No doubt about it, Clive Davis, who died at age 94 on Monday, had an ear for a hit. Decade after decade, he matched singers with tuneful, catchy material — often ballads — that he envisioned as potential pop standards with staying power: successors to Tin Pan Alley chestnuts. When he worked with singer-songwriters, he strove to guide them toward production and arrangements aimed at a perceived pop mainstream. His results built impressive careers and bank accounts, filling playlists for weddings and karaoke nights.
But for one major artist, Davis had a different, perceptive and ultimately brilliant instinct: to step back and leave well enough alone. That was Patti Smith, who signed to Davis’s Arista label in 1975 soon after she and her band started an incendiary series of shows at CBGB.
Smith was not presenting neatly structured three-minute pop tunes — far from them. Her performances exploded song forms into headlong musical and verbal improvisations. “As undisciplined as she was, she just gave me chills,” Davis wrote in his memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life.”
Davis clearly saw in Smith the same kind of raw emotion and burning charisma he had seen when he signed Janis Joplin to Columbia Records — though his memoir notes that he had convinced Joplin to allow the release of an edited version of “Piece of My Heart,” in order to gain a toehold on the Top 40.
With Smith, less than a decade later, things were different. By both his and her accounts, he stayed completely hands-off. When Smith was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, she thanked Davis: “I had a lot of guts, not a whole lot of talent, but he had faith in me and let me go out of the gate, just a colt, and stayed with me.”
Smith, not Davis, chose John Cale, from the Velvet Underground, to produce her visionary, paradigm-shaking debut album, “Horses.” Davis wrote that he had doubts at the time about the album’s Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo, but he didn’t veto it. Now it’s an indelible punk image.
No doubt Davis was delighted that two albums later, with “Easter,” Smith had a full-fledged, straightforward rock hit with “Because the Night,” written with Bruce Springsteen. He hadn’t instigated the collaboration; it came through Smith’s producer, Jimmy Iovine. And once again he set aside his misgivings about an album’s cover. Lynn Goldsmith’s photo on “Easter” has Smith’s hairy armpit at its center.
Davis gave a few other musicians free rein. One was Annie Lennox, who signed to Arista while she was in Eurythmics and stayed for a multiplatinum solo career. By his account, Davis didn’t meddle, but wished he had. “Over the years, I must admit that I would have loved to submit material to her,” he wrote. “I just know with more contemporary in-the-pocket material, Annie could be dominating pop music for years.”
Many musicians benefit from a nudge toward clarity and crowd-pleasing. Popular music constantly proves that art and commerce can be allies, not necessarily enemies. And to Davis’s credit, he never steered Patti Smith toward “contemporary in-the-pocket material.” Instead, the world got songs like “Dancing Barefoot,” “People Have the Power” and “Gone Again.” For some artists, “undisciplined” means inspired.
