MJ (27 page)

Michael fulfilled his promise to rehire Bottrell for his next album. MJ considered Bottrell more than a technical hired hand, or even a creative foil off whom he could bounce ideas.
“It was a melding of minds,” says Thom Russo, an engineer who worked on the
Dangerous
album and considered Bottrell a mentor. “It was kind of a Lennon-McCartney thing, where they would oppose each other a lot, in a healthy way. I’d hear them on the phone, or working together—a lot of times it was, ‘No, dude, I don’t like it like this.’ ” Some interpreted Bottrell’s creative
confidence as arrogance. He was so convinced his approach to a song or an album was correct that he could rub people the wrong way, and he didn’t try to sugarcoat his messages. These qualities made him a rival to the friendly, plainspoken Swedien, whom Michael kept on for both his technical expertise and his ties to the
Off the Wall
,
Thriller
, and
Bad
eras.
“I don’t want to belittle Bill Bottrell’s talent, because he is really terrific,” Swedien says. “But a good nickname for Bill would have been ‘Grouch.’ ”

As they worked in the studio, Michael and Bill began to transform Michael’s ideas into songs—
“Black or White,” “Dangerous,” “Who Is It,” and “Give In to Me,” all of which made it to the album, as well as early versions of “Earth Song,” “Monkey Business,” and “If You Don’t Love Me.” Bottrell, a former garage-band guitarist, turned “Black or White” into a layered, upbeat rock-and-funk song with bursts of heavy guitar (provided by his friend Tim Pierce) and synthesizers. The song grew one section at a time, beginning with the middle parts. The thick, catchy rhythm guitar gave “Black or White” a sort of Kiss-and-Nirvana hard-rock timelessness. One morning, Bottrell woke up and decided the song needed a rap—so he created one himself. At first he was embarrassed about it, but Michael talked him into leaving it in. Eventually, Bottrell decided a white guy rapping was perfect for a Michael Jackson song about not seeing color. The credits attribute the rap to “L.T.B.,” Bottrell’s in-joke acronym for “Leave it to Beaver.”

Also collaborating closely was Bryan Loren, an R&B singer who’d had minor eighties hits such as “Do You Really Love Me” and “Lollipop Luv” and was signed as a songwriter to Michael’s ATV publishing company. While Bottrell and Loren were cranking out songs in their respective rooms, Michael hired a cutting-edge funk production team and set it up in an expensive studio. Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, along with Janet
Jackson’s producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, were in the process of inventing a new and influential form of heavily rhythmic funk known as new jack swing. They specialized
in melodies, and Michael coaxed them away from Atlanta to work at one of his many LA studios, Can-Am Recorders. Babyface and L.A. had come up with seven or eight songs, including one Michael loved—“Slave to the Rhythm”—and they worked endlessly to get it right.
“We went out and set up camp, and started writing like we normally write,” recalls Daryl Simmons, a producer who worked with Babyface’s team. “[Jackson] didn’t show up for maybe two days. He must have sang fifty tracks. He sang and sang and sang. And then some days he would disappear.” Other days, Michael showed up at Can-Am with Macaulay Culkin, and the two would roar around the studio, playing pranks with electrical-shock pens. In the end, Michael opted not to use “Slave to the Rhythm”—he preferred a more driving track to go with Babyface’s melodies.

Heavy D, the late hip-hop pioneer who performed the rap on “Jam,” would take credit for introducing Michael to Teddy Riley. A member of hit R&B vocal trio Guy, Riley’s specialty was a persistent, electronic, hip-hop-style rhythm, something Michael wished to export wholesale for
Dangerous
. It helped that Guy’s material sounded like an offshoot of Prince, a more streamlined, harmonic, and radio-friendly interpretation of “Raspberry Beret.” Michael had Prince on his mind.
“Quincy’s productions have a bit more of a jazz musicality to them, as far as chord changes and arrangements,” says Dave Way, an engineer who worked for years with Riley before joining the
Dangerous
team. “Teddy’s were a lot more beat oriented and stripped-down—very drum heavy and groove oriented.” Babyface and L.A. Reid knew they’d lost out to Riley when MJ began to bring them versions of Riley’s tracks, often stripped down so it was just the rhythmic hook.
“I remember him saying, ‘I want Teddy’s beats and your melodies,’ ” Babyface collaborator Daryl Simmons recalls. “L.A. didn’t like that, but that’s what Michael was after—the hard-driving, new jack beat, with our melody and lyrics.”

“I came in with ten grooves,” Riley said. “He liked them all.”

Michael rooted out the best qualities of each production team.
Buz Kohan, Michael’s old friend from the
Motown 25
days, convinced Michael to revisit his tearjerker “Gone Too Soon” as a tribute to Michael’s friend Ryan White, the eighteen-year-old AIDS activist who’d died in April 1990. Although he’d waited more than seven years for Michael to record his song, Kohan was lucky.
“You could make a lot of money getting on a Michael Jackson record. You didn’t have to be in the business to know that,” says John Chamberlin, a
Dangerous
assistant engineer. “It means you could be secure for the rest of your life.” Michael didn’t talk about it much, but some believed he was borrowing a technique from his former Motown mentor Berry Gordy Jr.
“He would set up independent teams,” says his longtime engineer, Matt Forger. “He was in a search for what was going to be the very best.” Jackson spent an estimated
$10 million to make
Dangerous
. He recorded in seven studios, including two years of twenty-four-hour access at Record One, at $4,000 a day. The project eventually shifted to three rooms at Larrabee, about five miles away in Hollywood, which over nine months cost roughly $3,000 to $4,000 per day.
“There was no deadline,” Swedien said, “we could just work on mixes for weeks on end.”

The relationship between Swedien and Bottrell escalated from rivals to nemeses.
“I had a sense it was very competitive, and they wanted to know what each other was doing,” Chamberlin says. “But [they] did not ask to hear each other’s stuff.” They brought different skill sets to the album. The experienced, personable, and hyper-confident Swedien was a heroic figure in the studio, especially to young engineers who considered the
Thriller
engineer a mentor. Riley, the big-name producer, worked well with Swedien; they frequently teamed up in the same room at Larrabee. Bottrell was not merely a technical guy but a songwriter and musician, and his contributions to the album were more multifaceted. “Bruce would sit there very comfortable in his skin, not swayed by anything. And he made it sound great,” Chamberlin says. “But with Bill, there was a sense that he was going to do more. Bruce Swedien couldn’t play guitar or drums or any of those things, but Bill
could do all that stuff. He could write a song. He could sing it.” As work on the album progressed, Bottrell continued to meticulously polish his own songs for the album, particularly “Dangerous,” “Earth Song,” and “Monkey Business.”

“I was feeling increasingly isolated,” Bottrell says. “I was really working alone by then.”

Although Bottrell remained excited about his work, he perceived that Michael in the big-money
Dangerous
era was a more distant collaborator than he’d been throughout previous sessions. “On
Bad
, he could call me after dinner and say, ‘Come on down, we want to do a vocal,’ ” Bottrell says. “There was no way to not succumb to the blockbuster-movie mode once we got to
Dangerous
.” Rather than working long hours with Bottrell one-on-one, Michael would poke his head in Bottrell’s studio room once in a while and say, “Hey, Billy, let’s do an intro on ‘Earth Song,’ ” or “I’ve got this poem, here’s the words.” Some days, MJ worked eighteen straight hours in the studio; others, he’d be on a video shoot and stay away completely.

The adversarial relationship between Bottrell and Swedien peaked one day at Larrabee studio. At issue were Bottrell’s working tapes. He had learned his lesson on
Bad
, when Quincy’s A-Team would send an engineer, Brad Sundberg, to Michael’s Hayvenhurst studio every night to pick up Bottrell’s mixes and take them back to the studio. “I had no way of knowing if they used my work, or just re-created it very carefully. During the
Dangerous
album, I kept all my tapes locked—very conspicuously, in the hall,” Bottrell recalls. Some interpreted Bottrell’s locked tapes as a screw-you to the rest of the studio; by and large, Bottrell did little to dissuade his colleagues from this impression.

At one point during
Dangerous
, Sundberg, an engineer loyal to Swedien, secretly set up two microphones underneath the racks of DAT machines Bottrell was using at his Larrabee studio room. Chamberlin, one of the album’s assistant engineers, was sitting in Bottrell’s room waiting for Michael to show up. When Chamberlin noticed an
unexpected cable leading to the tape machine, he opened the back of a cabinet and found the recording device. Chamberlin called Bottrell. Next thing he knew, Swedien’s assistant was in the room and somebody was telling Chamberlin to leave. Bottrell isn’t sure who gave the order for this “bugging,” and Sundberg wouldn’t comment. But, Chamberlin says, “I thought it could’ve come from Bruce [Swedien].” Matt Forger, Michael’s longtime engineer, believes it was MJ himself—so “he could monitor the process.” Either way, it left bad feelings with everybody involved—the competition had become not Berry Gordy–style best-you-can-be but ugly and demoralizing.
“It was beyond not cool. It was actually breaking the law,” Thom Russo, another
Dangerous
engineer, recalls. “That was an awfully fucking weird thing to go down.” Swedien, retired and living in Florida, doesn’t remember.
“Boy, that’s great,” he says. “I did a record by that name—‘Paranoia.’ ”

As with
Thriller
, the final two-month push to finish
Dangerous
was highly stressful. Epic executives wanted to release the album by Thanksgiving.
“When the deadline came, [Jackson] wanted to do more and more songs,” Riley said after the album came out. “And his manager came in there and said, ‘Teddy, you and Michael, you’re not up to your sneaky stuff. Do not write another song.’ ” Michael, Riley, and Swedien worked all night, drove back to their hotel for a short night’s sleep, then returned in the morning. One day, Swedien caught Michael crying at Record One because he couldn’t find the right key for “Keep the Faith.” Swedien had to play both drill sergeant and therapist to get the performance. “Pull yourself together, face this now,” he told Michael. “We’re not going home until you’ve sung this all the way through. Then we’ll go home and be able to sleep and continue.” Says Swedien: “That was scary. But he did it.”

Dangerous
came out on November 26, 1991, a bleak time for pop albums, no matter how contemporary they tried to sound. Nirvana’s
Nevermind
had arrived two months earlier, the climax of a percolating punk-rock movement in Seattle and elsewhere, prompting music stars
to be sloppy, spontaneous, non-choreographed, full of guitar-smashing passion. Still,
Dangerous
sold seventy thousand
copies per day,
seven hundred thousand in its first two weeks, and held No. 1 on
Billboard
’s album chart through the end of 1991. It succumbed to pop music’s inflection point on January 4, 1992, when the slow-building
Nevermind
took over. Reviewers hadn’t been especially kind: the
Los Angeles Times
called the album
“a messy grab-bag of ideas and high-tech non sequiturs, with something for everyone from the man who has everything.” Privately, Michael’s people began to worry he was losing his edge. “
Dangerous
was all Michael. He had no one telling him what to do. He just had a bunch of yes-men around him,” says Larry Stessel, Jackson’s longtime marketing executive at Epic Records. “You have a strong personality like Quincy Jones, you need someone to say, ‘That blows. We’re not going to do that.’
Dangerous
was just an average album. He was trying to emulate other artists that were out there.” Even Matt Forger, Michael’s loyal engineer, felt the album didn’t have the same concentrated punch as his previous works. “Several factions” contributed to the album, Forger says, including Bryan Loren and his “Minneapolis kind of funky flavor,” Bottrell and his more rock-oriented material, and producer Riley in tandem with engineer Swedien. “There was a lot of sharing the production duties at Michael’s request,” Forger says. “It’s not as cohesive as
Bad
was—ninety percent of the songs [on
Bad
] were Michael’s. . . . On
Dangerous
, Teddy did half the album, and then Bruce and other people did the other half. At the very end of the whole process, Bruce came in and did the final mix of several of Teddy’s songs to maximize sonic quality.”

But the very unfocused quality of
Dangerous
gives it a power unique in MJ’s album catalog. The first six songs are more explosively funky than anything MJ has ever done, as heavy and punishing as any Miami bass music of the time. “Jam” had begun with Michael repeating the word
jam
over a drum-machine pattern Swedien had set up, and Riley later beefed it up with elaborate horn lines and other sound effects. It opens with
shattering glass; a blast of heavy-metal guitar fades into the robotic drums at the beginning of “Why You Wanna Trip on Me”; car horns blare as if activated by rioting in “She Drives Me Wild.” Michael’s emotions arrive in a jumble, angry and lustful, worried about the world, all in a more specific and pointed way than he’d been in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” “You got world hunger / not enough to eat,” he sings, “so there’s really no time / to be trippin’ on me.” Writes critic Susan Fast:
“Michael as quirky crossover
wunderkind
, fabulous; inhabiting adulthood as the sexy guy he was, with those looks, his love of kids and kid-like things, his failure to partner up, making blacker-sounding music and talking seriously about race, sex and spiritual life: good God. We were kidding, we don’t want him to grow up. Please give us our little boy back.”