December 16, 2007
The little girl we once saw sleigh riding down a Wurtsboro hill grew up to put rap on the map — as a twentysomething record executive of THE rap record company in New York City, Def Jam.
The frizzy-haired teen who slayed ‘em in volleyball at Monticello High School is now treated like royalty by Madonna, Bono and Diddy.
At 38, Julie Greenwald is the president of one of the world’s largest record companies, Atlantic — one of just two female presidents of a major record company. She just made Newsweek’s list of 11 most powerful women. Crain’s magazine named her one of its 100 most influential New York City businesswomen.
Now this child of the Catskills must use the chutzpah of her shoot-from-the hip politician/businessman dad, Dennis, and the passion of her late act-from-the heart mom, Elsa, to help turn around an industry that faces more challenges than the grooves on an old 45. They’re “unprecedented” challenges, says an industry spokesman, ranging from downloading free music on cell phones to snaring it for pennies on computers. She must also fill the shoes of an industry legend, the late Atlantic records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who launched Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and signed the Rolling Stones.
Can she do it?
Can this former straight-A Sullivan County student turned Manhattan millionaire mom help turn around an industry that lost $3 billion in the last seven years?
You bet, say those who know her best. “She’s one impressive cat,” says the woman who shared a bedroom of the ranch home on Lindbergh Avenue in Wurtsboro — Julie’s younger sister Seena, who had the messy half of that room. “She’s very smart, very driven; she even went to debate camp, for (Pete’s) sake.”
Julie’s longtime boss agrees.
“Her work ethic and drive alone are enough to justify her rise to the top levels of the music industry, but it is her aggressive, cutting-edge approach to A&R (artists and repertoire), marketing and promotion that has kept her there,” says Lyor Cohen, the man who first hired her at Def Jam and is now the CEO of Warner Music Group.
In her corner office overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a typically confident Greenwald agrees.
“I wake up driven to win,” says the woman who has a final say in every aspect of the company, from signing artists like James Blunt and Gnarls Barkley to marketing them through TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and phone companies like Sprint.
Moxie and muscle
After all, this is a former high school soccer player with as much moxie as muscle in her kick, says her old pal, Susan Parks Landis.
Take the job that launched her career: a straight-out-of-college summer internship at Def Jam. First, she told Def Jam founder Cohen that she could type 50 words per minute. When he leaned over her shoulder, he discovered she couldn’t come close. Then, when rapper Flavor Flav needed a quick visa to perform overseas, she had to get it.
She gave an Embassy official a coveted Def Jam jacket. Faster than you can say hip-hop, the rapper with the criminal record got the visa.
Still, that was supposed to be a summer job. After Tulane University, Julie — the niece of Goshen lawyer Gary Greenwald — had planned to head to Washington, D.C., to lobby for children. Her parents had taught her that she should give to the community that gave her so much. How could she not listen?
Her mother would pick up a Hasidic hitchhiker and bring him home for Sabbath dinner. Her father would give away prescription medicine in the family drug stores — first in Wurtsboro, then Middletown. And Julie had worked for free at day camp, shelters and soup kitchens. The family always sat down late for Thanksgiving dinner because they waited until they served free meals to everyone else.
“We lived a fortunate life,” recalls big sister Jodi. “We were taught it’s our responsibility to give back.”
So, right after Tulane, Julie taught poor black kids in the projects of New Orleans. The girl who once shopped at Paramus shops like Bloomingdale’s and had an Izod alligator-themed Bas Mitzvah at Bernie’s Holiday restaurant in Rock Hill, had to duck under desks when gunshots blistered the New Orleans streets.
‘The other Madonna’
But then, in 1992, came that internship. And Greenwald discovered she liked the action of this new music that was scorned by mainstream America but loved by kids on the street. Soon, she was dreaming up all sorts of promotions, like the Def Comedy Jam or tours like Survival of the Illest that featured Onyx, DMX and Def Squad.
“And a nice Jewish girl from the Catskills became vice president of a rap company,” says Greenwald, wearing a smart, sleek black dress, black nail polish and black leather Jimmy Choo boots in that office with many more photos of her two kids, aged 8 and 3, than stars like Madonna, who wrote, “For Julie, the other Madonna”¦” on the poster above her square work-like desk.
It wasn’t long before the young woman showed that she packed as much business punch as power in that soccer kick. When MTV — which then ruled the music-business roost — wanted to use the music of Def Jam act LL Cool J for “Beavis and Butt-head,” Greenwald at first said no — to the man who would eventually become her husband, then-MTV executive Lewis Largent. Then, thinking ahead, perhaps to a time when album sales would not be the only game in town, she imagined the marketing opportunities of a partnership with MTV.
LL Cool J met “Beavis and Butt-head.”
When Def Jam merged with Island records, Greenwald — who by now had been given a stake in Def Jam — received a wedding present of Waterford crystal from one of Island’s stars, U2’s Bono. When Def Jam head Cohen went to Warner Bros. to run its music division, he brought Greenwald along. She became president of Atlantic.
Diving into the digital age
Now she’s using her marketing smarts to bring the company into the digital age. She was one of the first in the music business to realize that you have to figure out new ways to get the music out there — and make money from it. So she sold the rights of the music of Atlantic acts like Jet for ring tones to companies like Sprint— and worked with Sprint to market the acts. Atlantic then took a cut in the tours and merchandising that followed. She now calls My Space, AOL and Yahoo “our online partners.”
And even though she craves more time with her family than her 16-hour days allow, she hasn’t forgotten her roots.
While her father was recuperating from the car accident that took her mother’s life, she put him in her Manhattan home and made her bedroom and bathroom wheelchair accessible.
When her sister in Arkansas teaches disadvantaged kids, Julie sends them all sorts of albums and T-shirts and offers critiques of their amateur raps.
She flew her sister’s kids to the Super Bowl in Miami, let them sit in on private meetings at Diddy’s mansion and got them backstage passes before flying them up to New York to see a Broadway show.
For Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, she returns to the little white synagogue in Wurtsboro. For Thanksgiving, she roasts a turkey in her Tribeca loft and worries that she’s making the family’s mushy carrot specialty just right.
“You wouldn’t know who she was unless you know who she was,” says father
Dennis, over lunch in Danny’s in Wurtsboro, just a few blocks from where little Julie went sleigh riding. Only now, big Julie is featured in magazines like Billboard, Newsweek and Crain’s that are spread out in front of proud dad’s tuna sandwich.
Today, Atlantic is No. 3 in the music industry.
And even though the route to industry success has changed from LPs and CDs to ring tones, downloads and the new Internet videos called webisodes, Greenwald knows the bottom line is still the music. This is why the woman whose days can start at 7 and end at midnight lights up when she recalls the last words she heard Ertegun speak, just two days before he died last year.
He may have been 83. But the man who launched Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin knew that the music business was changing — and Atlantic had to change ahead of it.
So at a breakfast, he spoke of how Greenwald helped break new acts like Yung Joc, Cassie, James Blunt and Gnarls Barkley.
“He stood up, and said how proud he was that I changed the culture of the company,” says a smiling Julie Greenwald.
Thirty-eight years old. A mother of two. A child of the Catskills. The president of Atlantic records. A champion of ring tones and Gnarls Barkley.
If that isn’t meeting a challenge, what is?
sisrael@th-record.com.
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