Clive Davis, Hitmaking Titan of the Music Industry, Dies at 94

 

 

 "Mr. Davis’s epiphany in both music and business came at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, where the lineup included Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Grateful Dead. Mr. Davis was particularly smitten with Ms. Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The affectionate antics of the flower-child generation charmed him, but the mass commercial potential of rock made an even stronger impression.

“I felt my spine tingle and my arms vibrate,” he recalled in the 2017 documentary. “I realized this was going to be the future. I could feel it in my bones.”

In the years after Monterey, he brought Big Brother, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Diamond, Santana, Chicago, Laura Nyro, Aerosmith and many others to the label.

To shake up Columbia’s button-down corporate culture, he had his salesmen read Rolling Stone magazine — an act of “heresy” at the label of “My Fair Lady” and the piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz"

 read obit by Ben Sisario