Nirvana, Joni Mitchell, Weezer, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Eddie Rosenblatt worked with them all as head of Geffen Records and director of sales at Warner Bros. Records. After a stellar career that spanned folk rock to alt-rock from the late 1950s to the 1990s, Rosenblatt died of pneumonia in Santa Barbara on July 16 at the age of 89.
“People come out of Eddie’s office feeling like they have had a warm bath,” David Geffen was quoted as saying in Danny Goldberg’s memoir Bumping Into Geniuses. Goldberg, artist manager for Nirvana at the time, wrote that Geffen then said, “I am not a warm bath.”
Rosenblatt co-founded Geffen Records with David Geffen in 1980, having been at Warner Bros. Records and A&M Records before that. They released Lennon and Ono’s Double Fantasy just weeks before Lennon was killed. James Taylor, Alice Cooper, Van Morrison, and Fleetwood Mac were among the legends he worked with. After the label was sold to MCA in 1990, the two formed subsidiary DGC, which saw $500 million in album sales, more than a quarter of global revenue for MCA music in 1994.
When David Geffen moved on to form DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Rosenblatt added chairman to his duties at the record company. “If you think of David as the vision behind Geffen Records, then Eddie is the heart,” Mo Ostin had said, who was chief executive at Warner during those decades. “That label is not just profitable; it’s got hipness and heat, and Eddie is the glue that has held it together all these years.”
Born on November 6, 1934, in Far Rockaway, Queens, Rosenblatt attended Brooklyn College, where he got a degree in Applied Arts, then enlisted in the Army for two years. He moved to Cleveland, where he worked for a couple of music distribution companies and got to know Phil and Leonard Chess, whose Chess Records in Chicago was home to Howlin’ Wolf and released records by Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and many more R&B artists. He was in Los Angeles by 1967, where he co-founded the independent TA Records label with Steve Binder, signing Seals and Crofts.
In a conversation with the Legacy Society at Sansum Clinic, where he served on the Board of Trustees, Rosenblatt and his wife, Bobbie, remembered meeting at a beach club on Long Island. “He was the cabana boy,” Bobbie recalled, laughing. He was 16, and she was 15, Eddie said, “and we’ve been going steady ever since!” The interview was several years ago, and Bobbie Rosenblatt died in 2023. Together they had four children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. A memorial service is being planned, and the family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations to Sansum Clinic be made in Eddie Rosenblatt’s memory.
