Man in the Music

by Joseph Vogel

  “Michael was the best thing that came out of The Wiz for me,” Jones later reflected. “As we rehearsed the musical scenes…I became more and more impressed. He was always super-prepared. He showed up at 5:00 a.m. for his scarecrow makeup call and had every detail of what he needed to do memorized and ready for every shooting. He also knew every dance step, every word of dialogue, and all the lyrics of every song by everyone in the entire production.”

  Beyond preparation, Jones saw in Jackson that rare it factor. “[Michael Jackson] had the wisdom of a sixty-year-old and the enthusiasm of a child,” Jones observed. “He was a genuinely shy, handsome kid who hid his amazing intelligence with small smiles and giggles. But beneath that shy exterior was an artist with a burning desire for perfection and an unlimited ambition to be the biggest entertainer in the world.”

  DESTINY

  Off the Wall came third in a rapid succession of projects for Michael Jackson in the late 1970s. The Wiz premiered in October 1978. Two months later came Destiny, the Jacksons’ third album since leaving Motown for CBS/Epic Records. The group cut their ties with Motown in 1975—except for Jermaine, who stayed since he was married to Berry Gordy’s daughter, Hazel—because they wanted more creative independence and a fairer royalty rate (at Motown they received a measly 2.8 percent per record, while CBS offered them 20 percent). That move also required them to change their name from the Jackson 5 (which Motown claimed they owned) to the Jacksons. It began an exciting new era for the brothers. Yet by 1978, they had failed to gain much traction. The group produced a handful of solid singles—including “Going Places” and “Show You the Way to Go”—but nothing near as popular or memorable as their work at Motown.

  That changed with Destiny. By far their most ambitious album to date, it wasn’t just that the songs were great; it was that the Jacksons wrote all but one of them. Michael, in particular, found this invigorating. “All those records in the past are our songs, and we’ve sung them, and we put our hearts into the singing of them,” he explained to Rolling Stone, “but they’re really not from us. They’re not our thoughts and what we think should go on that plastic, on that wax. When I get into writing my own stuff, I’m gonna just let it all out. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do: Make it really me.”

  While he was eager to start his solo project with Quincy Jones, Michael didn’t hold back on Destiny, contributing to all eight songs and cowriting three of them. He had learned a great deal from Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the legendary duo who produced and wrote most of the songs for the Jacksons’ previous two records. Gamble and Huff were the architects of the “Philly Sound,” writing and producing more than one hundred seventy gold and platinum records for such artists as the O’Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, and Lou Rawls. “I actually got a chance to watch them create as they presented songs to us and that helped my songwriting a lot,” reflected Jackson. “Just watching Huff play the piano while Gamble sang taught me more about the anatomy of a song than anything else….I’d sit there like a hawk, observing every decision, listening to every note.”

  When the Jacksons finally had a chance to take the reins on Destiny, then, Michael was ready. Sonically, he “wanted to sound cleaner and more funky, with a flintier bass and sharper horn parts.” He recognized both the blessing and challenge of having “worked with the smartest, hippest pop people in the world at Motown and Philly International…we would have been fools to discount the things we’d absorbed from them, yet we couldn’t be imitators.”

  Destiny came together quickly. Recording commenced not long after Jackson finished production on The Wiz, and was completed by the summer of 1978, before The Wiz hit theaters. The results were remarkable. It had high-octane dance numbers and soul-aching ballads; it had strains of disco and R&B, as well as rock and country. Music critic Rob Sheffield describes it as “a fantastic record, combining the relentless forward motion of disco with the romantic heat of Michael’s voice.”

  Beyond its fresh, energetic sound, the album was also clearly the most autobiographical one yet for Michael. In the title track, he sings, “I wanna be far from here…Nobody can change my mind / I’m screaming out these words for me.” In “Bless His Soul,” meanwhile, he reveals what would become an increasingly common theme in years to come, singing about his confusion and being used. “There is no life for me at all / ’Cause I give myself at beck and call.” The lyrics were raw and introspective, suggesting something more compelling than the perpetual rainbows and sunshine listeners had come to expect from the group.

  Not that they weren’t still bringing the feel-good energy. The first single from the album, “Blame It on the Boogie,” practically dares you not to smile and sing along. The song bounces on a Stevie Wonder–like beat with punchy horn stabs and bright harmonies. Michael, meanwhile, brings a loose and playful confidence in his lead vocals, marking a new stage in his evolution as a singer. Strangely, the song peaked at just #54 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became a big hit in the clubs, though, and reached #3 on the R&B chart. It has since become a classic of the disco era.

  There are numerous other highlights on the album, from the lush sweep of “Push Me Away,” to the disco drive of “All Night Dancin’,” to the reflective soul of “Destiny,” which features one of Michael’s finest early vocals. But the album’s showstopper was undoubtedly “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).” Cowritten by Michael and younger brother, Randy, the single soared to #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold more than two million copies. It was by far their most successful song since moving to Epic. It also solidified the Jacksons’ place on the disco scene. A precursor to Off the Wall’s “Don’t Stop,” it starts with a cymbal roll and piano before that signature bass kicks in. After that, Michael locks into the groove, glides effortlessly in and out of falsetto, and stacks harmonies as he beckons the world to the dance floor. According to keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, who assisted with the rhythm arrangement, Stevie Wonder served as a big inspiration for the song, particularly the drumming and synth bass. The track stays in the pocket for eight straight minutes, including an extended outro (one of the few times in Michael’s career he got to keep one of his beloved long intros or outros).

  Even the album’s cover art spoke to the Jacksons’ ambition and creative vision for the album. On the front of the record, they sit atop a stone-carved monument spelling out the album title, which is surrounded by crashing waves and an ominous thunderstorm. The image suggests something solid and permanent surviving amid chaotic external forces; it also suggests those wild forces being harnessed and funneled into the contents of the record.

  Meanwhile, on the back cover, they included a picture of a peacock, the symbol of their newly created, independent production company (another token of confidence from Epic), along with a new statement of purpose for their work (written by Michael): “Throughout the ages,” it read, “the peacock has been honored and praised for its attractive, illustrious beauty. Of all in the bird family, the peacock is the only bird that integrates all colors into one, and displays this radiance of fire only when in love. We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one through the love of music.” The peacock symbol, interestingly, came nearly two years before NBC switched back to the logo, after having abandoned it for two decades.

  Destiny became the Jacksons’ most successful album since leaving Motown, selling more than two million copies in the United States and four million copies worldwide. Not long after the record’s release, the Jacksons embarked on the Destiny World Tour. It was a yearlong trip that commenced in Europe and made a notable thirteen-show visit to Africa before returning to the United States.

  On the final stretch, in the middle of an exhausting string of back-to-back shows, Michael wrote a note to himself on a tour program. It was November 6, 1979, the date of their Baltimore performance. “MJ will be my new name,” the note read, “no more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character
, a whole new look, I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’ [and] ‘I Want You Back.’ I should be a new incredible actor singer dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer….I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off.”

  This was Jackson’s manifesto as he looked forward to the beginning of his career as a solo artist.

  ENTER QUINCY JONES

  Legend has it that Off the Wall was completed in just six months, but it turns out this isn’t accurate. It was actually completed in three. The Destiny Tour ran from January 1979 to January 1980. That meant recording took place in three intervals: about half the album was recorded in December 1978, just before the tour began; a handful of other tracks were worked on in a three-week period between the African leg and the US leg in April 1979; and the final songs were completed in June 1979 during the last hiatus before the tour concluded. The first single, “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” came out the following month in July and the album was released in August.

  It was an incredible feat that, among other things, validated Jackson’s choice of Quincy Jones as producer. Jones was a fortuitous match for Jackson in numerous ways. By 1979, the producer was already a legend in the industry, having worked successfully with music icons like Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Nat King Cole. Like Jackson, Jones showed great talent at a young age. Born on the South Side of Chicago, he learned to play the trumpet in grade school and was already arranging and writing songs as a teenager. And, like Jackson, he was also a musical sponge. He studied music at Seattle University and the prestigious Berklee College of Music before traveling to Paris, where his musical education continued under the informal tutelage of two highly respected French composers, Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. In the 1950s and ’60s, he found himself working alongside jazz giants, traveling the world as music director for Dizzy Gillespie and arranging songs for Frank Sinatra (most notably, “Fly Me to the Moon”). In the mid-’60s he turned to film scores, composing dozens over the following fifteen years, including In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, Roots, and, of course, The Wiz. In that period, he also won five Grammy Awards (he would go on to win twenty-two more, the most by anyone in popular music history).

  Jackson was impressed with Jones’s musical knowledge and experience. “Quincy does jazz, he does movie scores, rock ’n’ roll, funk, pop—he’s all colors, and that’s the kind of people I like to work with,” he explained in a 1980 interview. Epic, however, initially balked at the proposition of Jones producing Jackson’s first solo album. They thought Jones was “too jazzy” and couldn’t produce pop hits. In a way, it was an understandable concern. As talented as Jones was, he was at the time known primarily for jazz and film scores (though he had experienced success more recently producing albums for the Brothers Johnson, including one of Jackson’s favorite songs, “Strawberry Letter 23”).

  But Jackson was adamant about working with Jones. “He marched back into Epic with [his managers],” Jones recalled, “and said, ‘I don’t care what you think, Quincy is doing my record.’ ” It was a bold and brave ultimatum for the then-twenty-year-old artist. And it worked. Given the potential they sensed in Jackson, particularly after the success of Destiny, Epic was willing to take the risk on Jones.

  THE A-TEAM

  After the premier of The Wiz in the fall of 1978, Jackson returned to Los Angeles brimming with newfound confidence. “There’s nothing inside of me that wants to come out [that] don’t know how,” he said in an interview at the time. When he sat down with Jones at the producer’s Brentwood home, he could hardly contain his excitement. Finally working independent of his family, having shed the control of his father and the expectations of his brothers, he was free to experiment, explore, and create on his own. “I was looking for someone who would give me that freedom,” said Jackson, “plus someone who’s unlimited musically.”

  The chemistry Jackson and Jones felt on the set of The Wiz carried over to Off the Wall. Not only did they work well together, they were on the same page in terms of the creative vision for the record. “Quincy and I talked about Off the Wall and carefully planned the kind of sound we wanted,” Jackson recalled. For Jackson, that sound, first and foremost, had to be different than anything he had done with his brothers. “That’s why I wanted to hire an outside producer who wouldn’t come to [the] project with any preconceived notions of how it should sound,” Jackson explained. Jones, likewise, wasn’t interested in another standard disco record. “I admired disco, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I just thought it had gone far enough. We needed to go someplace else.”

  Work on Off the Wall officially commenced in December 1978 at Allen Zentz Recording Studios in Hollywood. Jackson quickly recognized another asset Jones brought to the table: his ability to assemble talent. “He knew Los Angeles better than Mayor Bradley,” the singer effused, “[and] had a world of talent to choose from among his contacts.” Those contacts proved invaluable for Off the Wall. Jones referred to this talented assortment of musicians, engineers, and songwriters as his “killer Q posse” or “A-Team.”

  Along with Jones, that team included English songwriter Rod Temperton and recording engineer Bruce Swedien. Temperton was from the international funk-disco band Heatwave. He was a versatile, prolific musician Jones described as “one of the best songwriters who ever lived, with the melodic and contrapuntal gifts and instincts of a classical composer.” Given Heatwave’s sound, people often mistakenly assumed he was black (most of the rest of the group was). Many people who worked on Off the Wall—including Jackson—were shocked to discover that the mastermind behind such hip, funky songs was a little white guy from North Lincolnshire, England. Yet, musically, Temperton was a natural fit for Off the Wall—and Jackson. “Rod was a kindred spirit in many ways,” said the artist. “Like me, he felt more at home singing and writing about the night life than actually going out and living it.”

  Bruce Swedien, meanwhile, was one of the most highly regarded recording engineers in the industry. With his walrus-like mustache and warm personality, he became a fixture in the studio and a linchpin to every subsequent Jackson solo album. Like Jones, Swedien had a long, impressive résumé before Jackson. He recorded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra professionally for RCA Victor at the age of just twenty-one; in 1962, he engineered the Grammy-winning classic “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. He went on to work with icons like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Herbie Hancock, and, of course, Quincy Jones. Swedien was widely regarded as a pro’s pro. Jones praised him as having “one of the best pairs of ears” in the business. His ability to showcase the sounds and vocals on Off the Wall—and later on Jackson’s other albums—with such vitality and presence cannot be overstated. As Rod Temperton puts it: “These records would never have the same dynamic punch without a huge dollop of Bruce’s own special sauce….He is a complete contradiction: on the one hand a technical mastermind, and on the other a kid in a candy store infinitely piddling with each new toy he can lay his hands on.”

  Jackson and Jones also brought together an impressive array of session musicians, including Greg Phillinganes, the classically trained keyboardist who had played a prominent role on Destiny; Paulinho da Costa, a Brazilian percussionist rooted in jazz and one of the most in-demand session musicians of the ’70s and ’80s; Louis “Thunder Thumbs” Johnson, of the Brothers Johnson, on bass; John “J. R.” Robinson on drums; Melvin “Wah” Watson on guitar; Grammy Award–winning composer and arranger Johnny Mandel on strings; and trumpeter Jerry Hey and the Seawind Horns on horns and horn arrangements. Jones also enlisted the songwriting talents of some of the biggest names in the industry—Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Carole Bayer Sager, David Foster. In L
os Angeles, there was a growing buzz around the Michael Jackson project and everyone, it seemed, wanted to be a part of it.

  “WE FELT FREE”

  Integrating this diverse collection of talent is one of the greatest achievements of Off the Wall. These musicians came from a variety of backgrounds; they were of different races, cultures, and countries, yet somehow coalesced seamlessly into the fabric of the record. “It was the smoothest album I have ever been involved in,” Jackson said in a 1979 interview. “There was so much love, it was incredible. Everybody worked together so easily.”

  It was an environment Jackson tried to replicate as executive producer on later projects. In the studio, people knew to come prepared, but the vibe wasn’t rigid or intimidating. It was open and invigorating. If you were there, you were trusted to bring your expertise and allowed the space to shine. “We were just taking a lot of chances,” recalled Jones. “We felt free.”

  This spirit translated onto the tracks. “On a couple of tunes the band was there while I sang and we were able to feel each other,” Jackson said in the 1979 interview. “And it comes across on the record. I had never done that before—ever! It gives such a spontaneous feeling and reminds me of when R&B first started in the South and all the blacks would just get together in a shack and jam. That’s what’s missing today. Everything is so commercial and mechanical. Too many musicians today are into what they’re doing for themselves and not with each other.”