He worked with many important figures in jazz and traditional popular music, including Count Basie, Peggy Lee, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra.
Dexter is also known for his role in Capitol's turning down the early singles by the Beatles as well as his subsequent decisions regarding their packaging, and his sometimes altering their recordings for the American market.
[1] In 1943, Dexter joined Capitol Records, established the previous year, initially writing press releases and doing other publicity work, but eventually rising to the position of A&R representative.
In a 1956 memo, he complained that the music business was being driven by the tastes of children, and derided current hits by such artists as Elvis Presley and Guy Mitchell as "juvenile and maddeningly repetitive.
In addition, Dexter rejected the following British EMI artists on behalf of Capitol in 1963 and 1964: Parlophone's the Hollies and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, HMV's the Swinging Blue Jeans and Manfred Mann, and Columbia's Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Animals, the Yardbirds, Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clark Five, all of whom had some U.S. success on other labels beginning in 1964.
His piece, "Nobody's Perfect", resulted in threats of sponsor boycotts, prompting the magazine to publish an apology and a repudiation of sorts of the claims in Dexter's editorial in the following week's issue.
He was a tireless supporter of younger musicians and wrote the liner notes for the Fullerton College Jazz Band's 1983 Down Beat award winning LP Time Tripping released on the Discovery/Trend Records AM-PM label by his longtime friend Albert Marx.