Music producer Clive Davis visited a Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt franchise in Park Ridge to promote his new autobiography, Soundtrack of My Life, on May 4.
Davis has produced albums for Grammy Award-winning artists such as Whitney Houston. He has even won five Grammys himself for producing albums for Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson and Santana, according to grammy.com.
Davis said that the goal of this event was to educate the public about the music industry.
“I hope this [event] encourages everybody to read about contemporary music and that it fills in informationally and emotionally what music has been like in the last several decades,” Davis said.
According to the manager of the store, Randy Sturges, a friend of Davis’, the point of an event at Menchie’s was to to help the store gain notoriety.
“For me it was just to do something exciting and fun for the store and the community,” Sturges said. “It’s always good for your store’s image to have some fun event like that. From [Davis’s] standpoint, he was just supporting a friend.”
Books were for sale at the event for $20 each. Three dollars would be given to the Maine South music department for every book sold.
According to Sturges, both he and Davis came up with the idea of giving money to Maine South to give back to the community.
“The event itself was in Park Ridge, he [Davis] feels very strongly about supporting music in the high school and so together we came up with the idea of giving something back to the local high school,” Sturges said. “So we gave [Maine South] a nice check after that […] we ended up giving them a little over 200 dollars.”
According to Sturges, a raffle drawing was held for the event in which the two winners would be able to talk to Davis personally.
The winners of the contest were Brian Kerwin, the father of GBS sophomore Noah Kerwin, and Kimberly Schaefer, a 23 year-old songwriter from Park Ridge.
Schaefer regularly performs cover and original songs in the Chicago area and even got to play a couple songs in front of Davis. She said that performing in front of Davis was a cool but nerve racking experience.
“Here in front of me is a man that plucked artists like Janis Joplin from obscurity and made them into stars,” Schaefer said. “He obviously has a keen eye and ear for talent. […] I think Clive seems like a talkative, down to earth, and straight-forward guy who has experienced more than the average Joe could ever dream of.”
Clive was so impressed with Schaefer’s performance, Sturges says, that he gave her some advice about her music as well as the music industry.
“I think he was impressed enough, he suggested that she should definitely try to hone her craft on songwriting,” Sturges said. “And then he said, ‘You know, If you really want to make it, you should look at country,’ because of her voice and her styling.”
Davis stayed after his two sessions to do a book signing for the public.
According to Sturges, Davis took time to talk and take pictures with every person who got their book signed.
“He was taking time with each person to do a photograph and he made each person feel like they were the guest of honor,” Davis said. “That’s the way his personality is. He makes each person feel special.”
