Clive Davis to Publish a New Autobiography

September 12, 2012, 2:23 pm

By BEN SISARIO

Read! About how Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan were persuaded in the making and marketing of classic albums.

Gasp! At how Janis Joplin wanted to celebrate the signing of her deal with Columbia Records.

Peruse! Stories about the ups and downs of Whitney Houston's career from one of her key mentors.

Those and other adventures will be told an autobiography by the venerable music executive Clive Davis, to be published by Simon & Schuster in February.

Mr. Davis, 80, rose from a midlevel position as a lawyer at CBS Records in 1960 to running the label in the late 1960s and early '70s, when he pushed the company into the rock 'n' roll era and signed Ms. Joplin, Mr. Springsteen, Aerosmith, Sant ana, Billy Joel and many others. At Arista Records beginning in 1974, he signed Aretha Franklin, Ms. Houston and, in 1994, made a $10 million bet on a young hip-hop impresario named Sean Combs. Mr. Davis is now chief creative officer at Sony Music and still presides each year at his music industry soirée the night before the Grammy Awards.

Written with the music critic Anthony DeCurtis, the book does not have a title yet, and it will be Mr. Davis's second memoir, after “Clive: Inside the Record Business” in 1975. Perhaps given Mr. Davis's recent time in the spotlight after the death of Ms. Houston this year, the publisher is expecting significant demand. According to an announcement on Wednesday, the book was acquired after “a very spirited auction.”

“There was a unanimous opinion within Simon & Schuster that we had to publish this author,” Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in the announcement. “No one has had a life, or a care er, quite like the one described by Clive Davis in these remarkable and fascinating pages.”