Mr. Magic
Clive Davis defined an era of popular American music that ended with his death
The Last Mogul
He argues, threatens, and cajoles, even from beyond the grave.
Music lives inside our heads. That’s not entirely true, though. The music we live by is the creation of individual songwriters and musicians, who hear what we hear, but in a different way, and then they give it back to us, through the channels of their own mastery, and of their own particular psyches, which are unique to them. Who really knows what Bob Dylan is thinking about when he writes his American folk songs, which are not really folk songs, or what he thinks about when he performs on stage, with musicians who fill in the blanks of Bob Dylan’s own musical imagination. Sometimes he gets bored of what he’s hearing, the same way that we do. Why? Because he got bored, even though his music is ours, too, as part of the soundtrack of our lives. The phrase “soundtrack of our lives,” is another giveaway, though. American music is, or was, in its heyday, a vast commercial enterprise. For every Bob Dylan, for every Joni Mitchell, or Bruce Springsteen, or Prince, or Dionne Warwick, …