An array of bona fide A-listers was out in force at the funeral of Clive Davis in New York on Monday morning, paying heartfelt eulogies to the record company man who mentored so many huge-selling artists.
Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, Dionne Warwick, Alicia Keys and Barry Manilow were all there at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan’s Midtown. Kenny G opened the service with a clarinet piece, and was followed by Hudson, who sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and I Will Always Love You, a song made famous by Davis’s one time protege Whitney Houston.
Warwick sang Over The Rainbow and recalled how Davis convinced her to persist during a period in the 1970s she was considering leaving the music industry altogether. She also spelled out an acronym of his name: “Completely loyal, incredibly valuable and everlasting.”
“He was always asking, ‘Where’s my Dionne?’ Well, I’m here today, Clive, for you,” she said. “I’ll always be here for you.”
Another artist Davis mentored, Barry Manilow, who has been recently battling cancer, said in his speech: “A few months ago, surgeons removed a piece of my lung Last week, I lost a piece of my heart.”
It was Davis, he explained, who suggested he re-write his song Brandy, which became his breakthrough hit Mandy. “He would show me a song; I would turn it down; we would argue; I would rearrange it; I would record it. This went on for nearly 50 years. He believed in me from the very beginning.”
In an emotional eulogy, Alicia Keys said of Davis: “You saw the music that was still sleeping inside me, waiting for someone with the wisdom and the courage to call it forward. In a world that so often reduces art to commerce and genius to product, you held the line. You reminded me again and again that what we were doing was about truth and legacy and about the human heart reaching out to another human heart and saying you’re not alone.”
Springsteen remembered his own ‘golden moment’ with Davis, when he came into his office at Columbia Records in 1972 and played a couple of songs on an acoustic. “It’s the moment, the one where, if you’re talented, if you’re lucky enough, it comes but once in your life,” Springsteen said. “If the right man is listening to you from across that big desk. For me, now and forever, Clive Davis was that right man.”
After the speeches, Davis’s family left for a private burial with a string quartet serenading him on his way. His exit music? Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) and Springsteen’s Born To Run.
