In 1986, Dean Pitchford had dinner with his friend Clive Davis, and he mentioned this song that he’d written that just hadn’t quite clicked.
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He wrote the screenplay for the 1984 blockbuster Footloose, and he also co-wrote every song on the movie’s soundtrack, including the #1 hits “ Footloose” and “ Let’s Hear It For The Boy.” (Weirdly, Pitchford never wrote another movie after that.) It’s an 8.) In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Pitchford says, “I figured it was one of those songs that was probably going to be cut a number of times and not ever have its day.” Pitchford moved on, and he did very well for himself. (Sister Sledge’s highest-charting single, 1979’s “ We Are Family,” peaked at #2. Sister Sledge’s take made a slight dent in the R&B charts, but it didn’t reach the Hot 100. That same year, Sister Sledge also recorded a version of “All The Man That I Need” as a duet with the singer David Simmons. (Michael Gore made the Hot 100 once as a lead artist, when his theme for the 1983 film Terms Of Endearment peaked at #84.) Gore won two Oscars for Fame - one for scoring the film and another for the Irene Cara-sung title track, which he co-wrote with Pitchford. Dean Pitchford, a former Broadway actor, got together with film-score composer Michael Gore, the younger brother of former Number Ones artist Lesley, in 1980, to write songs for the musical Fame. “All The Man That I Need” is cut from the same cloth. He knew that Whitney Houston could turn them into money. Davis didn’t give a damn that these were drippy, old, unfashionable songs. A few months later, Houston returned to #1 with “ Greatest Love Of All,” a song that Masser and Linda Creed had written for George Benson in 1977. Whitney Houston’s very first #1 hit was “ Saving All My Love For You,” a Michael Masser/Gerry Goffin ballad that the former Fifth Dimension singer Marilyn McCoo had first recorded in 1978. But I’m Your Baby Tonight wasn’t a radical break from Houston’s past, and the album’s second single took her right back to what had been working since she first ascended the pop charts five years earlier.Ĭlive Davis always loved an undervalued asset, especially if that undervalued asset came from a brand-name songwriter with a history of hits. She pulled that off with the album’s title track, recorded with ascendant Davis underbosses Babyface and LA Reid.
For Whitney Houston’s third album, 1990’s I’m Your Baby Tonight, both Davis and Houston recognized that Houston needed to win back the grassroots R&B fanbase that had brought her to the dance in the first place. On her first two albums, Whitney Houston did pretty much whatever Clive Davis wanted, and the combination of her ridiculously powerful voice and his instinct for what the record-buying public wanted proved very, very lucrative. I don’t fucking get it, but the man clearly knew what he was doing. Clive Davis sold Barry Manilow and Air Supply to the world, and he made a colossal star out of Whitney Houston.
Lots of people - like, for instance, me - have absolutely no taste for his kind of soft-batch operatic balladry, but that sound turned this particular Brooklyn-born lawyer into the final boss of the music business - a cigar-puffing Bowser in orange-tinted aviators. Davis, the domineering music-business giant, made his name by signing Big Brother And The Holding Company and Santana in the late ’60s, but he made his fortune by pushing grand and overwrought love songs on an American public that was only too happy to buy them. “All The Man That I Need,” Whitney Houston’s ninth #1 hit, was a Clive Davis special. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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