Seymour stein biography

A lthough on the pulse of the very latest modern trends, one of music’s greatest A&R men, Seymour Stein, has always been a great admirer of the art of the past and an enthusiastic collector. Sotheby's Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art sale in London on 12 July features a selection of magnificent works from his collection, which includes one of John William Waterhouse's most famous works, The Siren.

Stein's enthusiasm for collecting was demonstrated in 2003 when he sold a portion of his vast collection at Sotheby’s in New York, an eclectic selection of Art Deco furniture and porcelain, metalwork and glassware, European Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

At that time Seymour wrote, “I thought many times of opening a gallery to sell off most of what I purchased, for in truth I had bought enough to fill several homes. I was always too busy chasing bands to do anything about it… Looking over the paintings, furniture, porcelain and objects in preparation for this sale brought back wonderful memories in much the same way that hearing a favourite song from the past does.”

Seymour was probably born a collector and as a child in Brooklyn he amassed the usual things that captivate young boys - bottle-caps and bubble-gum trading cards, tin soldiers and postage stamps. These collections were sold when Seymour discovered Rhythm and Blues, Country, and doo-wop to fund his expanding record collection which became the largest at his junior high school. As an ambitious and energetic teenager, he worked for Billboard magazine and interned at King Records in Cincinnati, where he met his great mentor Syd Nathan. Nathan's collections of netsuke and inro inspired Seymour’s early interest in art. At the age of twenty-three, in 1966, Seymour founded Sire Records with the songwriter and producer Richard Gottehrer and the long list of successful signings began like a roll-call of the most pr

American music executive (1942–2023)

Seymour Steinbigle (April 18, 1942 – April 2, 2023), known professionally as Seymour Stein, was an American entrepreneur and music executive. 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 1980s, including Talking Heads and The Pretenders; he signed Madonna as well. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Career

Stein was born in Brooklyn, New York City. As a 13-year-old high school student, he worked as a clerk at music industry magazine Billboard, assisting head of Billboard charts Tommy Noonan. Together they helped develop the Billboard Hot 100, launched in August 1958.

King Records owner Syd Nathan 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 into 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." Stein started work 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 short-lived, lasting only three months. He then became an assistant to impresario George Goldner, who had

“I’ve heard hundreds of thousands of records,” Seymour Stein says on the phone from Athens, where the seventy-five-year-old co-founder and president of Sire Records and vice-president of Warner Bros. Records is on a working vacation, en route to a music-industry festival in Cannes. His estimate may be too low. Stein signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Madonna, and brought to American shores a canon of indie music: the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, the Beat, Echo and the Bunnymen, Soft Cell. “I just put it out because it’s a great record,” he says.

What makes a great record? “A great song.”

And what makes a great song? “I’ll just tell you,” he says, with a sigh, “that the only answer to the question can be found in a song written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s from ‘South Pacific’ and the name of the song is ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ But forget the name of the song. The line goes, and I don’t mean to insult you with this, but the line is, ‘Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.’ O.K.?”

So, why write a memoir? “I was asked.”

As was Grace Jones, who wrote a miracle of a memoir, called “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs,” in which she persuasively locates the genesis of her genius inside hurricanes of evangelical Christianity, physical and psychological abuse, and twentieth-century art, while only deepening the mystery of her music. Carrie Brownstein and Viv Albertine both wrote thrilling memorials to under-respected scenes (riot grrrl and post-punk, respectively) that explicate what they were fighting for, and at what cost. In Stein’s new memoir, “Siren Song,” he does little of any of this. What he’s up to, he tells me, is his own kind of evangelism. “I want to see a continuation of the music business, and the point I want to drive home is: start young.”

Born Seymour Steinbigle in 1942, with a hole in his heart, in the center of Jewish Brooklyn, he couldn’t get early R. & B. stormers like Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rat