When Clive Davis sat down with Aretha Franklin in 1979 to discuss working together, Franklin already had her legacy secure: She was the undisputed Queen of Soul, whose late ’60s singles—“Respect,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools”—would be in rotation ’til eternity. Nearing 40, she understood that the music industry had changed since her earlier blush of success. But she hungered to launch a new phase of her career. Davis, speaking later at her funeral, remembered her wondering one thing: Could she still compete?

She’d gone to the right man to ask that question. Davis, the record-label executive who died this week at age 94, was one of the best competitors that music ever created. He’s credited with helping break an eye-popping array of artists, including Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow, Patti Smith, and the Notorious B.I.G. While some industry titans are known for a particular sound, and others for their personalities—and scandals—Davis’s approach boiled down to one thing: hits.

Obituaries over the past week have emphasized the image of him as the businessman with the “golden ear.” He grew up in a Jewish enclave of Brooklyn, studied law, and then was hired at Columbia Records, where he quickly rose to become president despite previously knowing nothing about the music industry. A visit to the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 tipped him off to the rock-and-roll youth revolution. He signed his first act, Joplin, and then began signing more. Over time—as he launched the label Arista, then J Records, then became the head of BMG North America and RCA Music Group—he developed a reputation for just knowing whether a song was destined for success simply by listening to it.

Read: Before and after Aretha

Yet as I’ve read about Davis’s life, I’ve wondered less about his ear and more about what it took to be the boss of so many seemingly indomitable figures—people who define the word diva. He was famed as a micromanager who took a hand in every step of the hitmaking process. Yet he worked productively with some of the most willful talents in music history—because he, fundamentally, magnified their ambition.

Franklin is a case in point. Davis recalled meeting her in his 2013 memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life: “This was no regal queen content to rest on past laurels. This was a working woman determined to give it her all.” Still, she could be difficult. In the studio, she was known for refusing to give more than a couple of takes, which sometimes caused producers to complain to Davis. “I would always let it go if it was an album track,” he wrote. “But for a potential single I would call her and explain that we had to have a song that we could get on the radio, so she needed to go back in and nail the melody.” Laying out the business upside, in his telling, worked to get her back in front of the mic. Together, they succeeded in landing 1980s hits such as “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” and the Eurythmics collaboration “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.”

The trajectory was different for Houston, who was 19 when Davis signed her. She had spent her adolescence being schooled in singing and performing by her musician mother, Cissy, but she was still young and unformed. So Davis took on a tutelary role. After watching her onstage before the 1985 release of her debut album, he wrote her a lengthy letter offering feedback on her performance style. Some of it was quite sharp: “Candidly, when you do a cover, you should have a different interpretation and do it as well or better than the original.” Yet every bit of critique was couched as serving a larger goal for both of them. His comments, he wrote, were “only meant in the spirit of you and I against the world that we have to conquer.”

Houston really did seem to share that spirit. In the studio, the producer Narada Michael Walden once wrote, “she was like Muhammad Ali”: obsessed with greatness and not afraid to show it. After she rose to commercial dominance—landing seven consecutive No. 1s on the Hot 100 from 1985 to 1988—she clapped back at commentators who speculated that she was a mere product of Davis’s hitmaking machine. “I wouldn’t be with anybody who didn’t respect my opinion,” she told Rolling Stone in 1993. “Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. You can’t make me sing something I don’t want to sing. That’s not what makes me and Clive click, because if it was, I’d have left Arista a long time ago.”

Some artists did bristle at his feedback, however. After Kelly Clarkson won the inaugural season of American Idol in 2002, Davis took a direct hand in her career. Her first two albums were radio-friendly blockbusters, but her third album, My December, was a darker, more personal effort whose songs she’d insisted on co-writing. When Davis heard an early cut, he informed her that he didn’t hear any hits and recommended that she record some songs written by other people. Though he eventually put out the album in the form she wanted, their disagreement went public.

In a 2007 Blender article, Clarkson angrily recalled a meeting she’d had with Davis. “I said, ‘Clive, I’m going to make tons of albums. It doesn’t have to be mainstream every time.’ Then he kept bringing up people he’s worked with. ‘You’re a Whitney! You’re a Mariah!’” (Davis actually didn’t directly work with Mariah Carey.) She shot back: “I don’t want a career like either one of those singers.” In other words, the spat wasn’t merely about sales or creativity. The exec and the artist were misaligned about the goal they were trying to achieve: She wanted to express something; he wanted to win the charts.

That’s not to say that Davis solely chased commercialism at the expense of art. He championed the punk poet Patti Smith and didn’t try to steer her choice of collaborators and songs. “I had a lot of guts, not a whole lot of talent, but he had faith in me and let me go out of the gate, just a colt, and stayed with me,” she later said. When he signed the Eurythmics, he thought of them “more in the category of David Bowie, a creative entity,” he noted in his book. “I didn’t ask to hear new material, and it never dawned on me to submit songs to them.”

Often, he pushed that kind of artist to augment, not scrap, their own writing. An early cut of Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., led Davis to pronounce that classic record-exec verdict: Where are the hits? Springsteen took the feedback and wrote “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night”—which he later called “two of the best things on the record.” Springsteen was young and hungry; why wouldn’t he want a smash?

Read: Rage in the U.S.A.

The 21st century hasn’t produced record-label executives as legendary as Davis for a variety of reasons: the internet’s upending of distribution structures, #MeToo’s complication of the male authority figure in the entertainment world, and the fracturing of pop culture in general. And Davis’s own image came under fire in later years. In 2012, Houston accidentally drowned in her bathtub at the hotel where, hours later, Davis was throwing his famous Grammys pre-party. When he chose not to cancel the event—citing the logic of The show must go on—it confirmed some critics’ view that he was more of a self-enriching mercenary than a true steward of artists. As another industry executive told Rolling Stone in 2008, “Notice when you talk to Clive how many of his sentences begin, ‘Then I. Then I … Then I …’”

Nonetheless, Davis remained warmly revered over decades by some of the most powerful and prickly figures in the record business. Many people really did see him as a champion for the ideal of music as a meritocracy in which the best songs always win out: “What I learned from Clive is that the only thing that matters at the end of the day when you’re making a record is the three and a half minutes of magic,” the executive Jimmy Iovine told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. The truth, of course, is that success in music is more complicated than that—it involves marketing, luck, ego. Pay close attention to Davis’s biography and you see that the last one can drive the art form forward even more than money does.