The Wall Street Journal Book Review: Clive Davis – The Midas Touch

Janis, Bruce and Whitney listened to Clive Davis’s advice— Laura Nyro, Loudon Wainwright III and Curtis Stigers didn’t.

By DAVID KIRBY
Wall Street Journal

Let’s begin with a quiz: Name the four performers who won an Oscar for acting and also had a No. 1 musical album. OK, Sinatra is a gimme, and it won’t surprise you to learn that Bing Crosby and Barbra Streisand are on the list. But that fourth name might be a little harder to come up with, so let’s range back and forth over the past half-century of the entertainment business, as producer and record executive Clive Davis does in this autobiography, and give that last bit of show-biz trivia time to bob to the surface….

Until now, though, no one has written a book that reveals as much about the industry as Mr. Davis’s book does. In his self-portrayal, he comes across as the nicest guy in the world, but make no mistake: This is one mogul who sometimes screws up and remembers every slight, often shedding crocodile tears as he points to yet another artist who might have had a career if only he had listened to the old square from Brooklyn who knew what made a song sizzle.

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