Gary Stewart with a longtime friend, visual artist and costume supervisor Marsha Perloff, circa the early 1980s.
“We always had fairly frank conversations,” Inglot says. “If you’ve known someone for 45 years, you’re going to have dark days and you’re going to share them with each other. But not on that day, and not at that time.” When I was a kid, reissues were little cheap LPs. They were considered car-wash purchases. Gary elevated them to high art.When word spread of Stewart’s suicide, his friends rushed to social media to pay tribute. Calling the news “impossible to conceive of,” music publicist Cary Baker recalled that Friday as “a web of emails, calls, texts and so many Facebook messages.
Drummer Danny Benair was there and was awed by the turnout: “He’s the only person I know who’s filling ballrooms and he’s not some rock star.” “He was ideally suited to the way music has gone,” says Elvis Costello, who worked with Stewart on numerous projects over the decades. “If you curate music properly, people can stumble across beautiful songs that may have otherwise been buried on albums in cut-out racks.”
Alongside Foos, and other crucial early Rhino employees like Harold Bronson and Jeff Gold, Stewart worked his way up to store manager, voraciously logging music, liner notes and opinions in his internal database. In the mid-1970s, Rhino became a label as well, pressing and selling records by a ragtag collection of artists including Wild Man Fischer and Allan Sherman before moving on to repackaging the catalogs of famous and semi-famous artists from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
Reminded that this guy was transforming the world, Stewart reconsidered and took the call. Jobs told him the company was looking for a senior level executive for the iTunes project. The former Rhino executive joined Apple that year in the newly created position of chief musical officer. “He had done very well, economically, there,” Gold recalls. “At some point he decided, ‘I’ve done what I’ve done and they’re not interested in my vision.’ ”
“Gary had very exacting standards,” Gold says. Apple Music “stopped being fun for him. He couldn’t bring himself to sell out, which is how he saw it.”
LilEdit Beautiful and timely article.
How’s many Sundays in a row are you going to tweet this? My God