Gary Stewart of Rhino Records, RIP

I know folks who knew Gary well, worked with him, spoke with and saw him up to the end. One in particular who was very close to Gary says he did suffer from depression ,was aware of it, but was treating it, and while he had a medical issue it wasn't serious. Feel free to contact me through PM.

 

Gary Stewart, longtime Rhino Records and Apple executive, dies at 63

Here's the LA times obit.

Just got off the phone with a buddy of mine who's known Stewart since the 70's, and he said this was one of the kindest people he ever ran across in any walk of life.

 

I indirectly knew Gary due to friends who worked at Rhino, then over the years got invited to Rhino parties/events as a guest where I got to talk to him. I really enjoyed talking to him about Rhino reissues that I bought as a teenager along with deep catalog reissues in general from time to time when the moment allowed itself and he always came off as a nice guy who just loved talking about music.

It's sad to see him go but he took the less painful route in comparison. Ride easy, Gary. R.I.P.

 

I see Gary was the creative force behind the HAVE A NICE DAY series and HAVE A NICE DECADE boxed set, which are two of my all-time collections of music. When I first stumbled upon the DAY series of discs, I figured they had to be brainchild of one individual -- although I'm sure many talented people helped make them a reality -- simply because the track selection and sequencing and art work were all so beautifully focused and inspired. When I saw those first five volumes, I thought, "I need to meet the guy who produced these and shake his hand."

 

R.I.P. Rhino is the biggest part of my collection...I miss the golden days of Rhino. Thanks Gary...

 

When I got my tour of Rhino in the 80's, I was introduced to Gary. I was just a low level media schlub, but he came out of his office and talked to me for a few minutes, I was being a fanboy about the Nice Day series, he was super nice.

 

I'm not sure how sad a day it can be when a beloved icon in an industry we love and support, sees his own imminent tragedy, and faces it on his own terms. I know the issue is a terribly-divisive and passionately-debated one, but we already know how we feel about ones' own loss of choice in the throes of impairment. And we have no closer-held opinion then how it affects our own choices in our own path; which is finally, the only one we have a right to take.

Look what a legacy a total stranger in our lives, still leaves in our own homes, and on our own shelves. Celebrating the passion and creativity in works of others, celebrated yet another level further, by music-loving people finding work-arounds to get our favorite music back into our hands, ears and hearts, and widening our choices and options one step further than the owners' whom they found ways to work with when they themselves had other things to do. I don't know a Gary Stevens from a Richard Foos from a Dr. Demento...but I do know that passion for something we share, is a passion to be celebrated.

Music is probably the most universally-beloved of man's works that we bask in without sharing the specifics with so many others in our world. Dad's music, the Church's music, your girlfriend's music, the guy in the truck's music driving right next to the guy in the Lexus in the lane next to him...it's one of the most defining criteria of our personalities that is accepted in so many forms and differences along with the fact of "acceptance" in general. We believe in, "different strokes for different folks". And who more than the people who seek to give us that variety to spice our lives. And of all the labels on the shelves known for this style of music or that genre of artist or this quality of production, Rhino is the one you are most likely to have in your collection, whose similar section in another's collection, is most likely to differ.

How's that for a life's work.

How's that for a reason to celebrate.

Godspeed, Gary Stewart. There are so many in the heavenly choir who are waiting to thank you, for your part in the next act of their music careers.

 

That's how I remember him from back in the day. Always a nice guy...

 

A more recent pic:

 

I never met Gary Stewart, but I knew his name from the credits on countless Rhino albums. These albums were both gateway and soundtrack to some of my earliest deep dives into older popular music. Gary sent me on a journey that continues to this day. I owe him a tremendous debt, as do we all. R.I.P. sir.

 

I knew the Rhino guys Richard, Harold, & then Gary since early days. Gary's first actual signing was The Beat Farmers from San Diego. He insisted I would love them. He was right! A true music man. RIP.

 

How fing cool.

 

Thank you for telling us. We need to know this - especially men over 35 or 40. Plus I would want to know why someone with his life's achievements would want to end it. I would certainly hope that it's not just because of an ending to his Apple tenure.

 

Where did you hear this, EWD?. Many of Gary’s friends (such as me) have read Jeff Gold’s thoughts. Jeff had lunch with Gary last week and they had a serious discussion about Gary’s depression, based on life circumstances not including illness. I must admit though, when I heard the awful news, my immediate thought is that he was sick. He lost a lost of weight a couple of years ago. I wondered if he’d actually been sick then and now had a recurrence.

However, the general thought remains is that it was depression.

 

I'm going to be blunt here. Tributes, praise and acknowledgements are fine, but SHUT the f' up with your speculations about Gary. His body has yet to even be released by the coroner and none of you know jack. And it seems few, if any of you knew Gary.

 

Good point. And I knew Gary over forty years. I see it’s too late to delete my post, or I would.

 

Posted by Elvis Costello:

This morning's brief promise of Spring was punctured by the news of the passing of Gary Stewart.

It is rare enough to find people of insight, kindness and loyalty but Gary had all these qualities in abundance. Friends have called or written all today trying to make sense of the impossible and the inexplicable.

As the vocation of criticism has become more fragmented, spiteful and distracted, so people with Gary's gift for advocacy needed to be valued. His appreciation of our work was immensely generous and deeply informed by personal emotion. With his help, I was encouraged to tell a broader tale as we compiled my catalogue for release on Rhino Records, augmenting the original albums with every outtake, sketch and mistake that I could find, all annotated until I'd run out of paper and ink.

Our work together was clearly superior to both prior and subsequent editions.

It is equally rare to find a music website with genuine passion and curiosity as the one Gary helped found; Trunkworthy - giving contributors space to both celebrate and disagree but offering the reader a chance to make one after another invaluable discovery.

When Gary took up curation duties at Apple, he sent me a series of playlists using an existing template from best known to rarest choices. I could not have disagreed with any of his selections, even though we both knew that on another day, half of the songs might have had different titles and that's the way it should be.

As an illustration of Gary's generosity, when the Imposters and I brought our "Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers" tour to the Greek Theatre, Gary didn't seek a place on the guest list to which he would have always been welcome but rather bought a stash of tickets to give to friends as that record had meant a lot to him and he wanted his pals to hear what we were up to with the songs after all these years. I even had to decline his offer of hosting a reception after the set, as I knew I had to sing the next night and talking into the small hours would be unwise. I know that when we return to the Greek in July, the band and I will pour a chaste glass and raise a toast to our friend.

This generosity extended beyond mere music business tributaries and blind alleys and into a sense of community and the desire and need to be of service. I know I am not alone in being grateful for having known and worked with Gary and send my deepest condolences to his family and all his many friends.

 

Two more personal remembrances:

David Fricke Remembers Rhino Records’ Gary Stewart – Rolling Stone

Gary Stewart—A Record Store Day appreciation

 

Sparks also paid tribute to him.

“In fond memory of Gary Stewart:

Getting an answer to the question of “why?” has become so much more unlikely for us in any situation after learning of the passing of our friend Gary.

We have known Gary for such a long time and were always buoyed, both selfishly by his incredible support for our band (from Rhino Records and beyond; the Sparks Spectacular in 2008 would not have happened without him), and probably more importantly in knowing that there was someone like him who was even more passionate and non-cynical than we about the music and popular culture we all loved.

We'll deeply miss him.

Ron Mael & Russell Mael”

 

R.I.P. Gary

 

Gary Stewart, Master of the Reissue Compilation, Dies at 62
by Richard Sandomir
New York Times
24 April 2019

Gary Stewart, a scholarly music fan whose enthusiasm and attention to detail helped make Rhino Records the much-emulated gold standard for reissue compilations of the great, the faded and the forgotten, died on April 11 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 62.

His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office. His younger brother, Mark, said their family had a history of depression.

Mr. Stewart, as senior vice president for artists and repertoire, wedded his deep knowledge of rock, pop, soul and other genres to the idiosyncratic Rhino label’s mission of producing definitive boxed sets and anthologies, including lengthy liner notes and high-quality artwork. Unlike major labels, whose reissues contain mostly music from their own catalogs, Rhino licensed material from many labels, allowing it to produce more inclusive packages.

“He loved deep cuts — little-known songs that were as good as the hits but were never pushed as singles,” David Gorman, a colleague of Mr. Stewart’s at Rhino, said in a telephone interview. “If we did a boxed set or anthology, he’d always sneak in little B-sides that he loved.”

Mr. Stewart’s best-known projects included “Have a Nice Day,” a series devoted to pop songs from the 1970s, mainly by one-hit wonders; “Hey! Ho Let’s Go!,” a Ramones anthology; and “Farewells & Fantasies,” a collection of the work of the 1960s singer-songwriter Phil Ochs.

He also played a major role in Rhino’s reissues of Elvis Costello’s Columbia and Warner Bros. catalogs in 2001.

“With his help, I was encouraged to tell a broader tale,” Mr. Costello wrote on Facebook after Mr. Stewart’s death, “augmenting the original albums with every outtake, sketch and mistake that I could find, all annotated until I’d run out of paper and ink. Our work together was clearly superior to both prior and subsequent editions.”

Mr. Stewart recalled in an interview in 2005 with Jewish Journal, a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, that his colleagues had lobbied him to include songs by the Bangles and Squeeze on a collection of alternative rock from the 1980s, but he resisted, he said, because they weren’t alternative enough.

“I’m a ‘no thank you’ kind of bully,” Stewart told the newspaper. “In the end, I’ll say this is how it’s going to be, which I think is a necessary ingredient for good art.”

Gary Lee Stewart was born on Feb. 10, 1957, in Chicago and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was about 5. His father, Ralph, was a mechanical engineer, and his mother, Charlyne (Jaffe) Stewart, was an artist and art teacher.

His brother said in an interview that Gary had been bullied in school, but that collecting records and displaying his knowledge of music had helped make him popular.

“Music saved his life,” Mark Stewart said.

Gary built his record collection during shopping sprees at Los Angeles shops, including Rhino Records, which opened in 1973 and began its own label in 1978.

“What drew him to the store is, we were turning him on to music and he wanted to soak it all up,” Harold Bronson, who managed the store and founded the label with Richard Foos, said in an interview. “We were all so knowledgeable.”

Mr. Stewart began working at the store in 1977 as a salesman. After graduating from California State University, Northridge, with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, he replaced Mr. Bronson as store manager. He shifted to the Rhino label in 1981 and worked his way up to senior vice president for artists and repertoire.

Mark Pinkus, the president of Rhino, described Mr. Stewart in a statement as “the architect and guiding spirit of Rhino” and said that he “defined what it meant to be a catalog label.”

In addition to his work on reissues, Mr. Stewart signed some new acts to Rhino, including the singer-songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill, a key figure in the so-called anti-folk movement, in 1987.

“He was a ‘convincer,’” Ms. Berryhill said in an email. “If Gary liked your music, he could probably talk others into it, including the guys that signed the checks.”

Mr. Stewart remained at Rhino until 2003, several years after its full acquisition by the Warner Music Group, and the next year began a seven-year stint at Apple, where he curated music for the expanding digital market. He was hired by the company’s chairman, Steve Jobs, as the chief music officer, with a mandate to organize the vast iTunes catalog into playlists for a download market. He left in 2011 and returned in 2016, to help organize the catalog for streaming.

In an interview in 2015 on the podcast “The Music Biz Weekly,” Mr. Stewart said he did not believe in relying on an algorithm or on personal preferences to produce a strong playlist. Asked how he created a playlist, he said he was guided by many factors, including airplay, concert set lists, greatest hits and how they charted, and what hard-core fans and music bloggers say about the artist.

“Curation, at its best,” he said, “is not just how you like something, which is the most dangerous place to go, but what the music means to the band, what it means to the fans and whether it should be part of how someone first connects” with the artist.

After leaving Apple last year, Mr. Gorman said, Mr. Stewart was “feeling lost career-wise and wondering what his place in the music economy was.”

Mr. Stewart’s brother is his only immediate survivor.

On Mr. Stewart’s final afternoon, he spent four hours at his home with Leo Diamond, the 18-year-old son of a friend, Sandra Itkoff, a documentary producer.

“They talked about ‘Born to Run’ and how Gary’s discovery of music was propelled by his love of ’50s rock ’n’ roll,” Ms. Itkoff said in an interview, referring to the Bruce Springsteen song. “And he gave him a boxed set of ’50s music, ‘Loud, Fast & Out of Control’” — which Mr. Stewart had produced.

Less than 12 hours later, Mr. Stewart took his life.

 

‘What Would Gary Stewart Do?’
Exec’s Music Evangelism, Social Activism Celebrated
by Roy Trakin, Variety

The late Gary Stewart drew a crowd in death, as he did at the parties he threw in life, attracting more than 1,000 mourners to a standing-room-only Herscher Hall on the grounds of Skirball Cultural Center Saturday {June 1, 2019}. The assembled crowd ranged from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to Rock and Roll Hall of Famers John Densmore and Blondie’s Clem Burke, along with the Go-Gos' Charlotte Caffey and one-time major label heads Jeff Ayeroff and Jay Boberg, among many others, including Gary's older brother Mark.

Afterwards, custom CDs were stocked in the facsimile of the back of his car, dubbed "Gary Stewart Trunk Sounds," patterned after the artwork, appropriately enough, on the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" album. Included were 24 songs and/or acts Stewart was known to have proselytized for, including overlooked gems like Glen Campbell's "Guess I’m Dumb," Sparks' "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us," Three Dog Night’s "Out in the Country" and the Bobby Fuller Four's appropriate "Never to Be Forgotten."

 

Very sad to hear, RIP

 

Not sure if this had been posted upthread . . .

https://recordmecca.com/news/rip-ga...social-justice-warrior-and-great-human-being/