Steve Popovich died June 8 at his home in Nashville at age 68. A native of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, he led bands including Ronnie and the Savoys and the Twilighters before working his way up the record industry ladder. He became a powerhouse at Epic Records in the 1970s after his dogged promotion of Meat Loaf’s operatic Bat out of Hell album on Epic subsidiary Cleveland International finally bore fruit, yielding millions in sales.
Popovich was a chunky, wry, working-class guy, among the last of a dying breed. He was scrappy and relentless and enthusiastic. He was a record guy.
Among the artists polka fan Popovich promoted: Springsteen, Dylan, Ian Hunter, Ronnie Spector, Ellen Foley (the girl on “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”) and Karla DeVito. But his signature client was the magnificently bombastic singer Meat Loaf, a big Dallas guy born Marvin Lee Aday.
In fall 1995, Popovich filed a $50-million civil suit against Sony and its CBS Records division, claiming he was defrauded of at least $5.2 million in back royalties on Meat Loaf’s Bat. Popovich accused Sony of conflating royalty payments from vinyl, cassettes and compact discs and of providing fraudulent semi-annual account statements. The suit also sought return of the master Meat Loaf recordings. It was settled out of court for close to $7 million. A follow-up yielded Popovich another $5 million in 2005.
Popovich, who moved to Cleveland as a teenager, was reputedly a fine bass player. He came a long way from Nemacolin, the area where he scored his first hit, the instrumental, “Slappin’ Rods and Leaky Oil.” Ronnie and the Savoys, his first band, would play in little Pennsylvania towns like Carmichael and Masontown—and in Cleveland, competing with the likes of Tom King and the Starfires, Dave C and the Sharptones, and the Grasshoppers (featuring the future Car Benny Orr). Among the Cleveland venues Ronnie and the Savoys played were Leo’s Café at 75th and St. Clair, and Luccioni’s in Richmond Heights. [Pictured: Steve Popovich (second from right in back row) with Meat Loaf and friends following a 1978 concert at Blossom.]
In 2005, when Popovich was still living in Wickliffe, he told me a story about another Epic Records-associated group he’d helped promote: Wild Cherry, essentially a one-hit wonder. But what a hit, a number one in 1976: “Play That Funky Music” still sells and is the blackest track ever recorded by a white band – especially one from Steubenville. It was recorded for Sweet City Records, an Epic custom label commandeered by Cleveland music figures Mike Belkin and Carl Maduri.
Here's a story about "color coordination" during Wild Cherry's early days, as told to me by Popovich:
"Carl Maduri brought me 'Play That Funky Music,' Wild Cherry. A couple million albums and a million and a half singles. Still sells today. We couldn't put their picture on the cover because lead singer Bobby Parissi was white. That's why they came up with the lips. They had a gig in New York opening for the Isley Brothers, I talked to Carl Maduri about getting some black faces in that band, so we put four black guys in the horn section.
“The opening night of the tour was at Madison Square Garden. There were 20,000 people waiting for the Isley Brothers and Wild Cherry, which was a black hit at that time, and no one had ever seen them live. The black guys walked out; it's dark, and the crowd's on their feet going nuts, and Bobby Parissi walks out, the guy who wrote and sang that song, and it seemed everybody sat down.
“They played, and at the end they played 'Funky Music,' and everybody dug it. But it was a hard sell. One great, great asset that a lot of blacks have is they have great bullshit detectors. They know when they're being bullshitted for the most part, and they also aren't into a lot of jive. It's like hey, be real. This had to be 1974, 1975.”
