Clive, We Hardly Knew Ye

Clive Davis, who died at 94, was one of the giants in the music business.  Many of the artists he supported were all about music, while he was the business.  He scored a fantastic deal with Neil Diamond at Columbia, he discovered Janis Joplin and signed Bruce Springsteen when he was at that label, developed Patti Smith's career, and resurrected the careers of Aretha Franklin and Graham Parker by signing them at Arista, the label he founded in the mid-seventies.

But while Clive Davis was a great man, he was not always a good man.  Black women - you know where this is going, right? - have taken to social media to set the record straight about how he handled the careers of artists of their race and their sex.  As the head of Arista, he tried to push Phyllis Hyman into recording more contemporary pop and disco in the late seventies when she insisted on remaining true to her jazz roots, and when he brought Angela Bofill to Arista, he promoted her at Hyman's expense, causing an immediate rift between the two women.  He had even more success with promoting Whitney Houston, but her own records were a disappointment to many critics who found her a formidable virtuoso who recorded the blandest, weakest songs ever conceived.  In Essex County, New Jersey, where Whitney Houston was born and raised (and where I was born and have lived for fifty of my sixty years, so I know a thing or two about this), the disappointment bordered on disgust, where black listeners familiar with Houston's gospel chops were incensed at how watered down her pop sound was.  

And the disgust many people felt with Davis goes beyond black women.  Kelly Clarkson called Davis a bully and said his handling of her recording career was toxic, and Kelly Clarkson is one of America's pop sweethearts, so her take on Davis ought to be taken more seriously.  One didn't need to be a music-business outsider to note Davis's commercial missteps throughout the years.  He signed Barry Manilow to Columbia in 1973, then brought him to Arista a year later when he and Columbia parted ways, and he chose to guide Manilow into a weird Tin Pan Alley-pop-rock bombast sound for much of Manilow's career.  He managed to sign the one supergroup of the eighties that had potential - the KBC Band, a band comprised of Jefferson Airplane alumni Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, and Jack Casady - only to give them inadequate promotion, leading to their swift dissolution, even as Davis signed the short-lived GTR, whose only album you already know about. 

Perhaps Davis's most egregious blunder, apart from promoting Sean Combs by giving him tons of money (and I prefer not to talk about what happened to him!), was issuing Milli Vanilli's only album on Arista in the United States at the end of 1988, which became the biggest selling-album of 1989 and probably the biggest-selling album of the 1980s apart from Michael Jackson's Thriller.  Milli Vanilli's LP sold ten million copies and spawned four huge hit singles.  When it turned out that Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, the Vanilli boys in question, weren't the real singers on the record, Davis responded with a defense commonly used by President Ronald Reagan through the last years of his administration - he knew nothing about it.

But even if Pilatus and Morvan weren't the real singers - and I don't want to dump on the duo because they've been shamed enough already - the fact that Arista used all sorts of promotional hijinks to push ten million copies of a record with lifeless vocalizing and soulless performances suggests a real lack of ethics at the label, as well as disregard for a scandal which Davis, even if he didn't know about the deception, should have been on top of. 

The Reagan reference notwithstanding, Clive Davis may very well have been the Richard Nixon of the music business - he had the power to do good, he had the power to do evil, and he did both.  It's a complicated legacy, yes, but if the results of Davis's career include giving Graham Parker the opportunity to record Squeezing Out Sparks - an album I love and haven't written about on this blog yet - I'm not going to be too judgmental.