Clive Davis is a legend in the music industry, having worked with almost every big star you can name. He just turned 90 and in a very long, but very revealing stream-of-consciousness monolog, he talks about his life in music and the artists he mentored into superstardom. 

My favorite part, though, is this little nugget, which concerns Simon & Garfunkel's biggest hit.

"One memory that stands out is when Simon & Garfunkel played their [1970] “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album for me. Paul and Artie thought that I would have picked “Cecilia,” the more obvious single, but I chose “Bridge.”

Now, in those days, major radio stations never would play a record over three or three-and-a-half minutes long, and this was a five-minute ballad. It was anything but formulaic. But from the creative point of view, sometimes you can’t go with formula.

And only in a meeting like that — where the promotion staff could point out the difficulties, that they couldn’t get this chain or this major station or crossover station — could you pass the word to promotion: You have to do everything you can to show that we know this one is different. And when the stations played it, the phones lit up at such a volume that it wasn’t just a hit record — it was a potential classic."

His faith in the tune was well rewarded - it wound up as the #1 song of 1970. 

An interesting man who made interesting music.

Clive Davis Shares ‘Clive-isms’ on Music, Artists, His History, and Keeping an Open Mind