Terry Tolkin, Who Championed Alt-Rock at Elektra, Dies at 62

Terry Tolkin, a former Elektra Records A&R executive who worked with influential bands including the Butthole Surfers, Stereolab and Luna, created the 1989 album The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young, starring Sonic Youth and the Pixies, and was a crucial figure in the development of “alternative music,” a phrase he was said to coin, died Friday at a New Orleans hospital. He was 62 and had been ill for months, to the point that his friend, Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham, had posted rarities from his band Luna to raise money for Tolkin’s medical bills.

“We were the artists, but he was the one who lived like a rock star, running up big restaurant tabs — getting limos, doing drugs, sleeping with lots of people,” Wareham tells Billboard. “More than we did, I think!”

“He knew everybody,” adds Lisa Gottheil, owner of Grandstand Media, who worked with Tolkin for years in the ’90s as a band publicist. “The orbit was large and the living was large. He was insanely generous with everything he had, expense account-wise.”

Born in Kansas, Tolkin grew up in New City, N.Y., learning about the Grateful Dead from summer camp counselors over an 11-year period. “At night they would load up the reel-to-reel and play their tapes,” he told Warped Reality Magazine in 2009. “By the time I was 12 I knew the words to most of their songs.”

Upon moving to New York, Tolkin wrote articles for Rockpool and worked at 99 Records’ shop, moving on to top indies Caroline and Rough Trade, booking shows at CBGB and other clubs before starting his own label, No. 6. Elektra Records hired him as an A&R exec in the early ’90s, and he signed or worked with a who’s-who of bands, including Afghan Whigs, Stereolab, Scrawl and Unrest. He did “de facto managing” for Butthole Surfers, he told Warped Reality, “although neither of us would use that poisoned word.”

“He had all kinds of useless information and details — from watching The History Channel, he knew all kinds of things,” Wareham says. “He’s someone who turned smoking pot and listening to music into a well-paying job.”

Tolkin, whose long friendship with outsider rock hero Captain Beefheart began with a phone call in 1989, described his Elektra job interview with the late label chief Bob Krasnow this way: “I instantly said ‘Yeah, what was it like working with Captain Beefheart during the Safe As Milk era’? He had been smoking a Cuban cigar throughout. He kicked back in his chair, put up a foot and said, ‘You know, I took so much acid during it that I can hardly remember. Um, when can you start?’”

Tolkin left Elektra — and the music business — in the mid-’90s. He moved back to Kansas, then worked in a Florida scuba-diving shop and was living in New Orleans when he became ill several years ago. Whether he actually invented the term “alternative music” in a late-’70s Rockpool article, as some have reported, is unclear.

“It’s one of those claims that he didn’t necessarily deny,” Wareham says. “Hey, maybe he did!”

In his Instagram post about Tolkin’s death, Wareham called him a “key figure in my life” and recalled Luna’s 1995 track “Chinatown” was about his friend. “In the tiny, tiny hours, between the evening and the day, we have placed our final bets, we have come out to play,” goes the song. “Fancy drinks and lucky toasts — I like this time the most.”