The greatest record company in the history of the music business was Warner/Reprise.

Don’t confuse today’s enterprise with yesteryear’s.

And as great as Ahmet Ertegun was, Atlantic was no match for its west coast counterpart.

Warner/Reprise had SOUL!

Let me take you back, to an era when music drove the culture, when young ‘uns were addicted to the radio and could sing every song on the hit parade, whether they liked it or not. This lasted until about 1968, when underground FM got started, and that’s where Warner/Reprise thrived.

It was Jimi Hendrix. It was the Grateful Dead.

It was Joni Mitchell and Neil Young when he was a nobody from up north from a failed band.

Warner let you do what you wanted, it was all about the bands and their music.

But the image came from Stan Cornyn.

He wrote a book, but today everything lives online, and there’s no shrine to the man…who made Warner/Reprise hip, who made youngsters all over this great country of ours believers. We wanted to go to 3300 Warner Boulevard not because of Mo and Joe so much as the culture, we wanted to be where the irreverent people who knew no rules were changing our society day by day.

That’s what Stan Cornyn did.

I remember running into his trade publication “Circular” at a record store. I wrote a note to the company asking to be put on the distribution list. I was for a while. It was like getting a note from the Pope, after all, music was my religion.

Not that Cornyn was famous. Other than the occasional credit. It was all done in service of the company, of the artists.

And now Stan Cornyn is dead.

He lived to 81, that’s a good long life.

And if he were here, I don’t think he’d be asking for either praise or remembrance, but my inbox is filling up with testimonials from those who knew him.

Warner/Reprise stood for something. And we knew it because Stan Cornyn said so. He was head of “creative services,” whatever that was, he was the person who rallied the like-minded troops into changing our country.

You can read his book:

“Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group”

Or you can just know that people make a difference. That life is a team effort. And that it’s our wackiest, outside the box thinkers, those who prod tradition, who take risks, who change the world.

Stan did.

 

Bob

One of your “Old Farts” died this week. Stan Cornyn had an enormous impact on Warner Bros/Reprise Records during the years when we became a powerhouse regarded as Super Hip.

He changed some of the old fashioned marketing, advertising presentations and we became the envy of much of the industry.

Contrary to your oft repeated indictments of the above mentioned Old Farts we had a group of people who loved the music, went with our own tastes and methods.

In fact it was the Erteguns, Clive, Mo and myself and a few others who shook off the Corporations and went our way and built a business. While we all did well financially no billionaires arrived.

You should recognize Stan in some way. He was the ultimate image maker and no one came close to his style, content and approach

Joe Smith