Former music industry executive Joe Smith, who for many years was the head of prominent recording labels including Warner Bros., Elektra, and Capitol, has died at age 91, Variety reports.
Smith’s time at Warner Bros. Records beginning in 1962 would see him sign bands and artists including Van Morrison, Black Sabbath, America, Alice Cooper, the Doobie Brothers, and most notably, the Grateful Dead. Other notable artists with whom Smith worked with during his Warner Bros. years included Rod Stewart, James Taylor, Deep Purple, Petula Clark, the Allman Brothers Band, and Jethro Tull, to name a few.
“The best time was building Warner Bros.,” Smith admitted in an interview with Variety when he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015. “It was dumbfoundingly dull when we got there. The big acts were Ira Ironstrings and all the people who were on the TV shows like Connie Stevens … The Grateful Dead was probably the most important signing because we were changing from the Petula Clark-Frank Sinatra company to what was happening in music.”
Speaking of the Dead, Smith oversaw the releases of the band’s first–and most important–era of studio and live albums, including The Grateful Dead (1967), Anthem of the Sun (1968), Aoxomoxoa (1969), Live/Dead (1969), Workingman’s Dead (1970), American Beauty (1970), Skull and Roses (1971), and Europe ’72 (1972).
Smith had a prominent role as an interview subject in Amir Bar-Lev‘s 2017 documentary about the Dead, Long Strange Trip. The audio from a phone interview which Smith held with Jerry Garcia many years ago was used in the film, where the two former colleagues discuss the band’s formation in the mid-1960s.
Listen to part of the interview below.
Joe Smith & Jerry Garcia Interview
[Video: Blank on Blank]
“I loved what I was doing, then it was time to hang it up,” Smith also told Variety in 2015. “The record business fell apart when you could get music for nothing.”
Fare thee well Joe, and thanks for helping to share the music of the Grateful Dead and many more with the world.
[H/T Variety]