Born in Brooklyn in 1932, Davis attended New York University before moving on to Harvard Law. When Davis was 28, he was hired as an assistant counsel for Columbia Records—actually the highest-selling classical label at the time. Fairly quickly, he was promoted to administrative vice president and general manager, and by 1967, Davis was appointed president of the record label, turning its eye toward rock music that it had been previously less interested in. One of his first outings as president was to the famed Monterey International Pop Festival, where he witnessed Janis Joplin perform. “I really had to go into some deep thinking, because I couldn’t read music, I couldn’t play music. I was head of the third-largest label of the day, okay, but never did I dream that I would ever sign an artist,” he recalled on a MUBUTV podcast in 2024. “That was a moment of truth for me… she was the first artist that I ever signed.”
It wasn’t just rock that Davis put a spotlight on, but R&B and progressive acts, too. This sometimes led to clashes between artists and the label, but Davis’ recollection of events usually focused on how he was able to overcome these hiccups. His signing of Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago had earned the ire of Miles Davis, who resented Davis signing “long-haired white kids and they’re stealing from me and they’re selling millions,” according to People. In return, Clive Davis offered the jazz musician a role “as a special guest star for some of my signings,” where Miles would watch college students listen to music and tell them what was resonating. “He agreed, and the album that came out of that experience was Bitches Brew,” the exec recalled. “And it really did great. He called me up and said, ‘You delivered. You’re a great man.'”
After seven years at Columbia Records, Davis was offered deals from all corners of the music industry before taking a deal with Columbia Pictures (then a completely separate company) to create the Arista imprint. Applying the lessons he learned at Columbia, Davis was able to build a robust, eclectic slate of artists, including Barry Manilow, Aretha Franklin, and Patti Smith. In a 2013 interview, Davis recalled how he began focusing more on the “repertoire” side of A&R, becoming more determined to produce hits for artists. This was not always popular with artists. “Barry didn’t wanna record or write the songs,” Davis recalled in conversation with the Recording Academy. “You go into surviving occasional differences and benefitting from it. When I saw him on Broadway 37 years later… every song is now a standard. Not just a hit.”
But perhaps the most famous discovery of Davis’ career was of Whitney Houston, who the exec first saw perform as a backup singer for her mother, Cissy Houston. During the set, Whitney sang two solo songs, one of which was “The Greatest Love Of All,” a song originally written for the Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest and would go on to become a number-one song for Houston in the 1980s. “From the beginning of that song, she was finding more meaning in that song than even the composers… could have thought,” Davis recalled during an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Davis won his first Grammy for his work on The Bodyguard soundtrack, which spawned Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You,” one of the best-selling singles of all time. The two remained close throughout the rest of Houston’s life.
In the new millennium, Davis continued on, even as mergers and acquisitions shook up the industry. Arista was eventually dissolved and folded under RCA records, while Davis moved up the ladder of the parent company, Sony. As of early 2025, Davis was still actively working as chief creative officer at Sony Music. He also spent much of his final years promoting the legacies of the artists he worked with, serving as a producer on the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody and appearing in the film as a character played by Stanley Tucci. “What I’m most proud of is the long-lasting nature of so many of the artists that I’ve been at the discovery of,” Davis told Billboard in 2009. “There is a tremendous feeling of pride that my artists, some of them become family.”
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