A beautiful tribute to a former boss: The branches made you quite a tree

Music REDEF chief Jason Hirschhorn pays tribute to Charles Koppelman,  one of the music industry’s most powerful executives, who worked with Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, Vanilla Ice and many more. Hirschhorn remembers the summer when he and other interns worked under Koppelman: "Thanks for giving us all your time. You can see we took some of what we watched you do and remixed it into our lives and careers. All these names, all these lives... The branches made you quite a tree. Salute." A quote from Variety's Koppelman interview: “When I first went into the music business, I’d look around at the record-label guys: They all had this white pallor, chain-smoked cigarettes, were nervous and jerky and always running to catch a plane somewhere. All the music publishers had great suntans, were smoking big, fat Cuban cigars and looked very relaxed. So I asked myself, which one did I want to be when I was 40?”.