Seymour Stein's Cdn connections

When Sire Records looked north

Two big deaths in the music world this past week. For this week’s live music listings, refer to the previous post; an update will run on Thursday.

Ryuichi Sakamoto is a giant, for so many reasons. But because I’m a total poser who’s very late to his music (though I’m enchanted by his last release, 12), I’ll instead tell you to read this thorough obit by Simon Reynolds.

Seymour Stein was also a giant: the founder of Sire Records, who died of cancer just days before his 81st birthday, is responsible for the recording careers of Madonna, Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Replacements, and the U.S. careers of the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and hundreds more. There is a Sire Records logo on the first album to truly change my life: Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s, which he put out in the U.S. by distributing Mute Records.

He appears in all three of my books, for 11 different reasons. The Tragically Hip is one of them. So are the Rheostatics, Joel Plaskett and Arcade Fire. More on them below.

Stein had an unusual ear for foreign music from the beginning. His first big hit was in 1973 when he licensed this bizarro Dutch band and their yodel-erific single: it’s the group Focus with their song “Hocus Pocus.” This song was actually a top-10 hit in the U.S. Cut to the one-minute mark for when the insanity begins:

Speaking of yodelling: I believe k.d. lang was the first Canadian signed to Sire internationally. (Men Without Hats put out their first two big records on Sire in Canada only, so not sure why that happened or if that counts.) Here’s what I wrote about lang in Have Not Been the Same: