Don Kirshner

Music publisher, producer and manager -- via Billboard. "The Man with the Golden Ear" started as the manager for Connie Francis; he moved on to co-own Aldon Music, which was a large part of the Brill Building Era of songwriting -- Goffin/King, Mann/Weil, Lieber/Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Phil Spector, Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach . . . the list goes on and on. He even discovered Kansas -- the band, not the state.

He provided the music for the Saturday morning TV hit "The Monkees"; when the stars insisted on actually playing the music they sang on the show, Kirshner quit and created "The Archies," an animated music/cartoon show based on the classic comic strip. Later still, he created "In Concert"/"Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," an influential live-music series.

Some of the hits he published: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Locomotion," "I'm a Believer," "Last Train to Clarksville" . . .