Justin Bieber (15 page)

“Overboard...”

I just couldn’t believe this great song was mine. We laid it down, and I loved it. Later on, we recut it with Jessica Jarrell, and I loved it even more. Finally, we had ten songs recorded. Among them were “One Time,” “Down to Earth” and “One Less Lonely Girl.” I could never tell you which ones were my favorites: I was proud of each and every track.

Now it was time to go back to L.A. Reid and persuade him to get behind us and release
My World
in a big way.

I
n January 2009, Scooter went to Los Angeles for the Grammys. His first stop was L.A. Reid’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Wilshire.

“What’s a bungalow?” I had to ask.

“Someday, young Padawan. Someday, you will know the bungalow.”

“Whatever. Tell me what happened.”

“Well, for starters, one of his key people is walking me over to the bungalow – which is like your own little house within this luxury hotel where he always stays – and she says, ‘I just wanted to tell you how proud I am, couldn’t happen to a better group of guys,’ and so on. ‘I’m so happy for you,’ she says. ‘But you have to understand, L.A. is a music guy. He has his own speakers flown out to freakin’ Los Angeles to this bungalow every year. And, if you get to play three records for him, that’s amazing. If he only listens to one, don’t be mad.’ I said okay. She said, ‘How many you gonna play?’ I said ten. She said, ‘You’re not gonna play ten. Pick the best three and play those.’ I said okay.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” I said. Sometimes Scooter gets going on a story and leaves me behind. “Which three did you play?”

“The best three.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No, listen. He goes, ‘This is great stuff. I wasn’t expecting it to be, like, that’s a hit, that’s a hit, that’s a hit.’”

“Which three?”

“It doesn’t matter. Because he listened to all ten. And then he listened to them all again,” he said.

“He listened to ten songs twice?”

“He listened to ten songs... twice.”

“That’s – wow! So what happens now?”

“You get your butt out here and sell this with me tomorrow.”

Shortly after, I was back on the white sofa, listening to my music with L.A. Reid. Crazy. He asked Scooter what we wanted to do, and Scooter asked for a small budget to make a video. Asher Roth had blown up huge on the Internet over the last year with the #1 album on iTunes for ten straight days and #5 album on Billboard Hot 100. Asher was the biggest thing on the Internet. L.A. asked Scooter if he thought I could make it as big as that. Without missing a beat, Scooter said, “He already is bigger, you just don’t know it yet. This kid’s like a sleeping giant.”

We called Usher in to help us out on the video for “One Time.” The storyline is basically me hijacking Usher’s house for a party. We flew my best friend Ryan “Butsy” Butler to Atlanta so he could be in on the shoot. (That’s him playing video games with me at the beginning.) When the rest of the cast showed up the whole party was full of beautiful, nice, fun – did I say gorgeous? – girls our age. Dancing, tossing confetti, swimming in bikinis.

“Oh... dude...” Ryan seemed to have trouble breathing at times. “This is sick.”

“Just act cool, buddy. It’s going to be a long day.”

The video turned out great, and we had a blast making it. The plan was to put it out there on a Tuesday morning a few weeks after the single was released. There would be promotional banners running for the first few days on iTunes, announcing this awesome new video by a new artist, featuring Usher. Good plan, huh?

But that’s not what happened. Through some kind of mix-up somewhere in the pipeline, “One Time” accidentally went into the iTunes system two weeks early, late on a Friday night, with no banner ads, no promotional page – nada. You literally had to go on your iTunes and type in Justin Bieber to see the icon for the video. If you didn’t search on it specifically, you’d never know it was there. And, since no one knew it was there, no one was going to search on it.

Scooter was so angry it was almost scary. He wrote an irate email to everybody involved in this thing at every level, and they all wrote back saying how sorry they were. He got quiet for a while (which is pretty unusual for Scooter), then he smiled at me and said: “I’m not really angry. We can make this work to our
advantage. The kids are going to find it.”

We’d just set up my Facebook page, so we posted a message on that. We’d set up a Twitter account a couple weeks earlier and sent out my very first tweet:

I got on there and started tweeting my brains out. I followed all my followers and friended their friends. I replied and retweeted and commented and tweeted back and forth as the conversation got bigger and bigger.

Monday morning, “One Time” was the #3 video on iTunes, stomping up the list over some of the biggest acts in the world. It was mind-blowing; we’d made it. We’d proved we could do it.

Tuesday morning, it was #2 behind Taylor Swift (and I’d never complain about being a runner-up behind Taylor Swift. She has been supporting me since day one and is still an amazing friend).

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we hung in there.

And the following week... the King himself, Michael Jackson, died.

Somebody sent me a text. Feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut, I texted Scooter: “Dude, Michael Jackson died?”

Scooter messaged back that people were always spreading jacked-up rumors about Michael. No way was he really dead. But he was. It was on the news. It was all over the Internet.

I was devastated. One of my greatest idols, and my inspiration, was gone. Of course, everything he ever recorded went straight to the top of the charts on iTunes, because he’s the King, which in turn meant that everyone else was driven off for weeks. “One Time” the single went to #14, hovering in the top 20 with a few big names and all those Michael Jackson songs that had been part of my life’s soundtrack since I was born. It was a weird feeling. “One Time” the video stayed in the top ten with Taylor and all those amazing videos by Michael, one of the great music-video artists of all time.

We have a special moment in the
My World 2.0
touring show that works as a celebration of Michael Jackson and a good reminder for me about what matters in this business. To the beat
of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” I get to introduce my dance crew and bandmates one by one, so that everybody on the stage gets a good round of applause. My team is my family and they all deserve their time to shine too.

We wanted a strong charity component to this tour, and that’s partly a tribute to the example set for us by Michael Jackson. A dollar of every ticket sold goes to Pencils of Promise, an organization that builds desperately needed schools in developing world countries. And it adds up fast. In the second leg of the tour alone, we’re building fifteen schools around the world. Michael Jackson was the most giving artist of all time. If I can do just one-tenth of the good he did for others, I can really make a difference in this world. That’s what this is all about.

Over the summer of 2009, we released my first four singles, even though it’s kind of unusual to have that many singles before you release an album. We were getting a lot of attention on YouTube and iTunes, but we weren’t getting the radio play necessary for a successful album. So many people were still locked into thinking that someone my age couldn’t get radio play, that you had to be on Nickelodeon or Disney. We had to change that way of thinking. Scooter and two of my champions at Island Def Jam, Steve Bartels and Erik Olesen, decided there was only one way to fight those old ideas: hand-to-hand combat. Basically, we had to go to every radio station on Planet Earth and make them play my records. We were hoping we could do this with our natural charm and charisma, but we were ready to call in CHUCK NORRIS if needed.