There are music executives, and then there is Clive Davis. The difference, to put it plainly, is everything.
Davis, who founded Arista Records and J Records and helped shape the careers of Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood, and many others, died on Monday at his home in New York City.
He was 94 years old. His death was confirmed by his longtime representative Aliza Rabinoff, who said in a statement that he had “passed away peacefully from age-related illness, surrounded by his family and loved ones.”
His family said Davis had been hospitalized with respiratory problems recently before passing away at home in Manhattan.
He had been released from that hospitalization just days prior, with a representative saying at the time that Davis was “in good spirits and happy to be recuperating at home.”
Even at 94, the man who helped write the soundtrack of modern American music had still been attending his beloved pre-Grammy dinner just months before.
He had hosted a birthday dinner for 120 guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel in April, taken over the private dining room at Le Bernardin for his 94th birthday celebration, and held a catered Memorial Day dinner just three weeks before his death, at which he reportedly persuaded Motown legend Valerie Simpson to sing “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” for the table. The title, those who were there noted, meant a great deal.
In a statement, Davis’s family paid tribute to the man behind the music, and to the person they actually knew.
“To the world, our father was the iconic music legend whose vision, instincts, and relentless pursuit of excellence shaped the soundtrack of countless lives,” they wrote.
“He discovered, mentored, and championed the greatest artists in modern music history, leaving an indelible mark on culture that will endure for generations.”
They added what so many families of legendary figures say, but in this case felt particularly true: while the world knew him as an icon, they knew him as “Dad and Granddaddy,” a source of wisdom, strength, and unconditional love. He is survived by his four children: Fred, Lauren, Mitch, and Doug.
From Brooklyn to Columbia Records: A Career That Defied Every Category
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. That detail feels almost poetic in retrospect, a man who would one day reshape the record industry was never, as a boy, particularly obsessed with records themselves.
What he had instead was ears, instincts, and an extraordinary capacity for work. Both his parents died within ten months of each other when he was 18, his mother from a cerebral hemorrhage and his father from a heart attack.
He moved in with his older sister and her family in Queens while attending NYU on a full scholarship, and later received another full scholarship to attend Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1956.
Music entered his life through the back door, as it often does with the people who end up changing it the most.
After graduating from Harvard, Davis got his start in the music business through practicing law, when he was assigned as assistant counsel at Columbia Records.
He was promoted to general counsel and eventually became president of the newly reorganized CBS Records. By 1967, at just 35 years old, he had been named president of Columbia Records, and wasted no time moving the staid, somewhat conservative label directly into the rock business.
The artists he signed during that period read like a syllabus for a course on the history of American rock music: Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Grateful Dead. That is not a roster, that is a revolution.
Davis was expelled from Columbia in 1973 amid allegations of misuse of corporate funds, and later pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion, paying a $10,000 fine while the remaining charges were dropped.
Another man might have let that be the end of it. Davis did not. In 1974, he accepted an offer to combine several of Columbia Pictures’ struggling record imprints into a new entity, which would become Arista Records.
The comeback he engineered from there was arguably more impressive than anything he had done before it.
Davis credited Barry Manilow, who recorded a song, renamed it “Mandy,” and watched it go to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, with setting the template for pop success at Arista.
“It was Barry Manilow that enabled and opened up the horizon to sign a Dionne Warwick, to sign the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, and obviously led to signing Whitney Houston,” Davis said.
That chain of events, from