Michael Jackson (30 page)

Throughout the tour, Michael was tired and discouraged and couldn't seem to find the unlimited supply of energy he had always
relied upon in the past. As enthusiastic as the audiences were to the show, Michael felt that something was missing from it.
Barely twenty-one, he felt he'd stopped growing professionally; he was frustrated by being in a group. ‘It was the same thing
over and over,’ he told me in an interview after the tour. ‘It was all for one and one for all, but I was starting to think
that maybe I should be doing some things on my own. I was getting antsy.’

To make matters worse, Michael loathed having to answer to Joseph and was getting to the point where he didn't even want to
be around him.

Though many industry observers believed that, based on the success of
Destiny,
Joseph Jackson had become a brilliant entertainment manager, Michael was not one of them. In Michael's view, his father used
a shotgun approach to his work: ‘If you shoot enough bullets, one will hit the target, eventually,’ Michael explained. ‘But
you can also waste a lot of ammunition and maybe hit some targets you would rather not,’ Michael explained. ‘Look at the way
Joseph alienated Berry and everyone else at Motown.’ Some people, Michael argued, determine their target, stalk it as long
as necessary, and then get it cleanly with one shot. ‘That's the way to go,’ Michael reasoned.

In truth, Joseph would never be able to win with Michael, no matter how many bull's-eyes he scored. Getting the group away
from Motown was the best thing he'd ever done, but Michael could not see it that way. His perception of Joseph was understandably
clouded by his personal views about him, and his judgement of his father as a child abuser and philanderer. There was no way
Michael would be able to credit Joseph Jackson… with anything… ever.

Michael didn't feel that the group had made an impact after leaving Motown and signing with CBS, even though they had a hit
with ‘Shake Your Body’. It wasn't enough. He was tired of The Jackson 5 image. He knew what he wanted to do: record another
solo album, one for CBS that would fulfil his ambition, expand his artistry and ease the restlessness that had plagued him
since the Destiny tour ended. Day after day, Michael stayed alone in his bedroom pondering, as Marlon would later say, ‘who
knows what, he's very secretive.’

His brothers soon realized that something was different about Michael, and it scared them. ‘Mike was acting strangely,’ Tito
would remember. ‘It was as if something had snapped in him. He stopped showing up at family meetings, and when we discussed
our future plans, he had nothing to offer. Maybe he was plotting to go out on his own, I don't know. He never did say much.
You never really knew what he was thinking.’

‘I just didn't think it was fair that I had stopped recording solo albums,’ Michael would say years later when looking back
on this time. ‘Part of our contract with CBS was that I would get to record on my own. When that wasn't happening because
we hadn't been able to find the time, I started getting nervous and upset.’

When Michael told his father that he wanted to record a solo album, Joseph's reaction was predictable – supportive but with
qualification. ‘Why not?’ he remarked. ‘You know how I feel about it, Michael. Do what you want as long as it doesn't interfere
with group business.’

‘What does that mean?’ Michael wanted to know.

‘You know what it means,’ his father warned him. ‘Family is the most important thing.’

Perhaps Joseph wasn't overly concerned about Michael doing a solo album because, in truth, his albums never amounted to much:
his first two for Motown,
Got to Be There
and
Ben
(1971 and 1972 respectively), each sold a little over 350,000 copies, which wasn't bad. However, his third album,
Music and Me
(1973), sold only 80,286 copies, a dismal showing. His last solo album for the company,
Forever Michael
(1975), did a little better (99,311 copies). Albums featuring all of the Jacksons always sold better than solo albums; let's
not even get into the statistics for sales of Jackie's solo album which, incidentally, was terrific. Joseph always felt it
was in everybody's best interest to keep the act together.

Therefore, if Michael felt the need to record a solo album in order to ‘get it out of his system’, it was fine with Joseph – as
long as the Boy Wonder remembered that his first allegiance was to his family and to the group, not to himself.

When Michael Jackson set out to make his new solo album, he didn't know what he wanted to be the final result. However, he
knew what he
didn't
want, and that was to make a record that sounded like a Jacksons' album. From the start of his professional career, someone
had decided the sound of Michael's music. First, it had been Motown's crack production staff and then the artist and repertoire
executives at CBS/Epic. Though the family was given the freedom to write and ‘produce’ the
Destiny
album, Epic insisted that they record a song they didn't write, ‘Blame It on the Boogie’. Other concessions and compromises
were made along the way with the three albums for that label, and Michael never felt totally responsible for the results.
While
Destiny's
hit single, ‘Shake Your Body’, re-established The Jacksons in the marketplace, many observers in the music business felt
as Michael did, that the brothers had left their magic at Motown.

Now, Michael wanted more creative freedom. He wanted to do his next album totally outside the family, even though the brothers
tried desperately to make his solo album a group production as soon as they heard about it. They were hurt that Michael wanted
to exclude them from the project, but he stood firm. ‘I'm doing this on my own,’ he said. ‘They're just going to have to understand.
For once.’

Uncertain as to how to proceed, Michael called Quincy Jones, who had offered a helping hand during production of
The Wiz.
The two had their first exchange one day on the set as Michael rehearsed a scene in which, as the Scarecrow, he pulled a
slip of paper from his stuffing and read a quote by Socrates. He attributed the statement to
Soh-crates,
as if it rhymed with ‘no rates’. ‘That's the way I had always assumed it was pronounced,’ Michael said later. When he heard
the crew giggling, he knew he had it wrong.

‘Sock-ra-tease,’
someone whispered in his ear. ‘It's
Sock-ra-tease?
’

He turned and saw Quincy, the film's musical director.
^*

The older man extended his hand. ‘I'm Quincy Jones,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘Anything I can do to help…’

Michael would remember the offer. A little more than a year later, he called Quincy and asked him to suggest possible producers
for his solo endeavour. Quincy suggested himself.

Quincy seemed an unlikely choice of producer for Michael. He had found success in the pop-R'B arena with his own albums, which
were virtual music workshops of musicians, writers and arrangers with Jones overseeing the entire programme. Quincy had also
found mainstream success with the Brothers Johnson, a sibling duo out of Los Angeles, whose platinum albums he produced. Still,
most industry observers privately felt that Quincy was too musically rigid to make a great pop record; many of these people
believed that his records with the Brothers Johnson, for instance, though successful, sounded too homogenized.

However, Quincy had a long and varied show-business career, starting as a fifteen-year-old trumpet player and arranger for
Lionel Hampton. Over the years, he immersed himself in studio work, arranging, composing, and producing for Dinah Washington,
Duke Ellington, Big Maybelle, Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie. In the early sixties, he was a vice-president of Mercury Records,
the first black Executive at a major label. In 1963, he began a second career in Hollywood, where he became the first black
to reach the top rank of film composers, with thirty-eight pictures to his credit, including
The Wiz.

‘I didn't even want to do
The Wiz’
Quincy has said. ‘I thought, There's no way the public is going to accept a black version of
The Wizard of
Oz. I kept telling Sidney Lumet I didn't want to do it, but because he's a great director and because he hired me to do my
first movie soundtrack [
The Pawnbroker,
1965], I did it. Out of that mess came my association with Michael Jackson.’

When Quincy and Michael came together in a recording studio in Los Angeles to start laying rhythm tracks together in 1979,
the artist and producer turned out to be a perfect match. Quincy's in-studio work method was to surround the artist with superior
songs and fine musicians and then let that artist have free reign. Michael had been so accustomed to being on a short creative
leash, he was ecstatic when Quincy began taking his ideas seriously. Quincy recalled that, at first, he found Michael ‘very,
very introverted, shy, and non-assertive. He wasn't at all sure that he could make a name for himself on his own. Neither
was I.’

Quincy, on the other hand, hadn't worked with unharnessed brilliance like Michael's since his days with some of the jazz greats.
In Michael, he'd finally found what he'd been looking for in a talent. As he would tell me, ‘Michael is the essence of what
a performer and an artist are all about. He's got all you need emotionally, and he backs it up with discipline and pacing.
He'll never burn himself out. Now I'm a pretty strong drill sergeant when it comes to steering a project, but in Michael's
case it's hardly necessary.’

Quincy was also amazed at Michael's versatility. ‘He can come to a session and put down two lead vocals and three background
parts in one day,’ he said at the time. ‘He does his homework, rehearses and works hard at home. Most singers want to do everything
in the studio – write words and music, figure out harmonies, try different approaches to a song. That makes me crazy. All I
can see is dollar signs going up. Studio time is expensive, and that's why someone like Michael is a producer's dream artist.
He walks in, prepared. We accomplish so much in a single session, it stuns me. In my opinion, Michael Jackson is going to
be
the
star of the eighties and nineties.’

The two developed a close rapport outside the studio as well, and over the years, Michael would think of Quincy as a hip father
figure. Michael would confide in Quincy and take direction from him in a way that reminded many observers of the kind of relationship
the public
thought
Michael had with Joseph. However, Quincy was the antithesis of the natural father who used to hit Michael to get him to perform
up to expectations.

‘When I'm in the studio, I don't believe in creating an atmosphere of tension or hostility,’ Quincy once told Oprah Winfrey
in an interview. ‘That serves no purpose. I believe in creating an atmosphere of love.’

Finally, after listening to hundreds of songs, Michael and Quincy decided on a batch to record. Among them were three Michael
Jackson compositions: the funky ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’, the dance-floor scorcher ‘Working Day and Night’, and the
prowling, urgent ‘Get on the Floor’ (co-written with Louis Johnson, bassist of the Brothers Johnson).

Quincy sought to balance the mixture of songs with melodic pop ballads like the emotional and symphonic ‘She's Out of My Life’,
contributed by songwriter-arranger Tom Bahler; the bright, melancholy ‘It's the Falling in Love’, written by David Foster
and Carole Bayer Sager; the cute, sugary Paul McCartney song ‘Girlfriend’ and most significantly, the romantic, mid-tempoed
‘Rock with You’, the driving ‘Burn This Disco Out’, and the mighty ‘Off the Wall’, (which would end up as the title of the
album), all written by Rod Temper-ton, chief songwriter and keyboardist for the Britain-based pop-R'B band, Heatwave.

With the songs selected, Quincy Jones then summoned a handful of crack session players – keyboardists Greg Phillinganes, George
Duke and Michael Boddicker; guitarists David Williams and Larry Carlton; bassist Louis Johnson; percussionist Paulinho DaCosta;
and the Seawind Horns, led by Jerry Hey – and they all went to work.

During ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’ (which would become
Off the Wall's
first single), Michael unveiled a playful, sexy falsetto no one had ever heard from him before. All of the right elements
were in place on this song: an unstoppable beat, a meticulous, well-balanced delivery of lyrics and melody and a driving energy.
Michael explained that he couldn't shake the song's melody when it came to him one day. He walked throughout the house humming
and singing it to himself. Finally, he went into the family's twenty-four-track studio and had Randy put the melody down on
the piano (Michael can't play). When he played it for Quincy, it was a done deal: it had to be on the album.

‘Don't Stop’ was released on 28 July 1979. In less than three months, it was top of the charts, Michael's first solo number-one
record in seven years. It soared to number three in the UK, a huge hit for him. It was also the subject of his first solo
video. When compared to the kind of musical videos Michael would do in just a few years, ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’
comes across as primitive. In the only attempt at innovation, Michael appears briefly dancing in triplicate. Still, it's fun
and memorable because, after all, it's the first one.