If, like me, you have owned any CDs from Rhino Records, chances are you have seen his name before. A passionate music lover who also happened to be Senior Vice President of Artists and Repertoire at Rhino, he has touched the lives of many of my friends.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/gar ... 203188602/

Sad. RIP

You know Dean, I think I may have met him in '77. I went to the store numerous times and if he was the guy I recall he was very friendly and bubbly. Encyclopedic knowledge of music and just a ball of energy.
Man, you can tell he loved his job. I am almost sure it has he but again the that a was a long tome ago now.

God Bless him and want to say Thanks for all the music he put together for all of us. I have almost an uncountable Rhino product with his name on it. RIP to our brother.

Are we talking about the store on Westwood Blvd? The only record store I spent any serious time in other than Tower. He's one of those guys I figured would live forever. At one point I think I had every CD that Rhino had out on the market. Thanks, Gary. You filled us with fun and oldies.

I spent much of yesterday ready many of my friends tell stories of Gary, who sounds like he was a really wonderful person.
Really nice obit in today's LA Times


https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/m ... story.html

In his recent online tribute to Stewart, Elvis Costello referenced Trunkworthy... if music discussion is your thing, be prepared to spend a few hours down the rabbit hole.

http://www.trunkworthy.com/topics/music

Elvis' tribute to Gary

A wonderful tribute to a real giant of the industry. Thanks for posting.

The first thing I bought on Rhino Records was some silly Dr. Demento record but it was the dawn of the CD era when I really became aware of them. As I tried to soak up as much music history as I could, Rhino releases were there to help educate me.

Thanks Gary Stewart and RIP.

Wish I had met him
RIP

+1

I think this is the first CD I bought on Rhino. I don't think there ever was, or ever will be a reissue/compilation label to rival Rhino! The best of the best!!

Surprised to read this in the NY Times just yesterday being so delayed but appreciative that they did.

Gary Stewart, Master of the Reissue Compilation, Dies at 62


Gary Stewart, right, in 1990, when he was an artists and repertoire executive at Rhino Records, with a colleague, James Austin. Mr. Stewart was a major force in creating definitive boxed sets and anthologies.CreditCreditBart Batholomew


By Richard Sandomir
April 23, 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.


Mr. Stewart at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1984. The president of Rhino Records called Mr. Stewart the company’s “architect and guiding spirit” and said that he “defined what it meant to be a catalog label.”CreditRobert Lloyd

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.


Mr. Stewart was honored in 2017 at an awards dinner for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. He was active in several social and economic justice organizations, including the Liberty Hill Foundation and the Community Coalition.CreditMik Milman, via Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy

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.

Thanks Rick for posting this article. I missed it. A sad end to what appeared, at least from the outside, to be such a full, productive and interesting life. RIP, Gary. We will continue to enjoy the fruits of your unending love of music.