Arista 8212
Producers: Jermaine Jackson, Kashif, Michael Masser, and Narada Michael Walden
Track listing: You Give Good Love / Thinking About You / Someone for Me / Saving All My Love for You / Nobody Loves Me Like You Do / How Will I Know / All At Once / Take Good Care of My Heart / Greatest Love of All / Hold Me
March 8, 1986
14 weeks (nonconsecutive)
When producer/songwriter Michael Masser first heard Whitney Houston’s voice, she was singing “Greatest Love of All,” a song Masser had written with Linda Creed for a film about Muhammad Ali called The Greatest. Masser had been invited by Arista president Clive Davis to attend a showcase featuring the young singer at Sweetwater’s in New York. “I felt like I lost it,” Masser says. “I was hearing this song that I loved and it was sung by this voice. Once I got past the shock, and I started listening, I knew that this was one of the greatest talents I have heard in my life.”
Naturally, when Davis asked Masser if he was interested in producing the young singer, he jumped at the opportunity. The first track Masser recorded with Houston was “Hold Me,” a song meant as a duet that he had promised to Teddy Pendergrass two days before the R&B singer was paralyzed in a car accident. When it was time for Masser to find a duet partner for Pendergrass, only one voice came to mind, the voice of Whitney Houston. “When she flew out to California, she was a young kid who was 18 years old with everything in front of her,” says Masser. The duet with Pendergrass stalled at number 46 in June 1984, hardly hinting at what was to come.
Over the next six months, Masser recorded three more tracks with Houston, but he was only one of several producers involved in the project. Davis also turned to Kashif, Narada Michael Walden, and Jermaine Jackson, who sang with Houston on “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” and “Take Good Care of My Heart.”
Masser opted to dig up “Saving All My Love for You,” a song he co-wrote with Gerry Goffin that was originally recorded by Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. in 1978. “1 rearranged the structure of the song and I thought it would be a great single for Whitney,” he says. “When I did the track, the musicians and myself were stunned by the torchiness of the way she sang it.”
While Masser was impressed with Houston’s take of that song, his real goal was to have Houston record “Greatest Love of All,” the first song he heard her sing. “That was why I took the project with Whitney. George Benson had originally recorded the track in 1977, but it wasn’t a big hit, peaking at number 24 “Nobody knew the ‘Greatest Love of All’ would be that big,” says Masser of Houston’s version of the song. “At first it was released as a B-side to the first single, ‘You Give Good Love.’ But it became one of Whitney’s greatest hits.”
By the time Whitney Houston hit the top spot in its 50th week on the Top Pop Albums chart, Houston was no stranger to the Number One position. “Saving All My Love for You” had topped the Hot 100 on October 26, 1985 and “How Will I Know” turned the trick on February 15, 1986. With Whitney Houston still at Number One on the album chart, “Greatest Love of All” became the third chart-topping single from the album. The feat put Houston in the record books as the first female artist to score three Number One singles from one album, but it was only the beginning of the Whitney Houston story.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of March 8, 186
1. Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston
2. Promise, Sade
3. Welcome to the Real World, Mr. Mister
A. The Broadway Album, Barbra Streisand
5. Heart, Heart