Clive Davis Dead: Music Mogul With Golden Ear for Talent Was 94

Clive Davis, the hands-on hitmaker with a “golden ear” who brought Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen to the world and revitalized the careers of Carlos Santana, Rod Stewart and Aretha Franklin, died Monday. He was 94.

Davis, most recently chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment, a former head of labels Columbia, Arista Records and J Records and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, died at his home in New York City. He recently had been hospitalized with an upper respiratory infection.

Through his six-decade career, the music mogul also nurtured such acts as Billy Joel, The Grateful Dead, Alicia Keys, Simon & Garfunkel, Jennifer Hudson, Barry Manilow, Pink Floyd, Earth Wind & Fire, Aerosmith, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Kenny G, Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson and Patti Smith, who once said that Davis “has a weakness for the unique performer.”

Davis was the recipient of five Grammys, including the Recording Academy’s Trustees Award in 2000. Each year on the Saturday night before the Grammys since 1976, he brought together top music executives and artists for a party, held at the Beverly Hilton when the event is in L.A. (The 2021 edition was online because of the pandemic.)

Talking about his ability to identify talent, Davis told Playboy magazine in 2013: “I didn’t necessarily have an ear, but I think I developed one. Whether there was a natural ear that was triggered, I don’t know the answer to that. But when you see a Joplin or a Springsteen, you know. And the statistics start mounting and give you confidence. You think, ‘My God, yeah, I did say yes to Santana.’”

Clive Jay Davis was born on April 4, 1932, to parents Herman and Florence, who raised him in the middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. His father made ends meet as an electrician and traveling tie salesman. As a kid, he never collected records but did like to listen to music on the radio. He attended Erasmus Hall High School and was awarded a full scholarship to New York University.

Both his parents died within 10 months of each other when he was 18, his mother succumbing to a cerebral hemorrhage and his father suffering a heart attack. He moved in with his older sister, Seena, her husband and their daughter in Queens while attending NYU and later received another full scholarship to attend Harvard Law School.

After graduating from Harvard in 1956, Davis found frustration working in small New York firms. At 28, he was offered a job in the Columbia Records legal department by Harvey Schein, who would go on to build CBS’ international record business. Davis accepted the opportunity even though he didn’t know much about music, but he took night classes to educate himself on copyright laws, contracts and litigation.

In 1968, his friend, manager, promoter and future fell Rock Hall of Famer Lou Adler encouraged Davis to come to California to attend the Monterey Pop Festival, which the New Yorker described in his 2012 autobiography The Soundtrack of My Life as “a defining realization.”

“Although I had begun to make some creative decisions at Columbia, I had no idea that I would really be in the business of signing artists,” he wrote. “Yes, seeing Janis Joplin perform provided one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.”

He brought Joplin’s band, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Electric Flag, featuring guitar wizard Mike Bloomfield, to the label, ushering the staid, tradition-bound Columbia — which under label president Goddard Lieberson had specialized in soundtrack albums like Davis’ beloved My Fair Lady — into the rock era.

He famously refused to seal the deal with Janis by sleeping with her, which the bluesy rocker suggested herself, but he did grow his sideburns and begin to wear Nehru jackets in the style of the day.

Davis was named Columbia’s general counsel in 1961, was promoted to vice president in 1965 and shortly after became president. He signed Santana, Joel, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd and Springsteen, revitalizing the label.

In 1971, he booked the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles for seven consecutive nights for shows featuring an amalgamation of artists including Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Johnny Mathis, Loudon Wainwright and Springsteen.

“His career had just begun,” Davis said of the Boss in the Playboy interview. “He gets on the stage with his guitar and just stands there. He plays and sings his songs and does nothing else. Emboldened by the confidence I was gaining from my signings, afterward I said to him, ‘Bruce, when you’re onstage like that you can’t just stand there. You’ve got to move.’ He was listening, but I didn’t think he was really absorbing what I was saying.”

Two years later, Davis caught the singer at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village and was “astonished. This was not the Bruce Springsteen I had signed,” he recalled. “He was not sitting quietly on the stage. He was not walking around the stage. He was jumping on tables, literally jumping off the stage. After the concert I went backstage and he looked up and said, ‘Did I move around enough for you?’ He became a great performer, one of the best. But that’s not why I had signed him. I signed him for his lyrics.”

In a scandal that rocked the business, Davis was fired from Columbia in May 1973, accused of defrauding the company of $94,000 in expense-account violations, including paying for his son Fred’s bar mitzvah and a renovation of his apartment. He vehemently denied both charges, and many allegations were dropped. In 1975, he wrote Clive: Inside the Record Business and plotted his return.

He still had the respect of the artists. Said Elton John in The Soundtrack of My Life: “When my recording contract was about to be renegotiated, Columbia Records was the only company I’d consider apart from MCA. Then Clive Davis left Columbia — I wasn’t interested anymore. Clive was Columbia.”

Davis eventually formed Arista Records, named after the branch of the national honor society at his high school, out of the remnants of the studio’s Bell Records label. He inherited Barry Manilow, signed Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Carly Simon and the Grateful Dead and introduced the world to a 19-year-old Houston, who became one of the most successful artists in music history under his direction.

After signing Houston in 1983, he brought her with him for an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. “My introduction of Whitney was that if there’s going to be one performer for the next generation who combined the beauty and lyric phrasing of a Lena Horne with those gospel fiery roots of an Aretha Franklin, it would be Whitney Houston,” Davis told MTV News in 2012.

He took two years to personally oversee her first album, and her eponymous 1985 debut was an explosive, showstopping success with such hits as “You Give Good Love,” “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “The Greatest Love of All.” (Stanley Tucci played Davis in the 2022 Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody.)

In 1989, Davis teamed with Atlanta-based label LaFace Records, run by singer-songwriters Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenny “Babyface” Edmunds, which resulted in hits from TLC, Outkast and others, and later he partnered with Sean “Puffy” Combs on Bad Boy Records, which released best-selling albums by The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans.

BMG, the parent company of Arista, forced out Davis in early 2000, citing its retirement policy, and replaced him with his onetime protege Reid. But Davis had reason to smile at the Grammy Awards that year, when Carlos Santana’s comeback album, Supernatural, was the big winner, grabbing nine awards, including album of the year, record of the year and song of the year. Davis himself received two trophies as the set’s producer.

Supernatural went platinum 15 times and has sold more than 26 million copies worldwide. “Smooth” remained No. 1 on the charts for 12 weeks, and “Maria Maria” also made it to the top.

When BMG realized the error of its ways, it partnered with Davis on the joint venture J Records, where he developed Keys and resurrected the careers of Stewart, with the Great American Songbook series, and Manilow.

In 2002, Davis was put in charge of the RCA Music Group, where he recognized the commercial potential of the new Fox reality TV series American Idol. He helped launch the career of first-year winner Kelly Clarkson (winning a Grammy for best pop vocal album for executive producing her Breakaway album), Jennifer Hudson and Leona Lewis, a standout on the U.K. series X Factor.

In 2008, he was named chief creative officer at the combined Sony BMG.

On the Saturday night before the Grammys, Davis brought together top music executives and artists for a party. Music moguls like Jimmy Iovine, Lucian Grange, Sean Combs, Richard Branson, David Geffen and Doug Morris were among the revelers each year, with a top industry figure singled out for their yearly accomplishments.

The 2012 gathering was marred by the death of Houston in her Beverly Hilton room just hours before the start of the party. Davis went ahead with the festivities, turning it into a tribute to the singer.

In 2003, he founded the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and later helped establish the Clive Davis Theater at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles.

In The Soundtrack of My Life, he revealed his bisexuality.

Davis was married twice, to Helen Cohen from 1956-65 and to Janet Adelberg from 1965-85. Survivors include his children, Fred, Lauren, Mitch (a concert promoter) and Doug.