MJ (24 page)

Michael dressed casually for work—as casually as Michael Jackson could. A typical uniform was a red shirt and black pants, a golden eagle on his belt, shades, a brown fedora, and, in his customary touch, white socks and black espadrilles. Bubbles, wearing overalls, climbed all over
his body. Quincy and Bruce, often snacking on fried chicken or fast food of some kind, manned the boards as always. The meals, provided by the “Slam Dunk Sisters,” Catherine Ballard and Laura Raynor, at precisely
noon and six
P.M.
every day, were gourmet and worth waiting for.
“When’s Catherine coming?” Swedien would shout in his booming voice just before meals. Everybody ate meat except Michael, who had separate prepared meals, although he did indulge in the banana pudding. Many of the musicians recall the
Bad
sessions as a great time.
“They’re all happy because everyone’s making money,” says Douglas Cooper Getschal, a drum programmer. “The
studio itself, when it wasn’t full of musicians, was full of great food.” Michael was alternately gregarious and approachable and shy and sequestered.
“Depending on the setting and surroundings, he could be a completely different person and a completely different personality,” says Cornelius Mims, who did drum programming on the album. At one point Mims walked through a doorway near the back of the studio and noticed Michael, alone, stooped behind a wall. When Mims spotted him, Michael hastily retreated upstairs. “It’s like he really didn’t want to be seen,” Mims says. “He never did come back down that day.”

Musicians came in and out according to the meticulous work schedules Quincy’s team had prepared for them. The great organist Jimmy Smith showed up for a fantastic solo on
Bad
, repeating frequent takes without complaint, giving the song’s electro beats a bit of old-school jazz soul over nineteen seconds. Michael asked for a take in which Smith’s spontaneous vocal grunts are preserved, and he obliged.
Run-D.M.C. showed up wearing standard-uniform black hats, white Adidas, and gold braided necklaces. But Michael’s reserved manner didn’t fit with the rap trio’s noisy kibitzing, and the band couldn’t come up with anything for the antidrug rap he suggested, so they left without a single contribution.

Even without hip-hop, Michael wanted an album that reflected its title—an aggressive, macho-sounding album centering on the angry
“Dirty Diana,” the spastic “Speed Demon,” and “Bad.” There were softer moments—every Michael Jackson album had to contain at least one ballad like “She’s Out of My Life” or “Human Nature,” and this time it was “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” But the production of the album was frequently rushed, convoluted, and filled with cool synthesizers replacing the warm congas, bass lines, and disco hi-hats of
Thriller
and
Off the Wall.
Some of that fast, cluttered ambience arrived after Michael had finished the album.

If the central songs on
Bad
had been “Speed Demon,” “Dirty Diana,” and the title track, it might have seemed cold, the pendulum shifting too far in the direction of metallic synths and buzzing electronic rhythms. Having found success with “Beat It,” Quincy Jones requested another crossover song, an
“anthem that had a good feel to it, just like some sunshine on the world.” He put out the call to one of his top singers, Siedah Garrett. Working one night with her writing partner, Glen Ballard, Garrett flipped through her lyric book while Ballard picked out bits on the piano. She came across the phrase “man in the mirror.” After fifteen minutes, they had written the first verse and chorus. Quincy loved it. Where he heard sunshine, Michael heard religion.
“Make it sound like church,” Michael instructed Andrae and Sandra Crouch, the brother-and-sister gospel team that led the choir on the song. The Crouches picked up on the line “make that change”—Sandra, today an assistant pastor at the late Andrae’s church, related to the narrator taking responsibility for changing his own life. The call-and-response between unhinged Michael rambling non sequiturs like “Shamone! Stand up! Stand up and live!” and the precise, structured Crouch choir is one of the highlights of Michael’s recording career. (
Mavis Staples, who delivered an inspired mispronunciation of “Come on!” in the Staples Singers’ 1972 classic “I’ll Take You There,” took credit for his use of the made-up word
shamone.
)

100 MILLION
, Michael had written on his bathroom mirror as he began to contemplate the follow-up to
Thriller
. Michael’s ambition
bordered on megalomania, but his record label was ready to help. So was MTV, by now firmly on his side.
“He still had great momentum on
Bad
,” says John Sykes, one of MTV’s founders and an executive at the time. The plan was to duplicate the video roll-out pattern of
Thriller
, which meant a big-name Hollywood director for the title track in the John Landis slot. After the Westlake crew finished “Bad,” one of the first songs recorded for the album, Quincy phoned Martin Scorsese, who was at a studio in LA editing
The Color of Money
. Scorsese accepted Jones’s invitation,
^IV
and they shot with Michael in New York City subways in a rush of four days.

Michael had a new, tougher image in mind for the
Bad
album, something Scorsese captured in the video. They filmed at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets subway station in Brooklyn, where the trains whooshed by underneath the performers’ feet.
“Wow, this is great! This looks real!” Michael enthused at one point. “There’s even some pee stains there!” Michael plays a young private-school student in a hooded sweatshirt who takes the subway to a hardscrabble neighborhood where the homies call him “College” and “Dobie Gillis.” A jealous rival, played by young, unknown Wesley Snipes, tries to shame MJ into robbing an old man on the subway. Instead, Michael shows his inner toughness, not with violence but with dancing. Hoyt-Schermerhorn turns into
West Side Story
by way of “Beat It.” The story line might have seemed corny, but it crescendoed into an extraordinary face-off finale between MJ and Snipes.

Michael’s personal photographer, Sam Emerson, captured this new image on the set, shooting Michael for the album’s cover photo. Whereas Michael on the cover of
Off the Wall
is all youthful exuberance, and his world-takeover image on
Thriller
is hungry and elegant, the
Bad
cover is detached and sculpted. Michael wears a tight black
punk-rock-style leather jacket covered with a motorcycle-gang menagerie of buckles and zippers, and his face seems different still—lighter skin, thicker eyebrows, a thinner and more pointed nose, dark eyeliner, more pronounced sideburns, and a mullet creeping past his shoulders. Perhaps unintentionally, Michael’s look drew from Prince’s
Purple Rain
movie of 1984—his hair was exactly the same, although Prince favored a vibrant purple Revolutionary War jacket, a hairy chest, and a come-hither look. “They were obviously trying to give Michael kind of a rougher edge,” says bassist Nathan East, the longtime Jacksons collaborator.
“I always thought it was a little bit forced. It’s like trying to change a guy’s fingerprints. He’s a beautiful guy. He’s not that brutal-looking character.”

The salespeople at CBS Records weren’t immediately enthusiastic. Their first reaction to the “Bad” video was: Great record. Great video. Their second reaction was: what the hell happened to MJ’s face?
“When that video stopped, everybody was silent,” remembers Larry B. Davis, an Epic promotions executive at the time. “We had all seen how much he had lightened his skin and how much surgery he had done. There was delayed applause when that video finished.”

A month before the “Bad” video was to premiere on MTV, Epic released what executives regarded as a “throwaway single,” as Davis recalls—the lighthearted Siedah Garrett duet “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” Released without a video, the ballad initially stalled at No. 2 and did not receive the all-important bullet from
Billboard
magazine, denoting upward movement on the charts. Frank DiLeo called his former colleagues at Epic Records to say, “This just can’t happen.” As Davis was walking out of the Epic offices at the end of a long day, a top label executive stopped him. “I don’t think you fucking
understand
. The
fucking record
lost its
bullet
.” Davis returned to his desk and arranged a lengthy phone conversation with
Billboard
about how to turn the single’s luck around. “We did our thing,” Davis says. “Everybody on the promotions staff, from vice presidents to regional staff,
got a bonus every time one of those singles went to number one.” The fortunes of the new MJ album soon turned around—the album didn’t meet Michael’s bathroom-mirror goal of one hundred million sales, but “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” was the first of five straight
Bad
singles to hit No. 1, setting a
Billboard
record. Davis himself went overboard a few times in his promotional zeal. When a major radio programmer pulled one of the
Bad
singles from its playlist, Davis accompanied him to a Jackson concert at Madison Square Garden and pulled a box cutter on him in the backseat.
“If you ever drop another of my fuckin’ records,” Davis told the man, “I’ll cut your throat.”
^V

Epic’s Larry Stessel was just as aggressive, if not quite as violent, in commissioning Jackson’s
Bad
videos. Epic followed “Bad” with “The Way You Make Me Feel,” in which Michael somehow gets away with stalking a beautiful woman, model Tatiana Thumbtzen, on the streets after dark, with a posse of young men hooting and gesturing in the
background. Naturally, Michael wins over the victimized woman with his charming dance moves—and the main thing viewers came away wondering is why Michael does not kiss Tatiana.
“I felt the kiss was too corny,” director Joe Pytka said. After “The Way You Make Me Feel,” Michael decided he didn’t have time to appear in his own videos, at least for the moment. During a meeting at DiLeo’s house in Encino, he instructed Stessel to produce the video for “Man in the Mirror.”
“I don’t want to be in it,” Michael told him. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” Stessel and a friend, veteran video director Don Wilson, agreed to track down current-events clips taken from stock footage and news channels, from Martin Luther King to Ethiopian famine to the space-shuttle explosion, and patch them together in a way that would seem meaningful to the “I’m asking him to change his ways” lyric. Wilson planted himself for days at a time in dusty video archives to find
“the worst things that ever happened.” When Michael saw the unfinished
cut, he was moved to tears. He didn’t see the final version until the 1988 Grammy Awards, long after the video had been out. He asked Stessel to stage it during his performance—to give him an “emotional burst.” The trick apparently worked. During the performance, Jackson abruptly fell down on his knees, prompting backup singer Andrae Crouch to put a hand on his shoulder and guide him back to his feet.

Jackson was under-available for “Dirty Diana” as well. On the first day of shooting, Jackson ran across the stage, dropped to his knees, and slid into guitarist Steve Stevens. He hurt his knee.
“I can’t film anymore,” he told Pytka, the director, “and I have to leave for Europe in two days, anyway. So good luck.” He instructed Epic’s Stessel, who had minimal filmmaking experience, to edit the clip with the veteran director. The two clashed—Stessel insisted Pytka watch Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” video and soup up “Dirty Diana” with the same kind of over-the-top rock drama. Stessel and Pytka battled over tone until Pytka backed down. He put in every conceivable cliché, with MJ singing into Stevens’s crotch, MJ’s shirt flying open, and fans blowing his shirt and hair every which way as he sings directly into the camera. It was a hit, of course.

The climactic video for the
Bad
cycle was to be “Smooth Criminal.” Michael had been preoccupied with it while recording the album. He gave an early version of the song to one of his dance collaborators, Vincent Paterson, who’d battled Michael Peters in the “Beat It” knife fight. Michael was thinking something in tuxedos—ten guys, maybe—and a swanky club with a strong Astaire vibe. He instructed Paterson to listen to the music for a few days,
“Let it talk to you, come back and tell me what your idea is.” Paterson added “gangster club in Chicago during the thirties” to Jackson’s rough idea. Michael approved. By this point, he’d finished the lyrics. Like everyone else, Paterson was mystified by the line “Annie, are you okay?” (Michael had taken a CPR class, and all test dummies are named Annie.) Michael began to work with director Jerry Kramer about making “Smooth Criminal” the anchor for a
broader home-video release called
Moonwalker
. At first,
Saturday Night Live
founder
Lorne Michaels was supposed to be the executive director, and comedian Phil Hartman had written a script about Michael waking up from a dream and being chased by hundreds of storm troopers. The plan was for a major theatrical release, like any Hollywood film, but the deal fell apart and Michaels and Hartman disappeared from the project. Instead,
Moonwalker
became a series of videos connected with a sparse plot involving Michael and a few little kids being chased by a spacey mobster played by menacing Joe Pesci of
Goodfellas
. The budget for
Moonwalker
expanded to
$22 million, which gave “Smooth Criminal” director Vincent Paterson the ability to go crazy with the shooting.

The theme for “Smooth Criminal,” originally to be called “Chicago Nights,” was hardly a departure from previous Michael Jackson videos: Michael fighting with gangsters, with dangerous dance moves in lieu of weapons. But unlike “Beat It” or “Bad,” there is no cornball contemporary story line. Instead, Michael enters the world of Fred Astaire’s 1953 movie
The Band Wagon
, in which the characters wear colorful zoot suits and battle each other in a dramatic dance scene. “Smooth Criminal” is Michael’s most overt homage to Astaire—he wears a beige suit and fedora, and he does his first real dance with a partner on video, spinning femme fatales in brightly colored dresses in approximations of the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. In a cartoon world where people don’t walk, they moonwalk, and they don’t trot down stairs, they glide over them, Michael seems more at home than he does in Scorsese’s gritty New York.