CLIVE DAVIS

A Life In Full
1932 - 2026

I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Clive Davis to interview him for our Cover Feature in the Jan/Feb ‘23 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine…and then feeling a little special that Clive knew me when I saw him from time to time.

Clive was legendary! As the leading music scout and producer of his time. And as an icon of a businessman. His legacy is indeed ‘The Soundtrack of Our Lives’, and his influence will be felt each time anyone listens to any one of the hundreds of hit tunes he helped bring to life.

Clive was really, really smart. He knew everything about music. But he knew everything about a lot of other things too. Like pop culture. And the law. And the Yankees.

And Clive was fastidious. About the way he dressed - always in a jacket and tie. About the way his house in Pound Ridge and his apartment in the Ritz Tower in Manhattan were decorated and kept. About maintaining friendships with his large circle of friends. About just about everything. …He, in fact, had even carefully planned every detail of his own funeral, down to the location and arrangements at Central Synagogue - where he’d been a member for more than half-a-century, and who would be invited and who would sit where…and as several of the dignitaries in attendance noted, he would have been thrilled to have been there!

The thing with Clive was, That the man behind the legend...really was a legend of a man…

Over the course of a 60+ year career, Clive signed a list of recording artists that most famously includes Janis Joplin, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Billy Joel, Notorious B.I.G., Ella Fitzgerald, and Whitney Houston. He won 5 Grammy Awards as a Producer and both the Grammy Trustees Award and President’s Merit Award - and the theater at the Grammy Museum is even named the Clive Davis Theater. In 2000, Clive was inducted as a Non-Performer into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. And in 2017, Clive was featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Clive Davis : The Soundtrack Of Our Lives’. His portrait, by the late David Hockney, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

…But Clive’s funeral, on June 29, was really about the substance of the man and, even though Paul Simon wrote a tribute, Kenny G played a prelude, Jennifer Hudson performed ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’, and the superstar artists Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick, Alicia Keys, and Bruce Springsteen each spoke, it was not about the spectacle or the show.  It was heartfelt, personal, and emotional. Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl spoke about Clive as a member of Central Synagogue and the Jewish community at-large, and sang a moving rendition of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’ The Sony Music Entertainment Chairman, Rob Stringer, spoke about the quality of Clive’s character, and about his relentless work ethic. Dan Pallotta, a close friend of Clive’s for over forty years, spoke on behalf of Clive’s large friend group about what a good and great pal Clive always was - through thick and thin. Two of Clive’s sons, Fred and Doug, painted a picture of a loving and caring father - who nevertheless never stepped out of the character of being Clive. And each of the superstar eulogists focused on Clive the mentor, adviser, supporter, and loyal friend, much more than being the simple sum of his achievements. Clive had a profound and personal impact on the lives of many. Alicia Keys said “Thank you for seeing me, from the very beginning, before I even saw myself”, and each of the superstars talked about how Clive had totally changed their life. …And Springsteen delivered the classic epithet, that “Clive was Born To Run…everything!”

Katonah local Monte Lipman, who alongside his brother Avery heads up Universal Music Group’s East Coast operation REPUBLIC, encompassing Island Records, Def Jam Recordings, Mercury Records, MCA, Republic Records, and is now among the most influential figures in the music industry, credits Clive as a mentor, adviser and inspiration.

“Clive’s impact on my life, both personally and professionally, was profound. He gave my brother and me our first opportunity in the music business, inspiring us to pursue careers in the industry.

His loyalty to family and community, commitment to excellence, and zest for life were always infectious. His passion for music and art was unmatched, and his enthusiasm for fine dining, high fashion, luxurious travel, and the Yankees was equally extraordinary.

Beyond music, Clive’s love for the Bedford area played a meaningful role in shaping my own connection to the town. Long before I moved here, he invited Angelina and me to his beautiful Pound Ridge estate and introduced us to the unique spirit of this special community.

I will always be grateful for the influence Clive had on my life and for welcoming my family into his orbit. I truly loved this man and will miss him dearly.”

When I wrote about Clive in the Jan/Feb ‘23 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine, I said, “He has a regal confidence and a stately manner, and seems to effortlessly command the center of attention.” He wanted everyone to know who he was and what he had done - and, to that end, he would have been pleased for us to provide the following excerpt from that Cover Feature:

He was born in 1932 in the middle of the Great Depression, and grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. “Let’s just say that from the start, when I was a little kid, I read everything and I got very good grades,” Clive admits about how his obvious exceptional intelligence was identified at an early age. “But, you know, my mother gave me some of the best advice of my life, telling me ‘I didn’t want to be just an ‘ivory tower intellectual’ and that I needed to go out 2 or 3 hours a day, integrate myself with friends in the playground, and play punch ball, stickball, and touch football. I listened. I think that’s something that’s helped me throughout my life. I’ve always tried to avoid being an ivory tower intellectual, and some of the great joy and benefit I’ve gotten from contemporaries has been from friendships involving sports. I was a pretty good tennis player when I could still play…”

However moderated by a normal childhood in modest circumstances, Clive graduated Erasmus High School at the top of his class and as a member of the Arista Honor Society - hence his namesake Arista record label - earning admission with a full scholarship at New York University - the first in his family to attend college. His mother and father died, separately, during his freshman year at NYU, and he finished college living with his older, just-married sister, in Queens, taking the F Train and a bus to commute from Bayside to Washington Square. He nevertheless graduated NYU Phi Beta Kappa with a major in Political Science, and earned admission with a full scholarship to Harvard Law School - where he was Law Review. “When I was a young man,” Clive explains modestly, “the way to rise above the station of your parents was to be a professional, either a doctor or a lawyer. I’ve always known I should be a lawyer.”

He took a job with a small law firm in Manhattan, which dissolved after one year, motivating him to seek the relative security of one of the biggest New York law firms with Jewish partners, Rosenman Colin, run by his Harvard classmate Bob Rosenman. At Rosenman he was one of a few attorneys focused on corporate matters, while the vast majority of the 50-or-so lawyers were strictly litigators. After only a few years, impressed in particular with Clive’s work for Columbia Artists Management doing contracts for touring shows - and having nothing to do with music, Clive was offered the General Counsel position at Columbia Records. “I loved it! In the next five years Columbia Records bought musical instrument companies, including Steinway and Fender, and was the giant in the Classical music business, and then even signed and released Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel; and as General Counsel I got to put all those kinds of things in place.” Clive tells of his early days at Columbia. “In 1965, CBS acquired Columbia, made my boss, Goddard Liebersohn, the new Group Head for Columbia at CBS, and decided to break-up Columbia into four distinct companies. Goddard offered me the job heading-up the new instruments company to be based in La Jolla, California, with a raise from $25,000 to $75,000. But I was in the middle of a divorce with my first wife and knew I would have sole responsibility for my two boys, and didn’t want to move them out of their lives in New York, and was planning to turn down the position. When Goddard called at about 6:30 the next morning and, before I could get a word out, he said plans had changed, and that Norman Adler had always wanted to move to La Jolla and was campaigning for the instrument division job, and so I was to remain in New York and become the head of Columbia Records!”

“But I didn’t want to be just an ivory tower lawyer or CEO, so I immersed myself in listening to music - a lot of Miles Davis - and in everything going on in the music industry at that time. Watch, observe, and learn. The folks in A&R [artists and repertoire] who’d grown up with Mitch Miller and Johnny Mathis and were successful for Columbia with My Fair Lady and West Side Story, were not interested in the emerging rock n’ roll. Mitch Miller was quoted as saying that ‘rock n’ roll was short lived’,” Clive recalls with a chuckle. “As head of Columbia, I hadn’t personally signed a new artist for almost two years…and then I found myself at the three-day Monterey Pop Festival. It was the expression of the cultural revolution and musical revolution. People in robes with flowers in their hair…and the amplification of the guitar. I saw Janis Joplin - the most soulful White sister I’d ever seen -  breathing fire like the voice of the new generation. …There were no A&R folks with me, and I had no musical background to that point, but I followed my instinct, and the spine tingling sensation Janis had given me, and I paid $200,000 to Mainstream Records, who’d just gotten her under contract but had not produced an album, to buy her contract.”

“Music became my passion,” Clive states clearly. “Back in New York a few weeks after Monterey, I signed a heady ensemble of horns playing a rock, blues and jazz mix known as Blood Sweat & Tears. Then Earth Wind & Fire, and Santana…and Springsteen. And as an executive, I was pretty comfortable hiring and managing the best executives and matching the right executives with the right artists. I was not afraid of dissent, and wanted always to get the best of everyone’s different expertise. Although I’d come to music accidentally, I had a love of contemporary music, found I had a good ear, and had the confidence to follow my instincts.”

“I was fired in 1973, when CBS cleaned house in the wake of a scandal in the record world involving alleged ‘payola’ going to radio stations, and it was a painful year-and-a-half before I was personally exonerated. I wrote my first book, about the drama of withstanding adversity, during that time. I had to start all over again, and formed Arista. Columbia Pictures put in $10M and gave me the right to pick artists from what had become their music division - and I chose Barry Manilow and Melissa Manchester among others. I wanted to compete with RCA and Capitol, and eventually we became #1,” Clive says of his years at Arista. “I signed artists who could produce platinum hits and pop albums. The Kinks, Patty Smyth, The Outlaws, The Brecker Brothers, Collin Brown, Lou Reed, Lily Tomlin and Monty Python, and Alicia Keys, to name a few…and of course The Grateful Dead. The Dead had interviewed a half-dozen record company executives - including me - two or three years prior to when I signed them, only to decide to go it on their own with their own label. They called me up and asked me to come to San Francisco, and told me they were frustrated that their albums were only selling to a fraction of their true audience, and that everything I’d predicted about being an independent label had come true and that I’d been the only executive who’d been honest with them.”

“Over the course of my career, some of the artists I’m most proud of are those that didn’t write their own music,” Clive says with a warm smile and somewhat fatherly manner. “I honed my ear to find songs I could match with artists to produce hits. Santana came to me in 1999, thirty years after I’d first signed him to Columbia, and said he missed me, and missed having hits. I told him it was the progressive stuff he was doing, and offered to do an album where I found ‘one side’ of the music for him…that was ‘Supernatural’! Aretha was 40 and wondering if her career was over, when I began to give her the music that made her the Queen of Soul! I convinced Dionne Warwick she had a second career, and then gave her ‘I’ll Never Love This Way Again’, ‘Heartbreaker’, and ‘That’s What Friends Are For’. And it was through Dionne that I met Whitney Houston - and we had 7 worldwide #1 hits!”

…In the end, it’s just as Clive would have it! Known and admired as a legend, and “Someone who created a haven for many genius artists - whose music affected mankind and will go on forever,” as Clive put it. He told me that he was “...proud to be doing philanthropy toward the study of contemporary music at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and to have helped to finance the Clive Davis Arts Center at the Bedford Playhouse to benefit local artists and filmmakers.” But then, leaning-in with focus, Clive revealed, “…But most of all, I want to be remembered as a great father and grandfather. I’m most proud of my four children, Fred and Lauren from my first marriage, and Mitchell and Doug from my second marriage, and of my eight grandchildren, two from each child! We all go away on trips together to Europe, and on boat trips, and every year to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And my greatest pleasure is that they all come visit with me in Pound Ridge. Family is truly most important to me. My parents were exemplary, and I will never forget what it must have been for my sister, who was newly married, to have me living in her small apartment so I could continue in college after our parents died. Family has always been primary.”

…Adding only, “And I’d like it to be remembered that my annual pre-Grammy parties were the greatest parties ever!”