“I’m not the oldest of the young guys,” director Francis Ford Coppola once remarked of his place in modern Hollywood. “I’m the youngest of the old guys.”

That surprising -and surprisingly apt-assessment can be applied with even greater illumination to the extraordinarily wide-ranging career and contributions of record executive Clive Davis.

The presence of Bob Dylan and the Byrds on its roster notwithstanding, Columbia Records was hardly a rock powerhouse in 1967 when its new president, Clive Davis, ventured west to the Monterey Pop Festival.