Appreciation: Seymour Stein, dead at 80, discovered the Ramones, Madonna, many more: ‘I never believed in press for myself’

SAN DIEGO — Seymour Stein was never a household name to most music fans before his Sunday death from cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 80. But he certainly was to the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Madonna, Ice-T, Depeche Mode and the dozens of other artists Stein signed to Sire Records, which he co-founded in New York in 1967. Moreover, Stein was the behind-the-scenes missing link between such disparate acts as the English blues-rock band Fleetwood Mac in the 1960s, the Dutch prog-rock band Focus in the early 1970s, and the The Pretenders and Richard Hell & the Voidoids later in the same decad…

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