{"id":514292,"date":"2026-06-23T12:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T12:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/514292\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T12:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T12:18:13","slug":"clive-davis-always-knew-how-to-grab-public-imagination-from-signing-janis-joplin-to-reinvigorating-rod-stewart-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/514292\/","title":{"rendered":"Clive Davis always knew how to grab public imagination, from signing Janis Joplin to reinvigorating Rod Stewart \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clive Davis<\/a> always claimed that his life in the music business was really kick-started when he chose to attend the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival: it was there he saw Janis Joplin<\/a> and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and immediately bought their contract for $200,000, the first really high-profile signing of his career. But Davis was an unlikely fit at the most high-profile event of the Summer of Love: he was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been \u201cshocked\u201d when a restructuring of Columbia Records saw him promoted from general counsel to the company\u2019s president. He was sharp enough to spot which way the pop cultural wind was blowing \u2013 \u201ca revolution in culture and philosophy\u201d, he later recalled, \u201cthe Haight-Ashbury scene, with love peace and flowers\u201d \u2013 but he was no one\u2019s idea of a hippy. Amid a sea of paisley, batik, love beads and bells, Davis turned up to the festival clad in \u201ckhaki pants and a tennis sweater\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Clive Davis, who launched careers of Whitney Houston, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, dies aged 94Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

It was an image he would often recall for comic effect \u2013 \u201cI was the costumed freak surrounded by everyone with flowers in their hair\u201d \u2013 but there was something rather telling about it too: Davis\u2019s skill as what used to be called a record man lay in his ability to balance the progressive with the traditional. He turned one wing of Columbia into something of a home for artists associated with the burgeoning counterculture, swiftly signing Santana, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Electric Flag and the wonderful psychedelic soul band the Chambers Brothers. But he never lost sight of the other side of the company, which dealt lucratively in soundtracks and easy listening and was home to Barbra Streisand<\/a> and Tony Bennett: at one juncture, he found himself simultaneously attempting to renegotiate the contracts of Bob Dylan<\/a> and Andy Williams. When he founded Arista Records in 1974, he did exactly the same thing: it was a label that provided a home for both Patti Smith<\/a> and Barry Manilow.<\/p>\n

That Davis never seemed particularly in thrall to one style or genre of music might have been attributable to his background. Before taking the job at Columbia, he claimed he had \u201czero\u201d interest in the music industry, and wasn\u2019t even a particularly big fan of music: \u201cI listened in a very ordinary way,\u201d he recalled, \u201clike anyone would listen to the radio. I never collected records, or wanted to be the fly on the wall in a studio.\u201d You can see how that enabled him to flit between genres with ease \u2013 he was as happy to sign Earth Wind and Fire as he was Aerosmith or Bruce Springsteen<\/a> \u2013 or to take risks when others might have demurred. When Miles Davis protested that his records weren\u2019t selling in the quantities he would have liked, Davis boldly suggested he move out of traditional jazz venues and play as a support act for rock bands, one of the key factors in the crossover success of 1969\u2019s Bitches\u2019 Brew. But more mysterious was his seemingly unfailing ear for a song, his innate understanding of what would grab the public\u2019s mass imagination.<\/p>\n

It was Davis who spotted a minor 1971 UK hit by Scott English called Brandy and took it to Manilow (retitled Mandy, it became his first number one); Davis who heard something in the work of a minor songwriting duo called Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and signed their nascent label, Philadelphia International Records, to a distribution deal; Davis who found Saving All My Love for You and I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) for his most celebrated signing of the 1980s, Whitney Houston; Davis who re-signed Santana in the late 1990s with the proviso that he be allowed to pick half the songs on his next album (Supernatural went on to sell 30 million copies); Davis who worked out that what the American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson needed was a song a little tougher and hipper than the usual TV talent show winner\u2019s fare, and spotted it in Since U Been Gone, a Max Martin\/Lukasz Gottwald track that had already been rejected by Pink and Hilary Duff. He seemed to know instinctively when to meddle in an artist\u2019s career \u2013 he told Springsteen he needed to move around more onstage if he didn\u2019t want to be saddled with the \u201cnew Dylan\u201d tag that Davis considered a kiss of death \u2013 and when to sit back and leave them alone: rebuffed when he tried to sign the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s, he simply bided his time while they attempted to set up their own label, completely independent from the rest of the music industry, then signed them when the venture came to grief, as Davis had predicted it would.<\/p>\n

He certainly made mistakes, among them turning down Meat Loaf\u2019s 43 million-selling Bat Out of Hell on the grounds that it was \u201ctoo theatrical\u201d and its author didn\u2019t look like a star. But his successes were so stellar and varied that it seems churlish to dwell on his failures. Moreover, he demonstrated an astonishing ability to pick himself up and carry on after what appeared to be career-derailing disasters. Arista was founded after he was fired by Columbia, who alleged financial irregularities that Davis hotly disputed. Ousted by Arista in 2000, he set up his own label J Records, which proved extraordinarily successful in the early 2000s, the home of Christina Aguilera<\/a> and Avril Lavigne<\/a>, Alicia Keys and Kesha, Maroon 5<\/a> and Leona Lewis: still keeping one eye on the middle-of-the-road, J also reinvigorated Rod Stewart\u2019s career by encouraging him to record albums of Great American Songbook standards.<\/p>\n

\"CliveClive Davis at the offices of Sony Music Entertainment in New York in 2017. Photograph: Bryan Derballa\/ New York Times <\/p>\n

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary career, so varied that it was almost impossible to make sense of. Confronted with the man who provided a connection between Barry Manilow and Iggy Pop or Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston, interviewers were given to wondering, what did the array of artists with whom Davis worked have in common? Clive Davis had a snappy answer pre-prepared: \u201cThey\u2019re all,\u201d he was wont to say, \u201cheadliners.\u201d \u2013 Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clive Davis always claimed that his life in the music business was really kick-started when he chose to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[9002,21748,321,93,61,60,93000,26011,71011],"class_list":["post-514292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-bob-dylan","tag-bruce-springsteen","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-janis-joplin","tag-patti-smith","tag-whitney-houston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}