Word came last night of the death of Stan Cornyn at age 81. Stan was an advertising copywriter who, in 1958, joined the newly founded Warner Brothers Records - and stayed with the label through all of its evolutions until 1990, when he left and (after a few years in the video games industry) moved to the Santa Barbara area.
Cornyn's work at WBR focused on publicity, but that would understate the extent of his contribution. As much as anybody, he generated the "hip" image that made Warner/Reprise the leading labels of the mid-to-late '60s and '70s. Part of this had to do with his idiosyncratic approach to writing liner notes, where he took the kind of rhetoric common in the back-jacket writing of the day and let his satirical but curiously lyrical sensibility run wild; some examples are at
http://www.spaceagepop.com/cornyn.htmHe also became famous for writing word-heavy ads intended to turn commercially unsuccessful Warner/Reprise albums into word-of-mouth cult favorites; two such examples were for Randy Newman's first album (headlined: "Once You Get Used To It, His Voice Is Really Something"), and, famously, the one headed "How We Lost $39,509.50 On The Album Of The Year (Dammit)" - concerning Song Cycle. Van Dyke has often complained that this ad gave him an Orson Welles-type rep for going over budget and hindered his recording career, but he still Tweeted a tribute to Cornyn yesterday.
Stan also published a very entertaining history of Warner/Reprise, Exploding, in 2003. It mostly focuses on the bizarre and arcane business of the music biz, but it does discuss the labels' artistes here and there. It also illustrates his impatience with the industry. In the late '80s, Cornyn saw the digital revolution coming and tried to get WBR involved by encoding info (basically written material) into CDs that could be read on computers. After a few such discs (including VDP's Tokyo Rose), WBR junked the idea, which was when Stan moved over to video games. Later on, he memorably remarked that the record industry was tied with the Amish when it came to dealing with technology.
And to answer a question the more political-minded might be wondering about - yes, Stan was a first cousin of John Cornyn, the Texas Senator.
RIP.
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