There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Richard Gottehrer – but there’s also a good chance that if you’re even a regular music fan, or know a thing, or several things, he did a pretty good job.
As a songwriter in the early 1960s, he co-wrote songs such as “I Want Candy”, “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Sorrow”. As a producer, he has directed classic albums for Blondie, Go-Go’s, Richard Hell, Joan Armatrading, Raveonettes, and Dum Dum Girls among others. As an artist, he formed a short-lived group called Strangeloves with songwriting/production partners Jerry Goldstein and Bob Feldman which nonetheless has achieved several singles (including the original “I Want Candy”). As an executive, he co-founded Sire Records with Seymour Stein in 1966, and 30 years later, co-founded Orchard with Scott Cohen. This company is now owned by Sony Music, one of the largest independent music distributors in the world.
It’s one of the music industry’s most colorful and varied biographies, spanning nearly 70 years – since the day Richard was discovered as a songwriting prodigy at the age of 14 (by a man who happened to pass an open window in his family’s Bronx apartment). ) to the present.
At age 82, Richard still comes to Orchard’s East Village offices daily, and continues to work as a producer, most recently recording new versions of a pair of songs he recorded with blues and rock singer Jeffrey Gaines in the 1980s to protest the recent coup d’état of Roe v. Sad for gun control in the United States.
We didn’t cover all of these topics in the conversation you’re about to hear, but we did cover a lot of them.
“Strictly Business” is a weekly podcast from Variety featuring conversations with industry leaders about the media and entertainment business. New episodes start every Wednesday and can be downloaded to iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
[ad_2]
