond grateful for every minute our family spent with him, and that the music he brought to the world impacted so many people’s lives in a positive way,” Mandy Stein said in a statement Sunday.
