Seymour Stein accepts his award throughout the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Monday, March 14, 2005, in New York.

Julie Jacobson/AP

conceal caption

toggle caption

Julie Jacobson/AP

Seymour Stein accepts his award throughout the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Monday, March 14, 2005, in New York.

Julie Jacobson/AP

NEW YORK — Seymour Stein, the brash, prescient and extremely profitable founding father of Sire Records who helped launched the careers of Madonna, Talking Heads and lots of others, died Sunday at age 80.

Stein, who helped discovered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and was himself inducted into the Rock Hall in 2005, died of most cancers in Los Angeles, in line with an announcement by his household.

Born in 1942, Stein was a New York City native who as a teen labored summers at Cincinnati-based King Records, James Brown’s label, and by his mid-20s had co-founded Sire Productions, quickly to turn out to be Sire Records.

Obsessed with the Billboard music charts since childhood, he was identified for his deep data and appreciation of music and would show an astute decide of expertise throughout the Nineteen Seventies period of New Wave, a time period he helped popularize, signing file offers with 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 supervisor Gary Kurfirst informed the Rock Hall across the time of Stein’s induction.

His most profitable discovery occurred within the early Nineteen Eighties, when he heard the demo tape of a bit of identified singer-dancer from the downtown New York membership scene, Madonna.

“I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel, and I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and played it again,” he wrote in his memoir “Siren Song,” printed in 2018, the identical yr he retired. Stein was hospitalized with a coronary heart an infection when he first realized of Madonna, however was so keen to fulfill that he had her dropped at his room.

“She was all dolled up in cheap punky gear, the kind of club kid who looked absurdly out of place in a cardiac ward,” he wrote. “She wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked her demo. ‘The thing to do now,’ she said, ‘is sign me to a record 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 file promoter and actual property government 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 Nineteen Seventies and years later he got here out as homosexual.

“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 stated in an announcement Sunday.