Clive Davis and the end of the record man

Clive Davis died on Monday, June 22, at his home in Manhattan. He was 94. The man who ran Columbia Records, then built Arista and J Records from nothing, had been hospitalized recently with respiratory trouble; no cause was given. With him goes the last great example of a now-extinct species — the record executive who could hear an unknown singer in a small room, sign them on instinct, and then will them into a superstar through sheer force of taste and budget.

That sounds like hagiography until you look at the roster. Davis didn’t have a good run. He had four of them, across six decades, and the names are absurd.

The golden ear

Davis became president of Columbia Records in 1967, a former Harvard-trained lawyer with no obvious musical pedigree, and immediately did the thing that made his reputation: he went to the Monterey Pop Festival, watched Janis Joplin tear the roof off with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and signed her on the spot. The album that followed, Cheap Thrills, went to number one in 1968 and turned a San Francisco club act into a national headline. He was a lawyer who had been running the label for a matter of months, and he had just out-heard every A&R veteran in the country. That instinct — sign the talent, worry about the format later — defined the Columbia years. He brought in Carlos Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel, and Pink Floyd’s American deal. He turned a sleepy, jazz-and-classical label into the dominant rock house of its era, mostly by trusting his own ears over the room’s.

The phrase people use is “golden ear,” and it’s a cliché, but Davis earned it the hard way: by being right, in public, over and over, on artists nobody else had bet on yet.

The fall, and the second act

It nearly ended in 1973. Columbia fired him for misappropriating company money — $94,000 of it — and he pleaded guilty to tax evasion two years later and paid a fine. In most careers that’s the obituary’s second paragraph and the story’s end. For Davis it was halftime. He founded Arista Records in 1974 and rebuilt from scratch, and the second roster was even stranger than the first, because it refused to pick a lane.

This is the thing about Davis that gets flattened in the tributes: the same man who made Barry Manilow a household name also put out Patti Smith’s Horses, one of the foundational punk records, in 1975. He engineered Aretha Franklin’s mid-’80s commercial comeback and signed Kenny G and Sarah McLachlan. He was, depending on which critic you asked, either a vulgarian who over-polished everything he touched or the most versatile A&R mind in the business. The honest answer is both. He had no shame about the middle of the road and no fear of the avant-garde, and he ran them out of the same office.

Whitney, and the star-making machine

The masterpiece was Whitney Houston. Davis signed her to Arista and built her 1985 debut into one of the best-selling first albums anyone has ever released, song by song, single by single, with a level of hands-on control that became the template — and the cautionary tale — for the modern pop launch. The Whitney project is the clearest distillation of the Davis method: find a once-in-a-generation voice, surround it with the most expensive, most meticulous pop machinery money can buy, and aim it directly at the largest possible audience.

You can hear how durable that machinery turned out to be from a distance of forty years. Houston still anchors a wedding reception mix on this site, two of her songs deep, right next to the Aerosmith that Davis had signed back at Columbia. The criticism — that it was airless, that it sanded the gospel grit off a church-trained voice — is fair and also beside the point. He was not trying to make a cult record. He was trying to make the biggest record in the world, and he did.

J Records, and proof the ear still worked

The truly remarkable part is the third act. Davis founded J Records in 2000, at an age when most executives are decades retired, and his breakthrough signing was Alicia Keys, whose 2001 debut Songs in A Minor swept the Grammys and announced a genuine songwriter, not a manufactured star. A year earlier he’d been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the non-performer category. The year before that, he’d masterminded Santana’s Supernatural, reuniting with the guitarist he’d signed in 1969 for one of the best-selling comebacks in history — a Davis full circle if there ever was one. And the empire was wider than the names on his own signing sheet. Through Arista’s joint venture with Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Babyface’s LaFace, his house also took in TLC, Toni Braxton, Usher, and OutKast — much of the engine of ’90s and 2000s Southern R&B and hip-hop ran partly on his money and his cover. Years earlier he’d even steered the Grateful Dead, of all bands, to the only Top 10 single of their entire career, ‘Touch of Grey,’ in 1987. A 22-year-old jam band with no interest in radio was not beyond his reach either.

He hosted an annual pre-Grammy gala that became, in 2009, an official Recording Academy function — the one night a year the entire industry showed up to his court. It was self-mythologizing and a little ridiculous and also a real institution, because Davis had earned the right to throw it.

The end of the record man

Here is why his death feels like the end of something larger than one long life. The job Davis perfected barely exists anymore. The all-powerful label boss who signs an unknown on a hunch, pours a fortune into the launch, and personally steers the career — that role has been hollowed out by streaming, by playlists, by algorithms that surface a song before any executive has heard it, and by artists who increasingly skip the label entirely. Look at the way Jack White now releases records: no announcement, no machine, the artist controlling distribution because he owns it. That is the photographic negative of the Davis model, and it is where the business has gone. Nobody is going to spend 2026 the way Davis spent 1967, walking into a festival tent and walking out with a career to build by hand. The gatekeeper has been replaced by the feed.

Davis believed, to the end, in the gatekeeper with the golden ear — the idea that taste could be a job, and that one person’s conviction about a voice could change the culture. He was sometimes wrong, occasionally a crook, and frequently accused of buffing the soul out of the music he sold. He was also right more often than anyone in his business, for longer than anyone in his business, and the proof is scattered across half the playlists you’ll ever hear at a wedding, a Cinco de Mayo party, or a late-night drive. The record man is dead. He was the last great one.