Product Code Database
Samuel Clarke " Sandy" Pearlman Jon Pareles, "Sandy Pearlman, Producer, Manager and Lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult, Dies at 72", The New York Times, July 26, 2016 (August 5, 1943 – July 26, 2016) was an American music producer, artist Talent manager, music journalist and critic, professor, poet, songwriter, and record company executive. He was best known for founding, writing for, producing, or co-producing many LPs by Blue Öyster Cult, as well as producing notable albums by The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, and Dream Syndicate; he was also the founding Vice President of eMusic.com. He was the Schulich Distinguished Professor Chair at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, and from August 2014 held a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship at the Coach House Institute (CHI) of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information as part of the CHI's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.
In 1966, he was introduced to the founder of Crawdaddy! magazine, Paul Williams, by Playboy political analyst Michael Horowitz; by 1967 Pearlman had become one of the original rock music critics of the magazine along with Williams, Jon Landau and Richard Meltzer, with Horowitz later penning a cover profile of Jim Morrison for Crawdaddy! in April 1969.
Pearlman was considered an important figure in the development of both alternative and commercial American rock music, and for his intervention in British punk rock. He was drafted by record company CBS to produce Give 'Em Enough Rope, The Clash's second album, which gave the band their largest audience to date, and also produced many of the tracks that were compiled in "Black Market Clash". He was described as the "Hunter Thompson of rock, a gonzo producer of searing intellect and vast vision.", in the Billboard Producer Directory.
Pearlman also worked as a full-time artist manager, managing the careers of Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath (1979–1983), Romeo Void, The Dictators, Shakin' Street, Aldo Nova and others. In the 1980s, he pioneered the mega-tour stadium format of several bands traveling together, sharing promotional costs and production and travel costs, a format persisting today with the Lollapalooza, the Lilith Fair and related tour packages.Billboard Encyclopedia of Record Producers, entry on Sandy Pearlman, ©1999
In 1983, Pearlman leased Studio C in San Francisco's The Automatt Studios from studio owner David Rubinson and dubbed it Time Enough World Enough Studios. After The Automatt closed in 1984, he leased Studio C at Hyde Street Studios from studio owner Dan Alexander. Pearlman ran a recording operation in Studio C as Alpha & Omega Studio from 1986 until 1991. He also used it for his own projects, including those on his short-lived MCA-distributed label Popular Metaphysics, and he also sub-leased it to other producers and artists.
In 1989 he took over as president of the alternative record company 415 Records and established a production and distribution deal for the label with MCA Records, before purchasing the company and changing the label's name to Popular Metaphysics.
The label was short lived, but it signed a few solid acts and released their records on the MCA Records label, including Love Club (1990), Manitoba's Wild Kingdom (1990), and World Entertainment War (1991). The 1991 edition of Mark Garvey's Songwriters' Market, published in 1990, carried a listing that read as follows: "*SANDY PEARLMAN, INC., 245 Hyde St., San Francisco CA 94102. (415)885-4999. A&R Director: Natasha V. Record producer, record company (Popular Metaphysics, formerly 415), recording studio (Alpha & Omega Recording, Hyde Street Studios)."
In the late 1990s, Pearlman served as the founding vice-president of eMusic.com, a subscription store for download-to-own online music and that is headquartered in New York City and now owned by Dimensional Associates. eMusic was one of the first sites to sell music in the MP3 format, beginning in 1998. As of September 2008, eMusic had over 400,000 subscribers. He also served as vice-president of media development for MoodLogic.com, the first on-line music recommendation engine, from 2000 to 2003.
In 2009, Sandy Pearlman was appointed as an at-large member of the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress.
Pearlman was the Schulich Distinguished Chair of music at McGill University in Montreal, specializing in the programs in music theory, sound recording and music technology; he later served as Centenary Fellow at the McLuhan Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, where he co-taught a course on Digital Media Distribution. Additionally, he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and an invited speaker at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Future of Music Coalition, Canadian Music Week and SxSW Festivals. As a Professor and as a public speaker, Pearlman lectured on the architecture of the music industry, strategies for re-monetizing music downloads, and the history and future of music. He owned Alpha & Omega Recording, a 72-track analog recording facility in San Rafael, California. His production career was managed by Peter Shershin at Breathing Protection, Inc.
|
|
