Like most people who write about popular music, I penned a Clive Davis tribute last week. It was highly laudatory. No surprise there, Davis, even to his detractors, had an outsized influence on the music world for the better part of the last fifty years, and even if some considered that influence to be negative, the most serious misdeed he could be charged with was primarily one of taste.
I don’t mean to minimize individual grievances. I have heard mostly second-hand accounts of young artists who felt the mogul had lied to them. I have never worked in the world of music, but I have been involved in filmmaking, and I know from my own experience that “lies” are often miscommunications.
Producers want their artists to see success just around the corner. If they do little to dissuade them of that notion, it may not be a lie, but simply a rose-colored view of a business that has way more than fifty shades of gray.
Clive Davis’s complicated legacy
If I simply list the artists who publicly expressed their love and respect for Davis immediately after his death, it is very hard to deny the positive part of his impact. Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. Jennifer Hudson and Carlos Santana. Alicia Keys and Barry Manilow.
Billy Joel. Diane Warren. Ray Davies. Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. Davis’ impact on the world of pop music crossed genre, gender, and race. Many of those who paid tribute indicated that to some degree they owed their careers to Davis.
You’ll note that these people are wildly successful. But what about those many artists who did realize their dreams working with and for Clive Davis? There were quite a few. Some have expressed a different side of the man.
They argue that he was overly controlling and that he was quick to abandon new artists the moment they had a commercial stumble. They all admit he had a genius ear for talent. But many say he failed in his role as a cultivator of that talent.
It’s a reasonable point. On the one hand, you have the reality of the business. Not everyone will succeed. That applies to wildly talented artists. And it is those artists who are most likely to voice displeasure with the way they were promoted. Fair criticism or sour grapes? Unless you were there, it’s hard to decipher.
Davis had a great ear, but it was not infallible. He rejected Blue Oyster Cult twice, but the band kept changing their name and putting demos in front of him before Davis eventually decided he had found another hitmaker. He tagged Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as having no commercial potential.
That last point gets to the heart of what I find most interesting in the Davis debates. He was right, of course. Frank Zappa was never a commercial giant. He did release 14 original albums and a boatload of other material – live recordings, collaborations, compilations. More than 100 releases in all. He is one of the most influential artists of the rock era.
Yet as a commercial artist? It is estimated that he has sold a little over three million albums worldwide. As a point of comparison, Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 40 million copies.
Davis didn’t like Zappa because he did not hear hit singles. Davis had an extraordinary ear for hit singles. Springsteen said when Clive heard Greetings From Asbury Park for the first time, he expressed his admiration, but said he didn’t hear a single note.
Springsteen says he went home and wrote “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night” to address that concern. It worked out pretty well for everyone.
I don’t know if Tom Petty had Clive Davis in mind when he wrote “Into the Great Wide Open” in 1991. “Their A&R man said ‘I don’t hear a single’” was addressed to all the Clive Davises of the world who demanded artists reach for hits.
So the question is, is that mindset good or bad for the music industry? Davis would tell you that his primary concern was to get the artists’ music in front of the public. The way to do it was through hit records. That got you on the radio.
That in turn got fans to buy your albums, where they could hear your other cuts. He knew that any great artist was going to write personal material. Making sure there were a couple of commercial tracks along for the ride was only going to help.
But is that true? If artists are concerned with what they think the public wants, are they robbing their own craft? There’s no easy answer to that question. It probably changes on a case-by-case basis. We’d all like to believe that a producer will stick with an artist through some commercial failure, but is that really the job of the label? Or is it up to the artist to figure out the balance?
Most of the complaints I have heard come from rock bands who felt abandoned by Davis. That’s the world I hang out in, so that’s who I am more likely to hear from. In a sense, it was easier for Davis to promote rock acts early in his career when rock was in fact a major player on the pop charts.
By the middle of Davis’ career, that was changing. And he was as well. He signed Whitney Houston. He helped Rod Stewart realize his dream of singing the Great American songbook – five volumes worth.
So he did abandon rock, at least to a degree. But if Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith are singing your praises in 2026, how big a crime did you really commit? Davis had always felt the pull of the hit record. The same year he released Patti Smith’s Horses, he also released Barry Manilow’s Tryin’ to Get the Feeling.
Manilow might be the best place to end this discussion. He was, and maybe still is, anathema to rock and roll lovers. But he was beloved by many. Tryin’ to Get the Feeling had one fascinating song. “I Write the Songs” became Manilow’s second number-one single. (“Mandy,” recorded at the suggestion of Davis a year earlier, had been his first.)
To the public, “I Write the Songs” sounded like an autobiography with a catchy tune. Everyone knew that Barry Manilow was a songwriter. He had cut his teeth writing earworm jingles for TV commercials. To some older readers, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” and “I am stuck on Band-Aid, ‘cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me” will be in their heads to the day they die.
Only Manilow did not write “I Write the Songs.” It was written by former Beach Boy Bruce Johnson. This caused Manilow no small degree of anguish. He asked Davis how he could record songs by other writers when, first and foremost, Barry Manilow considered himself a composer. Davis' answer says all you need to know about how he saw the music business.
He told Manilow that he needed hit records. “I Write the Songs,” regardless of who wrote it, was a hit. Manilow could record a bunch of his own songs along with the hit. It wouldn’t make him any less of a composer.
Whatever came of those other songs was up to the artist. Clive Davis saw his job as making sure the audience heard them – and the way he did that was by making sure the artist had a couple of hits on the album. The rest was up to the artist.
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