Almost nobody knows what happened at the Columbia record signing. The official version is simple. Clive Davis saw Janis Joplin at Monterey in 1967, signed her, and Cheap Thrills went to number one. Clean, professional, the music industry at its best. The actual version, which Davis himself put in his memoir, is something else entirely.
There was an offer, there was a naked band member, there was a Broadway legend who was unmoved. There was a phone call that ended with one of the best lines ever delivered by a rock singer to a record label president. This is the actual version. June 17th, 1967, the Monterey Pop Festival. Clive Davis was 35 years old and had been president of Columbia Records for exactly 6 weeks.
He had been a lawyer, he had become a music executive through a combination of ability and circumstance. He was conscious, by his own later admission, of his complete lack of a musical background. He was running one of the largest record labels in America, and he was not entirely sure he knew what he was doing. Then he watched Janis Joplin perform.
He wrote about it decades later in his memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life. He described the experience as spine-tingling. He wrote, “This is a social and musical revolution. How could it be that none of us in the East knew this was taking place?” He wrote that watching Janis Joplin perform provided one of the greatest musical experiences of his life.
He wrote that it gave him the confidence that this was a world he could get comfortable in. He signed her immediately, or rather, he began the process of signing her, which turned out to be considerably more eventful than the word signing implies. Big Brother and the Holding Company were signed to Mainstream Records at the time.
Davis paid $200,000 to buy out their contract. He negotiated with Albert Grossman, who had become Janis’s manager, about the Columbia deal. The money was arranged, the details were worked out, and then Grossman delivered a message. He called Davis or met with him, the exact logistics are not specified, and he delivered a communication from Janis.
She wanted, Grossman relayed, to sleep with Davis to cement the deal. To make it, in her phrase, more personal, more meaningful, not just a document signed in a corporate building. Davis wrote about this in his memoir with a mixture of obvious flattery and careful professionalism. He took it as a great compliment. He declined.
He told Grossman that it would not be fitting to complicate their professional relationship, and so the deal was made on conventional terms. The signing meeting was scheduled. The signing meeting. This is the part that almost nobody knows. Read that sentence again. The signing meeting, Clive Davis, Albert Grossman, Janis Joplin, the members of Big Brother and the Holding Company, a Columbia Records conference room, documents on the table, pens in hands, the meeting proceeded.
The documents were reviewed, the questions were asked and answered, the deal was discussed in its final form. At the end of the meeting, the documents were signed. People began to stand and gather their things, and one of the members of Big Brother and the Holding Company rose from his chair, and Clive Davis saw, in the specific way you see things you were not expecting to see, that this particular band member had been sitting at the table for the duration of the meeting without any clothing below the waist. He had been nude throughout the entire contract signing at Columbia Records in New York City. Davis wrote about this in his memoir. He wrote it with the careful understatement of someone who has had 50 years to find the appropriate tone. When one of the members of Big Brother stood up at the end of the meeting, he wrote, “I could see that he had been sitting there nude the whole time.” 11 words, “I could see that he had been
sitting there nude the whole time.” Nobody in the room had reacted. Not Janis, not Grossman, not the other band members. The Columbia executives had apparently not noticed. The meeting had proceeded normally. A man had been nude at a record label signing for the entirety of the meeting and nobody had said anything.
That was how Big Brother and the Holding Company signed to Columbia Records. After the signing, Davis did something that reveals everything about the gap between the world he came from and the world he had just entered. He called Richard Rodgers. Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The man who had written Oklahoma and South Pacific and The Sound of Music and Carousel.
The most successful composer in the history of American musical theater. A man whose work defined what American popular music had been for 30 years. Davis was a theater lover. He had grown up with Rodgers’ music. He respected Rodgers enormously and he thought, genuinely thought, that Rodgers might be impressed by Janis Joplin’s cover of Summertime from Porgy and Bess.
The logic was not wrong, exactly. Summertime was Gershwin, not Rodgers, but it was the Great American Songbook. It was the musical tradition Rodgers represented and Janis’ version was extraordinary, raw and powerful and completely unlike any previous version. He played it for Rodgers. Rodgers was not impressed.
Davis wrote about this with the rueful humor of someone who has had decades to understand why it went the way it went. He had asked a man from one musical world to evaluate something from a completely different musical world, and the man had assessed it accurately from his own perspective. It was not his world.
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It was not what he understood music to be. Richard Rodgers was not wrong about what Janis Joplin was doing. He simply did not have the vocabulary to value it. Davis did not repeat the experiment. There was also the matter of Laura Nyro. Laura Nyro was a singer-songwriter who had been just beginning to develop her reputation when she encountered Janis Joplin at an industry event.
She was, by 1969, someone that Clive Davis had also signed. A writer of extraordinary songs, a performer of unusual intensity. She approached Janis. She was barely known at the time. She wanted to tell her how much she loved her work. She stood nearby hoping to be acknowledged. Janis was busy.
She was drinking Southern Comfort and talking to someone she found more interesting in that moment. She didn’t acknowledge Laura Nyro. Davis watched this happen. A little while later, after Nyro had become somewhat successful herself, Janis called Davis. “I can see I’m not the number one female in your eyes anymore,” she said. She meant it.
She was also making a joke about it. She was also right. She was, as she often was, all three things simultaneously. The relationship between Janis Joplin and Clive Davis was, across its three years, the specific relationship of an artist and a record executive who genuinely respected each other and occasionally drove each other to the limits of their patience. Davis wanted hits.
Janis wanted to make the music she was trying to make. These interests were mostly aligned and occasionally weren’t. The Cheap Thrills title argument, the Cosmic Blues reviews, the specific tension of someone who had been signed by the music industry and was now discovering what that meant in practice.
Davis, to his credit, gave her significant creative latitude. He had signed her because of what she was. He was smart enough to understand that what she was could not be managed into something more convenient without ceasing to be what it was. Pearl was almost done when she died. Davis was still at Columbia. She had been recording at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles.
The album was extraordinary. He could hear it in the sessions, in the rough mixes, in everything that came out of that period. And then October 4th, 1970. Davis heard about it the way everyone heard about it. Suddenly, without preparation, the news arriving in the middle of an ordinary day. Pearl was released in January 1971.
It went to number one. Davis had signed her at Monterey. He had declined her offer professionally and graciously. He had watched a band member sit nude through an entire contract meeting and said nothing. He had played her music for Richard Rodgers and been politely rebuffed. He had heard her say, “I can see I’m not the number one female in your eyes anymore.
” And now she was gone and the album was number one and the voice that had reorganized his understanding of his own career was on vinyl, finished, as good as anything he had ever been involved in. He put it all in his memoir. 40 years later, he left nothing out. Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever been in a room where the rules you came in with turned out to be completely irrelevant to what was actually happening? Clive Davis went to Monterey with the instincts of a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer who had recently been appointed to run a major record label. He left having signed Janis Joplin, which meant he then had to navigate a contract signing at which one participant was nude throughout, an offer from the artist to sleep with him, a Broadway legend who was not impressed, and a phone call that ended with a line he is still quoting 50 years later. He managed all of it. He is 92 years old.
He is still in the music business. He has been in the music business for 60 years, and the first major signing he ever made was the spine-tingling woman he watched at Monterey who offered to sleep with him to make the deal more personal. He declined. He has never regretted the signing.
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