Clive Davis Remembered by A&R Pete Ganbarg: He ‘Had This Crazy Ability to Predict the Future’

Pete Ganbarg, a two-time Grammy Award winner, worked with Clive Davis from 1997 to 2001 as senior director of A&R at Arista Records, where he A&R’d Santana’s Supernatural album, which sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and won nine Grammys in 2000. He then reunited with Davis, who died June 22, from 2004 to 2008 as an A&R consultant at J/RCA Records. Here, Ganbarg takes readers inside Davis’ legendary A&R meetings.

Clive treated A&R people almost like protected species. They were the most important people inside of his company because he realized that as an A&R if you can’t do your job right and give the company the tools to work with, then the company can’t do its job.

A&R meetings with Clive were never scheduled. You’d get a call at 9:30 in the morning: “A&R meeting at 10” or “A&R meeting right now.” An A&R meeting was basically a day in the life of Clive Davis because you were spending so much time listening to music. It could be the artist is calling in and so he’s talking to the artist about the music, while we are there helping, passing notes and things like that. It’s really a lost art. You don’t see that anymore. You could be sitting there, literally, from 10 a.m. to midnight. If you had another meeting, tough, cancel it.

Clive worked with a lot of artists who did not write their own songs, so you would have publishers and songwriters sending in songs to be considered for Whitney [Houston], for Aretha [Franklin], for, the [American] Idols, whoever was in cycle looking for material.

This was back in the pre-MP3 days. The [music] would literally — first on cassette and then on CD — be put in a folder called “the song folder.” There was a Whitney folder, an Aretha folder, an Idols folder. Every CD was wrapped in a lyric sheet and went in the folder. There was never an agenda, but it was like, “OK, today’s the day that we’re going to talk about Whitney. Who’s got the latest Whitney song file?” It would come in with seven or eight CDs. It would never pile up more than that because we would do this once a week, sometimes more than once a week. Everybody would have a lyric sheet and everybody would be listening.

Now it’s about algorithms, TikTok, virality and influence. That had nothing to do with anything with Clive. It was always about the music.

I realized over time that he was not asking our opinion to influence his opinion; he already had his opinion. He was asking our opinion because we were stand-ins for the audience. He didn’t want you to answer with words, he wanted you to answer with numbers. Clive just wanted to cut to the chase: “Is the song a hit or is it not a hit?” The scale was zero to 10. Nothing was a zero, nothing was a 10. A six was a pass, a seven was an album cut, an eight was a hit. Eight was rare air. You did not say the word “eight” unless you were ready to take a bullet for it, because hits were currency. So when you said eight, that’s like trumpets blaring, that’s like the gates of the kingdom opening.

Nothing was a two because it’s like six was the word for two. Six, we don’t need to talk about it. The A&R [executives] would get cute sometimes because if there was a song that was better than an album cut, but they didn’t want to put their neck on the line that it was a hit, they would say, “Well, Clive, it’s a 7.97275.”

I remember listening to Whitney’s comeback in the late ’90s when I was there with “My Love Is Your Love,” the Wyclef [Jean] song. That got hit scores across the board. It was like, “That’s a smash.” There was also a Whitney song that Rodney Jerkins did called “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay.” Everyone was like, “That’s an eight. That’s a nine.”

It was one thing to play a song when it’s just Clive and the A&R people in the room, but if the artist was sitting in the room, how did you tell Clive that you think the song is a hit or not? So, like with baseball, we would come up with signals like a third base coach is flashing signs to the batter. So you’d suddenly put three fingers on your cheek. Clive would notice 10 minus three is a seven. He knew exactly what you were talking about.

Clive also had this crazy ability to predict the future. Sarah McLachlan had an album called Fumbling Towards Ecstasy that came out in 1993. It was triple platinum, ultimately, in America. She took a while between that studio album and the next studio album, which was Surfacing in 1997. Clive said, “OK, this is what’s going to happen. We’ve got ‘Building a Mystery’ out now. Second single is going to be ‘Sweet Surrender,’ third single is going to be ‘Adia,’ fourth single is probably going to be the biggest single, ‘Angel.’ They’re all going to be hits, and we’ll probably end up selling north of probably 6 or 7 million.” He was exactly right, and that album sold 8 million copies. He was not only predicting the future, he was willing it.

He never got tired of listening to music. It was always whatever is out, whatever’s new, whatever people are excited about, just to understand what keeps music moving forward.

Every weekend his assistant would make him a cassette, and it would be all the new songs, and that’s what he was listening to all weekend. He had a thirst to keep current. Nothing was ever too new or different for him not to try to understand why it was connecting with an audience.

This story appears in the July 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.