MUSIC BIZ GLORY YEARS

I worked side by side with some of the greatest music executives, producers, and artists of all time, including Aretha Franklin, Cream, Ahmet Ertegun, Arif Mardin, Tom Dowd, Doug Morris, Crosby, Stills & Nash, AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Tommy Mottola, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion. (And Michael Jackson, a whole separate story!) My chief mentors, the visionary retail pioneer John Cohen (Seaway/Dot Dist./ Disc Records) and the brilliant executive/producer Jerry Wexler (Atlantic Records), taught me everything from how to write a business plan to the value of persistence to the essentials of leadership.

Until recently, I resisted memorializing my story. I never sought publicity, rarely gave interviews, and didn’t keep a contemporaneous journal, so there wasn’t much of a public record to draw on. And though I’ve always had a photographic memory for certain things—like the catalogue numbers of the 45s I organized in that warehouse! my recollections of long-ago events tended to be cloudier.

I’d been retired for more than a decade when, in 2016, former Record World magazine editor Michael Sigman asked to interview and profile me for his book, History of the Music Biz. I agreed