Barron Alexander Machat (1987-2015)
My son, Hippos in Tanks label founder Barron Alexander Machat, lost his Earth life at 27 on April 8, 2015. He would have turned 38 last month.
The Moody Blues had a song, “Watching and Waiting”:
Watching and waiting for a friend to play with
Why have I been alone so long?
Mole he is burrowing his way to the sunlight
He knows there's someone there so strong
My whole life, I was waiting for someone to play with.
Someone who understood me.
Someone I could build a world with.
I believe we choose our parents — and our children choose us.
When that dream first manifested in my head, it called a Barron energy into being.
From the day he was born, Barron was the yin to my yang.
If you look at the inside cover of my 2018 book “Spiritual Insomnia: A Journey From Consciousness,” you’ll see two interlocking hearts.
That image doesn’t just reference the Unified Heart, the symbol my former client Leonard Cohen used to express divine love.
No, those hearts are Barron’s and mine.
The heart is where love lives. The heart is where the energy of all conscious beings lives. And when we feel the absence of love, if we meditate on the energy inside our hearts, we can feel the universe’s energy soothing us.
Just ask for consciousness to guide you. Ask that higher power not on behalf of yourself as an individual, but for the collective whole.
You will get an answer.
You do not need a third party to speak to the energy for you. You do not need those pundits who claim to speak to their Gods/Sky Gods/Muses who are nothing but liars.
My name is Steven Machat.
I’m a global entertainment guru — a music publisher, talent manager, and record label owner. I’ve also produced movies and theatrical shows around the world.
My clients — all signed before Barron and I started his Hippos in Tanks label — have included Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Leonard Cohen, Phil Spector, Snoop Dogg, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Rita Lee, and Manu Dibango. Today, I work with the next wave of talent: the Gulls, Cubaismo, Isaac Ryan Brown, and Jesús "Aguaje" Ramos and his Buena Vista Orchestra.
The BVO are preparing for a U.S. tour — one not to be missed — this July. Get your tickets here.
And hit the Subscribe button below to stay tuned for my dispatches on metaphysics, the Muses, and my worldwide, seesaw life in the entertainment industry.
On my new Substack page, I will tell you the whole story as it unfolds.
I will tell you the whole, naked truth.
In the early morning hours of April 8, 2015, I was in New York on business from my home in Miami.
I was jolted awake by a call.
It was Emilio Fagone — Barron’s friend and the co-manager of Yung Lean.
This requires a little backstory.
Back then, the now globe-conquering rapper born Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad was just emerging along with his crew, the Sad Boys. But unlike Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, who were looking for love, these Sad Boys were upset.
Why? Because they came into a world where they had no dream left.
That’s why they rapped their sad songs to the beat of a jackhammer.
There was nothing for the youth of that world to dream of other than: Shut your face, get a job, go to school. And then we will put you in a system where you are nothing more than a slave to that system.
So at the end, when you reflect, you will ask yourself:
What was I living for?
Capitalism, in practice, means you’re good for nothing except getting a job, raising children, paying the bankers who own our world, and paying taxes to the government to pay the bank’s imaginary debts.
Unfortunately, these young lads carried too much chaotic energy for my son to oversee. And I cry for that — still, forever — because I truly believed Barron could guide them. I believed he could hold the vision, keep them focused on the goal. We would be able to use music and the energy of live concerts to keep people going.
Which was never just about music or fame. It was about communication. About connection. About helping their generation find a dream — not just fall into the slavery rhythm of this existence we call life.
I am living for love. I am living to share love. I want to build a world based on love.
Back to spring 2015.
Yung Lean and the Sad Boys were living in my flat in Miami Beach. We were wasting time waiting for our next series of concerts to begin. So I gave them a holiday there, where they proceeded to go absolutely rock and roll crazy.
April 7 was the first time Barron did not call me.
On April 8 — the day they were all scheduled to fly to Texas — Emilio told me Barron had been missing for more than seven hours.
He’d left his phone at my flat and jumped in my white Ford SUV for an “urgent work errand.”
Nobody could contact him.
Immediately, I knew something was wrong.
My son, then 27, wouldn’t disappear like this. So I began frantically calling anyone and everyone who might know Barron’s whereabouts.
But the worst possible outcome would soon transpire.
A friend told me he thought he saw my car on the early morning news at 4:30.
A white SUV just like mine had crashed and was consumed with fire by the Miami airport.
The Miami police started contacting me.
Eventually, they started asked me questions, like who my son’s dentist was so they could obtain records of his teeth.
I felt sick to my stomach.
But I had no choice but to keep my composure, knowing deep down I could not fix it.
Soon enough, I began to piece together what happened. This is what Barron’s bandmates, who were living at my flat, told me:
Barron had left in my car to get drugs for Yung Lean. Riding shotgun was Hunter Kaman. They had taken too many Xanax tablets.
Barron fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a pole.
The car exploded.
Thankfully, someone saw it burning on the highway.
But they could only pull Hunter out.
Barron was trapped inside.
When I got to the hospital and saw Hunter, I could see the fear in his eyes.
I comforted him, because there was little I could do.
But don’t think for one moment that I didn’t want to snap his head right off his body.
After all, I could have.
So why didn’t I?
That confirmed right then and there who I really am.
I had the same faith in my son as my father had with me.
Marty Machat was an entertainment lawyer with links to some of the most famous artists and legends of our time — Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones, and Leonard Cohen among them.
He gave me the chance to walk with giants.
I carried that energy forward and have spent decades at the heart of music and the arts of the Muses.
My son was a few days past his due date, which happened to hit on June 21.
Father’s Day.
Funny story: I tried to have him born at Yankee Stadium.
It must have been 95 degrees, and I took his mother, Lisa, and my sister Helene to the Yankees game to get the Yankee bat they were giving out on Father’s Day. It would have been really cool, but it didn’t happen.
When Barron Alexander Machat did come into this world on June 25, 1987, I was ready to share my highway with him.
I gave Barron that name because, to me, he was the elite. And not in the context of Catholicism or the Holy Roman Empire, where the name Barron emanates from.
To make sure there would be no mistake, I gave Barron’s name two Rs.
As for Barron Alexander’s middle name: Alexander the Great was one of my heroes of history. Alexander knew damn well that we were from another realm. He conquered the then-known world as he looked to discover his true father.
I wrote of this subject in my book “Unraveling the Bible: The Colonization of Earth and the Making of Mankind.” It appears in Act 7, Scene 9.
Barron had the unique, extraordinary, and special aesthetic abilities to help make people feel good, to make people happy. To make them see that there’s more to life than just being a moving vegetable that sits and gets money, lies to get it, steals to keep it, and sits there and pays the taxman.
He was born with innocence and a splendid personality.
Much like Mary. No
When they tell you Mary was a virgin, it means it was her first-time entry into this realm, and she came in with no karma.
Barron could only watch on from the inside and outside as my then-wife Lisa, our daughter Margaux and I became locked into an increasingly abusive triangle.
Which is another story.
But it troubled him. It fucked him up.
Perhaps as a result, Barron didn’t have my type A ambition.
When Barron was young, I tried to get him interested in anything — whatever it was he wanted to do. He didn’t play an instrument, but he liked ball. I encouraged him toward music and baseball.
In 2005, Barron and I were living in Los Angeles. I brought him down to Miami to try out for the University of Miami’s baseball team.
They had these Caribbean kids pitching at almost 100mph, and Barron flipped out.
He only threw in the low nineties.
Not surprisingly, he was spooked.
The dream was then a question mark.
Regardless, Barron made me so proud.
He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and got into Pace College in Manhattan to play on the baseball team. Then he got bored and dropped out of school. He didn’t want any part of it.
I got him a gig doing PR for an agency in New York But all of a sudden, he longed to go home. His mother insisted he needed to come home. He asked me to let him, so I did.
Barron went on to work at Apple and LP33.tv.
He had a breakthrough with his label, Hippos in Tanks — named after Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’ novel “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.”
The first act on Hippos in Tanks was the Manchester band Everything Everything.
We had the rights for the United States.
They had a hit single, “Schoolin,” which didn’t match the album it was on, 2010’s Man Alive. The single sounded like Duran Duran. The album sounded like a bad version of Genesis’ “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.”
Barron got really worried about the aesthetics. Barron wanted the label to mix the energies of Air, the French electronic band, as well as the French Argentinian act Gotan Project.
While working at LP33.tv, Barron became aware of an artist named Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never. Daniel idolized the electronic music I was putting out. He and Joel Ford, his partner for that type of music, gave Barron and me a song that was inspired by the System’s “Don’t Disturb This Groove,” a hit I had when Barron was born.
We came up with the name Games. We put out an EP, and then we had a record that could have gone the distance, and it did. A hip-hopper told me I couldn’t use his name.
I told the the hip-hopper to eat it.
But the two of them got scared and changed their name to Ford & Lopatin, which sounded like a Jewish law firm.
Anyway, this is the cover of “That We Can Play,” the first release on Hippos in Tanks.
We named the band Games and put up flags because of the games people play.
We create nations to make believe we’re different people, when the truth is we’re all the energy of love.
Because of our connection with Daniel, and the fact he almost had a hit pop record, the doors flooded with similar artists. Barron and I signed Grimes, Arca, James Ferraro, Laurel Halo, Dean Blunt, Hype Williams, Nguzunguzu, Sleep ∞ Over, Gatekeeper — artists on the bleeding edge of electronic dance, psychedelia, and beyond, many of them from deep underground and experimental pedigrees.
Again, Barron had aesthetics.
Look who Grimes and Arca turned out to be.
As Joel from Games put it, “Barron was an idealist. He promised everything to his friends and artists.” Rolling Stone eulogized him as a “label boss who took pop in wild, new directions.”
Barron and I shared life as we were incarnated to do.
At our best, we led a life that fathers and sons dreamed of having.
We argued, we yelled, and we loved each other through and through.
When I’m talking to you, I don’t see you as a noun. I see you as a verb, and I’m engaging with you as a living being. Today, I see Barron as a verb, not a noun. If I saw him as a noun, that would mean he was dead like a statue. But at this point in time, I still see Barron in my mind as a verb — something in action.
My dad died in 1988. He was diagnosed with throat, lung, and brain cancer. At the end of his life, he was locked up with a woman he shouldn’t have been locked up with.
When he had six months to live, I was in New York City on March 20, early in the morning. His mistress did not want me and him to meet up because we were going to prepare for his passing. She was in denial — but in truth, she accelerated his passing. She could have brought him to the hospital two blocks down in New York City. He was coughing and coughing, his lungs filled with phlegm, and she suffocated him instead of calling for help.
I learned one truth: you will inherent half your parents’ friends and all of their enemies. Boy, did my life change — and it became a cross I had to bear. Lovable and straightforward Steven became this man who was going after his dad’s mistress. She went out of her way to tell everyone how horrible I was. I just dug in, maintained my peace, and maintained my truth.
Barron, too, died because he was afraid.
He had gotten into a big fight with his mother.
He made the wrong turn and it cost him his life.
It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t fix something that went wrong.
No matter how well I could fix things, I could not bring Barron back to life.
Barron did something he shouldn’t have done.
Forever, I will blame myself.
I so much looked forward to the rest of our highway together as father and son.
But in spite of losing both my father and son, I’m still on my path to share the true meaning of life. As I see it either, the meaning is to learn how to live in and with love as your theme.
Today, in 2025, I’m Mr. Fantasy.
From the Traffic song, “Dear Mr. Fantasy.”
I'm Peter Pan, and what I do is:
I give you the belief that everything will be alright. I can make people happy. I can make them believe anything. I raise them to a certain level, and then they get scared They question whether they can maintain it, and instead of believing in themselves, they allow charlatans to get in their way. I watch them become everything they said they would never become when all they wanted to do was to sing their happy songs.
I make everybody happy, and all I am is sad.
That I live in a world without eternal love.
Yet I found my wife and partner. Below is a picture of Debbie, who has joined my quest to open up the pathways so people can see and begin to explore the possibilities of another way of life.
Won’t you join us?
Touching story, Steven. All my love