San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘King Midas’ worked with music industry’s biggest names
Charles Koppelman, a longtime music executive who worked with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Tracy Chapman, Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice, among many other artists, and later steered the companies of Martha Stewart and fashion designer Steve Madden through periods of turbulence, died Friday at his home in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 82.
His son, Brian, said the cause was cancer.
For decades, Koppelman was a player in the upper ranks of the music industry, acting variously as dealmaker and superstar matchmaker. Seldom pictured without a Cuban cigar and a jovial grin, he relished the excitement of striking big deals and the lifestyle that went along with being a top executive in music’s high-flying 1980s and ’90s.
His career took him from the songwriting cubicles of New York in the early 1960s to CBS Records in the ’70s, where he ran the music publishing division and the artists and repertoire department and worked with artists including Billy Joel, Janis Ian and Journey.
In the 1980s, Koppelman and two associates, financier Stephen Swid and music executive Martin
Bandier, carried out one of that period’s most lucrative music transactions. In 1986, they purchased CBS’ publishing unit — which controlled the copyrights to about 250,000 songs, including evergreens such as “Over the Rainbow” and “New York, New York” — for $125 million. Barely two years later, in early 1989, they sold it to Thorn-EMI, the corporate parent of the British label EMI, for $337 million, the richest price ever paid in music publishing to that point.
In the years after that deal, as EMI’s top recorded-music executive in the United States, Koppelman
oversaw hugely successful records such as the 1990 debut album by Wilson Phillips, the pop trio made up of daughters of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas.
“He’s like King Midas,” Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips said of Koppelman to New York magazine in 1992. “Everything he touches turns to gold.”
Charles Arthur Koppelman was born March 30, 1940, in Brooklyn, and grew up in Laurelton, Queens. His father, Irving Koppelman, worked at a printing press, and his mother, Ruth (Lerman) Koppelman, was an assistant to the principal of Far Rockaway High School, which Charles attended.
A sports aficionado, Charles grew up intending to become a physical education teacher. But while he was enrolled at Adelphi University, he and two classmates formed a vocal group, the Ivy Three. In 1960 they had a hit with “Yogi,” a novelty track that mixed the tale of a yoga master — “a kook who was standing on his head” — with catchphrases of the cartoon character Yogi Bear. It went to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
The Ivy Three never had another hit, and Koppelman served for a time in the Coast Guard. But the success of “Yogi” led him and Don Rubin, another member of the Ivy Three, to mogul Don Kirshner. His company Aldon Music was one of the top songwriting shops in New York at the time, employing a deep bench of hitmaking writers such as Neil Sedaka and the teams of Carole King-Gerry Goffin and Jeff Barry-Ellie Greenwich.
Outshined by those writers, Koppelman found himself on the management side of the company and was drawn to the business of music publishing: handling the work of songwriters and maximizing earnings from those copyrights. In 1965, Charles Koppelman and Rubin started a production company, Koppelman & Rubin Associates. They signed the Lovin’ Spoonful (“Do You Believe in Magic”) and worked with songwriters like Tim Hardin, whose song “If I Were a Carpenter” became a Top 10 hit for Bobby Darin in 1966, in a version that was produced by Koppelman and Rubin.
After the pair sold their company, Koppelman went to work at CBS. In 1975 he formed the Entertainment Co. with real estate developer Samuel LeFrak and Bandier. Koppelman developed a close association with Streisand, serving as executive producer on a string of her albums in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
In 1985, while Koppelman’s son Brian was a student at Tufts University, he saw Tracy Chapman perform at a coffeehouse and encouraged his father to sign her as a songwriter. He did, and Chapman’s debut album, released by Elektra Records in 1988, went to No. 1 and established her as a major talent.
In addition to his son, Charles Koppelman is survived by his wife, Gerri Kyhill Koppelman; two daughters, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt and Stacy Koppelman Fritz; a sister, Roz Katz; and seven grandchildren.