For the record: how Madonna, The Ramones and Ice-T got their big break

Seymour Stein tried to executive produce this article.

“Don’t put it like that,” the co-founder of Sire Records told me in his gruff New York accent on a recent afternoon. “I’m talking too much. If this appears, I’ll kill you.”

Stein, 74, is discussing his long career, in which he’s helped launch artists such as Madonna and Talking Heads, shepherded wayward luminaries like Brian Wilson and served as the inspiration for at least one pop song: “Seymour Stein” by the Scottish indie group Belle and Sebastian, in which the singer blows his chance to impress the powerful tastemaker.

But the unexpectedly intimate conversation came with repeated caveats – suggestions, he might call them – about how the interview should be presented so as to jibe with Stein’s public persona.

It was, of course, that flair for managing an image – for understanding, and controlling, how things look and sound – that made Stein one of the defining record men of our time, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who established his reputation by consistently selling listeners on the next idea of cool.

The Ramones, Soft Cell, Everything But the Girl, Ice-T – in each of these diverse Sire acts, Stein knew what people wanted before they knew for themselves.

“Seymour goes with his gut,” says Clive Davis, a fellow music industry magnate who’s known (and competed with) Stein since the late 1960s. “And he’s always been right there, sniffing out who’ll be stars in the many years to come.”