Music mogul Jerry Moss, co-founder of A&M Records, dies at 88 | The music industry

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 from Alpert, the police, the carpenters and hundreds of other artists, died at 88.

Moss, inducted with Alpert into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, died Wednesday at his home in Bel Air, Calif., according to a statement released by his family. He died of natural causes, his widow, Tina, told The Associated Press.

“They really don’t make them like him anymore and we will miss conversations with him about everything under the sun,” the statement said. “The twinkle in his eyes as he approached each moment, ready for the next adventure.”

For more than 25 years, Alpert and Moss ran one of the industry’s most successful independent labels, releasing hit albums such as Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Carole King’s Tapestry and Frampton Comes Alive by Peter Frampton! Their label housed the Carpenters and Cat Stevens, Janet Jackson and Soundgarden, Joe Cocker and Suzanne Vega, the Go-Go’s and Sheryl Crow.

Moss made one of his last public appearances in January when he was honored with a tribute concert at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles. Performers included Frampton, Amy Grant and Dionne Warwick, who was not an A&M artist but had been close to Moss since he helped promote her music in the early 1960s. While Moss has not spoken at the ceremony, many others congratulated him.

“Herb was the artist and Jerry had the vision. It just changed the face of the recording industry,” singer Rita Coolidge said on the event’s red carpet. and that’s where everyone wanted to be.”

Moss’ surviving family includes his second wife, Tina Morse, and three children.

Born in New York and studying English at Brooklyn College, Moss had wanted to work in show business since he was a waiter in his twenties and noticed that customers in the entertainment industry seemed to have so much fun. After a six-month stint in the military, he found work as a promoter for Coed Records and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he met and befriended Alpert, trumpeter, songwriter- composer 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 surnames and renamed their company A&M, working from a desk in Alpert’s garage and designing the distinctive trumpet logo. down.

For several years, they specialized in “easy listening” groups such as Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, the Brazilian Sérgio Mendes and the folk-rock trio the Sandpipers. After attending the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the first major rock festival, Moss began adding rock artists including Cocker, Procol Harum and Free.

A&M continued to expand its catalog in the 70s and 80s, taking on 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 Ozarks. Mountain Daredevils.

In the late ’80s, Alpert and Moss operated out of Hollywood land where Charlie Chaplin once made movies, but they struggled to keep up with ever-higher record deals and sold A&M to Polygram for a amount estimated at $500 million. They remained at the label, but clashed with Polygram 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 make a certain type of music. They make their best music when they do what they want to do, not what we want them to do.