Cy Leslie

Music and house video pioneer Cy Leslie founded Pickwick International, a low-budget record label that greatly expanded the industry’s advertising and distribution reach by licensing articles in the majors for re-release in supermarkets and various other nontraditional shops. Blessed Seymour Leslie in Brooklyn on Dec 16, 1922, he dropped his dad as a teenager and backed his family members by delivering glaciers while participating in DeWitt Clinton SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL. After serving using the U.S. Military Indication Corps during Globe Battle II, he released his music profession as co-founder of Voco Information, which produced some records offering birthday music and related sentiments, offering each discharge through drug shops. In 1950 Leslie produced Pickwick Information, which centered on the children’s music marketplace and gained its creator the banner of “Ruler from the Kiddie Information.” In the years to check out, the passions of parent company Pickwick International grew to add the Musicland Group retail string, a rackjobbing department, a record low cost device, and, most effective of most, its lower price reissue arm. With budget-line editions coming in at $1.49 — roughly half the expense of a new launch — Pickwick sold a lot more than 100 million records by 1957, licensing efforts from famous brands Sammy Davis, Jr., Excess fat Waller, and Dizzy Gillespie. Pickwick was also among the 1st publicly exchanged record brands, and its share prices soared after a 1962 Supreme Courtroom decision banning prayer in universities galvanized product sales of its spoken-word produces. Pickwick additionally released a variety of rock and roll & move soundalike records, many of them having a then-unknown Lou Reed, who offered as an employee songwriter. In 1964, the Reed-penned “The Ostrich” demonstrated a minor strike, also to promote the one Pickwick set up an random music group dubbed the Primitives, recruiting a classically educated Welsh musician called John Cale. Reed and Cale afterwards founded the seminal Velvet Underground. Through the early ’70s, Leslie steered Pickwick in just one more brand-new path, reissuing LPs removed from major-label catalogs. A relationship with RCA Information enabled the company to make a lucrative group of compilations spotlighting Elvis Presley, although the offer ended using the King’s 1977 loss of life, kick-starting RCA’s very own endless development of Presley reissue deals. Pickwick also spun from the subsidiary brands P.We.P. and De-Lite, using the last mentioned notching some strikes via the funk music group Kool & the Gang. Despite gaining Record Industry Guy of the entire year honors in 1975, Leslie started selling off bits of the Pickwick empire as the 10 years drew to its close, with PolyGram Information purchasing the privileges to its back again catalog of first recordings. In 1980, Leslie moved into the nascent house video business as leader of CBS Video Corporations, two years afterwards becoming creator and chairman of MGM/UA ENTERTAINMENT Group. During his tenure at MGM/UA, he was instrumental in changing house video from accommodations business right into a sell-through organization, partly by presenting and popularizing boxed models. He also shepherded the business’s entrance into pay out Television and licensing. Leslie “retired” in 1988 after Ted Turner obtained MGM/UA and relocated functions to California, but he continued to be mixed up in entertainment sector as an buyer. He also tenured for the planks of several open public, private, and non-profit corporations, like the T. J. Martel Base, a music sector organization focused on leukemia, tumor, and AIDS analysis. Furthermore, he was vice chairman from the Songwriters Hall of Popularity. Leslie offered as chairman of capital raising company Leslie-Linton Entertainment until succumbing to center failing on January 6, 2008, simply days history his 85th birthday.