The Man With the Golden Ear

How Clive Davis Shaped the Careers of Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando

Clive Davis did not play an instrument, and he never pretended otherwise. What he possessed instead was rarer and, in the end, more consequential: an ear that could hear a star before the rest of the world had even learned the name. From the moment he walked into the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 — a buttoned-up lawyer in tennis whites, blinking at a sea of flowers and long hair — to his death on June 22, 2026, at the age of ninety-four, Davis spent six decades deciding which voices the world would carry with it. He signed Janis Joplin on instinct that weekend. He would spend the rest of his life trusting that instinct, and the careers it built form a map of American popular music. Two of those careers belong to artists whose paths Eileen Shapiro has long followed: Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando.

Davis was the founder and president of Arista Records, the onetime president of Columbia Records, and, until the day he died, the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment. He guided Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Santana, Barry Manilow, and Alicia Keys, among a roster so deep it reads like a century’s worth of radio. But the measure of a man like Davis is not only in the titans he made famous. It is also in the moments — sometimes a single phone call, sometimes a single song — when he changed the trajectory of an artist’s entire life.

For Tony Orlando, that moment came early, and it came from the other side of the desk. By the late 1960s Orlando had already tasted teenage pop success and then watched it evaporate, and he had stepped away from performing altogether. It was Davis who, in 1967, hired the young Orlando as a music executive at Columbia Records — a vote of confidence that kept him inside the industry at the precise moment he might have left it for good. From that perch Orlando learned the business from the inside, eventually extending the same faith to others; it was Orlando who would give Barry Manilow one of his earliest recording opportunities. The chain of mentorship that defined an era began, in no small part, with Davis’s willingness to see in a sidelined young singer something worth keeping. Orlando would, of course, return to the stage and become a household name with Dawn, but the bridge that carried him there was built by a man who believed talent was worth investing in even when the charts had gone quiet.

For Randy Edelman, Davis’s touch arrived through a song — and reshaped two careers at once. In 1975 Edelman, then recording for 20th Century Records, wrote and recorded a piano-driven ballad he called “Weekend in New England.” It was a quiet, aching thing, and in Edelman’s own hands it slipped by almost unnoticed. Davis heard it differently. Early in 1976 the Arista chief recognized the song’s enormous commercial promise, commissioned an arrangement tailored to Barry Manilow, and placed it on Manilow’s album This One’s for You. The result was one of the defining ballads of the decade — a standard since recorded by artists from Jim Nabors to Vera Lynn. That a composer of Edelman’s stature wrote it should surprise no one who knows his catalogue. That Davis knew exactly what to do with it is precisely the kind of alchemy that made him singular.

The relationship did not end there. Davis brought Edelman onto the Arista roster himself, releasing the albums If Love Is Real in 1977 and You’re the One in 1979. Edelman, a Cincinnati Conservatory-trained pianist who had begun in Broadway pit orchestras, would go on to become one of the most prolific and beloved film and television composers of his generation — the architect of scores for Gettysburg, Dragonheart, Kindergarten Cop, My Cousin Vinny, and the unmistakable music of MacGyver. His songs have been carried by The Carpenters, Dionne Warwick, Olivia Newton-John, and Blood, Sweat & Tears. But it was Davis who first heard, in a modest B-side, a melody capable of becoming permanent.

There is a thread that runs from Orlando to Edelman, and it is the same thread that runs through every name Davis ever championed. He did not merely sign artists; he saw them whole — saw what they could become before they could see it themselves, and then arranged the circumstances in which it might happen. He restarted careers the industry had given up on, as he did for Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, and he launched others that had not yet begun. When Franklin worried in 1979 that her best years were behind her, Davis’s answer was two words: “You’re timeless.” It was less a compliment than a creed.

Davis was twice married and twice divorced, and shared his later years in a long partnership with Greg Schriefer; he leaves four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He leaves, too, a discography so vast that to list it is to narrate the second half of the American century in song. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, and his pre-Grammy gala remained, until the very end, the hottest invitation in the business.

For the artists whose lives he touched, the loss is not abstract. It is the loss of the man who picked up the phone, who heard the song, who said yes. Randy Edelman’s music endures in concert halls and film scores around the world; Tony Orlando’s voice remains a fixture of the American songbook. Both can trace a decisive turn in their stories back to a single, discerning listener in a Manhattan office. Clive Davis spent his life proving that the right ear, at the right moment, can change everything. He was, to the last, the man with the golden ear — and the world he heard into being will outlast us all.