They had a huge, wonderful classical artist division: Vladimir Horowitz, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra. They were a very successful label in middle-of-the-road music. When you come into something unfamiliar, you watch. What was your first step? How do you start to tackle that job? So how did you feel? Did you feel prepared? I was their chief counsel for about five years when, out of the blue, there was a reorganization of the company and they said, "I'm gonna make you head of Columbia Records." I had no vision of being in the music business, but I did take that job. I worked my way through college and law school. Here I'm out of law school three years and they come to me and they say, "You know, if you come over to Columbia Records, because you've been doing some nonlitigation contract work for some music companies, you could be chief counsel of Columbia within a year." I was about 27, 28 years old, and the offer was very attractive to me.
I was with a law firm that had CBS as a client. What happened?ĬLIVE DAVIS: You know, life gets affected by lucky breaks. You were a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who excelled at school and who went to Harvard and wanted to be a lawyer. You certainly liked music - you were a big fan of Broadway shows - but you weren't of the music business. Click the audio link on this page to hear the radio version, and read more of their conversation below.ĭON GONYEA: You describe yourself early in the book as being musically kind of an agnostic.
Over more than four decades in the music industry, Davis helped make household names (and, in some cases, icons) out of Billy Joel, Carlos Santana, Barry Manilow, Alicia Keys, Sly Stone, Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston.ĭavis shares personal stories about his life and career in his new memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, and he spoke about it with NPR's Don Gonyea. And Springsteen wasn't the first or the last huge success for Clive Davis, the man at the helm of Columbia Records at the time. If Columbia Records hadn't signed Bruce Springsteen in the early 1970s, there's a chance The Boss could have just been a small-stakes act, playing gigs around Asbury Park.īut music history would, of course, unfold differently.
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