I should be in Nashville today for Steve Popovich’s memorial, but I couldn’t afford the trip—and Steve would understand. But I write about him now because I couldn’t say everything, of course, in the appreciation piece I wrote for examiner.com on June 8 the day after he died in Murfreesboro at 68.
Examiner.com’s not really a blog, so I wrote it in third person—and it was quite good. But it could never be good enough. Steve was too big a figure in my life and so many others—and if he didn’t know it, I know they did and I’m sure many of them are there right now testifying.
As I wrote in Examiner, Steve was the one guy who lived up to the cliché, "he would give you the shirt off his back.” And no, I don’t have a closet full of Steve’s shirts like I said in Examiner, but he gave me plenty more than clothes.
For there was no truer friend than Steve Popovich. And there was no greater music man. As my friend and genius Nashville music historian Robert K. Oermann wrote in Musicrow.com, Steve was "one of the most colorful record executives in the history of Music Row”—having signed such legendary artists as Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, polka king Frank Yankovic, Lynn Anderson, Billy Swan and Johnny Paycheck to Mercury Records when he ran its Nashville operations from 1986 to 1988.
But this was long after he helped establish the likes of Santana, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Mac Davis and Chicago during a stint at CBS Records in the 1960s and '70s, then became vice president of A&R at Epic Records, where he signed or helped guide the careers Michael Jackson, The Jacksons, Cheap Trick, The Charlie Daniels Band, Ted Nugent, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and Boston.
Still, he was probably best known for his own label Cleveland International Records, home of Meat Loaf's 1977 album debut Bat Out Of Hell, one of the biggest selling albums ever. After his stint at Mercury he returned to Cleveland and restarted Cleveland International in 1995, releasing albums representing his typically wide musical interests with titles from Grammy-winning polka acts Brave Combo and Eddie Blazonczyk & The Versatones, as well as country music great David Allan Coe. I wrote CD liner notes on many of these discs.
I first met Steve, I don’t know, soon after I moved to New York, probably around 1985 in Nashville. I know it was in March, at a Country Radio Seminar hospitality suite at the Opryland Hotel.
I knew who he was, of course, and was suitably awestruck. What I didn’t know, and never would have imagined, was how down-to-earth this record business legend was, and that he would become one of my dearest friends and supporters. Then again, he was born the son of a coal miner in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, and began in the music industry by unloading trucks at a Columbia Records warehouse in 1962. I was a kid from Wisconsin, 10 years younger, who knew his name first from the records he was thanked on.
It was only fitting, I guess, that I first learned of Steve’s death while waiting for Eric Burdon to go on at B.B. King’s. Eric Burdon & The Animals, the most working class of the British Invasion, and Steve Popovich was nothing if not working class as a record executive.
Fitting, too, that Eric’s first song was his autobiographical “When I Was Young.” Eric had just turned 70, though you wouldn’t know it by how young he still sounds. And Steve the last few years was finally turning the corner in diligently exercising and losing weight, while doting on his grandchildren. Pictures I saw in the various Internet obits and tributes all showed him to have kept that boyish quality of being forever a young man in love with music.
And it was a love of all music. It was Steve who gave me a full appreciation of polka music and its many styles, who brought me to Cleveland to be part of it and eventually convince my editor and friend Tim White to put polka on the cover of Billboard. Not everyone got it, of course, but I’ll never forget another late friend and great record man, Dave Nives, joining me in Central Park to seen Eddie Blazonczyk & The Versatones—the great Chicago “push” Polish polka band—shaking his head in amazement and declaring, “This is rock ‘n’ roll.”
And to top it off, out of nowhere, Steve decided to offer $50 to the best polka dancers (I was one of the judges).
I'd see Steve whenever he came to New York, of course. "Bruth-uh!" he'd call a day in advance, then instruct me to meet him at the Warwick Hotel, or at a gig the next night. The last time was last year, when he brought his son Steve, Jr., to attend a charity dinner honoring his friend Steve (Little Steven) Van Zandt. He would have bought me a ticket but I told him I'd meet him after at City Winery, where his former Cleveland International artist Ian Hunter was playing. He was always loyal to his friends--especially if they were his artists.
But most of the time I'd see Steve in Nashville. It's been many years, now, but there was a place I'd always meet him at on weekend nights after I left the Grand Ole Opry, usually around 11, 11: 30. I'd head down to the Stockyard's Bullpen Lounge, the famed lounge downtown that no one I knew really went to but me and Steve, who held court at the center table. We'd be there to see Tommy Riggs, the great Nashville lounge singer, who at 450-plus was even fatter than Steve, and who died in 2000 at 57. No one sang "If You Don't Know Me By Now" like Tommy, and none other than Jimmy Webb was a devoted fan.
"You almost have to go back to Brook Benton or Billy Eckstine to find a true baritone singer like Tommy," a grieving Webb told me after Riggs died. "He was of that school: a tremendously gifted guy who never strained a note—and the greatest friend a guy could ever have."
The greatest friend a guy could ever have. He said it about Tommy--and Tommy was indeed that--but I'll borrow the great songwriter's words for my friend Steve. After the legendary Columbia Records a&r executive Mitch Miller died last year, Steve recalled that he and the fellow legends--John Hammond, Goddard Lieberson--were at the label when he was starting out in the warehouse. And Steve would have none of the scorn that was later heaped on Miller for denigrating rock 'n' roll as, among other things, "musical baby food."
"Columbia had a lot of hits then," he said, speaking of the early 1960s. "Streisand was happening, Steve [Lawrence] and Eydie [Gorme], Patti Page, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash--what a genius music man!" he said of Miller. "He'd have breakfast with Leonard Bernstein and lunch with Mahalia Jackson and dinner with Johnny Cash. He was all things to all people."
Steve Popovich, too, was all things to all people. Miller, he said, was "one of those guys who should be honored in Washington with a presidential award." And Steve was one of those guys who deserves a statue in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But he'll always have a place in my heart, at the very least.
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