Marvin Schlachter, a music executive who helped launch Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in the 1960s and who a decade later created one of the world’s most influential disco labels, bringing acts like Musique and France Joli to the masses, died on Sept. 19 in Manhattan. He was 90.
His son Brad said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was intestinal cancer.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Schlachter played a crucial role in the emergence of Black musicians from genre-based appeal to become a force in the American music mainstream.
He spent nine years as an executive with Scepter Records, a New York label comparable in some ways to Motown in Detroit (although much smaller). The label brought in Black songwriters, producers and musicians and promoted their albums among white audiences — still an unusual idea at the time.
Among Scepter’s biggest successes was Ms. Warwick, whom the label paired with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The Bacharach-David team wrote many of Ms. Warwick’s early signature hits, including “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By” and “Alfie.”
In 1976, Mr. Schlachter founded his own label, Prelude Records, to promote a new sound coming out of the city’s clubs and underground dance halls: disco.
Mr. Schlachter did much of the early talent scouting himself (he later hired the D.J. François Kevorkian to fill that role). He had a keen ear for the new, combined with a veteran’s knack for bringing the raw material he found in clubs like Paradise Garage and Studio 54 to radio and commercial success.
At Scepter, Mr. Schlachter had tended to invest in acts for the long term. But he understood that the disco scene was different, demanding novelty above all else. He employed a stable of producers at Prelude who would bring in a rotating set of musicians, mix and remix tracks, and then push them out to D.J.s.
If a track caught hold on the dance floor, Mr. Schlachter and his business partner, Stanley Hoffman, would take it to disco-friendly radio stations like WBLS and WKTU in New York.
Among his first hires was Patrick Adams, a gifted producer who made catchy dance tracks under a variety of stage names. His first big hit for Prelude, in 1978, was “In the Bush” by Musique, which one critic said was among “the horniest records ever made.” (Mr. Adams died in 2022.)
Other acts on the label included Sharon Redd, D Train and Inner Life (another Adams creation). Those acts’ infectious beats and sumptuous strings often lived on for decades in remixes and samples, long after the artists and even the tracks themselves had faded into obscurity.
Mr. Schlachter “was an icon,” Ray Caviano, the president of Powered by RFC, a music promotion company, said in an interview. “They put out hit after hit after hit.”
Marvin Herbert Schlachter was born on Nov. 25, 1933, in Manhattan and grew up in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents — Herbert Schlachter, a furrier, and Bertha (Goldblatt) Schlachter, a milliner — were both Jewish immigrants from Poland.
He graduated from the City College of New York in 1955 with a degree in business administration, then spent two years in the Army.
He returned to New York, where he found work in the mailroom at CBS television, after which he was hired as an ad executive for the music-industry magazine Cash Box.
He was pitching ads to a radio station in 1959 when he met Florence Greenberg, an agent who was promoting her sole client, a group of singers from her daughter’s high school in Passaic, N.J., called the Shirelles.
After the Shirelles were dropped by their label, Decca, Mrs. Greenberg decided to start her own business. She invited Mr. Schlachter to join her at Scepter, and he came on board full time as executive vice president in 1961.
He married Trudy Weiner in 1962; among the guests at their wedding were Scepter acts like the Shirelles, who led the attendees in the twist.
Mrs. Schlachter, a photographer, later provided the cover art for most of the more than 60 records released by Prelude.
Along with their son Brad, she survives him, as do two other sons, Chris and Scott; three grandchildren; and a brother, Leonard.
Mr. Schlachter’s title at Scepter was executive vice president. Officially he was in charge of sales and marketing, but in practice he ran the label’s day-to-day operations.
He left Scepter after nine years to become president of Janus Records, an American branch of the British record label Pye. After a reorganization, he took over a portfolio of labels under Pye’s successor, GRT, including Chess Records.
In 1976, after the reorganized company failed, he took some of his recently signed artists with him to Prelude.
He ran Prelude until 1986, by which time disco had long since left the dance floor. But Mr. Schlachter insisted that it had simply evolved into new forms of dance music. Among those new forms was freestyle, a genre popular among Latino crowds, which he capitalized on with yet another label, MicMac. He founded it with Mickey Garcia, a D.J., in 1987, and ran for another decade.
“I don’t think the disco era ended!” he told the website Disco-Disco. “They may have changed the name, but they haven’t in effect changed the fact that dance music, the club scene and such, still goes on. Obviously music always evolves. It changes from disco to dance, to electronica, to trance, to ambient — you can call it whatever you want, but in effect it is music that people wanna hear, people wanna dance to and that people love.”
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