April 4 – Davis, King Of The Hitmakers

Happy 87th birthday to one of rock’s biggest behind-the-scenes men, Clive Davis. Davis is one of the small number of people inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the “non-performer” category.

Little surprise there. He’s been a major player in the record industry for some 50 years, rising to prominence as president of Columbia in the late-’60s when he helped make stars out of Bob Dylan, Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel (at the time his personal favorites), and perhaps most of all, Santana.

He told the Atlanta Journal Constitution Santana was “about the third artist I signed at Columbia” after Janis Joplin and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Not a bad run that! “Bill Graham, the legendary music promoter, asked me to fly to the Fillmore West to audition a new artist that he felt special about. It turned out to be the Santana band. Obviously, I was knocked out.”  The partnership was good at Columbia, but even better decades later when Davis, with Arista Records, a label he had started, got together with Carlos Santana and decided to resurrect his stalled career. The result was the 30-million selling Supernatural which Davis produced. 

Recently Clive’s been back at Columbia, in its modern version, as the Chief Creative Officer at Sony. He says the biggest challenge in the record business is once you identify talent knowing “whether the artist needs marketing or material.” Artists he signed like Barry Manilow and Whitney Houston had the raw talent but only marginal songs, so he was instrumental in finding the right songs for them to work with. On the other hand, he says when it comes to Springsteen, Alicia Keys or the Grateful Dead (other artists he’s signed) they just need the proper marketing once “you’ve got to wait for them to give birth” to the great material. Whether this is overly simplistic or not, it’s certainly a formula he’s used to shape the sounds of the past few decades as much as anybody.

 

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