Legendary music producer Clive Davis remembers too well when Whitney Houston suddenly died over Grammys weekend 12 years ago.
“It was painful. First of all, it was shocking. I had been with her 48 hours earlier,” Davis recalled in an interview with CNN this week.
The superstar singer was set to attend Davis’ annual pre-Grammys gala the night of her death, when she was found in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel where the party would be held hours later.
Decades before the tragedy, the Grammy-winning producer discovered Houston as a teenager in New Jersey and helped catapult her to what would become an unparalleled career. Davis and Houston remained close throughout her life. He said the singer told him she felt she had beat her struggles with addiction and was ready to get back into the studio to record new music.
“She knew I couldn’t believe that she was still smoking cigarettes,” Davis said. “And she showed me she had given up smoking. She had gone to some kind of throat doctor to remove all the nicotine from her throat. This was February.”
Davis said that just days before she died, Houston asked if he could come up with new material for new music.
We scheduled that we’d be ready,” he recalled. “That’s the way we worked. We collaborated and met before any recording session with material. And we said, ‘Yeah, she’ll go in August.’ So she was vital, optimistic. Looking forward to the future. That’s the lethal power of drugs. You never beat it. She didn’t beat it.”
Even with the painful news of Houston’s passing that day, the function proceeded in order to provide attendees a place to grieve. “I gave her family a call. “Look, this was her favourite party,” I remarked. “We must honour her,” Davis reflected. In addition to honouring her life, we must create a calm space where the bereaved can congregate and not feel alone. We decided to continue honouring her life and her special gift of playing the music she adores.
