Clive Davis predicted music’s biggest stars like no one else | Alexis Petridis

The legendary music executive signed everyone from Patti Smith to Barry Manilow and changed the industry forever

• Clive Davis: music industry executive who signed Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen dies aged 94

• Clive Davis: a life in pictures from Diana Ross to Aretha Franklin

Clive Davis always claimed that his life in the music business was really kickstarted when he chose to attend the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival: it was there he saw Janis Joplin and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and immediately bought their contract for $200,000, the first really high-profile signing of his career. But Davis was an unlikely fit at the most high-profile event of the Summer of Love: he was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been “shocked” when a restructuring of Columbia Records saw him promoted from general counsel to the company’s president. He was sharp enough to spot which way the pop cultural wind was blowing – “a revolution in culture and philosophy”, he later recalled, “the Haight-Ashbury scene, with love peace and flowers” – but he was no one’s idea of a hippie. Amid a sea of paisley, batik, love beads and bells David turned up to the festival clad in “khaki pants and a tennis sweater”.

It was an image he would often recall for comic effect – “I was the costumed freak surrounded by everyone with flowers in their hair” – but there was something rather telling about it too: Davis’s skill as what used to be called a record man lay in his ability to balance the progressive with the traditional. He turned one wing of Columbia into something of a home for artists associated with the burgeoning counterculture, swiftly signing Santana, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Electric Flag and the wonderful psychedelic soul band the Chambers Brothers. But he never lost sight of the other side of the company, which dealt lucratively in soundtracks and easy listening and was home to Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett: at one juncture, he found himself simultaneously attempting to renegotiate the contracts of Bob Dylan and Andy Williams. When he founded Arista Records in 1974, he did exactly the same thing: it was a label that provided a home for both Patti Smith and Barry Manilow.