MJ (12 page)

Michael had talent and seasoning. Quincy provided an experienced comrade willing to give him space, as well as a killer studio team, including engineer Bruce Swedien and British songwriter Rod Temperton.
“We tried all kinds of things I’d learned over the years to help him with the artistic growth,” Jones says. “Dropping
keys just a minor third to give him flexibility and a more mature range in the upper and lower registers, and more than a few tempo changes.” Seth Riggs, Jackson’s vocal coach, helped expand his top and bottom range. Riggs recognized that as Michael matured, he was still singing, and even speaking, in his jarringly high Peter Pan voice. Riggs encouraged Michael to speak more deeply (which he barely ever did) and added half an octave to his upper register and a whole octave to his lower one. At Quincy’s
instruction, Riggs worked with Michael two hours a day. One time, the teacher was sitting at the piano as Michael held a high C, then looked up to find Michael doing an endless pirouette.
“You don’t have to do that,” Riggs told him. “Yeah,” Michael said, “but maybe somebody will ask me to do that—and I want to be ready.”

For Jones, Michael was a blank canvass—someone who fit his idea of R&B so cutting-edge it could become not just black music but pop music. Jones called Michael “Smelly Jelly,” a reference to MJ’s preferred word for funky.
“Quincy and Rod were like, ‘Wow, we got this guy who could execute everything we hear in our heads,’ ” says Ed Eckstine, then an executive for Jones’s production company. “And Michael was like, ‘I got these two guys who hear everything in their heads—and I can add something on my own.’ ” Quincy had a way of staving off Michael’s prolific ideas without undercutting his enthusiasm. “Michael would come in every day with a new idea: ‘This is great!’—and he’d spew fifteen ideas,” Eckstine adds. “And Quincy might not respond to any of them: ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ ‘So, Bruce, what are we working on today?’ ”

Jones and Swedien devised a system to capture moments of inspiration as they happened in the studio. To record Temperton’s “Rock with You,” Swedien decided he needed the best possible rhythmic setting for the drums, so he asked studio carpenters to build an eight-foot-square, ten-inch-tall platform made of natural wood,
“braced and counterbraced.” Drummer John Robinson set up his kit on the platform. Then Swedien asked Michael to sing on the same platform, and he wound up with the perfect acoustic spot to capture MJ’s habit of snapping and tapping as he recorded his vocals. “I absolutely love those little sounds as a part of Michael’s sonic character,” he says. To record hand claps, Swedien recruited Robinson, keyboardist Greg Phillinganes (a holdover from
Destiny
), and bassist Louis Johnson of the Brothers Johnson to stand around a microphone. He then played the tape back at faster speed, so the recording sounded like the Chipmunks clapping, and reconvened the trio to clap again in real time.
Thus the hand claps throughout
Off the Wall
have a full sound, treble and bass at the same time.

Quincy Jones, at one point, thought the clapping looked like fun and joined in. Then he hit his wrist wrong and his
Rolex crashed to the floor. “You’re out,” Robinson joked to the superstar producer who’d failed hand claps. “You gotta go.”

Jones and Swedien recorded in fragments, then reassembled the songs like a puzzle made of magnetic tape. This inspiration-in-pieces approach extended into the parking lot. After one long day with Michael and Quincy, Louis Johnson was sitting in his car, listening to an unmarked cassette on the $5,000 stereo system he’d rigged for LA commutes. It was a bass-and-drum Brothers Johnson demo he’d recorded in his garage twenty-four-track studio. Michael walked by, hearing the music.
“Man, what is that?” he asked Johnson, in the driver’s seat. “Oh, something I’m working on. Something separate.” “That’s
bad
,” Michael said. “Can I listen to it?” MJ climbed into the passenger seat as Johnson rewound the tape and they listened. The next day, they returned to the studio; Michael had refashioned the track into “Get on the Floor.” The songwriting credit on the record is to Jackson and Johnson, which means, in worldwide publishing royalties, Johnson has made, conservatively speaking, almost $1 million from
Off the Wall
sales alone.

“She’s Out of My Life,” the ballad that famously made Michael Jackson tear up at the end, came from Tom Bähler, an arranger and songwriter who’d worked with Quincy and Michael numerous times. It was based on a woman Bähler dated after his divorce. Bähler planned to give the song to Frank Sinatra, but Jones called and talked him into holding it for
Off the Wall
. When Michael heard “She’s Out of My Life,” he called it “the Single.” It was the first song they recorded during the
Off the Wall
sessions. Michael changed one line, the last one—from “instead of begging my wife / she’s out of my life” to “And it cuts like a knife / she’s out of my life.”

Off the Wall
, which came out in August 1979, opens with one of the most extraordinary expressions of frustration and catharsis ever captured on a pop record. “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” was the first song Michael Jackson ever wrote by himself, at his Hayvenhurst studio, with help from session men such as keyboardist Greg Phillinganes. The heart of the composition was a groove, similar to the way he cowrote “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).” Quincy knew how to tease a bona fide song from the groove, adding strings, horns, a middle section written by Phillinganes, and what MJ called
“guitars chopping like kalimbas, the African thumb pianos,” during the fade-out. In the studio, later, drummer John Robinson mirrored the robotic, steady beat on his kick drum; Phillinganes and Louis Johnson later added Fender Rhodes and electric bass, respectively, giving the track a thick and full feeling. “Don’t Stop” begins with Michael’s subdued voice, at first teary and desperate: “You know, I was . . . I was wondering . . . eh . . . because the force has got a lot of power.” The listener wonders whether this is a
Star Wars
reference, or something more mysterious, unhinged. “It makes me feel like . . . ,” he continues, dramatically trailing off. Then again: “It make me feel like-
uh
 . . .” There’s a pause, followed by a falsetto orgasmic scream so intense that Michael would later have to convince his mother,
Katherine, the devout Jehovah’s Witness, that his new song was not about sex: “OOOOHHWWWOOOAAAAH!”

The groove on
“Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,”
Off the Wall
’s first single, which came out on July 28, borrows a central concept from disco—man vs. machine, relentless, mechanical rhythms matched with a sensual voice. But no disco star, not even Donna Summer or the Bee Gees, had more charisma and humanity than Michael Jackson. Quincy Jones had correctly identified the decline of disco, and
Off the Wall
, when it came out in late 1979, threw the many itinerant disco fans a life preserver, giving them a place to go: “Burn This Disco Out,” “Workin’ Day and Night,” and, of course, “Don’t Stop” would become staples at underground dance-party warehouses and post-disco radio
stations. It’s a short album, ten songs in forty-one minutes, with no ostentatious solos to obscure the impact of Michael’s voice.
Off the Wall
contained everything that was fun about disco. Every song has persistent percussive noises, hand claps, cowbells, bongos, and Michael’s own vocal tricks, running into and around the central rhythm, like multiple heartbeats competing for space in the same body. “Workin’ Day and Night” alone contains melodies and countermelodies, fast and intricate horn arrangements, bursts of wah-wah guitar, Michael oohing, sighing, and
oh no–
ing and call-and-response choruses of
Got me, got me workin’ day and night
. The whole work is so damn joyful that when “She’s Out of My Life” finally appears, the clear-eyed ballad of love, loss, and desperation is even more devastating.

The cover photo, of a big-haired Michael Jackson smiling against a brick wall in a black tuxedo and bow tie, was a throwaway, an idea from a designer that wouldn’t cost much or require any travel. Jackson wanted to shoot the cover at the Hollywood Observatory, but photographer Mike Salisbury wound up capturing him in an alley against the redbrick wall. Salisbury gave Michael the tuxedo. The white socks were Michael’s idea—a Fred Astaire move, to focus attention on his dancing feet. “Put a little attitude into it,” Salisbury said. Michael moved his hands around and smiled.

It was 1979. There was a gas crisis, an economic malaise. In July, disco crashed, thanks to a massive record-smashing party at Chicago’s Comiskey Park led by Steve Dahl, a young radio DJ. White rock fans rioted for the right to never hear disco on the radio again. They almost took down the entire record industry with them, as sales of disco albums abruptly stopped.

*  *  *

Through his cousin, Mike Sembello, who worked on the
Destiny
album, Bud Rizzo landed an informal audition to play guitar on the Jacksons’ world tour. He showed up at Hayvenhurst and jammed with the boys for two days. The next day, Tito called back and said,
“Why
don’t you come to rehearsal?” The Jacksons’ management negotiated a decent salary, and Rizzo boarded a plane to London in early 1979. By this point, the
Off the Wall
album release was still several months away.

Although Rizzo was in his mid-twenties at the time, he had played with Brazilian-jazz bandleader Sérgio Mendes and became a sort of wizened mentor figure to some of the Jacksons while they rode on a tour bus through Europe. He was a vegetarian at the time and scoured London for Indian restaurants. Michael, also a vegetarian, began to bond with Rizzo over food, music, and spirituality.
“Kind of these way-out talks,” Rizzo says. Michael and Bud sat together on the bus, and the singer played the guitarist a prerelease demo of “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” with Randy Jackson on Coke-bottle percussion, and a version of “She’s Out of My Life” with just Michael’s voice and piano. Rizzo turned Michael on to Little Feat, the Neville Brothers, the Rolling Stones, and jazz-fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth.

During breaks before shows, they’d go to the movies together, sometimes with Randy or Tito. Michael had his own cache of Fred Astaire tapes that he’d watch on a VCR on the bus, allowing Bud to draw his own connections between the Michael he saw dancing every night and Astaire’s famous elegance. The European tour was a success, although Michael at one point developed a throat infection and had to cancel several shows. The Jacksons began to play arenas once they returned to the US. By the middle of the tour, they needed a horn section, especially to play the more complex dance numbers Michael was about to release for
Off the Wall
. Alan “Funt” Prater, a trumpeter and trombonist, had been in R&B singer Millie Jackson’s band and heard about the Jacksons’ auditions through a friend. He showed up at Hayvenhurst with his unknown horn section from Montreal, audaciously padding its résumé in advance, and falsely, as a renowned session group called the
Memphis Horns. Katherine Jackson answered the door and the young men blew their horns for her; she liked them and introduced them to the Jackson brothers, who invited them to rehearsal at an MGM
Studios soundstage in Culver City, outside LA. When Michael first walked in, he was wearing shorts and unmatched white gym socks and sat on the floor, taking in the music, moving his body and grooving and bopping silently.
“Wow,” Prater thought, “this guy is kinda nerdy-like.” Then Michael stood up, grabbed the microphone, and sang, while doing his astounding twirls and kicks. “I couldn’t believe what I just witnessed,” Prater recalls. “This guy just flipped a switch—he was this entity. He was
Michael Jackson
.”

When the tour started again, Prater noticed what Rizzo had seen earlier that year. The Jacksons were accessible. They’d hang out with the backup musicians in their hotel rooms. Michael and Marlon were the pranksters, setting buckets of water on the top edges of the doors between rooms, then laughing uproariously when a victim took a splash to the head. Jackie was always the one trying to calm them down: “Hey, hey, hey, let’s get it right.” Joe was always around, as stern as ever. At one point, Prater drew up his courage and scheduled a meeting with him to discuss a raise. “
Raise?
” Joseph responded. “Nah, nah, nah, nah—ain’t gonna be no
raise.
I can’t do that. You want to be here or
not
?” Groupies were everywhere. Prater returned to his hotel room occasionally to find a young woman in his closet or under the bed. He could never figure out how it happened, given the Jacksons’ strong security team, but he developed a habit of searching any given hotel room to weed out unwanted guests before retiring for the night.

The Jacksons took the stage every night underneath a giant sparkly peacock. This, Michael would explain, was
“a symbol of what we are trying to say through our music, and it is summed up by the fact that the peacock is the only bird that integrates all the colors into one. . . . To bring all races together through love.” Their costumes were over-the-top, even by Jackson 5 standards—for one early 1979 show in London, they wore silver-spacemen outfits. Michael did the Robot during “Dancing Machine.” Randy played bongos and keyboards, and he and Marlon subbed in the vocals for the absent Jermaine. Bud Rizzo, in
his beard, yellow Nudie suit, and large glasses, played a pretty Spanish guitar line between Michael’s vocals in “Ben.” And while the band squashed chestnuts “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” and “The Love You Save” into a brief greatest-hits medley, they stretched
Destiny
tracks such as “Things I Do for You” and “Blame It on the Boogie” into long funk workouts that showcased Michael’s dance steps. When Michael sang “I just can’t control my feet!,” his feet seemed to propel the rest of his body, side to side, back and forth, into flawless spins.

After carefully rehearsed twirls throughout “Keep On Dancing,” “Enjoy Yourself,” and others, the encore was something different. MJ returned to the stage in a black tuxedo, black shoes, white socks, black bow tie, and what seemed like two yards of white cuff. The band (with Marlon and Jackie on percussion) cranked into the groove for “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” a song from
Off the Wall
that had yet to come out in stores. Michael held a pose with his right arm outstretched and his left hand in his pocket. He held a beat. Another. A few more. Then he spun, removed his jacket, hiked up his pants, strutted and kicked. His brothers were still performing in their original garish outfits, and for a moment it looked like the past and the future were converging on stage.
“It was the same thing over and over,” MJ said 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.” Those around him could sense his frustration. At the end of the
Destiny
tour, Bud Rizzo says,
“You could feel something was ending. You could feel the change in the room when [Michael] was around. He was separating himself from the rest of the group.” Michael Jackson, finally, was beginning to leave his family behind.