Clive Davis, the Hitmaker Behind Whitney Houston, Dies at 94
Across nearly six decades he turned unknowns into stars and stars into institutions, from Janis Joplin to Whitney Houston to Alicia Keys.
Clive Davis, who spent close to six decades turning singers into stars and built two record labels from scratch, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.
Davis "passed away peacefully from age-related illness," his representative said, with family around him. His death was confirmed by Variety and Rolling Stone, among others.
The list of artists he signed or steered reads like a survey of American popular music: Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Barry Manilow, the Notorious B.I.G., Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood. And, above all, Whitney Houston, whom he guided to seven consecutive number-one singles and more than 50 million records sold. Aretha Franklin once called him "the greatest record man of all time."
He was not a musician. He was a lawyer who fell into the business and then refused to leave it. Born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1932, Davis was orphaned as a teenager (both parents died within a year) and went through New York University and Harvard Law on scholarships. A job at a New York firm led to work for CBS, and in 1967, at 35, he was made president of Columbia Records with little idea of what hit music sounded like.
That changed at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer, where he watched Joplin tear through a set with Big Brother and the Holding Company. "I couldn't believe it. It was a cultural revolution, a social revolution and clearly a musical revolution," he told Rolling Stone. He signed her, and kept signing: Santana, Springsteen, Billy Joel, Earth, Wind and Fire.
His career was not all triumph. Forced out of Columbia in 1973 amid an expenses dispute, Davis was later exonerated of the most serious allegations, pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion, and paid a $10,000 fine. He simply built again, founding Arista and, in 2000, J Records, and discovering or reviving acts well into his seventies.
Houston's death in 2012 marked him deeply. "There was no comprehension on her part or my part that she was flirting with death," he said the following year. He kept working anyway, and kept throwing the lavish pre-Grammy gala that, for decades, rivalled the awards themselves.
In a 2013 memoir, "The Soundtrack of My Life," he came out as bisexual at 80, an act of candour from a famously guarded man. He had four children and, by his own telling, never lost the thrill of a song that might become a hit. The entertainment world has lost defining figures in quick succession this month, among them Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot; few shaped what the public actually listened to as directly as Davis did. "Music is the universal language," he liked to say. For sixty years, he was one of its most fluent speakers.
