Music mogul Jerry Moss, co-founder of A&M Records, dies at 88
Jerry Moss, a music industry mogul who co-founded A&M Records with Herb Alpert and rose from a Los Angeles garage to the heights of success with hits by Alpert, the Police, the Carpenters and hundreds of other performers, has died at 88.
Moss, inducted with Alpert into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, died on Wednesday at his home in Bel Air, California, according to a statement released by his family. He died of natural causes, his widow, Tina, told Associated Press.
“They truly don’t make them like him any more and we will miss conversations with him about everything under the sun,” said the statement. “The twinkle in his eyes as he approached every moment ready for the next adventure.”
For more than 25 years, Alpert and Moss presided over one of the industry’s most successful independent labels, releasing such blockbuster albums as Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Carole King’s Tapestry and Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! Their label was home to the Carpenters and Cat Stevens, Janet Jackson and Soundgarden, Joe Cocker and Suzanne Vega, the GoGo’sand Sheryl Crow.
Moss made one of his last public appearances in January when he was honoured with a tribute concert at the
Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles. Among the performers were Frampton, Amy Grant and Dionne Warwick, who was not an A&M artist but had been close to Moss from the time he helped promote her music in the early 1960s. While Moss did not speak at the ceremony, many others praised him.
“Herb was the artist and Jerry had the vision. It just changed the face of the record industry,” singer Rita Coolidge said on the event’s red carpet. “Certainly A&M made such a difference and it’s where everybody wanted to be.”
Moss’s surviving family include his second wife, Tina Morse, and three children.
Born in New York City and an English major at Brooklyn College, Moss had wanted to work in show business since waiting on tables in his 20s and noticing that the entertainment industry patrons seemed to be having so much fun. After a six-month army stint, he found work as a promoter for
Coed Records and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he met and befriended Alpert, a trumpeter, songwriter and entrepreneur.
With an investment of $100 each, they formed Carnival Records and had a local hit with Tell It to the Birds, an Alpert ballad released under the name of his son, Dore Alpert. After learning that another company was called Carnival, Alpert and Moss used the initials of their last names and renamed their business A&M, working from an office in Alpert’s garage and designing the distinctive logo with the trumpet across the bottom.
For several years they specialised in “easy listening” acts such as Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Brazilian artist Sérgio Mendes and the folk-rock trio the Sandpipers. After attending the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, rock’s first major festival, Moss began adding rock performers, including Cocker, Procol Harum and Free.
A&M continued to expand their catalog through the 70s and 80s, taking on the Police, Squeeze, Joe Jackson and other British new wave artists, R&B musicians Janet Jackson and Barry White and country rockers 38 Special and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.
By the late 80s, Alpert and Moss were operating from a Hollywood lot where Charlie Chaplin once made movies, but they struggled to keep up with ever-higher recording contracts and sold A&M to Polygram for an estimated $500m. They remained at the label, but clashed with Polygram’s management and left in 1993.
For a few years, Alpert and Moss ran Almo Records, where performers included Garbage, Imogen Heap and Gillian Welch.
“We wanted people to be happy,” Moss told the New York Times in 2010. “You can’t force people to do a certain kind of music. They make their best music when they are doing what they want to do, not what we want them to do.”