MJ (15 page)

Jones’s A-Team felt more deadline pressure. They were behind from the start, because Quincy was working on the storybook album for
E.T.
, with MJ himself reading the story and providing a new ballad called “Someone in the Dark.” CBS Records was unsympathetic, demanding an album timed to the week before Thanksgiving, the kickoff for the crucial holiday-shopping season.

“Everybody was working twenty-four hours a day and had five rooms
going at the same time,” recalls Humberto Gatica, one of the album’s engineers.

The musician-recruitment process was rushed and occasionally humorous. Steve Lukather, a member of hit pop band Toto and one of Quincy’s favorite guitarists, was introduced to Michael Jackson in an unusual way. The singer called him at 8:30
A.M.
—an absurd hour for a twenty-two-year-old Los Angeles musician who worked eighteen hours a day on studio sessions—and introduced himself.
“Fuck off,” Lukather said, and hung up. Eventually, Quincy Jones’s office intervened, and Lukather found himself apologizing to Michael. “Don’t worry,” MJ assured him, “it happens all the time.”

Quincy and the crew began work on what would become
Thriller
in August 1982.
“Okay, guys,” Quincy told his team, “we’re here to get the kids out of the video arcades and back into the record stores.” This was a timely mission statement, due to the sad state of the record industry—disco had crashed, and CDs had yet to kick in.

At first, the A-Team had exactly one finished track, a demo of which Michael had created earlier with McCartney:
“The Girl Is Mine.” Waiting to hear a cassette version of the song, guitarist Lukather and his Toto band mate, drummer Jeff Porcaro, had wishfully envisioned something like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” meets “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough.” But after Quincy sent it to Porcaro’s house, they laughed. “ ‘The doggone girl is mine’—really?
This
is the song?” they said to each other. They showed up for a three-day recording session in Tucson, Arizona, met Beatles producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, and found themselves playing a long jam of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” with Paul and Michael trading vocals. “It was funkier than a motherfucker,” Lukather recalls. He and Porcaro kept to themselves, ignoring the assembled “odd group of celebrities” on hand to witness the recording, including, inexplicably, child star Kristy McNichol and game-show host Bob Eubanks. When the pianist, Toto’s David Paich, started absent-mindedly plunking
out the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” Paul and Linda
McCartney joined the band in the studio. Although Paich later said he wished “The Girl Is Mine” had been “a better piece of material,” the final version of the song would be a crucial opening move in the campaign to break
Thriller
to the widest possible audience—and smash racial barriers in radio, records, and video in the process.

Beyond “The Girl Is Mine,” Quincy began to gather six or seven hundred songs for possible use on the album. Some came from Michael. Some came from other songwriters:
“When it was known that Quincy was getting ready to go in the studio for the next Michael Jackson album, every songwriter and music publisher wanted to have a track on that record,” recalls Matt Forger, the album’s technical engineer. Jones and Temperton listened to each potential album track before whittling them down to ten or twelve. Jones had a process he called “Polaroids”—directing Michael and his all-star team to figure out the arrangement, the key, and the tempo. The process was time-consuming.
“I’ve never seen Quincy so into anything. Ever,” Swedien recalled.

Jones had made dozens of film scores, and he knew how to use sound to build drama.
“It wasn’t how most people made records that I was involved with,” says synthesizer specialist Anthony Marinelli. “It was so visual. . . . They cast musicians and arrangers. And like a film, they’d throw all this stuff on the cutting-room floor. They were really looking for that big picture.” MJ, with his love for Fred Astaire movies, clicked with this approach.

Michael built his songs from the bottom up, scatting melodies over rhythmic ideas on early working versions of “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” To help him translate thoughts into sixteen-track demos, he continued to work with the musicians he’d brought to his home studio. Keyboardist Bill Wolfer soon became an expert on distinguishing Temperton songs from MJ songs.
“Rod Temperton had that Quincy Jones sound, which was great—Michael was a fit to it,” Wolfer says. “A [Jackson] song like ‘Don’t Stop ’til You Get
Enough,’ that’s an extension of what he was doing on
Destiny
or
Triumph
—riff-based, the harmony doesn’t change, a groove song. Quincy was able to make it all hang together.”

Michael had “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” left over from
Off the Wall.
It was the perfect successor to “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” with a dance groove that seemed to last forever. He had worked on a demo off and on for months, as far back as the 1979
Destiny
tour, when he confided to band mates his idea for the “mama-say-mama-sa-ma-ma-koo-sa” bit he’d nicked from Cameroonian star Manu Dibango’s seven-year-old hit “Soul Makossa.” (Dibango sued Jackson for plagiarism immediately after
Thriller
came out for one million French francs, and MJ quickly settled for somewhere between
$25,000 and $50,000—a pittance.) Michael had completed a version of “Startin’ Somethin’ ” months earlier, with the Waters singers on backup vocals. By the time it came to Quincy’s attention, it was nearly finished.

“Startin’ Somethin’,” the first track on
Thriller
, is one of Michael’s best vocal performances. After three explosive pops of the drums and a Louis Johnson slap-bass that resembles prison bars slamming shut, Michael lays down his vocal foundation for the album: tense, through his front teeth, more like James Brown than the happy kid from much of
Off the Wall.
The lyrics are dark and fierce, building on themes that Michael introduced two years earlier on “This Place Hotel”: Women are scary. The world is scary. The pain is like thunder. Somebody’s tongue becomes a razor. A baby cries. Toward the end, the Dibango chant matches the strength of Johnson’s bass line. Michael flies above them, soaring and whooping. Searching for percussion for the track, Michael had told Quincy,
“There’s a sound I want.” Somewhere at
Westlake, he found a piece of plyboard and stood it up against a wall in the bathroom. Swedien set up one of the dozens of microphones from his elaborate collection, and Michael, his assistant Nelson Hayes, and Jones’s driver Steven Ray pounded on it with their hands and feet. “We created this unusual kind of a sound that couldn’t be duplicated with a keyboard,”
recalls Ray, who with Jackson and Hayes would be immortalized in the
Thriller
liner notes as playing the “bathroom stomp board.”

MJ had been working on another song for months. He and Wolfer had created demos of it at his home studio. Michael kept a huge cockatoo in a wrought-iron cage. During a break, Michael scooped up a handful of birdseed, went to the front door of the studio, and stood entirely still, holding the seed in his outstretched palm. Wolfer watched with his mouth open as a blue jay flew across the yard, landed in Michael’s hand, and devoured the seed.
“This guy is different,” Wolfer thought.

Michael had asked Wolfer to translate what he heard in his head—a bass line and a rough idea of what Wolfer calls “that three-chord vamp.” In Jackson’s studio, it took Wolfer almost forty-five minutes to find the harmony part in the loose musical idea Jackson was communicating to him. But Michael wasn’t satisfied.

“He couldn’t play an instrument. He could barely play a few notes on a keyboard,” Wolfer recalls. “He’d come up with not only elaborate songs but elaborate arrangements, in his head, and he’d stick to them. You might lose things you hear in your head. He’d keep his vision and be as patient as he could be until finally he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ ” It took a while, but Wolfer nailed it.
“He knew what he wanted,” adds Jerry Hey, who worked on string arrangements for “Billie Jean” at Michael’s home studio. “He wasn’t a technical musician. He didn’t say, ‘Play this chord here,’ but he could definitely sing it and he had unbelievable rhythm and time.”

The 1981 demo for “Billie Jean” begins with Michael asking for “more bottom and kick in the phones” and includes fascinatingly amorphous scat-singing in lieu of lyrics. At his home studio, Michael had recorded the drum machine and Greg Phillinganes had laid down the bass line with a mini-Moog keyboard. Wolfer added the keyboard part with a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer. Later, Louis Johnson re-recorded the bass line so it sounded less like a tinkly keyboard and more like chunks of rubber set on fire and bounced against the studio walls in precise
rhythm. The demo had already been recorded by the time it got to Johnson, but the loquacious bass player recalls Michael approaching him, in his high voice, to describe the part as
“dit dit dit dit!” “No,” Johnson told him, “it’s not gonna go like that. That ain’t bass.” He adds: “I went in there and showed him how it’s supposed to. I double-tracked. I had two basses on there.” Johnson tried three or four of his many basses before he and Michael agreed on a Yamaha; he overdubbed three different parts to get the thick riff, and Phillinganes later added his synthesizer bass (as he did on most
Thriller
songs). Swedien used sixteen-track tape, a little thicker than for the twenty-four-track equipment he usually used, to get a fuller sound. For the rhythm, he made one track with a drum machine and the other with drummer Ndugu Chancler’s nine-piece wooden jacaranda kit. Everybody who heard it immediately knew it was a hit. Quincy didn’t want to call it “Billie Jean” at first because he thought people would associate it with tennis star Billie Jean King, but eventually he made the obvious, correct decision.

As the world knows by now, Michael fleshed out his “Billie Jean” scat-singing into a story about a man confronted by a woman who claims to be the mother of his child. Who was the real Billie Jean? Who knows? In public, Michael insisted she didn’t exist:
“The girl in the song is a composite of people we’ve been plagued by over the years.” In private, he told Chancler he was thinking about a specific girl:
“There was a story about Michael getting up to get something out of the refrigerator over at Hayvenhurst, and this girl had jumped the fence and was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him,” the drummer recalls. “We talked about the lack of privacy that existed in his life, with all the girls and people carrying kids in.”
Theresa Gonsalves, who says she was Michael’s girlfriend during his time filming
The Wiz
in New York, is the most vocal of the many women who have taken credit for it.

In the middle of recording “Billie Jean,” Michael walked into the studio with a cardboard mailing tube under his arm. Matt Forger, the technical engineer, didn’t think anything of it. But Swedien noticed
Michael had written all over it with Magic Marker. He sang through the mailing tube into Swedien’s microphone.
“He knew how to make that sound character unique,” Forger recalls. “He knew the arrangements, he knew the notations, he knew every note the instruments played, all the vocals, all the lines, absolutely cold. He completely had every song memorized.”

Jones was filling the nine song slots he’d mapped out for
Thriller
quickly. He had a vision for how this album would sell:
“Two records per household.” MJ could have made the funkiest James Brown album in the world, with “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Billie Jean,” and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” at its core, but then all he ever would have done was become the newest James Brown. Both Quincy and Michael had broader goals. They needed a song that would appeal not only to hip young kids but their parents as well. They needed the perfect tearjerking ballad.

Quincy called David Paich, one of the two keyboardists for Toto, later famous for middle-of-the-road eighties hits such as “Africa” and “Rosanna.” Through Quincy, Toto had emerged as sort of the house band for
Thriller
. Quincy asked Paich for some musical ideas, and Paich obligingly laid them down on a cassette. Quincy sent a messenger to Paich’s house, where he was working with Steve Porcaro, to pick it up.

“Hey,” Paich shouted to Porcaro from upstairs in his house, “Quincy’s guy is coming over here. Put those two things we did yesterday down on cassettes, will you?”

They’d run out of cassettes, so Porcaro used an existing, unmarked one, flipping it over to dub two new grooves Paich had taped on side A. What Porcaro had forgotten was that the cassette contained a song
he
had written on side B. It was something he had noodled out after his daughter, Heather, a first-grader, had cried because a boy pushed her off the slide at school. Porcaro had blurted out the best fatherly advice he could think of: First, the boy probably had a crush on her; second, people can be strange sometimes; third,
it’s human nature
. The lyrics
weren’t exactly polished—“horrible, self-indulgent things about my daughter, whatever,” Porcaro recalls—but the chorus stuck in everybody’s head in exactly the way a ballad should stick. When Quincy received the cassette, he queued up the wrong side and listened to Porcaro’s song. “Human Nature.” Quincy loved the title. He loved the chorus. He didn’t like the verses. He asked Porcaro if he could get a prominent lyricist, John Bettis, to perform surgery.

“Absolutely,” Porcaro said.

Quincy wanted the widest possible audience, and that involved crossing over to rock radio, the domain of white programmers who perceived their audiences would listen almost exclusively to Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. He asked his people for a hard-rocking hit; Michael brought him “Beat It.” Instantly excited, Quincy instructed Toto’s Porcaro and Lukather to lay down the sing-along rhythms, but Michael felt the snares needed more oomph. One day somebody hauled in a new
gran cassa
bass drum and began unwrapping it from its hard-paper packaging. Something fell on it and Michael whirled around.
“What’s that sound?” he asked. Swedien hauled everything into the studio bathroom, hung a microphone inside an instrument road case, and rolled tape while Michael pounded on the package. So Michael gets credit on “Beat It” as Drum Case Beater and the drums on the song go not
boom-chk
but
boom-CRASH.