by Leonard Burkat
[Leonard Burkak, after seventeen rears on the staff of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, be came director of Columbia Masterworks in 1963 and a vice president of Columbia Records the following year. He was named a vice president of the newly formed CBS/Columbia Group in 1966, the rear before Clive Davis became president of Columbia Records, and retired from his corporate aerie in 1973, three months before Davis was fired.]
above: Clive Davis
Clive: Inside the Record Business, by Clive Davis with James Willwerth. 300 pages. William Morrow and Company, Inc.. $8.95.
THE CLIVE DAVIS story, in case you missed it, goes like this: In 1965, he was suddenly elevated from his relatively obscure position as Columbia Records general attorney to its second-highest post, where he was heir apparent, or per haps even heir presumptive, to the presidency. The company prospered, and others moved upward or aside to make room for his succession. As president, Davis enjoyed great power and generous emoluments until one day in May 1973, when he was abruptly dismissed and served with a civil complaint that he had charged $94.000 in personal expenses to his business expense account.
He tells much of his story in his recently published book. Clive: Inside the Record Business. It is a simple book that relates by example something about how the business works and a good deal about how Davis thinks he made it work.
He recounts his pursuit and capture of one popular star after another, out witting or outbidding competitors on the way, and his rapid transformation from lawyer into president into musician making it all seem much too easy, even when it is not very difficult.
I am convinced it is an honest book. I do not mean that I believe it to be an account of the facts, that everything in it happened exactly as described. I mean that it tells truths as the author saw them, or as he sees them in retrospect. In many readers it will arouse interest and sympathy, despite a high degree of that vanity and pride that seem essential to show-business memoirs. Like some other such works, it is ornamented by a few modest admissions of error and occasionally even mentions the name of some faithful servitor who did his share in making possible the boss's glorious procession from one great triumph to another. There are simple errors, but I think they are slips of the memory or of understanding, not conscious misrepresentations.
To call the writing clumsy is generous--even merciful. The editors should have repaired such sentences as "Mathis had left the company to go to Mercury Records for a large guaranty [sic] and royalty (where he had no chart success at all)" and "For the moment, he was most interested in opera, which he'd recently had a triumphant European tour con ducting." Davis chooses to mark the beginning of his new life from his discovery at Monterey in 1967 of Janis Joplin's capacity to move an audience. Yet others who were there thought that he was puzzled and perhaps even frightened by her performance (remember that hack then many people felt threatened on first en counter with the art of Joplin). that his touch with the times was so different from what he now believes it to have been that he had to be convinced that Joplin could be taken from the so-called "underground" of San Francisco in the Sixties and launched by a big and respectable record company. I think he did come to understand what this extraordinary woman meant, but only much later.
Then, confident that the same mysterious power that had unexpectedly made him president had also given him just claim to musical taste, skill, and knowledge, he took to improving his stars' songs and performances. doing a little tape-editing on the side, right in the presidential office suite, until in a kind of climax to this account he could confidently give both career-counseling and ideas for composition to no less a person age than Leonard Bernstein. His counsel is not taken, and a Bernstein recording fails-on another label, happily--but Davis' advice, it says here, eventually influenced the musical content of Mass.
What is one to believe? To be sure, there are lawyers with sound ideas about the arts and for thousands of years memorable music has been made by entirely untutored musical artisans, either sprung from the folk and forever anonymous or as well known as Irving Berlin and the Beatles. But their skills were generally developed in a lifetime of effort, not suddenly acquired as though by revelation or as part of the power of corporate office.
The formulas that Davis says he deduced from his examination of successful songs may, in truth, be very good ones, but such formulas do not guarantee commercial results. Davis really believes that his tampering with the work of his artists resulted in increased sales.
The skeptic says it seems not to have hurt; what he did was meaningless, or what he did it to was unimportant, or both.
I can more easily yield to Davis all the credit he wants for the sales increases that resulted from his revision of some marketing practices. One was a change in the usual sequence of release of 33-rpm albums and related 45-rpm singles.
Another was better management of what record-business people call simply "pro motion"-by which they mean the pro motion through radio broadcasts of their singles. This is an area of activity that can strongly affect sales, one to which no high level of intelligence had been applied before.
It may be hard to believe that some grown men and women--serious people--lose sleep worrying whether or not some trifling tune, or even one of distinction, will be broadcast on a radio station somewhere to an audience of teenagers. Yet business careers rise and fall on this issue and on the handling of very similar ones in the merchandising of toothpaste, cake mixes, and cat food. I am certain that the refinement of Davis' musical perception had much less to do with the market penetration of his hits than did the persistence with which he followed radio promotion and the efforts of his two promotion chiefs.
These men are almost the only subordinates, of the few mentioned, who are written about with anything like a sense of gratitude for their work. It is clear that if for good reasons or had a record catches the interest of an elevated officer in a large company, all the underlings who are charged to attend to these matters will devote rather more effort to drumming up a demand for it than they would otherwise have done. In his discussions of how he conducted various business functions. Davis unwittingly reveals how a man in a position of being held responsible for anything that goes wrong comes to believe he actually did everything that went right.
There are a few things wrong with Davis' view of the recent history of popular music and Columbia's place in it.
He tells again and again how he saved Columbia from stagnation in the music of Mitch Miller and Broadway shows, as though he had appointed himself to this mission. Perhaps he does not know that for some time before he came out of his law office the very top management had been determined to get a share of the market in rock-and-roll and rock music.
This repertoire had been the exclusive province of a number of small companies, generally operated by individual entrepreneurs who had an intimate sense of their audience and were unencumbered by the rigid policies of large corporations. People from the rock world and big-company executives were too often ill at ease with one another. Trade practices didn't fit. Yet there were many buyers, and the signs indicated there would be more.
Orders were issued again and again in attempts to make this still somewhat scruffy music comfortable in the rich surroundings of Columbia Records. Davis was lucky in rising at just the right time: the moment when the music at last be came respectable. It was no longer a necessarily countercultural art for an advanced state of consciousness or any of the other special things it had been be fore. It had become no different, in many respects, from the so-called middle-of the-road music-not in style and subject matter, but in cultural distribution and in popular taste. That is why Davis obvious plan, proudly described as though it were an idea for an artistic revolution, to persuade the Barbra Streisand’s and the Andy Williamses to sing rock songs worked out as well as it did. The songs were no longer so special. They held the place in our culture that had once belonged to the June-moon-spoon songs.
On this whole subject, Davis is the victim of his own propaganda. He believes the literature-such as it is-of the cur rent pop society. He sees neither through it nor over it.
Rock, being at least 5I'n of the total record business, got at least that much of Davis' attention when he was in office and when he wrote this book as well.
Jazz and country music are quickly taken care of in sections on his dealings with Miles Davis and Johnny Cash. Rhythm and-blues music, recorded and bought principally by blacks, has continued to resist Columbia, so Davis tells of the acquisition of distribution rights to the production of others in this field. Quadriphony is mentioned late in the hook and only in passing, although Davis supported it vigorously at the time of its introduction. One may deduce that he has given up hope that it will create a new market and revitalize the record business as stereo did.
Classical music-perhaps for its "class." since neither the music nor its market is well understood-gets a whole chapter. There is a brief account of how the inept managers of RCA in the mid-Sixties took the Philadelphia Orchestra away from Columbia for had reasons and with what was not so much a generous business deal as foolish bribery.
Davis was right in not attempting to meet the competition that time and in suggesting that the conditions of that contract eventually did great damage to RCA and to the classical recording business as a whole.
A section on Horowitz describes some social encounters, including one in which a television executive, in an excess of high spirits after a successful Horowitz broadcast, indulged in some rather tact less joshing of the great pianist. It is understood that Davis would never commit such an error, vet a few pages later he is making a gaffe of his own--a managerial and artistic gaffe rather than a social one--in a squabble with Leonard Bern stein about recording operas. Davis re ports that he Leonard Bernstein "clearly unaccustomed to having a record executive challenge his views." Others will read Bernstein's reactions as simple withdrawal from unworthy argument, a polite form of non-response to a proposal made with little understanding and couched in unacceptable terms.
Just how Davis' career came to take its unexpected turn from the law to high office is never made quite clear. I think the move was the direct result of a study of the whole of CBS, not just of Columbia Records, which was made by an outside management-consulting company and which is not referred to in the book. I rather doubt that he never knew of the study, but I can believe that a number of these investigations have run together in his memory.
The consultants examined all the businesses that CBS was in and decided they should be organized into groups. So, a Broadcast Group was formed of the CBS Television Network Television Stations, Radio, and News Divisions, and a new Columbia Group was created by dividing up several new businesses that had accumulated under the administration of the Columbia Records Division. Investigators interviewed the upper-middle-level executives who were thought to be candidates for elevation to most of the new presidencies and vice presidencies. The consultants' final re port to the corporation's highest officers prescribed in detail the steps necessary for the reorganization, the election of the groups' officers, and even the dates for the announcements of the moves. The few CBS employees of whom action was required to bring about these changes were allowed to see portions of the study and its recommendations, but perhaps the high-level pawns who were being shifted around did not even know of the report's existence. Those who did some times wondered who was running the corporation: its officers or its consult ants.
The measure of success in the record business is hits--their number and size.
Davis is properly pleased with Columbia's in his lime, but anyone who possessed the near infallibility he claims would he foolish to remain for long a mere employee of a record company, even at 5300.000 a year. In business for himself, his income potential would be practically unlimited.
After the completion of his book, Davis allied himself with Columbia Pictures Industries. Inc. (no relation to Columbia Records or CBS), which was re ported to have given him part ownership of its record division. It is a smaller company than CBS, though no midget, working hard at relieving itself of some financial burdens inherited from a former management, so one may wonder whether it will be able to make enough capital freely available to Davis for him to operate on the scale to which he is accustomed. Will he be able to afford the misses that insist on sprinkling them selves among the hits? Ask a thousand men why they were dismissed from executive positions, and few will know or admit more than Davis does. ("I don't remember the exact words he said.") Despite all the planning and preparation for every contingency in big corporations, powerful people move in and out of office sometimes for little reason, sometimes for had reasons, sometimes by chance, and it is foolish to think of even a great corporate career as much more than a game. All of it, from internal competition for position and power all the way to market competition for sales, is a game of strategy, of skill, and--again--of chance. When anything happens to diminish the player's utility, he's out of the game. I have seen players of great power and skill swept off the board by a hand so near and so large that they could not perceive it.
A half-hour or so after Davis got home on the day he was fired. CBS called and asked that his company limousine and chauffeur return directly to headquarters. On hearing this, he says. "A cold chill ran through me." If this comes any where near to being one of the greatest indignities he ever suffered, he is a lucky man and should be a happy one too.
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(High Fidelity, Apr. 1975)
Also see:
Bozak Monitor-C speaker system (ad, Apr. 1975)