obituaries
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Polito Vega, the larger-than-life radio personality and longtime programming director of New York City’s WSKQ (Mega 97.9 FM) — the top-rated Spanish-language station in the country — who for decades reigned as the most powerful man in that corner of radio, has died, the station confirmed on Thursday. He was 84.
Vega spent more than 50 years on the air in NYC, earning the moniker “El Rey de la radio” (The King of Radio). He was known as much for his deep booming bass, which anchored numerous popular shows through the years, as for his trademark starched white outfits and baseball cap.
Vega was so well-known in the city that there was an oft-told joke that went like this: Two friends are standing on Fifth Avenue in New York as Polito Vega and the Pope stroll by, talking together. One of them asks, “Who’s that?” The other replies, “I don’t know who the old guy with the white robe is, but he must be important if he’s that friendly with Polito!”
Vega’s importance to Latin music cannot be overstated. He was the most influential tastemaker in the country’s top market dating back to when tropical music first became popular in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and stretching all the way to the 21st century.
“The architect of Hispanic radio at a global level,” wrote DJ Alex Sensation on his Instagram feed.
In 2009, Vega celebrated 50 years on the air with two shows at Madison Square Garden featuring performances by a group of A-list talents – Enrique Iglesias, Laura Pausini and Luis Fonsi, among many others. The shows were meant to signal his imminent retirement.
Three years later, in 2012, he celebrated 53 years on the air with “El Megatón Mundial de Polito Vega” (The Polito Vega World Megathon), a show at Citi Field in Queens featuring performances by Gloria Estefan, Don Omar, Alejandro Sanz, Juanes, Ricardo Arjona, Daddy Yankee, Paulina Rubio and Tito “El Bambino,” among others.
“I’ve only done radio in New York; I belong to the city,” he told Billboard at the time. “I go out on the street and people go crazy saying ‘Polito, Polito, Polito.’ I still have the same enthusiasm I had at the beginning; the same positive attitude in front of a microphone.”
Born in Hipólito Vega Torres, Puerto Rico, Vega came to the Big Apple harboring more artistic ambitions. He wanted to become a singer, but instead found his calling behind the microphone inside a radio booth rather than on stage. It was the early 1960s, and in NYC and around the country, Spanish-language radio was a fledgling business where broadcasts mostly lived part-time on AM stations. Vega’s first job was as a DJ on a half-hour show called “Fiesta Time,” which aired on the now-defunct WEVD-AM.
“The radio station was part time, but they decided to program 24 hours and they gave me a shift that went from midnight to 6 a.m. I felt I was in heaven,” he said. “The show was so successful and I felt that liberty to express myself that I’ve maintained to this day.”
Vega eventually landed at WBNX, where he met the senior program director Raúl Alarcón. It was the beginning of what would be a life-changing relationship. Alarcón, who’d had radio stations in Cuba before fleeing after the revolution and had big ambitions of his own, would soon acquire his first station in the U.S., launching what would become SBS. Forty years ago, he hired Vega, who never left.
As for Vega, he developed his signature voice and a reputation for defending the music he was passionate about. Vega was the first to play a record by a Fania artist on the radio, the first to play bachata, the first to play reggaetón.
“I grew up listening to Polito,” Prince Royce told Billboard a decade ago. “He was one of the first to support my music, and the first time I heard one of my songs on the air it was on his show.”
“He has that rare and unique combination of personal assets and experiences that make him a veritable expert where Latin music is concerned,” remarked SBS president and CEO Raúl Alarcón, who took over the business his father founded. “He has seen – and heard – it all, and he retains an uncanny ability to judge what’s good and what’s lacking, despite the constant change in musical trends and the whims of an extremely fickle public. He has a golden ear that can’t be fooled and he is as unfailingly relevant today as he was 50 years ago.”
Over the course of the past year, the music industry has lost some of its brightest behind-the-scenes stars: corporate executives, songwriters, managers, producers, engineers, lawyers, promoters, inventors and more.
Between them, these individuals penned hit songs (“Crazy for You,” “Elvira,” “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” “The Way We Were”); helped launch important careers (Metallica, Prince, Little Richard); masterminded iconic cultural events (Woodstock); founded enduring labels (Stax, Impulse!); built empires (Clear Channel); created and/or produced iconic Broadway musicals (Hair, Dear Evan Hansen); helped popularize burgeoning musical genres (hip-hop, alternative rock); and even changed the way people listened to music.
While they may not have enjoyed the high profile or public adoration of their artist counterparts, these individuals played just as important a role in keeping the business humming – or at least dissecting it, in fire-breathing fashion. Some worked in the industry across decades and eras; others passed on far too soon, but left their mark nonetheless. Some created new and important spaces for underrepresented voices; others paved the way for those who came after them. They have been remembered as dreamers, visionaries and jokesters, and described as “magnetic,” “legendary” and possessing “a rock and roll heart” by those who knew and loved them.
To celebrate those who have passed on, Billboard is highlighting these often-unsung movers and shakers, all of whom made a difference in the music industry in ways both large and small, across every aspect of the business.
Here are the behind-the-scenes players we lost in 2022.
Shirley Ann Watts, a former art student and prominent breeder of Arabian horses who met drummer Charlie Watts well before he joined the Rolling Stones and with him formed one of rock’s most enduring marriages, has died. She was 84.
“Shirley died peacefully on Friday 16th December in Devon after a short illness surrounded by her family,” her family announced Monday (Dec. 19). The Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood was among those mourning her.
“We will miss you so much, but take comfort that you are reunited with your beloved Charlie,” Wood wrote on Facebook.
While Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards all have had multiple wives and girlfriends, Charlie and Shirley Watts remained together for more than 50 years, until Charlie died in 2021. Their only known crisis happened in the mid-1980s, when Charlie Watts struggled with heroin addiction, a time he would later say nearly cost him his marriage. He was otherwise regarded as so devoted to his wife, and daughter Seraphina, that journalists essentially left him alone.
“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer [and] as long as it’s comfortable with my wife, I’ll continue to do it,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996.
When Charlie wasn’t touring or recording, he and his family lived on a 600-acre, 16th century estate in Devon, where they were better known for their Polish Arabian horses and for rescuing animals than for the drummer’s singular place in rock history. Stories about the Watts were as likely to appear in Arabian Horse World as they were in a music publication.
According to Charlie, his wife had warm relations with Jagger and Richards and, unlike him, would play the Stones’ music around the house. But Shirley herself expressed ambivalent feelings, telling Vanity Fair in 1989 that the band’s drug use affected her life “very, very deeply” and that she otherwise had little use for the rock star world.
“It was quite appalling being pitched into the life of the Rolling Stones,” she said. “I really got lost for about 25 years and I’ve never been able to cope with it. There’s been lots of anger, much of it very, very deep. I like the people in the group — up to a point. But I’ve always hated the way rock music and its world treat women and particularly the Rolling Stones’ attitude. There is no respect.”
Shirley Ann Shepherd was born in London in 1938 and was studying sculpture at the Royal College of Art in the early ’60s when she first saw her future husband, who at the time was part of the emerging blues and jazz scene in England that also included Jagger and Richards. They were already dating when Watts joined the Stones early in 1963, and married the following year, just as the band had established itself as second only to the Beatles in local popularity.
“She was so funny and clever, and she had the most infectious laugh you’d ever heard,” Charlie Watts said of her when interviewed by The Guardian in 2000. “And I loved the world she was in, the world of art and sculpting. I just admired Shirley very, very much.”
The biggest scandal about their marriage was their decision to get married. Rock star weddings were considered bad business at the time, a turnoff to young female fans — the Beatles’ John Lennon was among those who hedged when reporters asked him about his domestic life.
Without informing the other Stones, the Watts married in Bradford and had a quiet lunch at a nearby pub. According to Paul Sexton’s Charlie’s Good Tonight, a 2022 biography of the late drummer written with his family’s cooperation, Charlie Watts initially denied reports that he was married, telling the Daily Express that “it would do a great deal of harm to my career if the story got around.” But Shirley happily confirmed the news, saying they could not “bear to live separately any longer.”
Neither Charlie nor Shirley liked drawing attention to themselves, but at times they did so anyway. Shirley Watts was arrested at the Nice airport in 1971 for attacking customs officials after they had reportedly singled out her husband for attention. In 2016, she threatened to sue Polish government officials over the alleged mistreatment of two Arabian mares at a state-run farm.
Shirley Watts also endured a battle with alcoholism, one she helped overcome by hours of sculpting horses and dogs. The Watts’ shared interest in horses grew from collecting figurines to raising hundreds of Arab horses, a passion that began after Charlie purchased a part-bred stallion for his wife.
“I much prefer my life here with the horses. I love the hunt. The sense of power one gets on a horse,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s a very primeval instinct. When you hear the hounds — they call it the music — when you hear the hounds’ music, it’s bloodcurdling it’s so thrilling. And it affects both you and the horse. There’s nothing like it. It’s dangerous. It’s exciting.”
She added, with a laugh, “It sounds rather like a rock ‘n’ roll concert.”
In the 1970s, Louis Messina visited the Houston Astrodome to check out the events his new business partner, Allen J. Becker, was putting on. “He’s doing boat shows and having Evel Knievel jump over 150 cars and thrill shows and demolition derbies,” Messina recalls. “I went, ‘Holy crap, there are 60,000 people here!’ A guy jumped from the top of the Astrodome into the air bag.”
Becker, 90, who died Monday (Dec. 12) at his Houston home, first approached Messina, then a New Orleans rock promoter, in 1975 to form a concert-promotion partnership. Their company, PACE Concerts, went on to dominate Texas and much of the South for more than 20 years, booking stars from The Who to Bruce Springsteen to Rush.
“Allen had an old saying: ‘I’d rather lose money with you than you make a dime without me’ — meaning that if you had a good idea and you truly believed in it, he’ll be there with you,” says Messina, today an Austin-based promoter who has represented acts from George Strait to Taylor Swift. “He saw something in me that no one else in my whole life saw in me.”
Becker had been a life insurance agent in 1965 when a banker friend suggested they promote a consumer boat show at the new Astrodome. The show was a success and led to years of monster-truck rallies and tractor pulls. In 1975, the New Orleans Superdome approached Becker about producing entertainment events for acts such as Bob Hope and The Temptations, which is where he met Messina. A Glenn Miller fan, Becker recognized he had a blind spot in rock acts and reached out to Messina to partner on shows throughout the South.
It was Messina who suggested moving to Houston to create the partnership that became PACE Concerts: “We’ll make a go of it and we’ll see what happens,” he told Becker.
Like other promoters in the U.S., Becker and his son, Brian, soon recognized the money in the concert business wasn’t in ticket sales but in beer, hot dogs and popcorn. They steered PACE into building amphitheaters for $8 million to $10 million apiece — “They were affordable,” Messina says — in Nashville, Atlanta and elsewhere. “The concert promoters who have really prospered have been the ones that stepped out and got involved in facilities,” Becker told Billboard in 1998, about controlling sheds and their revenue streams. “You need those other revenue streams.”
“That created 10, 12, 13 amphitheaters,” says Gary Becker, Allen’s son, a former top PACE exec who was 16 when his father employed him to shuttle bus and truck drivers to their hotels and purchase batteries and guitar strings for touring artists. “You go to an Elton John and book him 13 times around those amphitheaters and it was a win for everybody, including the bands.”
In 1998, PACE was on track to gross nearly $250 million in revenue when Robert Sillerman‘s company SFX bought it for $130 million. Two years later, Silllerman then sold SFX to radio giant Clear Channel Entertainment for $3.3 billion in stock — Brian Becker, Allen’s son, served as CEO of that company for the next five years. “It was definitely emotional,” Gary Becker recalls. “It was time for my dad. Things can’t stay the same. It gets too big, I guess.”
Born in Houston, Becker was the son of a shoe salesman and a homemaker. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a marketing degree. He served in the Air Force, then started his career in 1957 with Kansas City Life Insurance Company. When he began working in entertainment, he told Texas Monthly in 1996, it was a “real street business.”
After the SFX sale, Becker continued to be active in that business. He oversaw the ACE Theatrical Group, whose holdings included the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn and the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts in New Orleans, before selling them in 2018.
“He liked to compete, and he liked to win, but he liked to do it in the best way possible,” Gary Becker recalls. “You don’t need to go for the jugular. You don’t need to press real hard. You want the people you do business with to know you are honest and fair.” In 1998, Allen Becker told Billboard: “I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. We have a reputation in the marketplace, and people trust us. It has been a hell of a career.”
Becker’s survivors include his sons, Brian and Gary; daughter, Sunni Markowitz; 11 grandchildren; and one great grandchild. His wife of 54 years, Shirley, died in 2008.