‘Moment in Time’ Already a Winner in the LP Olympics

Jackie Joyner-Kersey and Greg Louganis are among the thousands of athletes who will be going for the Olympic gold next month in Seoul, but pop stars Whitney Houston, the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton are already guaranteed some Olympic platinum.

“One Moment in Time,” an album featuring 12 musical selections commissioned by NBC-TV for use during the network’s Olympics telecasts, doesn’t officially go on sale until Wednesday, but the LP’s executive music supervisor, Gary Borman, says advance orders have exceeded the 1-million mark required for platinum recognition in the record industry. The title track, sung by Houston, has already been released to radio stations.

The collection, on Arista Records, also features original works by composer John Williams, the Four Tops, Taylor Dayne, Jermaine Jackson, Eric Carmen, Jennifer Holliday, Kashif, the Christians and a new Los Angeles rock band, Odds & Ends. Proceeds from the album will be divided among the artists, Arista, NBC, Borman and the United States Olympic Committee.

Borman, a partner in Los Angeles-based Borman/Sternberg Entertainment, became involved in the project two years ago while working at the Kragen & Co. management firm, headed by U.S.A. for Africa catalyst Ken Kragen.

“We got a call from NBC asking to meet with us to discuss the best way to promote the Olympics through the use of contemporary music,” said Borman. “They wanted to do something unique, something to attract both a younger audience to the Olympics and entertain the existing one.

“Our approach was to create a joint venture between NBC and a record company, to find songs that suited the Olympic broadcast and the Olympic concept, and at the same time would stand on their own with the American music consumer. So we had to satisfy both (television and album) needs.”

While “Nadia’s Theme” rode public sentiment up the charts following Nadia Comaneci’s gymnastics performances at the 1976 Games, a 1984 Columbia Records attempt to market an album of music from the Olympics made Borman aware that he couldn’t just rely on the excitement of the games to sell the album.

The 1984 project--”Official Music of the XXIIIrd Olympiad” featuring tracks by composers John Williams and Philip Glass as well as such pop acts as Toto and Foreigner--stalled at No. 92 on the Billboard pop chart.

The key in making a commercially successful album, Borman reasoned, was coming up with music that would have a sales punch regardless of the Olympics connection.

“The songs were not written for specific events,” said Borman, noting that in the case of the 1984 album some of the pieces were tied to particular ceremonies or competitions. “Our songs fit overall moods, the sense of winning and competing and fighting and willpower. All these emotions and concepts are what made up our songs so they could fit any visual that comes up.”

Armed with four pieces of music (three he had commissioned from such established mainstream writers as the teams of Albert Hammond and John Pettis and Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, plus Williams’ NBC-ordered fanfare), Borman started the Olympian task of finding the right performers last year.

When he suggested to Arista Records President Clive Davis that Whitney Houston do the song “One Moment in Time,” Borman found a powerful ally.

“Clive said, ‘I’ll do it if I can have the whole album,’ ” Borman recalled.

In a separate interview, Davis said, “The idea of commissioning songs and trying to match them with artists of major note is fairly without precedent.”

Davis took over finding the artists, drawing largely from his Arista roster. (Borman, who manages the Bee Gees, provided them as well as the Bee Gees-Eric Clapton teaming billed on the album as the Bunburys.)

The result, Davis believes, is likely to be one of the top-selling albums of the year.

“It’s not just because there’s a cut by Whitney,” he said. “There’s an overall matching of the artists and the material. ‘Fight’ by the Bunburys is a tremendous cut. The John Williams cut will probably be a hit. I think this will have five or six hits and be as strong as any major film sound track.”

That very commercial design, though, also sets up the project for criticism.

For one thing, the album toes the pop mainstream line, with little representation of harder-edged or adventurous styles, including rock and rap.

Borman maintained that he approached rock artists but was generally turned down on grounds that the project didn’t fit the rock image.

“To be honest, I got a lot of resistance from record companies, artists and managers who didn’t think it fit their image,” he said. “Some were skeptical because of the pop nature of it and the national television aspect.”

Another question is more fundamental to the perception of the project as a whole: Is making a commercially intended, for-profit album somehow exploitative of the Olympic spirit?

Both Borman and Davis confirmed that the album was never approached as a benefit project in the manner of “We Are the World.” The portion going to the USOC is part of the licensing agreement between the committee and NBC. (An NBC spokesman said the exact figures are confidential, though Borman said that the USOC will receive a “significant” portion of all sales, not just a percentage of profits.)

To a suggestion that the project could possibly be perceived as tarnishing the Olympic image, Davis reacted strongly.

“If it was inferior material and production around a theme just trying to get by on the theme, that would be one thing,” he said, “but to say great songs written around a theme is exploitative is silly.”