They Barked, He Bit Back

"What has two arms, two legs and no ears?” The answer to that riddle, as any good ole’ boy working in the country music industry in the early ’80s would have known, was Joe Galante, the brash young New Yorker who was dispatched from RCA corporate headquarters to Music City in 1973 to become manager of administration for RCA Records Nashville. Though its small Music Square West office was then considered a hillbilly branch of New York or Los Angeles headquarters, RCA Nashville enjoyed an acclaimed legacy of talent, leadership and musical heritage that reached back to the 1920s. By the time Joe Galante moved to Music City, RCA or one of its earlier incarnations (Victor, Bluebird) had been home to artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Chet Atkins, Porter Wagoner, Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Elvis Presley, Hank Snow, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton, just to name-drop a few. When Galante arrived, RCA was being run by two country music heavyweights: artist/musician/producer Chet Atkins, and producer Jerry Bradley, son of the legendary Owen Bradley.

So what in the hell did a smart-ass, Italian, Yankee pencil pusher know about country music? Most felt he didn’t know a thing, though their criticisms were cloaked in sweet-talking, hypocrisy-drenched, good-old Southern hospitality. The riddle itself about arms, legs and ears was a pointed reminder that Galante was not a producer, or a publisher, or a musician; he had not been drawn out of the backyard well from which Nashville record labels had typically selected their management. The boy wasn’t from here. He talked funny, too quickly, too directly, and, in fact, he was downright rude. Who were his people anyway?

The riddle made the rounds of Music Row and the watering holes that served as second offices for label executives, but the person being made fun of ultimately had the last laugh. By 1982, Atkins and Bradley were gone, and fewer than 10 years after he arrived, Joe Galante was named head of RCA’s Nashville division. At 32, he became the youngest person ever named to run a major country record label. He was also the first such executive to rise through the ranks of marketing, rather than A&R, or the creative side.

“When he was named to head the label, Music Row was extremely distrustful of him,” says journalist and country music historian Robert K. Oermann. “He was the first bean-counter, non-music person to head a label here. It wasn’t easy for him.”

In September of that first year, Billboard named RCA the No. 1 country label, a position it maintained for the next decade. Over that time period, the band Alabama reached superstar status. Critically acclaimed artists like K.T. Oslin, Keith Whitley, Vince Gill, Clint Black and The Judds were signed. The tremendous gifts of these artists put some of the doubts about Galante’s musical credibility to rest. But nothing could silence the criticism of his aggressive—some would say ruthless—business practices and his no-nonsense personal style.

In 1990, Galante rose higher still, tabbed by corporate hierarchy again. This time he was summoned back to New York and named national president of RCA Records Label-US, which by then was owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann Corporation. The appointment made him the first Music Row label head to run the U.S. operations of a major label. Recognizing what he had achieved in Nashville, Bertelsmann Music Group’s (BMG’s) chairman and CEO Michael Dornemann believed Galante was just the man to repair the pop division, which was floundering infamously. As Dornemann said when announcing the appointment, “Joe Galante’s outstanding performance as head of BMG’s RCA country music unit has made him the logical choice. Under Joe’s leadership, BMG’s RCA label has become a dominant force in country music, and I believe that in his new position he will have the same impact on the larger RCA Records U.S. operation.”

In August 1990, not long after RCA had moved into its new $3 million Nashville headquarters on Music Circle North, and just three months before his planned wedding to Arista Nashville executive Phran Schwartz, Joe Galante, the Italian New York Yankee, was headed home.

Or was he? Over the next several years, Galante would discover that Thomas Wolfe was both right and wrong when he warned that you can never go home again. If he had begun his music career in Nashville as a stranger in a strange land, the truth is that over time Galante had grown to become one of the most powerful, influential and successful people in the country music industry. The proverbial Nashville outsider had ironically morphed into the ultimate insider. Strangely, it was in New York where Galante foundered. And after a brutal three-year stretch that took an enormous personal toll on both him and those around him, Galante was lured back home to Nashville to do what he had done so well before.