Seymour Stein was of the old school in every way. Someone who ascended the ladder of an industry by starting at the bottom and pulling himself up by his proverbial bootstraps. Perhaps he could see something of that quality when he first laid eyes on Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone in a hospital room in 1982. This was sixteen years after Stein had thrown in his own money into co-founding Sire Productions with producer Richard Gottehrer. This, eventually, would become Sire Records. Cashing in on signing British acts to showcase in the culturally bereft U.S., Sire’s success led to its acquisition by Warner Bros. Records in the late 70s, right as Madonna was arriving in New York with nothing more than a dream and that fabled thirty-five dollars in her pocket. Roughly four years later, her path would cross with Stein’s in Lenox Hill Hospital. Laid up after having open heart surgery, Stein seemed just as eager as Madonna to be seen as someone with power.
And the power Stein held in that moment was something that even he couldn’t fully understand. After all, Madonna was a “fluke” act for the Sire brand, more known for signing New Wave groups like Talking Heads, The Cure, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode. But something about Madonna evidently spoke to Stein’s own inner hustler. Seeing her hunger and raw ambition, Stein was endeared rather than put off by it, likely sensing a kindred spirit. For, in addition to being a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, Madonna is also a New York-born Jewish man at heart. Mark Kamins, another personality from Madonna’s early rise that kicked the bucket, was integral to arranging this meeting (just another reason she wrote “Lucky Star” with him in mind). As one of the “hottest” DJs in New York, he had a certain clout with record execs like Stein. And, of course, as is the case with most people living in New York, he wanted something in exchange for his “good deed”: “giving” him Madonna. What he ultimately wanted from that “trade” was to be a producer. Per Stein, however, “I told him flat out that no big artist would ever risk working with an unproven producer, even if he was New York’s hippest deejay. Like everyone else, he’d have to earn his stripes by finding nobodies and making them sound like stars.” Madonna was going to fit that bill perfectly. Especially since her real name already carried such stage name weight.
Kamins was determined to produce Madonna once she got signed, making it all the more important to him for this hospital room meeting to go well. Maybe it was the drip-drip-drip of the penicillin into Stein’s heart that warmed it so much to the sound of Madonna’s voice, or maybe it was the fact that Stein was actually a gay man (even if closeted for a long time about it). Either way, he recalled thinking upon his first listen to the “Everybody” demo, “I liked the hook, I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel and I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and played it again. I never overanalyze or suck the life out of whatever I instinctively enjoy.” An explanation such as that, of course, would never be heard among the halls of today’s record labels. Whose operational practices seem to be based entirely on what’s “trending” as opposed to using one’s own instincts and emotional reactions to set trends. Gone are these Steinian days of taking a chance on an artist based on instinct, having faith in a musician’s “raw material” to grow and evolve into something truly special (as Madonna put it, “Not only did Seymour hear me, but he saw me and my potential!”). The lack of gambling in art in general and music in particular these days is most manifest in how everything “old” is repackaged as something “new” for bite-sized consumption on TikTok. This complete with the “sped-up version” trend that makes every shortened song sound like Mickey Mouse is singing it.
With the Stein hospital room signing being one of the many mythological stories adding to the narrative of how Madonna rose to fame, one myth that never endured was M being controlled by any kind of Svengali figure in her early career. If anything, Madonna herself was the Svengali to all the music men (and women) she orbited (from Stephen Bray to Kamins to Jellybean Benitez), getting them to do her bidding with her unbridled powers of seduction. In contrast to most female pop stars, Madonna was never “groomed” by any man behind the scenes, but entirely self-made. Stein’s ability to intuit something special about her without worrying if she was going to contribute to the label’s bottom line is why we have Madonna. In the decades since, this overall lack of a combination of risk-taking and intuition is what has contributed to the deterioration of popular music’s quality. For, like every industry, music has been subject to the merciless tenets of neoliberalism (which was just taking flight at full-force as Madonna eked by the cutoff for pre-Reaganism and Thatcherism). A “philosophy” that really only has one tenet: make more money.
Artistic experimentation isn’t conducive to that, and as such, Stein might never have signed Madonna in such a climate as the post-1985 one. While some have maintained that the “democratization” of music through early internet mediums like MySpace is what has actually improved things for artists by cutting out the “middle man,” in so many ways, that middle man was an artist unto himself. For it takes a certain kind of talent to recognize talent (with Madonna also remarking of his death, “Anyone who knew Seymour knew about his passion for music and his impeccable taste. He had an ear like no other! He was…deeply intuitive”). And without people such as Stein, we wouldn’t get Madonna. Tellingly, there hasn’t been a similar artist of her impact to come up in the world since, maybe, Britney Spears.
So sure, Stein might look faintly like Harvey Weinstein, but he was no predatory prick when it came to his music industry cachet. For him, it really was all about the music. As Sid King told Stein’s father, “Your son is good for one thing and one thing only, and that’s being in the record business.” Madonna would tend to agree.
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