In a candid interview earlier this year that marked one of his final on-stage appearances, music industry icon Clive Davis shared with his oldest son, Fred Davis, his reflections on the Columbia artist he was closest to — and how following his mother’s advice led to his legendary career in the music industry.
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Davis, who died on Monday (June 22) at his New York home at the age of 94, was known for his “golden ears,” which led him to sign and mentor superstars across genres, from Janis Joplin and Carlos Santana to Patti Smith, Barry Manilow and Maroon 5. In the conversation, which took place May 8 at the Amplify Music Conference, Davis shared standout memories from his more than 50-year career, including how his “jaw dropped” the first time he heard Whitney Houston sing “The Greatest Love of All,” and how he coached a young Bruce Springsteen on how to improve his stage presence.
Davis worked with Springsteen when he was a teenager in the early 1970s, recalling that he was a “unique artist, great in his own right,” such that Davis had a video made for every employee of Columbia Records to reference so that they would “not call him another Bob Dylan. [That would have been] the kiss of death.”
There was just one problem. On a large stage, Springsteen solo “looked lonely,” Davis said.
Davis recalled “low-key” instructing Springsteen to walk the length of large stages, a technique he thought would help him “personalize [the concert] and get closer to each member of the audience.”
Two years later, Davis recalled seeing Springsteen “jump[ing] on nearly every table” during a performance in New York.
“He was electrifying, exciting, no longer the lonely performer,” Davis said, adding that after the show, Springsteen asked him, “Clive, did I move around enough?”
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“It is so important to have people smarts,” Davis said, recalling advice he received from his mother, whom he said had the most significant influence on his life. “You’ve got to get out there with people. You’ve got to learn from all walks of life, all races, all colors. You’re not going to get that purely from reading.”
Davis said it was that wisdom that led him — a Harvard Law School-educated lawyer “wearing tweed jackets and khaki pants” — to leave his job at New York law firm Rosenman, Colin, Kaye, Petschek, and Freund to join Columbia Records as in-house counsel. Davis eventually became president of Columbia Records from 1967 to 1973, and later founded his own labels, Arista and J Records.
While at Columbia, Davis said the artist he felt closest to was Paul Simon, who twice signed with Columbia: first with Simon & Garfunkel in 1964 and again as a solo artist in 1972.
“We started working together with ‘The Sound of Silence,’ as it broke,” Davis remembered.
Simon wrote the iconic, folk-rock Simon & Garfunkel hit, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. It was the first of the duo’s 17 career charting songs.
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After the song’s release, Simon moved into the same New York apartment building where Davis lived, at Central Park West and West 69th Street. Davis recalled they both had young families at the time, “and our sons [went] to school together. We had great access to each other and became very [close].”
During the conversation, Davis’ son Fred, himself a partner at The Raine Group and a leading music-industry investment banker, recalled his father playing new albums by Columbia artists at home with his family, “trying to select the single from that album.”
“I actually thought he really cared what I picked,” Fred Davis told the crowd, recalling memories of his father being surrounded by mountain-high piles of documents with music consumption statistics and data.
An avid childhood fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Clive said his love of baseball informed his studies of and work in music. But he said he remained convinced that identifying hit songs was not a science that could be reduced to a formula.
“There is another quality that goes into identifying hit songs and hit artists that you can’t reduce to black and white,” Davis said. “I can say, make sure there’s an emotional impact from the lyrics that is meaningful, significant, and make sure you can sing that chorus. That melody is ringing in your ear. That is the clinical, dictionary method, but that doesn’t describe what happens to my body when I hear the unusual, the unique and special.”
Davis closed the conversation with a story about pairing Carlos Santana with Rob Thomas of Maroon 5 for the 1999 hit “Smooth,” which spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and rejuvenated Santana’s career, whose last hit before that had been “Say It Again” in 1985. On recalling the first time Santana and Thomas performed the hit live, Davis said, “It was electrifying, welcomed by a lasting, standing ovation.”
