Friends and acquaintances became matchmakers, telling the Brinleys about a rum blender on the island, Michel Joly, who had worked for a label that was sold to a spirits company in Guyana after the death of its founder, Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
After being drafted into the Army, which stationed him in Stuttgart, Germany, Mr. Charen returned to the music business in 1970, working for a small label, Scepter Records.
Things changed when Geeneus met Sarah Lockhart, 35, who was working for a record label distributor handing out test pressings to pirate DJs to create a buzz about the tracks.
Wiping out zombies is predictably violent work, but apparently working for a record label is almost as brutal, at least according to EA Chicago's fighting game Def Jam: Icon, in which record company executives must beat up other rappers, paparazzi and anyone else who happens to get in the way.
I never fancied working for a record label.
It's a hard industry to get into, but it is changing and there are lots of routes in that may not necessarily involve working for a traditional music label.
Mr. Walker, who neglected to finish high school, got his start in long-ago times working for Williwear, a label created by Willi Smith, the prodigy who designed the wedding dress worn by Mary Jane Watson when she married Peter Parker in the Spider-Man comic book in 1987 and the suits that Edwin Schlossberg and his groomsmen wore when he married Caroline Kennedy in 1986.
At 16, he said, he dropped out of high school and became a petty criminal, dealing drugs and working for a hip-hop record label before a rabbi introduced him to the Torah in his early 20s.
After working for a couple of commercial labels, the designer decided to strike out on her own; in September, she opened her new boutique, Sophistic (Jana Masaryka 52; sophistic.cz), in the pretty Vinohrady neighborhood.
Gloria Woods, 26, who works for a record label, said: "There will never be another voice like that in our generation".
