Interviews

Does anyone use the term "record man" these days? In an earlier era, it would have been used in the same way the term "ad man" was used, as a particularly American job description. People who spend their careers in and around the music business. Some of these record men are known by the public—some of it anyway—whereas others may be familiar only to colleagues.

I met Steve Berkowitz under the best of circumstances: sitting in a basement listening room hearing beautiful recordings made in 1958 that I'd never heard before, by the Miles Davis Quintet. It was the recently issued Miles Davis—Birth of the Blue (Analogue Productions APJ 172). The album was, the credits state, "Supervised by Steve Berkowitz." The name rang a bell, though prior to this meeting, I didn't have a face to go with the name. Steve described how he and engineer Vic Anesini had mixed the original three-track tapes from the Columbia vaults to stereo. It was then mastered to LP by Matthew Lutthans at Quality Record Pressings.

Born in 1952, Berkowitz grew up in Boston, immersed in the exploding 1960s music scene of that college town. "I'm proudly from Brighton, Mass.," Berkowitz told me, "from the projects of Fidelis Way." A blues guitar slinger from early on, Steve uses his stage name when it suits him: "T. Blade." His band "T. Blade & The Esquires" was part of the Boston club scene in the day. Hanging out, being a roadie, being a deejay, managing a recording studio, getting his start at managing artists: Berkowitz got his hands in the musical clay.

When I started to pull records and CD box sets off my shelf and reading the credits, I realized that for many years, Berkowitz has played a role in wrangling some of the greatest music recordings ever made. Through his work for Columbia Records and other labels, Steve has trod a unique path, becoming an expert in exploring personal collections, libraries, archives, and the radio and record company vaults and advocating for the great music he has found there. As a result, Steve has directly participated in bringing music to the public that they would not have heard otherwise. He has garnered two Blues Foundation Awards and five Grammy Awards along the way. His complete discography would run many pages, so here's a (very) short list of artists whose catalogs Berkowitz has worked with: Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Paul Simon, Tony Bennett.

It was fascinating to talk with Steve and touch on some of the music history he's been involved with and the process involved in his work.

Sasha Matson: What year did you first start working for Columbia?

Steve Berkowitz: 1987, as a product manager and a head of artist development.

Matson: Did the Legacy project and label exist then?

Berkowitz: It did not. I first mentioned that it be called "Legacy." A coworker of mine named Kevin Gore, who is now the head of Rhino Records, and I were supervising a lot of jazz artists and catalogs at Columbia. I had gone from being an artist-development guy. I had been an agent and a manager for The Cars, Ministry, and others, working for Geffen and Robert's Lookout Management from 1979 to 1984. I really wanted to grow up and be Peter Asher: manage a couple of artists and produce them. At Columbia, Gore and I were given the jazz department and the budget that came with that. The contracts for Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Tony Bennett, Harry Connick, Jr., and others were old school—very lucrative. But the jazz market by the early '90s had come down. So how could we run a department that would gross enough in sales to make any money? It's a record company, not the Library of Congress.

Matson: Costs getting ahead of income?

Berkowitz: I had championed the ultimate release of a complete Robert Johnson box set, though I didn't produce it originally. I really took it to the mat with the head of the sales department at Columbia. What gave me a lot of credibility was that they said they would maybe sell 14,000 copies. I went to (author) Peter Guralnick, an old friend I used to hang out with at Club 47 in Boston, and got his permission to use quotes from his book Searching for Robert Johnson from Keith Richards and Eric Clapton in the ad campaign for the release. I'm going to market this thing as the greatest ever, because they said so! Open the door to the rock market. It isn't what I did; it's because of how great Robert Johnson is.

The company was amazed. We sold a million six. Suddenly it was, "What does this guy want to do? Maybe Berkowitz knows something." The entire original Legacy music team was music oriented and business savvy. When we started Legacy, it coincided with the sales explosion from the advent of CDs. We had located the other 14 tracks by Robert Johnson that hadn't been released earlier and put it out on CD and LP: The Complete Robert Johnson.

Matson: Hasn't it been gratifying for you over the years, Steve, when you know that something you are working to get out to people is great—that no one's trying to pull a fast one?

Berkowitz: Such great artists that have been on Columbia and RCA, you can't injure that music: It's already great. It's classic, not because of what the record company does but because of the music and what the people recognize. It's classical music. It's natural.

Matson: So how did you pitch the idea of Legacy?

Berkowitz: We went to the heads of the company, Don Ienner and Tommy Mottola, and said: "A big thing for all the labels is market share. Let us add to your market share. Let's take the Miles Davis catalog and stream it back into the jazz department within Columbia. Let's reorganize that so that at least the sales of all the jazz, blues, and old catalog comes through the label. Let's start a reissue division." I wanted to do what Verve Records was already doing: There's old stuff, and there's new stuff, but there's only one Verve. Let's do that at Columbia, and Epic, and Masterworks. Not Reader's Digest specialty reissues. I didn't understand why it had to be Ryko, Rhino, or Hippo, or some funny animal name for a reissue label.

So they said, "Come in on Monday with a name for the label." I sat all weekend trying to think of a name. I wanted it to be called "The Columbia Legacy." And they immediately turned it into "Legacy."

By the way, in the '50s there already was a "Legacy" label that John Hammond and Goddard Lieberson had been doing. I did not know that till afterwards.

Matson: Early Legacy projects?

Berkowitz: I really wanted to reissue the Tom Waits soundtrack for One from the Heart. We had done the first Miles Davis box, The Columbia Years, 1955–1985. That was an important set. CDs had recently come in. The idea was that it would be like a coffee table book version overview of an artist with music. Big and with beautiful pictures. Dylan's Biograph collection had come out by then, I was involved with the marketing of that, and that was the beginning of me being the Bob Dylan product manager. There was a Sarah Vaughan box and a five-LP Fred Astaire collection. Those were the first ones done with this idea that there could be a well-archived, high-quality reissue series. Then it became Legacy.

Matson: You have worked on all the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series sets. For Dylan's Fragments– Time Out of Mind Sessions, you and your colleagues did something different. That is not the same as the original; it's a remix, not a remastering. A different approach, stripping away some of that heavy reverb and slap echo for Bob's vocals.

Berkowitz: It was Dylan who requested the remix. Jeff Rosen (Dylan's manager) called and said, "Bob wants a remix of Time Out of Mind." I could hear on the originally released album that Dylan cut the vocals live, but it's kind of swamped in a bit. Rosen said: "Yeah, let's make it sound more live again." Now Dylan and (producer) Daniel Lanois made the album they wanted to, and the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The whole idea was to bring back the moment of creation, with Bob singing in the room with a couple of musicians. We wanted to get closer to it, because that's what he asked for.

Matson: You've got to use the available technology, which of course is very sophisticated these days. Do you care about hi-fi?

Berkowitz: It's a multipronged question for me. I've had the benefit of working in some of the greatest studios in the world, constantly, with some of the greatest people. For my own system at home, I'm mostly still listening while I work on Yamaha NS-10s. For pleasure listening, I move over to the other side of the room, where I still have late-'70s JBL 4312b studio monitors with an Onkyo integrated amp, a gigantic thing I've been listening to since the '70s, and I understand exactly how it sounds. I like mono, and I like stereo. But I also like surround and Dolby Atmos. I did Miles Davis–Live in Montreal in Dolby Atmos, with mixer Dave Darlington, and it's fantastic. It's a spectacular presentation of that great live band.