Arista Records Story and Album Discography
FOREWORD 2024
You may wonder why I had decided to write another version of the Arista Records story and album discography for Medium when I already had one done for FIMFiction a time or two ago. Well, it dawned on me, at that moment, that there was more of the story of Arista to be told than I had told before, and that I had the potential to provide a much more detailed version of the discography than I had previously.
I vowed to work at any given time to patch up a few mistakes that were present in the original FIMFiction version, from an overflow of gaps in the discography to certain items like “(CD, Album, RE)” still being present in the text provided for certain albums. The extra work obviously was going to take longer than the original version did (I only worked on that for a few days, at that).
As well, I began to work on a rewrite of this discography in the weeks that led up to Election Day (much like the original version), and, as a result, was quite reasonably distracted by things related to both that and the COVID-19 pandemic. I returned to this project after getting my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, mainly to recapture some small percentage of the moments and hours I lost to every bit of hell that we had endured around the world. For some reason, I stopped again in September of 2021, only for my commitment to the project to resurface in the summer of 2022. That turned out to be a false start, as did an attempt to work on it earlier in 2023. I was compelled by an airing of “A Very Barry Christmas”, the NBC holiday special starring Barry Manilow, the label’s most famous act, to work on this project again in December. This time, a passion returned, and it’s quite timely that it did: 2025 will be the year in which Arista celebrates its 50th anniversary. And that is a good thing on which to time this writeup. The total work this took was approximately three years and seven months, and survived OS upgrades, changes at Discogs, and multiple hard and flash drive migrations.
This project is dedicated to Clive Davis, who ran Arista Records for most of the original label’s existence. He has been an open bisexual since 2013 and I, a fellow member of the LGBTQIA+ community, hereby award him considerable salutations.
ORIGINAL WRITING (certain rephrasings and additional material within are from between 2020 and 2024)
The story of Arista Records was, for much of its life, the continuing one of Clive Davis, who headed CBS Records from 1967 to 1973.
It all began when Davis was fired from CBS for various allegations, including that he used company funds to bankroll his son’s bar mitzvah (he strongly denied this claim back then and still does now). Clive was subsequently hired by Columbia Pictures (which later became sister to the former CBS Records in 1989) in June 1974 to be a consultant for the company’s record and music operations, including Bell Records, a successful label on mainly the singles front that was, alongside various labels it distributed, was home to Tony Orlando & Dawn, the 5th Dimension, the Box Tops, the Delfonics, the Partridge Family, David Cassidy and a number of one-off talents. During the early 1970s, Bell had been particularly successful in a number of overseas markets. especially the U.K., where it even had its own hitmaking roster of talent. On the domestic front, however, 1974 had been a disappointing year for the label financially, which led to part owner Larry Uttal selling his stake and founding Private Stock.
Clive seemed to have felt that a part of the problem with Bell’s underperformance was in what it emphasized. Bell’s penchant for sunny, happy songs was working wonders for it on the Hot 100, but, with a few exceptions, seemed not to correspond well to chart action on the increasingly more demanding album surveys, which had been pursuing more serious affairs such as jazz and progressive rock music. He decided that the direction of Columbia Pictures’ record labels should be directed toward those serious affairs, and by November 1974, with a 10 million dollar investment from the studio, and while keeping time writing his memoirs, Davis folded its various legacy labels (Colpix Records, Colgems Records, and Bell Records) into a new entity of which he would ultimately own 20 percent. In order to achieve the shift in direction Clive wanted for the new label, he let go of many of Bell’s earlier acts, outright dropped David Cassidy, Tony Orlando and Dawn, and The 5th Dimension, who respectively joined RCA, Elektra and ABC, and farmed Suzi Quatro and Hot Chocolate out to the Bell/Arista-distributed label, Big Tree, but kept some of the Bell acts he felt had commercial potential, such as Barry Manilow, the Bay City Rollers, and Melissa Manchester. The new label, Arista, was officially launched in January 1975.
If you’ve continuing to wonder where the name Arista comes from, then you should take a visit to New York City’s secondary school honor society (Clive was a member of such a society at Erasmus Hall High School).
Clive didn’t take long to find some talent to grow. One of the first places he founded was in the least likely of his associated acts: a decidedly anti-establishment vocal pioneer named Gil Scott-Heron and his keyboard-playing assistant Brian Jackson. Their first album for the label, The First Minute of a New Day, followed Scott-Heron’s and Jackson’s critically acclaimed collaboration effort Winter in America on the Strata-East label; the title track appeared on the newer album because it was not featured on the earlier album. Although it was guaranteed to be more of an underground than commercial success, it was still heavily promoted by the label and entered the Top Jazz Albums chart at #17 on February 8, 1975. It later peaked at #5 before falling off the charts on July 19, 1975, 24 weeks after its original appearance; Arista’s efforts also saw it peak at #8 on the Black Albums chart and #30 on the Pop Albums chart.
On the singles front, things looked promising for Clive’s new label. Having helped to send out Bell Records with a bang on its last chart-topper “Mandy”, Barry Manilow catapulted himself to stardom. He started his path to becoming Arista’s signature star; within a year of its establishment he hit #12 with “It’s a Miracle”, #6 with “Could It Be Magic” and #1 with “I Write the Songs”, a composition from the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston that entered Arista into 1976. In the case of “Could It Be Magic”, it was a remake of a song he initially released in 1973, but it did much better than the original version. The successes of these three singles led to his first two albums being reissued (now with roman numerals) and becoming huge album hits, something the original releases weren’t.
Meanwhile, another underperforming Bell artist saw her star turn upside down overnight in her own respect: Melissa Manchester. Even though her first two works (for Bell) didn’t do so well, she was on the verge of stardom and finally got it with her Arista debut, “Midnight Blue”, which enjoyed 17 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 charts; it peaked at #6 by August 9, 1975.
Clive also tested the Bay City Rollers, who were noted in the book British Hit Singles & Albums as “the tartan teen sensations from Edinburgh”, “the first of many acts heralded as the ‘biggest group since the Beatles’ and one of the most screamed-at teeny-bopper acts of the 1970s”. Here in America, their albums and singles hadn’t even come out yet! Clive sought to change that. He put out their self-titled American debut album on Arista. It went to #20 thanks to one of the catchiest tunes that the decade ever brought: “Saturday Night’’ was an upbeat pop rock number encoded with a memorable hook that took it right to #1: the word “Saturday” was spelled out in a rhythmic chant. The track debuted here in the States via a satellite-link performance on the short-lived Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell (the first three words of the title would be inherited by NBC for SNL as we know it today). The follow-up album, Rock and Roll Love Letter, did just as well, hitting #31 thanks to their #9 hit ‘’Money Honey’’. They did even better with another follow-up, Dedication, which was modified to remove tracks that were on their previous US outing; the result, capitalizing on their #12 (#4 UK) remake of Dusty Springfield’s ‘’I Only Wanna Be With You’’, hit #26.
Another set of teeny-boppers struck gold on Arista with another summertime anthem: Silver, a country rock group from Los Angeles, had an enormous hit with “Wham Bam” (sometimes spelled out in full as “Wham Bam Shang-a-Lang”), which #16 on the Hot 100 and #27 in Canada upon its release in May 1976, and which was put back in the public conciousness through its usage in the Marvel superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. The group consisted of lead vocalist-guitarist John Batdorf, keyboardist-vocalist Brent Mydland, bassist-vocalist Tom Leadon, vocalist-guitarist Greg Collier, and drummer-percussionist Harry Stinton. The song, composed by country music songwriter Rick Giles, was personally handed to the band by Clive, who felt that it was the only song of theirs who could have any real hit potential. Clive was proven right by the band’s next singles, “Memory” and “Musician (It’s Not An Easy Life”), both of which flopped on the charts; their self-titled album only managed to peak at #145 on the charts. The group, which thusly became a one-hit wonder, disbanded in 1978 and Mydland became the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead in 1979.
Some other singles, including former Raspberries musician Eric Carmen’s #1 smash ‘’All By Myself’’, Gil Scott-Heron’s groundbreaking single “Johannesburg” (a #29 R&B hit which was the first pop single to ever directly address South Africa’s much-maligned and apartheid system, which would be abolished in 1994) and charting albums by Monty Python, the British comic troupe who entered America via PBS (particularly via KERA-TV in Dallas), completed Arista’s (and thus, Clive’s) story for the first two years.
Arista’s open to the rest of 1976 was with one of its biggest coups: the signage of Lou Reed. Reed had earlier put out a string of successful albums for RCA . . . that is, until 1975, which saw the debut of Metal Machine Music, a critically savaged (and less than healthy) mixture of industrial music, noise rock, and contemporary sound art that RCA (according to some sources) returned to stores by the thousands after a few weeks. Though his next album, Coney Island Baby had fared better in the critical eye (far better in some cases) it still underperformed and Reed was on the verge of bankruptcy. Clive Davis successfully helped ail his financial health and signed him to his label . . . Arista. Although his first album for the label, Rock and Roll Heart, didn’t do all that well, he next released Street Hassle, the first commercially released pop album to employ binaural recording technology, which put his music back on familiar ground. Interestingly, although Lou Reed is credited as a pioneer of punk music, he never wanted anything to do with the genre and despised any and all attempts at connecting him to that genre, stating in an interview:
I’m too literate to be into punk rock . . . The whole CBGB’s, new Max’s thing that everyone’s into and what’s going on in London — you don’t seriously think I’m responsible for what’s mostly rubbish?
From his then-freshly released album, Barry Manilow released “This One’s for You” (#29), “Weekend in New England” (#10) and, in 1977, the #1 smash “Looks Like We Made It”. The #10 song from the album is notable as it is among those tunes that just barely gives out its title, only hinting at it via the lyric “Time in New England took me away…” Going back to his roots as a writer of commercial jingles, Manilow won two Clio Awards in 1976 for his work for The Coca-Cola Company (Tab) and Johnson & Johnson (Band-Aid). For those who don’t know what the Clio Awards are, they’re the Oscars of the world of advertising.
Eric Carmen followed up his major hit success ‘’All By Myself’’ with hits “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” (#11) and ‘’She Did It’’ (#23) during this period, and had two of his songs (“That’s Rock and Roll”, “Hey Deanie”) covered by then-rising teen idol Shaun Cassidy, who kept Carmen’s chart boat afloat for a while.
Meanwhile in Detroit, Ray Parker Jr., with Vincent Bohnam, Jerry Knight, and Arnell Carmichael formed a group with the tongue-in-cheek name of Raydio. After securing a record deal with Clive’s Arista, the group scored their first big hit in early 1978 with “Jack And Jill”, which was taken from their self-titled debut album. The song peaked at #8 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, followed by a #5 peak on the R&B end, and it also reached #11 in the UK Singles Chart, earning a gold record in the process. The group’s “Is This a Love Thing” peaked at #27 in the UK in August 1978. After only hitting #43 with “Honey I’m Rich”, the group returned with another major hit, “You Can’t Change That”, which hit #9 pop and #3 R&B in early 1979.
In 1977, Melissa Manchester recorded an album titled Singin’…, featuring a cover of Michael Jackson’s 1972 hit ‘’I Wanna Be Where You Are’’. Its songwriter Leon Ware heard the cut and subsequently expressed interest in producing the singer. He went right to work on her, producing what was intended as the singer’s 1978 album release — which Manchester planned to name Caravan — all original material except “Bad Weather”, a Stevie Wonder composition which had been a single for the Supremes in 1974. Clive Davis then received the resulting master tapes from Ware. Davis, however, didn’t feel as though it had anything that would put Manchester back in the Top 40. Davis had the idea of putting out the Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager composition “Don’t Cry Out Loud” — originally recorded by The Moments, who had a minor hit with it — and strongly suggested that Manchester do her own version. She had in fact stated that this was her brainchild — but that she wanted to record it as a personal, intimate ballad, rather than as the bombastic, Broadway-style showcase that Harry Maslin would arrange for her; when she heard the latter, she was startled, somewhat pleasantly. The track later was added to the album; even though she wanted to keep the album titled Caravan, it was in fact the tune itself, issued simultaneously as a single, that became the new title of the album. The album wound up becoming the new top 40 hit Clive had hoped for, hitting #10 in March and kicking the LP to #33. She was unable to maintain this new success though. Her next single, “Through the Eyes of Love”, a theme song from the Robby Benson vehicle Ice Castles, only reached #76.
The Kinks looked for a long time like they wouldn’t click either. Ever since they were banned from touring the U.S. in 1965, they spent their time putting out albums. These, such as Something Else (1967), The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968), Arthur (1969), and Lola Versus Powerman (1970), along with their accompanying singles, were considered among the decade’s finest and most influential recordings; they were, however, not commercially successful. In the 1970s, success further eluded them, critically and commercially. The group may have been about ready to make a comeback however. In 1978, Van Halen covered “You Really Got Me” for their debut single, a Top 40 US hit, helping boost the band’s commercial resurgence (the band later covered “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”, another early Kinks song). Around the same time, they were roped into the artist roster of Arista. The hard rock sound of their first album for the label, Low Budget, released in 1979, helped make it the Kinks’ second gold album; it is their highest charting original album in America, where it peaked at number 11.
Another British band that had great success on Arista was the Alan Parsons Project, fronted by Alan Parsons, the man who helped to produce many well-known albums by the Beatles (Abbey Road, Let It Be), Pink Floyd (The Dark Side of the Moon), and Ambrosia (their self-titled 1975 debut). In 1976, Parsons’ own group, which featured him, songwriter Eric Woolfson, and a revolving door of British session musicians that deeply infused themselves with science fiction, released an album called Tales of Mystery and Imagination which just barely made the top-40 on the Hot 200. In 1977, Parsons switched to Arista for his 1977 sophomore album I Robot, named for the Issac Asimov story series. The record went to #9 on the Hot 200, and the band became a mainstay of AOR radio and the album charts for the next few years, also scoring with such albums as Pyramid (1978), Eve (1979), The Turn of a Friendly Card (1980), Eye in the Sky (1982), and Ammonia Avenue (1983). By 1987, with their last proper studio album for Arista, Gaudi, the group was over the hill.
From the deal with Alan Parsons came Arista’s gain of North American distribution rights to the work of the Scottish folk-rock singer-songwriter Al Stewart (no relation to rock superstar Rod Stewart), who in 1976 had a major album and single hit with Year of the Cat on Janus, his first in a career that began with Bedsitter Images, an album Stewart had issued in 1967 on the British arm of CBS Records. Parsons received praise for his production and arrangements on the Year of the Cat album, which over the next few years would become a popular record for demonstrations of stereo phonographs. Parsons and Stewart moved to America for the follow-up album (and Stewart’s Arista debut), Time Passages, recorded in June 1978. When it came out three months later, it became a smash hit, going to #10 on the Hot 100; the title cut reached #7 on the Hot 100 and had the longest stay at #1 on the Easy Listening chart of any 1970s hit single, ten weeks in all. Stewart’s next album, 24 Carrots, was not nearly as successful, though “Midnight Rocks” did go to (appropriately) #24 on the Hot 100. Stewart released one more album on Arista, Live/Indian Summer; when that only made it to #110 on the Hot 200, Arista ended U.S. distribution of his albums, and that was it for him stateside.
Arista somehow seemed to be a retreat for 1960s rock musicians during this period, its label chief, Davis, helping matters by allowing Columbia Records to have considerable success with rock and roll music during his tenure. The late 1970s period at Arista also had albums by Martha Reeves (from the Vandelles!), Don McLean, and even the Grateful Dead, who’d be on the label until 1990; in fact, it was Arista that in 1987 would become the home of the Dead’s only top-10 pop hit, “Touch of Grey.”
Meanwhile, a change of corporate hands was initiated at Arista during 1979. Columbia Pictures, which owned Arista from its inception, was suffering badly from a check-forging scandal involving executive David Begelman, as well as from numerous takeover attempts courtesy of MGM studio chief Kirk Kerkorian, and was seeking to stave off bankruptcy. As a result, Clive Davis went to Munich and successfully convinced Reinhard Mohn (1921–2009), the head of the soon-to-be-giant empire known as Bertelsmann, to acquire the label for $50 million, which Bertelsmann arranged to do on July 27, 1979. The sale was completed on October 1, 1979, and Bertelsmann’s ownership of the label would span the next 25 years of Arista’s life; Mohn was content with the idea of leaving Clive alone to do what he normally did at Arista.
Amidst the negotiations Clive had with Mohn, Arista further cracked the R&B market, topping the Soul charts with “Disco Nights (Rock-Freak)” by a group called GQ, who went on to follow it up with a remake of Billy Stewart’s ‘’I Do Love You’’; Clive was also able to bring such artists as Norman Connors and Phyllis Hyman away from Buddah, which he distributed in 1978. Its potential in this market began to grow exponentially with the news that the label signed R&B songstress Dionne Warwick.
Warwick (or Warwicke) had many a seminal hit during the 1960s (mostly with songs from the Bacharach-David catalogue, 31 in all!) yet the next decade wasn’t at all hers; her latest hit for that time, “Then Came You”, a collaboration with the Spinners, had been 5 years old. Clive Davis personally signed her to Arista around 1979, saying to her: “You may be ready to give the business up, but the business is not ready to give you up”. Her comeback album, Dionne, was produced by Barry Manilow, by this point Arista’s signature artist, with plenty of hits to his credit. The LP, the only one in her career to go Platinum, produced the memorable smash hit “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” (#5) and a hit with the Issac Hayes composition “Deja Vu” (#15, #1AC).
The success of the album made Warwick one of Arista’s first major Black solo artists. Her next album, No Night So Long, also hit the top-30 on the R&B and pop album charts, with the title cut topping the Easy Listening survey, but another single from that album, “Easy Love”, only hit #62 on the Hot 100. After a year of absence from the record business, Warwick returned in 1982 with the album Friends in Love, the title cut of which barely made the top-40 on the pop charts but was a top-30 R&B hit and also hit #5 on the newly renamed Adult Contemporary chart. However, Warwick’s next album, Heartbreaker, from the same year, went Gold almost immediately thanks to a title track (composed by the Bee Gees) that put her back in the top 10 on the pop side.
With her success, Reinhard Mohn brought another soul legend of the 1960s, Aretha Franklin, to Clive’s attention. At Atlantic Records, Aretha had many a (still) celebrated LP to her credit in the late ’60s and early ’70s (including I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Lady Soul, Young, Gifted & Black and Amazing Grace). However, Atlantic was pushing itself more and more toward rock music during the mid-to-late 1970s, increasingly ignoring its R&B acts, among them Aretha, whose mid-to-late 1970s releases began to plummet commercially, save for her 1976 recording of the Curtis Mayfield composition “Something He Can Feel”. With that, she was disappointed, and, after giving a Royal Command Performance at Royal Albert Hall in front of Queen Elizabeth, she opted to exit Atlantic and Clive took the gamble of signing the Queen of Soul to his label.
Her debut album for the label, Aretha, yielded the hit “United Together” (#3 R&B); her cover of Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” was nominated for a Grammy (although it lost to the Manhattans’ “Shining Star”). During her first year at the label, the album competed hotly against a Columbia compilation on her recordings for that label, Aretha Sings the Blues. Her debut album for Arista appears to have won the competition, hitting #47 on the album charts while Aretha Sings the Blues didn’t chart at all.
Her next album, Love All the Hurt Away, included her famed duet of the title track with George Benson; the B-side of the single of that name, a remake of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’”, was nominated for, and this time won, a Grammy. Her album after that, Jump To It, gave Aretha her tenth #1 R&B album — at the time it was the all-time record. It enjoyed a seven-week run at #1 on Billboard’s R&B albums chart and also reached #23 on Billboard’s main album chart. The album was also boosted by its title track, which resumed Aretha’s top-40 career (#1RB, #24pop). Her success (as well as that of Dionne Warwick) boosted Arista into the direction it was about to go: in terms of the amount of R&B records that it sold, from the likes not only of her, but of artists such as Kashif, Whitney Houston, Jermaine Stewart and a great many others, Arista became the Motown of the ‘80s.
As far as one of the other R&B acts on Arista was concerned, Raydio seemed to fall in and out of popularity with each single; after the two singles that followed their 1980 smash (“Two Places at the Same Time”, #30pop, #6RB), they came back strongly with the slow groove “A Woman Needs Love”, which made topped the R&B single chart and crossed over to #4 pop in 1981. Raydio were more consistent hitmakers on the album end; their four albums all went Gold and all of them hit the top 10 on the R&B end. Raydio quietly disbanded in 1981 due to Parker’s desire to launch a solo career, and in acknowledgement that the band had hit a crossroads. His first solo album, The Other Woman, proved to be a smash hit, hitting #11 pop and #1 R&B; th single hit #4 on the pop side and #2 on the R&B side, also reaching #7 in Canada, and #1 on the Australian Kent Music Report.
On the soft-rock front, Melbourne, Australia, contributed to Arista (state-side) a duo called Air Supply consisting of British-born singer-songwriter and guitarist Graham Russell and lead vocalist Russell Hitchcock. They had recently released an album called Life Support. Clive Davis was particularly intrigued by one of the tracks on the album, ‘’Lost In Love’’ (#13AU). He remixed the song and released it as a single in the US early the next year; the result hit #3 on Billboard Hot 100 and №11 in the UK. The group went on to have 7 more Top 10 hits in America: “Every Woman in the World” (#5), “All Out of Love” (#2), “The One That You Love” (#1), “Here I Am (Just When I Thought I Was Over You)” (#5), “Sweet Dreams” (#5), “Even the Nights Are Better” (#6), and the Jim Steinman tune “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” (#2).
Arista got into making CDs relatively early, beginning to do so in 1983. Their first CD, Side Kick by the Thompson Twins, was carried from its LP counterpart Quick Step & Side Kick; in fact, many of the earliest CDs from Arista, much like their earliest albums, were reissues of previously released product.
Their second CD was a brilliant collection of ‘’Greatest Hits’’ by Melissa Manchester (who had recently hit the Top-10 again with “You Should Hear How She Talks About You”) that, like most greatest hits packages, spelled a ‘’death knell’’ of sorts for her; she never hit the Top-40 again.
In 1983, Bertelsmann sold 50% of its stake in Arista to RCA. RCA and Bertelsmann’s main label, Ariola, formed a joint venture together called RCA/Ariola International in 1985. The next year brought General Electric’s purchase of the entire RCA Corporation; GE reverted RCA’s stake in Arista and in the aforementioned joint venture back to Bertelsmann (Reinhard Mohn had retired by this point and one of his successors at Bertelsmann was Thomas Middelhoff.)
Hits for Arista during 1983 included the Kinks’ “Come Dancing”, which, along with 1965’s “Tired of Waiting for You”, would become the band’s highest-selling singles in the U.S., Barry Manilow’s rewrite of the Jim Steinman tune “Read ’Em and Weep” (originally recorded by Meat Loaf), and GRP expatriate Angela Bofill’s biggest R&B hits (“Too Tough”, “Tonight I Give In”, “I’m On Your Side”), none of which entered the pop charts. It also marked the first significant entry in any chart other than jazz for the Seattle-born smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G, whose second album, G-Force, entered the Billboard Hot 200, where it peaked at #62.
1984 brought Kashif’s R&B hits “Baby Don’t Break Your Baby’s Heart”, “Are You the Woman” and “Ooh Love” (for all his success in the R&B field, he never hit the Top 40 pop charts), along with hits from the Thompson Twins’ #10 album Into the Gap, hits that included “Hold Me Now” (#4), “Doctor! Doctor!” (#11), “You Take Me Up” (#44, despite being their biggest British hit), ‘’Sisters of Mercy’’ (#11UK) and ‘’The Gap’’ (#69US). Jermaine Jackson (one of the more unsung members of the Jackson family) came to Arista in 1984 and began to reap success immediately with “Do What You Do” (#13pop, #14RB) and “Dynamite” (#15pop, #8RB). The other single from his self-titled debut album, “Sweetest Sweetest”, didn’t chart. Also kicking up a storm on the charts for a while was a master acquisition from the Beggars Banquet label in the UK: the Icicle Works’ “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)”, which petered out at #37 on the pop charts, but was a sizable Dance Club chart hit (at #13); it did better on the Canadian pop charts, peaking at #19 on an RPM survey.
Of course, who could forget about Ray Parker, Jr.’s “Ghostbusters”? That was a smash hit single from the smash hit film that starred Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis as a three-man ghost removal company from New York. The tune topped the pop and R&B charts in America, and also topped the pop chart surveys of Belgium, Canada, and France, as well as being a top-5 smash all over the world; the music video, which, as with the film, was directed by Ivan Reitman, was one of MTV’s first film-related successes. Behind the scenes, Huey Lewis sued both the studio (Columbia Pictures) and Parker over the melody of the triumphant tune, which he claimed was stolen from his group’s hit “I Want a New Drug.” In 1995, the three reached a settlement that barred them from publicly revealing any information not disclosed in a then-recent press release they had issued. In March 2001, Parker launched a counter-lawsuit against Lewis for breaching that portion of the settlement during an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music.
Parker’s follow-up single, “Jamie”, though not as big a hit worldwide, reached #14 pop and #12 R&B, also reaching #6 on the Adult Contemporary chart. His next charting single, 1985’s “Girls Are More Fun,” made it to #24 pop and #21 R&B, but the album it came off of (Sex and the Single Man) couldn’t even crack the top 40 R&B chart upon its release.
February 1985 saw the release of the debut album of the woman who would prove to be the biggest selling artist Arista ever recorded and one of the biggest-selling artists the world over. Whitney Houston, the daughter of singer Cissy Houston, was working various modeling jobs (and a commercial for Canada Dry ginger ale) as well as some engagements with a band called Material and an appearance on the Merv Griffin show. Arista’s A&R representative saw her perform in a 1983 concert and promptly convinced Clive Davis to sign her to a worldwide contract. Her self-titled debut LP was delayed for two years to ensure she would not go elsewhere for said LP and to enable Davis time to find the right materials and the right producers for the job. He seems to have found the latter in such names as Michael Masser, Kashif, Jermaine Jackson, and Narada Michael Walden. Response was initially slow, but it grew strong with the #3 pop hit “You Give Good Love”, along with “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Will I Know” hitting #1.
Meanwhile, Aretha Franklin, opting to go more in the pop direction had by her legendary 1967 recording of ‘’R-E-S-P-E-C-T’’, put out Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, which spawned the hits “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” (with Eurythmics) (#18), “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” itself (#7) and another Grammy-winning smash, “Freeway of Love” (#3). Not to be outdone, late in the year, Dionne Warwick began charting again with the album Friends, which yielded the best-selling single “That’s What Friends Are For”, which was the #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks and boosted the album to #12 on the Hot 100 by March of 1986. In 1985, Barry Manilow exited Arista to join RCA.
1986 brought a revival of the theme song from the late boxing great Muhammad Ali’s biopic The Greatest, as Michael Masser’s “Greatest Love of All” became a tour-de-force for Whitney Houston and went right to #1 on the charts and kept the DJs busy all year and right into the sessions of her next album. It did however, sound familiar, at least to the Canadian folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot. In April of 1987, he sued Masser, alleging that the song stole twenty-four bars from Lightfoot’s 1970 hit “If You Could Read My Mind.” According to Maclean’s, Lightfoot commented, “It really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t want the present-day generation to think that I stole my song from [Masser].” Lightfoot has stated that he dropped the suit when he felt it was having an unintentionally negative effect on Whitney Houston, as the suit was about Masser and not her.
Elsewhere, Carly Simon signed with Arista and, as her first album for the label suggested, it was on the charts where she was promptly Coming Around Again: the title track hit #18 and she also had AC hits in “Give Me All Night”, “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”, “All I Want Is You” (which featured Roberta Flack on backing vocals), and a cover of “As Time Goes By”; the harmonica solo on it, if you want to be reminded of the early Motown days, is from Stevie Wonder. Aretha Franklin successfully maintained her success from her previous album; her newest (for the year) had hits in “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” with George Michael, “Jimmy Lee”, “Rock-A-Lott” and a hard rock cover of The Rolling Stones’ classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. The music videos for each song were extremely popular on MTV, BET and other video outlets. And Kenny G made some of his biggest noises during the year with the album Duotones, which would go to #6 on the Hot 200 and spawn such hits as “Songbird”, “Silhouette”, and the Lenny Williams duet “Don’t Make Me Wait for Love”.
No one can talk about 1987 (or that particular year in the life of Clive Davis) without mentioning Whitney. The second album from Whitney Houston catapulted her to international fame, and made world history: the album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and remained at the top for eleven consecutive weeks, creating a record; the album enjoyed the most cumulative weeks (25 weeks) at number one on the albums chart by a female artist during the 1980s, while Whitney became the first female artist to have more than one chart-topper on the Billboard Hot 100, as all four of its first singles, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “So Emotional” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” hit #1 right away.. The album and its first single topped the charts in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and mainland Europe. Indeed her success was such that she gained the most attention out of anybody at Arista that entire year; not even Barry Manilow, returning to the label after two years, could divert attention from Whitney.
After a Whitney-laced 1987, 1988 was a relatively quiet year for Arista. Tommy Mottola attempted to keep Hall and Oates under contract to BMG when their RCA obligation ran out, so Hall and Oates left RCA for Arista and their first album for the label, Ooh Yeah!, included the hits “Everything Your Heart Desires” (which was their last to make the Top 10), “Missed Opportunity”, and “Downtown Life”. Aretha Franklin returned to her gospel roots with One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but neither it, nor its lead single “Oh Happy Day”, charted. And yet another 1960s R&B superstar act came to Arista. The Four Tops, fresh from an only marginally successful return visit they paid to Motown during the mid-1980s, put out an album called Indestructible, which hit the charts (barely), with the title cut going to #35 here in the States and “Loco in Acapulco” going to #7 in the U.K.; otherwise the group was unable to recapture the glory of their 1960s Motown days. Still, the big hit for Arista that year came from the Summer Olympics as held in Seoul, South Korea: Whitney Houston’s performance of the theme from the games, “One Moment In Time”, topped the UK Singles Chart and went to #5 in America. This must’ve been a surprise hit from the games at it; the 1988 Summer Olympics Album, which that single originated from, doesn’t seem to have been made with the charts in mind, and, indeed, didn’t chart. On the other hand, some more big hits came from Taylor Dayne: her debut album, Tell It to My Heart, went double platinum thanks to top-10 hits in the title track, “Prove Your Love” (both of which hit #7), “I’ll Always Love You” (#3) and “Don’t Rush Me” (#2).
1989 was a year in which the label’s charting fortunes improved, but not by much. Of the big hits its scored that year, the three that would never arouse any future controversy were contributed by Taylor Dayne, whose “With Every Beat of My Heart” hit #5 that year, a group called Exposé, who had a smash hit with the song “What You Don’t Know” that summer and Carly Simon, who had a huge hit with the breathtaking “Let the River Run”, from the film Working Girl, and became the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.
Among the other, significantly non-controversial pop-chart notes for Arista in 1989, were these: Aretha Franklin put out the album Through the Storm, which despite the #16 US Pop hit title track (a duet with Elton John), was not a commercial success; it reached #55 on the Top 200 Albums chart, and was taken out of print shortly after selling approximately 225,000 copies in the United States. The follow-up, “It Isn’t, It Wasn’t, It Ain’t Never Gonna Be,” a duet with Whitney Houston, only hit #41. And Arista scored the US rights to the Eurythmics’ album We Too Are One, which entered the UK album chart at no.1 (their second no.1 album after Touch) and gave the duo four UK Top 30 hit singles. The album was a return to the rock/pop sound of their mid-80s albums and was certified Double Platinum in the UK, but was less successful in the U.S. (although the single “Don’t Ask Me Why” graced the Billboard Top 40). Other singles from the album included “Revival”, “The King and Queen of America” and “Angel”. The duo also conducted a world tour for the album in late 1989. And in a low-charting but still noteworthy feat, rock pioneer Dion signed with Arista after resuming his (non-Christian) music career; his first album for the label, Yo Frankie, contained appearances from Paul Simon, Lou Reed, k.d. lang, Patty Smyth and Bryan Adams. With a moving introduction from Lou Reed, Dion was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that year, but without the Belmonts (Carlo Mastrangelo, Fred Milano, and Angelo D’Aleo); only Dion has ever been inducted as of this writing.
Also in 1989, another meeting involving Clive Davis was made in Atlanta between him and the duo of Antonio “L.A.” Reid & Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, which formed LaFace Records, whose titles had their own numbering system.
The most infamous album on Arista — or any other label — arrived on March 7, 1989, when Milli Vanilli, a duo consisting of Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan based in West Germany, released their first American album, Girl You Know It’s True, which was a remixed and re-edited version of All or Nothing, which had been out in Europe the previous year. The album, certified sextuple platinum in the U.S., didn’t really have much of a controversy yet, as it charted five top-ten Billboard Hot 100 singles, three of them (“Baby Don’t Forget My Number”, “Blame It on the Rain”, “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”) reaching the number one position on that chart. For the album, Milli Vanilli won two American Music Awards and a Grammy Award for Best New Artist.
In 1990, Clive Davis co-launched Arista Nashville with Tim DuBois. Both signed Alan Jackson, a country artist from Newnan, GA who combined traditional honky tonk and mainstream country sounds, as Arista’s first country artist. Arista released Jackson’s debut single, “Blue Blooded Woman”, in late 1989. Although the song failed to reach top 40 on Hot Country Songs, he reached number three by early 1990 with “Here in the Real World”. This song served as the title track to his debut album, (which inherited the name of the song); it also included two more top five hits (“Wanted” and “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow”) and his first number one, “I’d Love You All Over Again”. It was his next album, the (country) hit-filled Don’t Rock The Jukebox, that sealed Jackson’s status as a perrenial country music success story. Alan Jackson has sold over 80 million records worldwide, placing 66 titles on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart. Of the 66 titles, and 6 featured singles, 38 have reached the top five and 35 have claimed the №1 spot. Out of 15 titles to reach the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, nine have been certified multi-platinum.
Within the first five years of the Arista Nashville imprint getting underway, Tim and Clive took artists such as Asleep at the Wheel, Exile, Rob Crosby, Steve Wariner, Michelle Wright, Pam Tillis, Brooks & Dunn, Diamond Rio, Lee Roy Parnell, Radney Foster, Blackhawk and The Tractors, and signed them all to Arista. In fact, Brooks & Dunn spent their whole entire recording career at Arista Nashville.
The rest of 1990 was partly notable for Snap!, a German group who managed to put out a Gold album with the album World Power and the hit song “The Power”, which went to #2 in the U.S. in 1990 and would be heard on the regular in years to come. The year also brought us a string of hits by Whitney Houston: her album I’m Your Baby Tonight, from November, spawned the chart-toppers “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and “All the Man That I Need” along with Top-20 hits “Miracle” (#9) and “My Name Is Not Susan”.
The fall of 1990 was when the controversy surrounding the Girl You Know It’s True album from Milli Vanilli really kicked off. On November 14 of that year, Frank Farian, Milli Vanilli’s producer, told the Washington Post that the duo did not sing a single note or utter a simple lyric to the microphone on their album, instead turning that duty over to credited background vocalists John Davis, Brad Howell and Charles Shaw. When Pilatus confirmed that statement to the Los Angeles Times the next day, the news led to an enormous controversy within the music business. As a result, electronic processing and overdubs were heavily scaled back, the Recording Academy revoked the Grammy the duo received, Clive Davis fired them, and the album and masters were removed from the label’s catalog, making their one and only Arista album the largest-selling ever to be taken out of print. In August 1991, a settlement was reached in a class action lawsuit which allowed for a partial refund to be paid to anyone who bought the album. Farian formed a group with the actual vocalists behind the album (The Real Milli Vanilli, whose album, The Moment of Truth, was never issued in North America), while the duo tried to regroup (with their actual voices) as Rob & Fab on Joss Entertainment, but neither of these efforts landed with the general public and the controversy was dead by 1993. Sadly, John Davis, one of the actual artists behind the Girl You Know It’s True album, died of complications from COVID-19 on May 24, 2021 at age 66.
Amidst the effects of Persian Gulf War (partly commissioned by George H.W. Bush) that was ongoing that year, Whitney Houston performed “The Star Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium on January 27, 1991. This performance was later reported by those involved to have been lip synced or to have been sung into a dead or non-functional microphone while a studio recording previously made by Houston was played. Dan Klores, a spokesman for Houston, explained: “This is not a Milli Vanilli thing. She sang live, but the microphone was turned off. It was a technical decision, partially based on the noise factor. This is standard procedure at these events.” Yet, could the U.S. national anthem become one of her hit songs? Actually, that’s exactly what happened, if you get how odd that is. A commercial single and video of her performance were released, and reached the Top 20 on the US Hot 100; other than José Feliciano, whose rendition reached №50 in November 1968, Whitney Houston was the only act to turn the US national anthem into a pop hit of that magnitude. Houston donated all her share of the proceeds to the American Red Cross Gulf Crisis Fund. As a result, the singer was named to the Red Cross Board of Governors.
Other hits scored by Arista during 1991 included Kenny G’s theme from the film Dying Young, Curtis Stigers’ “I Wonder Why” (not to be confused with the Dion and the Belmonts song) and “You’re All That Matters to Me”, and the KLF’s ‘’Justified and Ancient’’, the music video for which featured country legend Tammy Wynette; the last of them hit #2 on both the UK Singles Chart, and the U.S. dance charts, #11 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and topped the charts in 18 countries. Clive leased the recording (and the album it was off of) from the group itself.
1992 was a year of more business activity than pop chart action for Arista. Arista on the business sector entered a deal with 20th Century Fox to establish the record arm of the newly established Fox Music, which would be called Fox Records, and thus would serve as the studio’s return to the record business following its 1982 divesture of 20th Century Fox Records to PolyGram. The intent was to release film and TV soundtracks from Fox’s film and TV inventory and then to do individual artist signings in its own right. Jamie Foxx provided hits for the label in the latter category. Both companies (Arista and Fox) shuttered the label in 1995.
Of Arista’s pop releases in 1992, Annie Lennox, half of Eurythmics, spawned two notable hit singles from her solo debut album Diva: “Why” (#34), which won an MTV Video Music Award, and “Walking on Broken Glass”. The music video for the second one was set in the British Regency period, and co-starred Hugh Laurie and John Malkovich. The group L.A. Style also scored a hit during the year with “James Brown Is Dead”, which appeared on Billboard’s Hot 100 Airplay chart, giving Arista a first: the first EDM techno recording to venture near the top 50 of the main Billboard singles chart. Aside from the Lisa Stansfield hit “Change”, Whitney Houston was the only other non-country artist to make any real noise for Arista in 1992, for she entered Hollywood with Warner Bros.’ The Bodyguard, co-starring Kevin Costner.
Although The Bodyguard opened to middling reviews, the film was a huge financial success story for Warner Bros., and, via star Whitney Houston, also one for Arista. The soundtrack became one of the all-time best sellers, commanded by a revival of the Dolly Parton standard “I Will Always Love You”, which became the most identified rendition of the song, having peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for a then-record-breaking 14 weeks, number one on the R&B chart for a then-record-breaking 11 weeks, and number one on the Adult Contemporary charts for five weeks (Parton herself later donated her royalties from Houston’s rendition to the Black community at large). The other singles from the soundtrack, “I’m Every Woman” (another revival, this time of the Chaka Khan song) and “I Have Nothing”, hit the top 5. The successes of these made her the first female act to have three songs in the Top 20 simultaneously.
Aside from this, if it was not a country song, Arista in 1993 was kept busy by the three Whitney Houston singles, Kenny G’s “Forever in Love”, which won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Recording, Taylor Dayne’s remake of the Barry White hit “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love”, which reached #20, and the Crash Test Dummies’ international smash “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”, to which Arista had the American rights. In another business deal, Sean Combs, or, if you will, P Diddy, teamed up with Clive Davis to create the Bad Boy label, which also had a separate numbering system from Arista.
Much as 1988 had been, 1994 was a quiet year for Arista on the pop front. It was marked by Sweden’s comeback to the pop charts here in the States. Ace of Base, signed to Mega Records, had a huge hit in Sweden and much of the world with “All That She Wants”, which was a big hit for the label a year before. When it became a hit, Mega attempted to bring it to the attention of many a major label here; executives responded with the claim “This band will never work in the States.” Executives, that is, that were not named Clive Davis. By the end of 1993, “All That She Wants”, which appeared on Arista over here, had made its way to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. The group followed that up with “The Sign”, “Don’t Turn Around” and “Living in Danger”, and, true to Clive’s thoughts, wound up selling over 30 million albums worldwide.
Elsewhere in that year, Aretha Franklin had her biggest hit of the mid-’90s with “Willing to Forgive” (#26 pop, #41 R&B) and hit the lower ranges of the charts with “A Deeper Love” (#63 pop, #56 R&B) and “Honey” (#114, not to be confused with the Bobby Goldsboro song); the R&B duo Atlantic Starr came and recorded “I’ll Remember You” (#55 pop, #58 R&B) but their best days were behind them by this point.
1995 was another year of mixed feelings at Arista. Although Annie Lennox’s profile decreased for a period because of her desire to bring up her two children outside of the media’s glare, she continued to record: her album Medusa produced the hits “No More I Love You’s” (which entered the UK Singles Chart at №2, Lennox’s highest ever solo peak), “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, “Waiting in Vain” and “Something So Right”. The first of these was the only one from the album to chart in the U.S., hitting #23. Reception for Whitney Houston’s second film, Waiting to Exhale, co-starring Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon, improved somewhat dramatically over her previous film. The soundtrack’s hit songs included “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which peaked at №1, and then spent a record eleven weeks at the №2 spot and eight weeks on top of the R&B Charts; “Count On Me”, a duet with CeCe Winans, hit the U.S. Top 10; and Houston’s third contribution, “Why Does It Hurt So Bad”, made the Top 30. The album debuted at №1, and was certified 7× Platinum in the United States, denoting shipments of seven million copies; it also featured R&B artists as diverse as Toni Braxton, TLC, Brandy, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Faith Evans, Patti LaBelle, SWV and Mary J. Blige. Blige actually had a #2 hit on Arista with “Not Gon’ Cry” while still under contract with MCA’s Uptown label; as such it was a one-off single.
Aside from the two aforementioned hits in the pop field, the German-based electronic pop group The Real McCoy hit with “Another Night” (#3) and a revival of Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love (#19), British boy band Take That had its only American hit (“Back For Good”, at a chart peak of #7), and Canada contributed a Neo Soul act of its own, Deborah Cox, via hits “Sentimental” (#27 pop, #4 R&B). and “Who Do U Love” (#17 pop, #1 dance).
1996 was marked by another cinematic journey for Whitney Houston. Loretta Young, David Niven and Cary Grant all starred in the 1948 film The Bishop’s Wife, whose remake The Preacher’s Wife was put under what turned out to be the successful task of Houston and actor Denzel Washington. For the role, she earned $10 million, making her one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood at the time and the highest earning African-American actress in Hollywood. The soundtrack for The Preacher’s Wife became the largest-selling gospel album ever recorded, selling over six million copies thanks to the hits “I Believe in You and Me” and “Step by Step”. Not even anything on the Christian label Word sold nearly as well.
Elsewhere, Arista scored a huge hit with a song by Swiss-Italian tunesmith Robert Miles titled “Children” (#21), and another German act, No Mercy, contributed hits “Where Do You Go”, “When I Die”, “Please Don’t Go” and a revival of (pre-country) Exile’s hit “Kiss You All Over”. The first and third singles from this album were the group’s biggest hits here, peaking at #5 and #21 respectively.
1997 saw Arista’s fortunes improve a bit more. A Minneapolis-based R&B group named Next— yes, this was the name of it — that specialized in more explicit tracks than were allowed on the radio even at that time, released Rated Next; hits from the CD included “Butta Love”, “Too Close” and “I Still Love You”. The second of these was their first of two #1 R&B hits and their only #1 pop hit. After years of struggling, Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, leased from the Nettwerk label to Arista, released her most successful album to date, Surfacing. It topped the chart in Canada and reached number two in the United States, and also charted in various countries around the world; it featured the hit singles “Building a Mystery”, “Sweet Surrender”, “Adia” and “Angel”. Arista also released the soundtrack for New Line Cinema’s Money Talks; although the film had lukewarm reception and flopped, the CD went Gold.
Arista opened 1998 on a high note: Aretha Franklin released her most critically acclaimed and best-selling album of the 1990s, A Rose Is Still A Rose, which became her first Gold-certified studio album in twelve years and received two Grammy nominations for “Best R&B Album” and “Best R&B Song” for the title track “A Rose Is Still A Rose”, which returned her to the pop charts, peaking at #26. The follow-up single, “Here We Go Again”, only reached #76. Arista recruited Monica from sister label Rowdy and her album The Boy Is Mine debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 and at number two on the Top R&B Albums in August; the title track, a duet with singer Brandy, became the best-selling song of the year in the United States, spending 13 weeks on top of the US Billboard Hot 100, while peaking at number one in Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand. “The First Night” and “Angel of Mine”, released as the album’s second and third single respectively, also became chart toppers on the Billboard Hot 100. Deborah Cox also had an R&B and pop hit (#1 and #2 respectively) with the saucy “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here”.
During the summer of 1998, Arista acquired the American distribution rights to the British boy band Five, who were a major teen idol act on that side of the Atlantic. Despite a promotional push which included appearances on the Disney Channel and MTV, and despite their constant flow of hits in England, Clive Davis was only able to place one top-40 single from this act on the American end of things: “When the Lights Go Out” made it to #10 on the Hot 100 and was certified Gold by the RIAA that summer.
Later on in the year, Whitney Houston left Hollywood and went back to the recording studio; in November, she released the critically acclaimed My Love Is Your Love and hits from it included “When You Believe” (US №15, UK №4), a duet with Mariah Carey for The Prince of Egypt, which also became an international hit as it peaked in the Top 10 in several countries and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song;, “Heartbreak Hotel” (US №2, UK №25) featured Faith Evans and Kelly Price, received a 1999 MTV VMA nomination for Best R&B Video, and number one on the US R&B chart for seven weeks; “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay” (US №4, UK №3) won Houston her sixth Grammy Award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance; “My Love Is Your Love” (US №4, UK №2) with 3 million copies sold worldwide; and “I Learned from the Best” (US №27, UK №19).
And, finally, in 1999, Carlos Santana (another act Clive had signed when he was at Columbia) came back in a big way with his album Supernatural. Released in June, it went 15x platinum in the US and won eight Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year as well as three Latin Grammy Awards including Record of the Year, while showcasing the hit single “Smooth”, which featured Matchbox Twenty singer Rob Thomas on vocals, and was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 weeks. The follow-up single, “Maria Maria” (which featured The Product G&B), was number one on the same chart for 10 weeks. Miraculously, it was with “Smooth” that Arista (and Clive Davis) made out with both the final number-one Hot 100 hit of the 1990s AND also the number-two Hot 100 hit of the 20th century! It remains the only song to appear on two decade-end Billboard charts.
Elsewhere in 1999, Arista tried to have a teen idol boy band again. Signing a deal with a New Bedford, Massachusetts-based pop-rap act named LFO, Arista released the band’s first, self-titled, effort on August 24, 1999, and gave the group a pair of top-10 Billboard Hot 100 hits; “Girl on TV” made it to #10, and “Summer Girls” made it to #3, both in the summer of the Y2K craze. Their album even went Platinum on the strength of these singles, which led them to appearing on an episode of the Amanda Show on Nickelodeon. However, the market for boy bands was becoming saturated by that point, with Lou Pearlman managing both LFO and the two boy bands they were ultimately unable to compete with — the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, both of whom were on Jive and both of whom were more consistent hitmakers — right within the peak of the boy band craze among teenagers. In another licensing deal for a boy band in 1999, Arista got North American distribution rights for Westlife, and gave the Irish group its only top-40 entry on the American charts with “Swear it Again”.
In 2000, Arista celebrated its 25th year as a record company. The year was marked both by joy and misfortune: both involved Clive Davis. The joy came in the fact that he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. The misfortune came via L.A. Reid: BMG put him in the seat long-occupied by Davis at the end of the year. Not one to give up so easily, he started J Records, an independent label with financial backing from Arista parent Bertelsmann Music Group. BMG would buy a majority stake in J Records in 2002, and Davis would become president and CEO of the larger RCA Music Group.
Reid appointed two stablemates at the LaFace label to Arista: TLC and Usher.
Usher’s first effort for Arista, All About U, was intended for release on October 31, 2000, but was delayed numerous times, following the leak of several tracks onto Napster. Usher subsequently recorded new tracks and released the album under the new title, 8701, which is derived from Usher singing for the first time in his local church in 1987 and the album’s release date of 2001. Two hits from the album — “U Remind Me” and “U Got It Bad” stayed on the top of the pop charts for four and five weeks, respectively.
Arista also released what turned out to be the only released album of TLC’s most notable member, Lisa Lopes. She spent much of her free time after the conclusion of TLC’s first headlining tour, the FanMail Tour, recording her debut solo album, Supernova. It includes a song titled “A New Star is Born”, which is dedicated to her late father. Other tracks covered personal issues, including her relationship with NFL football player Andre Rison. In 1994, before the start of Rison’s fifth and final season with the Falcons, Lopes infamously burned down Rison’s Atlanta mansion, resulting in the loss of all his possessions. Among the album’s 13 tracks was also a posthumous duet with Tupac Shakur that was assembled from the large cache of unreleased recordings done prior to his murder in 1996. Initially scheduled for release on a date to coincide with the 11th anniversary of her grandfather’s death, Arista Records decided to delay and then cancel the American release. The album was eventually released in August 2001 in various foreign countries. If you import this CD from Japan, it includes a bonus track called “Friends”, which would later be sampled for “Give It to Me While It’s Hot” on TLC’s fourth album 3D.
As far as new acts were concerned, Adema’s self titled debut album was certified gold and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. The major singles from the album were “The Way You Like It” and “Giving In”. In contrast, the nu metal group’s signage to Arista must’ve been an odd activity for R&B titan L.A. Reid.
Hailing from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, P!nk followed up her urban-influenced debut Can’t Take Me Home with her sophomore Arista debut Missundaztood, birthplace of the global chart-topper “Get the Party Started” and hit singles “Don’t Let Me Get Me” and “Just Like a Pill”, all of which reached the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album’s final single was “Family Portrait”, a vulnerable R&B anthem that Pink wrote about her parents’ separation. That song became a worldwide Top 20 hit, peaking at #18 on the Hot 100.
Going back to the Clive Davis days, Whitney Houston’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” was re-released after 9/11, with the proceeds donated to the New York Firefighters 9/11 Disaster Relief Fund and the New York Fraternal Order of Police. The song peaked at №6 this time on the US Hot 100, topping its previous position.
L.A. Reid went to Canada to recruit his next act: Avril Lavinge, who signed an Arista contract right before she turned 18! For a year after signing a record deal with Arista, Lavigne struggled due to conflicts in musical direction. She relocated to Los Angeles, California, where her earlier material for the album were recorded; however, that material offered the kind of sound to which the label was not amenable by that time. She was paired to the production team The Matrix, who understood her vision for the album. The biggest pop debut of 2002, Let Go was certified sextuple× Platinum in the United States. It was released to generally positive reviews, although Lavigne’s songwriting (particularly on the song “Complicated”) received some criticism. It also did extremely well in Canada, receiving a diamond certification from the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), as well as reaching multi-platinum in many countries around the world, including the UK, where she became the youngest female solo artist to have a number-one album in the region.
Whitney Houston’s new album Just Whitney… debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200, and number three on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, with sales of 205,147 copies in the first week, not only beating her previous high first-week sales of 177,284 units with the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack but also logging her highest debut sales out of her SoundScan-era solo albums. The album received mixed reviews from music critics; it spawned four official singles with three―”Whatchulookinat”, “Love That Man” and “Try It on My Own”―peaking at number one on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart. “Try It on My Own” also peaked at number 10 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary singles. Since its release, Just Whitney… has gone on to sell/ship more than 2 million units worldwide and has also earned Platinum certification in the U.S. and Switzerland and Gold in France, Brazil and other countries. However, Reid lost focus when it came to promoting her and other established Arista acts as the three singles all hit the lower end of the pop charts here in America.
Toni Braxton, another LaFace export to Arista, recorded the album More Than a Woman and it bombed right away — its first single, “Hit the Freeway”, failed to get on the radio and peaked at number 86 on the Hot 100 while the two singles that followed (“A Better Man”, “Lies, Lies, Lies”) were scrapped, failed to make a dent and missed the Hot 100 completely.
Also, Cee-Lo Green debuted with the critically hailed Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections and Boyz II Men (Full Circle) were signed well after their prime. However, Reid was spending so much money at Arista that it wound up not making it back at all.
After the formation of the joint venture of BMG and Sony Music Entertainment (the former CBS Records) in 2004, Reid was let go. Arista, always an independently managed front line label at BMG, was merged with J Records in August 2005 and began operating under the newly formed RCA Music Group — of which Davis had become CEO, and thus again became in control of Arista. The Arista label continued to be used for new releases, although heavily scaled back, while its reissues are released through Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings. Also, as a result of the Sony-BMG merger, Arista once again became related to Columbia Pictures, which is fully owned by the Sony Corporation of America (through Sony Pictures Entertainment); Sony would buy out BMG’s share in 2008.
The most recent artists Arista had hits with in its original incarnation were Anthony Hamilton, Jennifer Hudson, Mario Vazquez, Paula DeAnda, Taylor Hicks, Baby Bash, Blake Lewis, and Dido; most of these artists faded into obscurity quickly after their runs on the chart, with only Hudson and Dido having any real staying power.
During the summer of 2011, the RCA Music Group underwent a restructuring that saw the elimination of the Arista name, along with those of sister labels Jive and J, later in the year. RCA Records started releasing all RCA Music Group releases under RCA Records. The final non-country album on the original Arista Records was from Mike and the Mechanics, while the final non-country compilation on the same label was by Patti Smith. Arista Nashville, which became nominally independent around 2000, continued to operate through Sony Music Nashville and was not affected by the closing of Arista Records. On March 23, 2023, Arista Nashville was closed, with its remnants going to other labels managed by Sony Music Nashville.
Arista Records France was founded in September 2012, and, for a while, was the last active remnant of the label. Also, Andy Grammer’s album Magazines or Novels was released in the UK in October 2015 under the Arista Records name.
In July 2018, Sony Music announced that Arista would have a second coming as one of the frontline labels of the company, alongside Columbia, RCA and Epic. It is currently headed by David Massey, formerly the president and CEO of Island Records. Around this time, the label got a completely new logo with droplets placed below the two As.
NOTES
This discography covers practically every era of the original Arista Records, including subsidiary labels such as 6 West Home Video and the various divisions of Arista Nashville, as well as a set of labels it distributed, with the exceptions of Novus, which had its discography well-chronicled on bsnpubs.com, and Savoy; Arista owned that label from 1976 to 1980, but its tenure of ownership for that label (and the years after, where it was owned by a different person who kept the numbering sequence that Arista introduced to it) has already been documented extensively by jazzdisco.org. Also excluded is the British dance label Dedicated; although Arista later acquired that label, and although it had its own BMG-distributed numbering sequence in the U.S., American releases that were carried out solely under the Dedicated name were handled by another BMG firm named the Wasabi Music Group, and, as such, that label will be covered at another point in time.
One more note before you continue: no, I did not, at any point when I wrote all this down, read Mitchell Cohen’s book Looking for the Magic: New York City, the ’70s and the Rise of Arista Records, which was published by Trouser Press in 2022. I will order it at some point and I will give it a read to see if it is any good.
Main Label:
4000 Series
9500 Series
8000 Series
8200 Series
8400 Series
(07822–1)8600(-X) Series
07822–18800-X Series
07822–19000-X Series
07822–14500-X Series (Special Projects Releases)
07822–14600-X Series
The Later Years (2003–11)
UK releases (pre-1982)
Other album series and distributed labels
Subsidiary Labels:
Arista Austin
Arista Latin
Arista Nashville
Arista Texas
Career
Freedom
GRP
6 West Home Video
