MJ (16 page)

For “Beat It,” Quincy and the rest of his A-Team sent for the Synclavier.
“In its day, it was far and away the most sophisticated synthesizer available anywhere in the world,” recalls Brian Banks, one of the album’s synthesizer players. Noises from the Synclavier wound up all over
Thriller
, from the “BONG . . . BONG . . . BONG” tones
^II
that open “Beat It” to the background drum programming throughout “Billie Jean” to the lush noises that stand in for strings on the title track.

After the A-Team finished “Beat It,” Quincy and Michael agreed it still needed something—a guitar solo. They already had two great guitarists on the track, Steve Lukather and Paul Jackson Jr., but neither commanded attention at rock radio. “What [Michael] was good at as a businessman was marketing: ‘We’re going to get Eddie Van Halen on “Beat It” because I’m going to sell to long-haired teenage males,’ ” says John Branca, his attorney. “He had a genius when it came to that.” Quincy sent the tape to Van Halen, guitarist for his namesake band and one of the world’s biggest rock stars. Eddie would claim he asked to move the guitar solo to a different place in the song, and Quincy agreed. Lukather, who also played bass on the track, remembers the story a different way: Eddie moved it on his own. It wasn’t until Quincy heard
Van Halen’s finished solo, in the wrong place on the track, that he realized “Beat It” would need major studio surgery.
“Me and [drummer] Jeff Porcaro had to fuckin’ Frankenstein that piece of music back together again,” Lukather recalls.

Van Halen’s whining, high-pitched solo would become one of the song’s signature features—it sounded unusual in the context of Michael Jackson, but not so much in hard rock. Considering Van Halen’s involvement, Lukather thought “heavy metal.” He recorded the track through Marshall amplifiers and sent Quincy a mix that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on Van Halen’s
Diver Down.
Q called back. “It’s too much,” he told Lukather. “You’ve got to get the small amps out. R&B radio won’t play it.” This was an important point. Quincy wanted rock-radio airplay, but he still wanted urban-radio play. Lukather did as he was told.

The A-Team kept working. They ordered food from
Golden Bird, down the street from Westlake on Beverly Boulevard, which had been serving chicken of all kinds in Los Angeles since the early fifties. Everybody indulged but Michael. He preferred the bean patties and spinach at the health-food restaurant on Vine and Fountain. He made fun of the others: “Bawk, bawk!” Quincy teased him back: “You know you want some of this chicken.” Not even the spicy tuna dip could entice
Michael. Vegetarians were rare back then, although drummer Chancler was one, too, and empathized.
“There were always good meat/carnivore jokes going around,” he recalls.

Within a few weeks, the team had successfully come up with nine finished songs.
“We thought at one point we were done,” keyboardist Greg Phillinganes said. “And Quincy was like, ‘No, not so fast. We need certain missing elements.’ Michael was pretty disappointed, but then that’s how we got ‘Lady’ and ‘Beat It.’ ” Landing in the dustbin was “Carousel,” written by Michael Sembello, the guitarist who’d worked with the Jacksons on
Destiny
and written a huge hit, “Maniac,” for the
Flashdance
soundtrack. It was a nice song, inoffensive, halfway between a ballad and a rocker, but as usual, Quincy was right: it didn’t have the same dynamic quality of, say, “P.Y.T.”

Because Temperton had come up with the title for
Off the Wall
, Quincy asked him to think something up for the new one. “Starlight Love” was the bland working title. Temperton went back to his hotel and thought up between two and three hundred alternate phrases. “Midnight Man” was his favorite. Quincy liked the mystery of it. Temperton kept brainstorming. The next morning, he woke up with the word
Thriller
in his head. “You could visualize it on the top of the
Billboard
charts,” he said to himself. “You could see it in the merchandising. This one word jumped off the page at me.” He hastily wrote lyrics to a newly retitled song.

“I’d always envisioned this talking section at the end and didn’t know what we were going to do with it,” Temperton said. “But one thing I’d thought about was to have somebody, a famous voice, in the horror genre, to do this vocal.” Jones’s wife at the time, actress Peggy Lipton, suggested
Vincent Price, whose precise monotone was associated with horror and
thrillers more than anybody else’s in the world. Temperton wrote an Edgar Allan Poe–style bit in the cab en route to the studio for Price’s session. He cut it so close that when his cab approached the studio, a limousine pulled up and the songwriter watched Price step out of it. “Go
round the back!” he barked at the driver. He ran inside the back door and literally grabbed the secretary: “Photocopy this real quick,” he ordered. He raced in with the new lyrics just as Price walked in and sat down in the booth. “Just hit it,” Temperton recalled. “Two takes.” “Thriller” became the title track of the album, and Quincy and Michael immediately began to see its monster-movie potential. Bruce Cannon, who had been an assistant editor on
E.T.
, provided sound edits—a creaking door, footsteps on wooden planks, howling dogs and ghost noises.

By the fall of 1982, Jackson and Jones were still messing with the
Thriller
album to the point that Epic Records had to push back the release date. Epic’s parent company, CBS, had laid off thousands of people on what the industry called
“Black Friday,” August 13, 1982. The label desperately needed a hit, and Michael Jackson had proved with
Off the Wall
that he had the ability to move four or five million in sales. So the possibility that
Thriller
would miss its original Thanksgiving release date, and perhaps a 1982 release altogether, was an intimidating thought.

With Swedien’s help, MJ and Quincy frantically tied up loose ends, alternating between three studio rooms at Westlake. Swedien went to work with his complicated techniques, recording rhythm tracks on sixteen-track tape, then switching to digital for a thick sound Quincy called “big legs and tight skirts.” Michael added another round of vocals to “Billie Jean.” Bruce kept splicing things in and out of the mix, just as he’d done on
Off the Wall
, frustrating the musicians yet again because they would have only a vague idea of who played on what.

When they finally finished, Swedien took the tape to Bernie Grundman’s mastering studio. Quincy brought MJ to his house, covering him in a blanket, so he could nap from nine
A.M.
to noon. They had an appointment to hear the final test pressing of the album before they sent it to Larkin Arnold, by then Epic’s head of black music, who had been readying
champagne bottles in New York. Michael and Quincy showed up, Grundman queued up the album and . . . it was like a cake
had fallen.
“It was a disaster,” Quincy said. “After all the great songs and the great performances and great mixes and a great tune stack, we had twenty-four-karat sonic doo-doo.” Arnold had a bad feeling in his chest.
“Oh my God,” he thought, sadly contemplating the unopened champagne. “We are not going to make the delivery date if we have to remix it. I can’t even drink.” Jones told him not to worry, but Arnold spent the next two days in a haze.

Among other things, Jones realized, they had recorded too much music, even with just nine songs.
“You need big, fat grooves to make it happen on vinyl,” Jones said. “We had twenty-four to twenty-seven minutes [per side], which makes the sound smaller. We had to get it down to nineteen to twenty minutes.” Arnold told Quincy the album was “unreleasable.” Was it?
“I’m not exactly sure,” Grundman recalls. “They didn’t exactly let me know what they were doing. I know they disappeared, and I didn’t see them for quite a while.” Quincy instructed the exhausted A-Team to take two days off. That was all they could afford. Holiday shopping season wasn’t going to take a break, even for the new Michael Jackson album.

They spent the next eight days rebuilding
Thriller
. They mixed one new tune every day. Temperton cut a verse from “The Lady in My Life.” “Smelly finally agreed to give up some of the jelly in the long, long, long intro to ‘Billie Jean,’ ” Quincy recalled. Finally, the album was ready for Grundman to perform some of his own magic. He pumped up the kick drum on “Billie Jean” and added a little more “top end” to the ballads. They had their new mix. “There’s more depth and more air—so it really wraps around you,” Grundman says. “It definitely came at you in a better way. It seemed to flow better. It seemed to connect better emotionally. When you put it on, it was just kind of more alive.”

On November 30, 1982, Larkin Arnold could finally drink his champagne.

I
. McRae was a companion of soul singer Jackie Wilson during his final days; today she is Joyce Moore, married to Sam Moore, part of the great soul duo Sam and Dave.

II
. Those “BONG” noises had actually come standard with Synclavier models at the time. They had been programmed by a synthesizer pioneer, Denny Jaeger. When
Thriller
came out, Jaeger contacted Jackson’s people and eventually received not only an album credit but keyboard-programming work on the follow-up album,
Bad
.

T
wo weeks before
Thriller
came out, Jon Badeaux obtained an advance reel-to-reel tape of the album. Badeaux was the music director of an LA R&B-leaning pop radio station, KDAY-AM, and he had been waiting for new Michael Jackson music for three years.
Thriller
was on lockdown. Epic Records was strictly controlling the release schedule, being careful to release singles one at a time, on the same day, so every radio station had equal access. But Badeaux scored a copy of the tape from a friend who knew Quincy Jones. After one listen, he knew every cut was a hit, with the possible exception of “The Lady in My Life.” Before Thanksgiving 1982, he waited until five
P.M.
on a Friday, strategically, because he knew record-label lawyers would have already returned home for the weekend, thus temporarily unavailable to issue legal cease-and-desist notices. His station started playing
Thriller
.

When Badeaux returned home for the evening, his unlisted phone number was ringing. “You’ve got to take it off!” the Epic executives pleaded with him. One poor record guy, taking the blame for the leak, actually cried. Epic hadn’t released the album to stores, yet, so nobody who heard
Thriller
could buy it. Plus, favoring one radio station over another meant all of Badeaux’s rivals would be furious. (That part
didn’t bother him too much.) But
KDAY stuck to
Thriller
all weekend. The phone lines lit up. Listeners actually drove to the station’s offices in an attempt to buy the album. Eventually, Epic had no choice but to release the album a few days early.
“It was so electrifying that you just could not get enough of it,” says Elroy Smith, then program director of Boston’s WILD.

Every radio station with a black audience, like KDAY and WILD, instantly used
Thriller
to boost its ratings into the stratosphere. White stations needed an extra push. In 1982, the music world was only three years removed from DJ Steve Dahl’s disco demolition riot at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The violent backlash had made Top 40 radio programmers skittish about airing almost any type of black music, and the rare urban (meaning
black
) single that crossed over to pop (
white
) boosted sales dramatically. In 1982, only two singles by African-Americans made the top ten, Lionel Richie’s “Truly” and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” (a duet with Paul McCartney).

The entire record industry operated along these racial lines—veteran record executive T. C. Thompkins was promoted to vice president of promotions for Epic Records in the early eighties, but he was only allowed to promote black records to black radio stations. While Epic’s white promotions departments were crammed with employees—secretaries, assistants, directors—Thompkins found himself with one lone assistant.
“It wasn’t any less racist there than it was in the street,” Thompkins says. “You’re a ‘black vice president’ in name only. You had none of the tools of the facilities that were made available to the pop department. As quiet as it was kept, as progressive as the industry was supposed to be, segregation was alive and well.”

Off the Wall
had been fortunate enough to come out in disco-crazy 1979, when 40 percent of songs that reached the top three were by African-Americans, and four singles from MJ’s disco-sounding album landed in the top ten. But Michael Jackson felt it should have sold far more—he was beginning to develop his vision for
Thriller
as the best-
selling album in history—and one executive at Epic Records agreed. In 1981, MJ and Katherine and Joe Jackson met with Epic’s Larkin Arnold at a
delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. Michael complained the label had done too little to promote
Off the Wall.
He saw no billboards. He saw no push to use the “Rock with You” video he’d filmed—this was before MTV—in which he dances in a gray sparkly outfit and moon boots in front of rotating lasers. He felt Epic saw no need to try harder to cross him over. Arnold promised MJ and his parents that the label would get behind
Thriller
.

Arnold sent “The Girl Is Mine” to white Top 40 stations as a strategic early strike, three weeks before the album release. “This was an attempt, by using Paul McCartney, to break that resistance to white radio,” Arnold says. “That was the plan.” It worked—the duet hit No. 1 on the black singles chart and No. 2 on the pop chart.

In February 1983, Epic followed up “The Girl Is Mine” with “Billie Jean,” and just as the single hit No. 1, the label’s promotional staff broke tradition. Usually singles came out one at a time, with one making its debut just as the other began to drop off the pop charts. Instead, Epic released a third single even as “Billie Jean” was still a smash. Frank DiLeo, at that time one of Epic’s top marketing executives, took credit for that part of the strategy.
“I had this idea that I ran by him—when ‘Billie Jean’ reached No. 1, I was going to release ‘Beat It,’ ” DiLeo
^I
says. “All of a sudden, I had both singles on the top five.” Michael liked this. DiLeo was a funny, fast-talking, short, bald, cigar-smoking singles whisperer. Michael would keep him in mind.