How I was a dick to Clive Davis. Twice.

In com­mem­or­a­tion of my friend Tom Carson’s enga­ging review of Mr. Davis’ latest book, The Soundtrack Of My Life, I relate this anecdote. 

I guess it was 1994. I had been a pop music colum­nist for the New York Daily News for a while, so I got asked to a bunch of music events, but by this time I don’t think I had the column any more. Nevertheless, I got an invite to a very special—I believe the word “intim­ate” was used—private mini-concert by Carly Simon. The main reas­on it was spe­cial was because of Carly Simon’s oft-cited reluct­ance to per­form live. Another was that it was being held at Fez, a cozy, some might say funky, even, spot below the chi-chi Time Café on Lafayette Street. 

Why did I go? I was­n’t the world’s biggest Carly Simon fan, as many read­ers may have inferred quite some time ago. Then again, it WAS in a sense an hon­or just to be invited. And there would be an open bar. And at the time I was a lot more insec­ure about my pos­i­tion rel­at­ive to New York night life than I am now, so there was that. The issue of there hav­ing noth­ing bet­ter to do that even­ing may have been per­tin­ent. I went, and I went stag. 

The reas­on I place the show around 1994 is because her band had Doug Wimbish, of the Sugar Hill ses­sion band and fur­ther fame, on bass, and he had played on Simon’s album of that year, Letter Never Sent. He sure is a good bass play­er. Anyway, the invite had­n’t been kid­ding about an open bar. It was wide open, includ­ing the top shelf stuff, and I could not believe that I was sit­ting at a little table with a couple of people I did­n’t know and belt­ing back the Macallans like there was no tomor­row. Soon enough I was feel­ing fine, and even singing along with some of Carly’s greatest hits. “Do the Mashed Potato with a new atti­tude…” Aw yeah. She plays for like a half hour, 35 minutes, and then off she goes, and of course the place goes wild, clam­or­ing for an encore. She makes the crowd wait good and long before she comes back out, and when she does come back out, she’s got Clive Davis, who at the time was the head of her label, Arista, with her. And again, every­body’s going nuts, and he’s grin­ning, and she’s grin­ning, and every­body’s stand­ing, and Carly and Clive are motion­ing for every­body to sit down (I myself was still sit­ting, swill­ing in my Scotch) and be quiet for just a minute. Once every­one’s sit­ting down and shut­ting up, Clive takes the mic, and the first thing he says is, “I prob­ably don’t have to tell you who I am.”

And the crowd lets out an appre­ci­at­ive chortle. And I have to tell you, I don’t think my tim­ing was ever bet­ter, because I waited just a microbeat and a half after the chortle died down and I bel­lowed, “Who are you?” And a couple of people laughed, and a couple of people gasped, and Clive looked annoyed and con­tin­ued with his speech.

Cut to May of 1996. I had spent the late winter/early spring of that year in Dublin, Ohio, work­ing as a freel­ance con­sult­ant for CompuServe, and after that I thought it would be a swell idea if I took the money I had earned and, instead of pay­ing taxes with it, going to Paris with it. Through a series of cir­cum­stances too tor­tu­ous to be prof­it­ably related here, my trav­el­ing com­pan­ion is Young Rosemary Passantino, a one-time rock crit­ic her­self, who was accom­pa­ny­ing me on a purely pla­ton­ic basis (her live-in boy­friend is even going to pick us up from Kennedy when we get back—I remem­ber that return flight being the last time I smoked on an air­plane). On our first night there we decided to vis­it the legendary nightclub Crazy Horse, because you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen an elab­or­ately cho­reo­graphed stage show fea­tur­ing a dozen identic­ally pro­por­tioned nude young women. Anyway, the only reser­va­tion we could get was for the mid­night show, so we had time to kill after din­ner, so we went to the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysee. It was around 11:30, near clos­ing time. I was gonna check out with some Lester Young double CD set (called Le Quintessence; I still have it, it’s real good). And I notice, stand­ing on the marble floor of the grand lobby, a famil­i­ar figure. 

“Clive Davis!” I say. “What are you doing in the lobby of the Virgin Megastore in Paris just before mid­night?” Clearly chuffed to be recog­nized, he says, “Where else is there to be?”

“Say,” I ask as I sidle up to him, “you remem­ber that nice little Carly Simon thing at Fez a few years back?”

“Sure I do. Great show!”

“It really was! And remem­ber, before the encore, when you had a few words for the crowd and you star­ted by say­ing ‘I prob­ably don’t have to tell you who I am’?”

Clive looked a little wary now. “Uh-huh!”

“And there was this drunk guy in the back and he yelled out, ‘Who are you?’ ”

“Yes…”

“That was me! I was that guy!”

And Clive just looked at me. 

“Anyway, it was great meet­ing you!”

After we had left, and were walk­ing to the Crazy Horse, Rosemary was all like, “What’d you have to go and ali­en­ate Clive Davis like that for?”

And I’m like, “Oh, right, because he was ready to ask us to cruise around with him in his limo all night.”

“You can­’t be sure of that. Maybe he wanted to hang out with some nice Americans.”

Maybe he did. Who knows? If I had played my cards dif­fer­ently, per­haps I  could have been Mrs. Clive Davis today. But no. I had to be a dick.