MJ (33 page)

As with
Dangerous
at its outset, the first vision for
HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book I
was a greatest-hits collection. The idea came from Sony Music executives, who began talking about it within two weeks of Michael’s 1994 settlement with Jordie Chandler over child-molestation charges. They wanted a stopgap, a way of reminding the public of their best-selling star’s good qualities until he could make a proper comeback.
“It was really a simple formula,” says Dan Beck, an Epic Records marketing executive who worked closely with the singer. “But with Michael, it’s never simple.” What Beck and his colleagues didn’t know was that Michael had been recording new music for nearly two years. Word soon came back to the label that he had five songs ready to go. It was difficult for Epic executives to communicate directly with Michael at that point—DiLeo, who was fluent in raspy record-business-ese and could translate Michael’s inexplicable behavior, was long gone. Gallin was more of an MJ yes-man, “offering no personal opinion, really doing the bidding of his artist,” as Beck recalls. Finally, Beck and Dave Glew, head of Epic Records, dropped in on MJ at the Hit Factory, heard the music, and came back with the idea for a double album.

Beck and Glew perceived darkness in the new material, a willingness on Michael’s part to address his personal anger through his songs more explicitly than he’d done since “Leave Me Alone.” Michael had been working with a few different producers and songwriters, sketching out the songs he heard in his head, as always. These included the Jimmy Jam–Terry Lewis team, longtime Prince collaborators who’d engineered smash albums for Michael’s sister Janet. On one gorgeous early-fall day, Michael flew to their Minneapolis studio to work on vocals for their song “Scream.” (It looked like Michael might record his entire album there, until a frigid December trip involving hoods and parkas changed his mind.) Michael began to record at his usual collection of studios in LA, from Westlake to Record One, but the 1994 Northridge earthquake scared him, so he relocated the operation to New York. To maintain Michael’s privacy, studio engineers were told to prepare for a session with a
“Mr. Sherman.” The discretion was ineffective—fans and paparazzi were a constant presence on the street outside the studio.

Michael’s primary songwriting partner at the time was Brad Buxer, who, like Greg Phillinganes and other key Jackson collaborators, had been a veteran of Stevie Wonder’s band. When the two met in 1989, Buxer said,
“a current immediately passed between us.” After Phillinganes dropped out of the
Dangerous
tour, Michael elevated Buxer to succeed him as musical director. For
HIStory
, Buxer and Michael worked in a makeshift Neverland writing room.
“Brad was his comfort-level guy,” says engineer Tony Black.

Unlike Bill Bottrell, who had a darkness to his personality, Buxer was upbeat to the point of being irritating.
“Brad was one of the most hyper
people I’d ever met,” says James “Trip” Khalaf, sound engineer for the
Dangerous
and
HIStory
tours. “He lived and breathed that music. He knew every little nuance of everything. He tried to make me put things in the [tour] mix that weren’t even on the records because they were on the original multitrack studio recordings.” CJ deVillar,
an engineer who worked with Michael after the
HIStory
sessions, was suspicious of Buxer’s role within Michael’s organization.
“He had his own power, and he sort of wielded it,” he says. “Anybody who went up against Brad seemed not to fare well.” Beginning on the
Dangerous
tour, where they worked on songs in their hotel rooms, Michael and Brad began to conceive “Stranger in Moscow,” “Money,” “Childhood,” and “Little Susie.” It was obvious to everybody that Michael was entering a more explicitly autobiographical portion of his career, inspired by the recent trauma in his life. “Stranger in Moscow” is one of Jackson’s bleakest songs, using Iron Curtain imagery as a metaphor for his feelings of oppression—the first line is “I was wandering in the rain / mask of life / feelin’ insane.” Michael turned the song into a meditation, offsetting the heavy-handed lyrics with a sparse torch-song ambience. As they began to put the album together, Jackson and Buxer viewed “Stranger in Moscow” as the centerpiece.

The Hit Factory producers and engineers settled in for eleven months of solid work, including frequent twenty-three-hour days.
“We were regularly handing in 220-hour time sheets,” Black says. “There was no Sunday off.” Often, Michael was right there with them, camping out at the studio for hours at a time, popping into and out of one of the multiple rooms to check on producers and engineers. He spent most of his time with Buxer, figuring out harmonies for new songs and recording vocals. Occasionally he’d disappear, to Los Angeles or Saudi Arabia, checking in by phone with Buxer, Bruce Swedien, or another engineer, Eddie Delena. He’d ask to hear a song in progress, then say, “I want it a little faster, and one key up.” Whichever engineer happened to be talking to him would dutifully remind Michael that the changes he was requesting were expensive: “We’re going to need ten or fifteen hours [of paid work] for this.” Michael didn’t care. “I know,” he sharply responded.

The crew was overworked and occasionally beleaguered, but they had plenty of perks. Michael housed much of the staff at the New York
Palace, overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The Hit Factory rooms alone cost roughly
$4,000 per day, plus additional staff and food deliveries. “Everything costs and costs and costs,” Black recalls. “You just can’t go down the street to go get a slice of pizza. There’s got to be two security guards and a van, and all of a sudden that slice of pizza costs forty-eight bucks.” Swedien called his old colleague Bernie Grundman, the mastering whiz who had worked on most of Michael’s solo albums, and invited him to leave his LA studio and join the
HIStory
crew in New York. Jackson’s people put up Grundman at a suite in the tony Pierre Hotel and arranged for him to work at the $400-an-hour Sony mastering operation. He told Swedien he’d have to haul in bulky equalizers from his own studio, at great expense. Over two weeks, Grundman worked on exactly one song—“Smile.” In the end, since Michael didn’t want to stick around for the cold New York autumn, Grundman wound up mastering everything else at his LA studio, as he had suggested to Swedien in the first place. He estimated his personal costs at $200,000.
“
HIStory
was probably the most expensive album. I know it was for mastering,” he says. “Really extreme.”

“The crew, all these second engineers, they’d find the most expensive places in New York City. They were ordering, like, steak and lobster to go,” adds a source who worked on the album. “It was like nobody was minding the store. It was crazy. There was no naked women and drug use going on, but it was like there was no budget.”

By
HIStory
, Michael had given up on his
Bad
-era goal, written on his bathroom mirror, to outsell
Thriller
. That hubris had morphed into a different one: create sounds the human ear had never heard before. He repeated this mission statement often to collaborators.
“Fiery and angry. There’s a lot of things to be angry about at the world, and I want a lot of sounds the kids will relate to,” Michael told Chuck Wild, former keyboardist for the new-wave band Missing Persons. Through his friend Swedien, Wild signed on to create four or five “soundscapes” every day, then FedEx them from his California home to the Hit Factory.
Gus Garces, one of the engineers, worked with an audio-technology expert for four straight days on a newfangled electronic
panning effect, in which a sound passes from one speaker to the other in the recording. It wound up taking exactly ten seconds of the album. To create the effect in “Childhood” of a little girl with a music box opening a door, engineers sampled a variety of music boxes and recordings of doors opening and closing. Swedien sent Wild a Synclavier; using Michael’s money, Wild hired people to wander LA, recording sounds downtown, near railroad tracks and such, and he combined them with samples built into the synthesizer. The electronic
“whoosh-vroom” toward the beginning of
“They Don’t Care about Us” came from Wild’s lab, but the rest of his sounds appeared briefly and sporadically.

“They Don’t Care about Us” embodied Michael’s approach to recording during this period. The song is sort of a sound-poem, stringing angry words together in the style of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Electronic drums move in and out of the song, as do a clapping children’s choir and heavy-metal guitar. Unlike “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” and most of Michael’s best-known songs, in which he conceived them fully formed, “They Don’t Care about Us” was a studio creation. It began with a metronome and a basic four-count kick drum. “Michael wanted the drums to have a certain attack—he really wanted it to hit you over the head,” says Rob Hoffman, a
HIStory
engineer who worked on the track. “It took time to go through millions of samples to build up that groove. Just the percussion element of that was probably twenty tracks or more.” Michael repeated the boom-boom-tak-tak groove for hours, over loud studio speakers, as he wrote the rest of the song in his head. Eventually he added the verses. Buxer added other elements and Chuck Wild sounds, and Michael and Brad brought in guest musicians to play briefly.
“I’ve never seen so many people doing a session in my life,” recalls Trevor Rabin of veteran rock band Yes, who contributed the distinctive high-speed heavy-metal-guitar bit in the middle. Guns
N’ Roses’ Slash, who’d played on “Give In to Me” on
Dangerous
, added another bit, and engineer Hoffman’s own guitar part survived as well. Michael and engineer Delena
“sat for days mixing and matching and compiling all the different layers,” Hoffman recalls.

Although Michael had intended “Stranger in Moscow” to be the focal point of
HIStory
, a leftover from the
Dangerous
sessions emerged throughout the recording process that would become not only the album’s most distinctive song but what critic Joseph Vogel would call Jackson’s
“magnum opus.” Michael had begun writing “Earth Song” in 1988, during the
Bad
tour, standing outside his hotel in Vienna, looking over the museums and cathedrals on Ringstrasse. “It dropped into my lap,” he said. As Michael began to conceive
Dangerous
, he brought up the unfinished song to Bill Bottrell. At the time, Michael was starting to break away from his strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing—he quit the faith in 1987—and develop, according to Vogel, “a much more inclusive, liberating understanding of himself, the world, and the divine.” While working with MJ on what would become the
Dangerous
album, Bottrell laid down the intro on a grand piano. Michael played it for Buxer, too, who loved it. Jackson and Bottrell worked for months on the song, trying to capture Michael’s vision of a gospel song linked to an elaborate Pink Floyd production, with booming drums and rich electronic bass. “It became quite the obsession for both of us,” Bottrell would say.

Michael and Bill tinkered endlessly with the song, but just as Bottrell felt the song was finished, Michael inexplicably left it off
Dangerous
.
“I was pretty disappointed,” Bottrell says. “I loved the whole thing, but I could tell, in Michael’s mind, ‘the song’s not done.’ I never got him in to write the last few lines—he sort of mumbled and sang them.”

By the time Michael began recording
HIStory
in 1994, he had essentially cut ties with Bottrell. But he brought up “Earth Song,” again, with arranger David Foster, who had become an accomplished producer and film composer since he’d worked with MJ on the
Thriller
album. The song had
“gravitas,” as arranger William Ross described it, and while Michael had channeled his desire to heal the world or save the children into ballads before, none of them had the presence of “Earth Song.” It would become a centerpiece of his concerts.

As usual, celebrities showed up regularly at the Hit Factory, sometimes to work and sometimes to hang out. Magic Johnson dropped by. Shaquille O’Neal and doomed hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G. were brought in to rap. Prince made an appearance, as he’d done for the
Bad
sessions, forcing the engineers to clear out of the studio.

There was another celebrity presence in the studio. The
HIStory
crew didn’t think much of it one day when Michael told them,
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” and took off. The next thing they knew, he was in South America, marrying Lisa Marie Presley.

*  *  *

It was inconceivable to reporters—and not just in the tabloids—that Lisa Marie could have fallen in love with Michael Jackson. To them, Michael’s motives seemed obvious: he needed a “normal” woman to establish that he was not a child-molesting predator. Upon spotting Michael with Lisa Marie at a Temptations show in Las Vegas, an Associated Press reporter called them
“an unearthly pairing.” The
Daily Oklahoman
opined:
“If Elvis really were alive, this would have killed him.” The
Washington Post
’s Richard N. Leiby concluded the only conceivable explanation was her creepy connection to the Church of Scientology.
“Scientology has been known to tell people to get divorced or married for public-relations purposes,” declared one of Leiby’s ex-Scientologist sources. The idea that Lisa Marie could have been in love rarely crossed anybody’s mind.

But really, why else? She didn’t need Michael’s money—her mother, Priscilla, had turned
Graceland into a tourist attraction, and since the King’s death in 1977, the value of his estate had grown from the low millions of dollars to more than $100 million. Lisa, twenty-six in 1994,
was to inherit the cash when she turned thirty. She had her own fame, too, and didn’t need more of it.
“In spite of what some people speculated while I was with him that I wanted a career or was trying to do something, it was absolute B.S.,” she said. “[I] loved being next to him and taking care of him. I was on such a high from doing that. It was a very profound time of my life.”