Didn't know him personally, but he was behind so many essential compilations like the Soul Hits of the '70's series that are just insightful and brilliant.

If I had to pick a set of "Desert Island Discs" his name would probably be on most of them.


[www.latimes.com]

“I would love to be remembered as someone who turned people on to great music,
art, culture or ideas that they otherwise wouldn’t know about."
Gary Stewart



Done Deal, son
God Love ya Gary




------------------------------------
a close friend. a huge loss.
i'd just seen him.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-04-14 18:00 by hopkins.

No Surrender - Bruce Springsteen
[www.youtube.com]

In Homage to Gary Stewart - RIP Rhino Records - Apple Music - iTunes - Philanthropist - Friend
[www.youtube.com]
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (Official Music Video)

I have a Rhino release circa 1999 called Hot Rods and Custom Classics....Cruisin Songs and Highway Hits that's a nice collection of car related songs about 80 of them.In a model car box. I like the concept a lot.All kinda goodies inside. Thanks Mr. Stewart for making that happen..

Gary was responsible for well over 500 various compilations and re-releases.
Special care to find the best original masters anywhere in the world were employed. They took care to hire credible and talented writers to annotate a lot of their re-releases, tho Gary had some original signings as well on "Handmade," a division of Rhino Entertainment. I haven't stayed in touch with the business side of things or many of the people in the business side of things variously and am far from an expert on these matters; but I know enough of him to know his passion was genuine and his knowledge was encyclopediac. He sorta made his own 'science' about the various considerations each and ever song chosen would get; and where it would sit in the album. We're really talking the Best of everybody we love here too; stuff like Faces, Kinks that would have possibly; at least significant chunks of it; not been really available in the world culture of music lovers anymore without some steady archival hands; he was so innovative that the small Indie went to major distribution and then was sold outright to Time Warner.
Gary stayed in touch with all that but Apple recruited him and he was deeply involved with itunes. I was totally out not only the business side of creative endeavors, but also out of the general modern computer technology and social media type communications....but our friendship was solid; and our work together when we were both young in the 80's really gave me a lifelong friend; we'd been talking and seeing each other again very recently and i'm shook up.

[celebrityaccess.com]

LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) Gary Stweart, 62, who brought the world the “Nuggets” compilations from Rhino Records among other gems, died Thursday.

Stewart’s vast musical knowledge, as noted by Billboard, was applied to such compilations as Have A Nice Day ’70s and the psychedelic songs on the Nuggets albums plus other sets like Shout Factory’s Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens.

Stewart rose to the level of senior A&R before taking a break and joining Apple Music where as chief music officer of iTunes. He left Apple music last year.

A longtime advocate for charitable causes, his life was celebrated by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who tweeted that he was “one of the funniest, most humble people we knew. A true champion of justice. A model of modesty, and most of all, our dear friend. L.A. is better off for everything he did. We miss you, Gary.”

Stewart served on the boards of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Social Venture Network, according to the Los Angeles Times, as well as being an active member of the Community Coalition and the Liberty Hill Foundation.

“During the unprecedented canonization of all types of pop music that occurred during the CD boom of the 1980s and ’90s, Gary Stewart was the single most important individual,” S-Curve Records Founder Steve Greenberg said in a statement. “Through his work at Rhino, he organized our knowledge and provided context for genres as diverse as doo-wop and punk, girl groups and ’50s rock. What Lenny Kaye[who started the Nuggets series] was to garage rock, Gary Stewart was to a hundred different musical styles. In his Have a Nice Day series, he rescued the entire genre of AM Radio pure pop singles from the historical dustbin, making the music available for the first time in many years, while shaping our understanding of why that music was, in fact, important. Because of Gary Stewart, we collectively know more about a wide variety of musical eras and styles and were exposed to a lot of great music that had previously been ignored or forgotten. The music community owes him a great debt.”

“The idea of turning people onto music or TV shows, it relates back to Rhino when we did the compilations,” Rhino Co-Founder Harold Bronson added. “It wasn’t just, ‘Here’s the hits that you know, so buy it for that.’ It was, ‘Here’s some really great music that you might not have heard and we’re including that with the hits.’ That continued to a different level with the trunk.”

Stewart would ride his bicycle to the new Rhino’s retail store in Los Angeles in 1974.

“He wondered in our store and never left,” says Rhino co-founder Richard Foos. “He’d found his home because we were a bunch of crazed record nerds.” A few years later, after Foos and Bronson started the record label (which eventually sold to Time Warner in 1998) and Stewart graduated from college, he managed the store before becoming head of sales for the label. He quickly moved to A&R, but continued to work at the record store for years afterwards.

[variety.com]

Elvis Costello Pays Touching Tribute to Former Rhino Exec Gary Stewart

Amid the many touching tributes to former Rhino and Apple Music executive Gary Stewart, who died on Thursday at the age of 62, there is one in particular that would have meant a great deal to him: A long and heartfelt post from Elvis Costello, one of Stewart’s all-time favorite artists and one who was a close personal friend.

“This morning’s brief promise of Spring was punctured by the news of the passing of Gary Stewart,” Costello wrote in a Facebook post today. “It is rare enough to find people of insight, kindness and loyalty but Gary had all these qualities in abundance. Friends have called or written all today trying to make sense of the impossible and the inexplicable.

“As the vocation of criticism has become more fragmented, spiteful and distracted, so people with Gary’s gift for advocacy needed to be valued,” he continues. “His appreciation of our work was immensely generous and deeply informed by personal emotion. With his help, I was encouraged to tell a broader tale as we compiled my catalogue for release on Rhino Records, 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.”

He also wrote about Stewart’s well-known habit of buying up a block of tickets for concerts he was particularly excited about, and then giving them out to friends he thought would enjoy them. “As an illustration of Gary’s generosity, when the Imposters and I brought our ‘Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers’ tour to the Greek Theatre [in Los Angeles], Gary didn’t seek a place on the guest list to which he would have always been welcome but rather bought a stash of tickets to give to friends as that record had meant a lot to him and he wanted his pals to hear what we were up to with the songs after all these years. I even had to decline his offer of hosting a reception after the set, as I knew I had to sing the next night and talking into the small hours would be unwise. I know that when we return to the Greek in July, the band and I will pour a chaste glass and raise a toast to our friend.”

----
Elvis Costello
12 hrs
--
"This morning's brief promise of Spring was punctured by the news of the passing of Gary Stewart.

It is rare enough to find people of insight, kindness and loyalty but Gary had all these qualities in abundance. Friends have called or written all today trying to make sense of the impossible and the inexplicable.

As the vocation of criticism has become more fragmented, spiteful and distracted, so people with Gary's gift for advocacy needed to be valued. His appreciation of our work was immensely generous and deeply informed by personal emotion. With his help, I was encouraged to tell a broader tale as we compiled my catalogue for release on Rhino Records, 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.

It is equally rare to find a music website with genuine passion and curiosity as the one Gary helped found; Trunkworthy - giving contributors space to both celebrate and disagree but offering the reader a chance to make one after another invaluable discovery.

When Gary took up curation duties at Apple, he sent me a series of playlists using an existing template from best known to rarest choices. I could not have disagreed with any of his selections, even though we both knew that on another day, half of the songs might have had different titles and that's the way it should be.

As an illustration of Gary's generosity, when the Imposters and I brought our "Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers" tour to the Greek Theatre, Gary didn't seek a place on the guest list to which he would have always been welcome but rather bought a stash of tickets to give to friends as that record had meant a lot to him and he wanted his pals to hear what we were up to with the songs after all these years. I even had to decline his offer of hosting a reception after the set, as I knew I had to sing the next night and talking into the small hours would be unwise. I know that when we return to the Greek in July, the band and I will pour a chaste glass and raise a toast to our friend.

This generosity extended beyond mere music business tributaries and blind alleys and into a sense of community and the desire and need to be of service. I know I am not alone in being grateful for having known and worked with Gary and send my deepest condolences to his family and all his many friends."
____________________________________



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-04-15 05:02 by hopkins.

[www.rollingstone.com]

Remembering Gary Stewart, Rhino Records’ Rock Archaeologist
Late A&R head’s reissues of everyone from the Ramones to the Monkees combined a scholar’s authority with a fan’s zeal
DAVID FRICKE



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-04-16 17:55 by hopkins.

Wonderful tributes...
sorry for your loss, hopkins.

RIP

[www.youtube.com]

Gary turned into a hugely meaningful philanthropist in his hometown of L.A.
He went to Venice High School and then UCLA where after graduation he got
his Dream Job, a clerk in a record store on Westwood Blvd. not far from
the Campus.
Beyond all the tributes and recognition, he was a sensitive and shy person generally speaking; and speech-making at Fab Events to get super wealthy
folks inspired to write very big checks in hopes of providing meaningful comfort to the distressed, and meaningful little and big policy changes that might serve to help others, was not natural for podium-shy Mr. Stewart....
... And he approached helping strangers with similar passion he always demonstrated as a complete and totally committed music fan,
in every sense of the original 'fanatic' designation before abbreviation.
A sure encyclopedia. surely he was.

He championed, and signed, Southern California bands and artists, but was
hugely into Elvis Costello and Springsteen; and their inspirations....
My Hometown,
linked above,
was as song he referenced in speeches, referencing the elements that
coalesced into his public advocacy as a Fund Raiser and philanthropist.
....so i am listening to it and sharing it.

My Hometown - Bruce Springsteen

In the late 70's when I went to see the up and coming NY and British acts like The Ramones, Blondie, Television, The Jam, and Elvis Costello, etc., make their local debut at LA clubs like the Roxy, the Whiskey, and the Starwood, Gary was one of the regulars that always seemed to be there. In all those shows I never spoke to him, he was just a guy across the room.

One time during a way-too-loud show I remember being amused at seeing him with visible wads of cotton jammed in his ears. Back then it was totally uncool, yet in hindsight he was pretty wise when I consider the hearing loss I'm living with today.

I didn't learn his name until years later when all those Rhino reissues came out, and someone I knew told me he was that guy. I think Rhino set the gold standard (I know a Bear Family fan might argue otherwise, but you can't deny that Rhino sets were always more fun!) for anthologies, and their box sets were like well-curated museum exhibits. Details like sequencing of tracks and informed liner notes to put everything in context can make all the difference in the world.

There are more than a few songs that I'm glad he included on various Rhino collections that I remember originally hearing on the radio but somehow fell through the cracks and became forgotten, like "Double Barrel" by Dave and Ansel Collins on the Soul Hits of the 70's series or "Little Black Egg" by The Nightcrawlers on their expanded box set CD version of Lenny Kaye's Nuggets.

I really appreciated his love and memory for music, and I wish now that I had reached out and communicated that to him.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2019-04-18 09:05 by loog droog.

I don't have a subscription and can't read this ny times piece but would like to,
if anyone finds it super easy to copy and paste, I'd be so grateful, thanks.

[www.nytimes.com]

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-04-25 06:30 by hopkins.

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.Credit: Bart 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.

The end of the iTunes era: The life and death of Apple's curator-in-chief


The last time music engineer and producer Bill Inglot spoke to his friend Gary Stewart, Inglot was in a Baskin-Robbins parking lot, eating an ice cream cone.

“It was a nice April day, so I sat in my car and opened the sun roof, and the phone rang. It was Gary.”

That wasn’t unusual. The two had been friends for decades — went to Hollywood punk shows together as teens, worked alongside each other during their wild run at famed reissue label Rhino Records across the 1980s and ’90s and still spoke three or four times a month: about favorite artists who never quite got their due, about shared memories of long-ago gigs and about the hazards of growing old in a business that prizes the new above all else.

“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.”

A day later, on April 11, just after midnight and as at least one onlooker watched from the street below, Stewart, 62, jumped to his death from the roof of a downtown Santa Monica parking structure.

Apple will shut down iTunes, ending the download era, report says »
Over his four decades at Rhino Records and Apple, Stewart left his mark as one of the greatest curators the music business had ever known, cataloging, packaging and recontextualizing forgotten and overlooked swaths of rock history, much as legendary anthropologists Harry Smith and Alan Lomax had done for folk and for blues.

His knowledge was so deep that former Apple Music colleague Brian Rochlin called him “unintentionally intimidating” when it came to discussing pop culture. “No matter how much you loved something,” Rochlin said, after talking to Gary, “you were going to find out that you knew a lot less than you thought you did.”

But on that April night, a life’s worth of obsession — the millions of facts, opinions, melodies and connections stored in his memory — vanished.

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.” Mayor Eric Garcetti described his and his wife Amy’s affection for Stewart, writing on Twitter that he was “one of the funniest, most humble people we knew.”

Musicians Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, actor Michael McKean, Blondie drummer Clem Burke and many others celebrated their friend and mourned his fate.

Stewart had lived with depression throughout his life, but he kept it a secret from all but a few. When Inglot got the news, he started replaying their phone call for warning signs but came up blank. “However I thought things were going to play out for Gary, it wasn’t this. I feel like he had another 20 years of being passionate about stuff.”

After his death, more than one person called Stewart a real life George Bailey, conjuring the despairing banker who contemplates suicide in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But Stewart didn’t have Clarence to stop his fall.

“I don’t think it was any secret to Gary how admired he was,” says Baker, a longtime friend. “But somehow that wasn’t enough.”

Gary Stewart never married and had no kids. But he had an enormous community of friends. Inglot and Baker were among those who attended Stewart’s 60th birthday party in 2017, which drew 650 people to a Santa Monica hotel ballroom and featured performances by San Francisco power pop band the Rubinoos and soul singer Swamp Dogg.

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.”

Across 45 years, Stewart had changed the way the culture hears music. By the time he was named executive vice president of A&R for Rhino Records in 1992, he’d already overseen the creation of hundreds of “best of” CD compilations and anthologies. At Apple’s iTunes, he introduced Essentials playlists long before streaming services upended the business. Philosophically, he may have done more to shift the listening experience from the single-artist LP and toward a compilation or playlist mentality than any other figure in music history.

Stewart’s Rhino compilations ignited the reissue business. Not only did they earn much-needed royalties for countless lesser-known musicians, but they rewrote the canon of popular music, offering counterprogramming to the codified tastes and values of the baby boomers in power.

For his 1993 multi-volume “D.I.Y.” series, Stewart wrangled explosive punk and post-punk songs onto CD compilations that served as both historical documents and aesthetic arguments. “Teenage Kicks: U.K. Pop I,” connected mid-’70s punk and pub rock. A U.S.-focused set illustrated the depth and range of regional punk and power-pop scenes. Stewart’s Los Angeles volume, “We’re Desperate: The L.A. Scene 1976-1979,” gave voice to the artistic range of Southern California punk.

“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.”


As the older of two siblings growing up on the Westside, Stewart was a culture freak. With the encouragement of his movie-going, music-loving parents, Stewart and his brother, Mark, collected comic books, monster cards, stamps and coins. As Gary hit adolescence in the late 1960s, his brother recalls, he fawned over records by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jackson 5 and their favorite band, Three Dog Night.

“His life before Rhino was his record collection,” Mark Stewart says. Gary used to invite “the whole neighborhood” over to play records as Gary shared trivia gleaned from the pages of Creem, Circus and Rolling Stone magazines. When Rhino Records — the 3,000-square-foot record store that would eventually spawn the label — opened in Westwood in 1973, Stewart was one of its original customers. Along with Tower on the Sunset Strip and Aron’s on Melrose in the pre-Spotify era, Rhino was the closest thing to the so-called celestial jukebox that West Los Angeles had, and its clerks served as the search engines.

“The biggest music nerds would hang out at our store because in those days there really weren’t a lot of stores for record fanatics,” recalls Rhino Records founder Richard Foos. “Gary came in to the store one day, and I think he never left.”

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.

During the ’80s, as vinyl ceded the market to compact discs, revenue soared. Stewart ascended to vice president of A&R, and did so during one of the most profitable decades in music business history. His former Rhino co-workers say Stewart was the guiding force in Rhino’s success.

"He helped write the book on the current-day reissue business,” Baker says. “When I was a kid, reissues were little cheap LPs. They were considered car-wash purchases. Gary elevated them to high art."

Rhino continued its success through the 1990s, producing series including year-by-year Billboard hit single collections and the transcendent “In Ya Face” funk compilations, plus career-redefining sets on Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding and John Prine. The four-CD “Aretha Franklin: Queen of Soul” collection sold more than 100,000 box sets alone.

These days, says Inglot, “if you sell 50,000 of anything you’d break out the party hats.”

Rhino sold to the Warner Music Group in 1998 and founders Foos and Bronson departed a few years later. Stewart stayed on after they left. Never much for corporate hierarchies and missing many of his peers, though, as the music business collapsed post-Napster, Stewart too put in his notice.

A call from Steve Jobs
In 2004 while Stewart was working as an independent producer and consultant, Steve Jobs called. Stewart didn’t recognize the name and told his assistant he’d call back.

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.

Stewart’s job was to oversee and organize content for the millions of downloadable tracks within the company’s music platform. Specifically, he helped advance the digital landscape by cementing the idea of hand-curated Essentials playlists. They’ve since become a defining feature of the streaming age.

“Gary told me, ‘The same thing I was doing on record I’m now doing digital,’ ” Baker recalls. “He was writing the template for the future.”

Frustrations over his changing job responsibilities — Apple had stopped supporting Essentials — led Stewart to depart iTunes in 2011.

“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.’ ”

For the next five years Stewart freelanced as an independent consultant. In 2016, David Dorn, a former Rhino colleague and then senior director of Apple Music, asked Stewart to return to work on curation at the newly unveiled streaming platform.

“We’ve got 50 million songs and we’re in a playlist world,” Dorn, who’s now a senior director in the company’s mapping division, recalls telling him. “I couldn’t think of a person who was better suited to help us create that context and storytelling.”

Stewart returned to Apple for two more years. He and a team of selectors helped build many of the thousands of playlists that Apple Music subscribers continue to access daily. He put in his notice in October 2018. Stewart told a former Apple Music co-worker that he’d accomplished his goals, but that “what they wanted him to be doing next wasn’t what he wanted to be doing next.”

“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.”

Music publicist Fiona Bloom recounts Stewart’s growing frustration with an industry that no longer valued his kind of inexhaustible expertise. “We talked a lot about how kids could just come up and take over a role that people spend years mastering — not paying their dues, not working those 10,000 hours. It was disturbing to him.”

‘They were moving in another direction’
In the hours before his death, Stewart participated in a conference call with colleagues from Liberty Hill, a community nonprofit advocating for economic, racial, LGBTQ and environmental justice.

The group’s co-founder, Sarah Pillsbury, says the conversation involved strategies to “end juvenile justice as we know it, and to engage our donors and contact legislators.”

Across his years at Rhino and Apple, Stewart devoted his time to social justice causes, including Liberty Hill; the Community Coalition, a community-driven South L.A. nonprofit on whose board he served; and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Stewart willed the majority of his estate to the trio of nonprofits, according to his brother, Mark Stewart.

That was just like Stewart. His reflex was to share. Those invited to his annual Loser’s Christmas parties, which he held for more than 30 years, remember celebrating and commiserating with a perpetual bachelor eager to connect.

“He loved discussing things, both in person or on the phone. That’s where he shined the most,” Bloom says. “You go to a show, there’s loads of people you know. But then you go home and you’re sleeping in your bed alone. It can be quite lonely.”

Pillsbury recalls that over the years they had spoken about the difficulties of getting old in the entertainment business. One of the biggest fears they shared, she says: “People are thinking about me in the past tense.”

It didn’t help that companies like Apple, Spotify and YouTube have come to rely on algorithms to recommend music to its users. Stewart’s obsessive knowledge of and passion for rock history was no longer needed.

One labor-intensive Apple project Stewart worked on, for example, School of Rock, presented the history of the music across a few dozen chapters and sets of playlists. When it failed to attract enough user interaction, the initiative was archived into a virtual lock-box.

“They were moving in another direction,” Rochlin says.

Corinne Bendersky, a professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, says she’s seeing “a lot of concern about AI and algorithms replacing white-collar jobs,” similar to what happened with the introduction of robotics into assembly line work.

Bendersky notes that Pandora, Apple Music and Spotify’s tools are similarly disruptive, even if they’re tackling jobs considered “more artistic or taste-based,” as she puts it. “That trend,” she says, “is very much likely to continue.”

Some of Stewart’s closest friends say that in the weeks prior to his death he had asked for, and received, help and advice.

“[H]e was depressed,” Jeff Gold wrote on Facebook. “He was lamenting not having a job, relationship, having spent too much of his Apple money and not knowing what the next chapter of his life was.”

Gold recalled a meditation retreat Stewart attended — “which he didn’t love,” Gold wrote — and “a very frank discussion” they’d had over lunch a few months before. The two talked about the drug ketamine and its potential in treating depression. Gold sent him a link to a film involving MDMA treatment for PTSD survivors. Stewart replied two days before his death that the video had given him a deeper understanding of the approach.

As news spread of his passing, friends gathered to mourn their loss and learn more about Stewart’s last days. Some got together for an impromptu Seder, which helped those who felt like they’d missed signals or let down their friend.

David Gorman, who worked with Stewart at both Rhino and Apple, compared Stewart to “the quintessential Jewish grandmother: ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll sit here alone in the dark,’ ” he said with a warm laugh.

On June 1, the Skirball Center will host an afternoon memorial in Stewart’s honor. Co-hosted by Rhino’s Bronson and Foos, Jeff Gold and artist manager John Silva, the event will be open to the public.

In May, his friends gathered for a private memorial hosted by McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a few blocks from Stewart’s home. Between shared memories, attendees watched musicians including Billy Vera, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple of the dBs and Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night celebrate a life.

Vera, who scored Rhino’s only No. 1 record with “At This Moment,” remarked that his deal would never have happened without Stewart. Noting the volume of sad songs shared from the stage across the night, Vera protested, reminding the crowd of Stewart’s approach to life. “Gary had a sense of humor. He wanted us to be happy, so let’s be happy.”

For many of Stewart’s friends, that’s easier said than done. The whole thing makes no sense.

“Every sorrow can be borne if we can tell a story about it,” says Pillsbury, quoting writer Karen Blixen. “But sometimes you can’t tell a story, because there’s one unknown, and there’s only this tragic ending.”

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[www.latimes.com]