Ken Barnes is the former editor of the trade publication Radio & Records and music editor for USA Today, as well as the editor of the Ross On Radio column. He first met Marc Nathan in the mid-’70s, when Marc was delivering the hits as a record promoter for Casablanca and Ken was typesetting song activity summaries for R&R, instantly leading to a friendship of 50 years. As the industry mourns Nathan, who died April 9 at 70 after an extended series of illnesses, here is Barnes’s appreciation of a friend’s unique contribution to the music business.
Journalists, and plenty of disgruntled artists, have long delighted in describing the music business as populated by soulless bean counters, motivated only by maximizing their financial returns. But in four decades spent lurking in various corners of the radio and record realms, I constantly encountered people who got into the industry through their love of music, and by and large maintained that passion.
Marc Nathan was a perfect example of that brand of musical idealism. His long career as a promotion and A&R executive was always grounded in the ardor awakened, as was the case for so many others, by seeing the Beatles on TV in 1964, and cemented by hearing Todd Rundgren’s early band the Nazz a few years later. But Marc also exemplified a subset of the passion-driven: the stathead type, which gave him a unique place in the music business, particularly in the ’90s and early ’00s.
Marc’s progression, which I’ve seen essentially replicated in a number of cases, went something like this:
- Childhood sports fandom, starting with baseball.
- Fascination with the statistics associated with the favorite sport. In the pre-fantasy league era, symptoms for those affected included compiling batting and earned-run averages, perhaps playing board games or devising your own.
- Exposure to the radio, and the wondrously addictive variety of music it offered.
- Fascination with the ups and downs of the records on the radio, leading to chart countdown listening and chronicling, or devising your own charts.
- Discovering radio stations’ free printed surveys, and learning of the existence of national charts in trade publications that provided an overview of record popularity.
- Reading the trades and absorbing not only the chart numbers but learning something about the mechanics of the industry itself.
- Scheming to find a way to become part of that industry.
Marc’s way in came to pass far earlier than most people’s: At 15, he bought a copy of Todd Rundgren’s first solo album that had two unlisted tracks, and he wrote to the label, Ampex, for more information. By the next year, a continuing correspondence led to him promoting Rundgren as an Ampex staffer.
Throughout the career that followed, he applied his analytical, scientific approach to the art of promotion and, later, artist discovery. Sean Ross reflects, “Marc really pioneered data-driven A&R. He used local hits and radio contacts, SoundScan, and eventually streaming to find hits. He was passionate about the music he loved; he still wanted to find the records that other people liked. In recent years, we’ve seen the substitution of data mining for A&R. Marc was somebody who really did bring art and science together and use both.”
(Editor’s note — I also remember Marc as being one of the key people in getting Alphaville’s “Forever Young” reissued in 1988 after it was highlighted in the Billboard radio section. At the time, it was one of many bringbacks and only became a slightly bigger national hit. But it continued to grow and his advocacy does give Nathan a role in a song that finally became a hit in a slightly altered form this year.)
Nathan’s own musical tastes were eclectic, extending from mainstream pop to the quirkiest novelties. That range served him well in unleashing hits or near hits such as Kon Kan’s “I Beg Your Pardon,” King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” and Merrill Bainbridge’s “Mouth” upon an unsuspecting world. His lifelong fascination with Canadian music led to a crucial role in the launch of Barenaked Ladies, while his A&R discoveries ranged from Three Doors Down to the Cash Money hip-hop empire.
Even with his ability to find hits through data, Nathan’s relentless crusades on behalf of his favorite records often clashed with label priorities, leading to a tumultuous career path that matched the wanderings of radio’s most peripatetic U-Haul jockeys. He worked in promotion and/or A&R for Ampex, Atlantic, Bearsville, Big Tree, Capitol, Casablanca, MCA, Modern, Mushroom, Playboy, RCA, Rising Tide, Sire, and Universal, in addition to his own label, Flagship. (I may have missed a few stops along the way, and some gigs may have been as an indie promoter or consultant for specific projects.)
In his later years, he suffered through a discouraging array of ailments, but he always retained his enthusiasm, bordering on fanaticism, for hockey, baseball (mainly the Mets), bowling, and dining, and continued to boggle minds with his encyclopedic memory of records and chart statistics from the late sixties on. And he continued to employ his ears and his analytic techniques in search of that next out-of-nowhere phenomenon, that hit that he never stopped believing was right around the next corner.
