Clive Davis, the legendary music executive who pushed the careers of Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, and more, has died. The New York Times reports that Davis passed away at his home in Manhattan today, after a recent hospitalization for respiratory problems. He was 94 years old.
Born in Brooklyn in 1932, Davis spent some of his earliest years in England and was raised in the middle-class neighborhood of Crown Heights. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1956, going on to practice law in a small firm in New York. Two years later, he moved on to the firm of Rosenman, Colin, Kaye, Petschek, and Freund, where partner Ralph Colin had CBS as a client. At the age of 28, Davis became assistant counsel of CBS subsidiary Columbia Records. In the span of seven years, he climbed the ranks to became president and signed artists including Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood, Aerosmith, and many others.
Davis would go on to launch numerous labels, including Arista in 1974 (home to acts like Patti Smith and the Grateful Dead), Bad Boy in 1994 (with Sean “Diddy” Combs), and J Records in 2000. In addition to signing established artists like D’Angelo and Busta Rhymes, J Records helped launch the career of Alicia Keys. As of 2018, Davis was Chief Creative Officer at Sony Music.
Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Two years later, he donated $5 million to endow NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. His memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, came out in 2013.
