Man in the Music

by Joseph Vogel

  Jackson also liked the fact that he was in complete creative control. By the end of Thriller, he had grown tired of compromising with Quincy Jones. “There were a lot of things he wanted to do that he had to fight for continuously,” noted Barnes. “He talked about how Quincy didn’t like ‘Billie Jean’ and how he would promise certain spots on the album to people. So when Michael got with us, he was like, ‘I’m sick of all this interference, and people in the way, I just want to express myself and be creative. I want to make my own record.’ ” Bottrell heard similar anecdotes. “There were just frustrations with the overall Q process,” he said. “There seemed to be some authority issues. Michael didn’t want to be shut down on certain song and arrangement choices.”

  For Jackson, the B-Team was about freedom and independence. “Michael was maturing and coming into his own,” explained Barnes. “So we were part of that team to help his maturation process. That’s what we were there to do.” Bottrell compared it to “a teenager leaving the nest….[He] was growing and wanted to experiment free of the restrictions of the Westlake scene.” For the next year and a half, beginning at Sound Castle and eventually at his home studio at Hayvenhurst, this was the small team that worked with Jackson day in and day out, allowing the artist to create his most personally realized album to date.

  IN THE LAB

  The period from 1985 to 1987 may have been the most prolific period in Jackson’s career. John Barnes estimates that they recorded around sixty songs during this time, nearly all of which were written and coproduced by Jackson. The artist wasn’t looking for outside songwriters anymore. He wanted to do it all—the rhythm tracks, the ballads, the mid-tempo cuts.

  Some of the early songs were carryovers from the Thriller and Victory sessions: songs like “Buffalo Bill,” “Don’t Be Messin’ ’Round,” and “Pyramid Girl” (which eventually became “Liberian Girl”). Other songs—“We Are Here to Change the World” and “Another Part of Me”—were for Captain EO, a 4-D film attraction for Disney that Jackson committed to in 1984. And still others were developed at Hayvenhurst in 1985, including “Dirty Diana,” “Tomboy,” “Hot Fever” (which eventually became “The Way You Make Me Feel”), and “Al Capone” (which later was renamed “Smooth Criminal”).

  Barnes remembered some of these songs coming together almost through osmosis. “With ‘Liberian Girl,’ ” he recalled, “when we started into it, it was almost like it was a magical, spiritual experience and everything just happened at light speed. Within three to four hours, all the main parts were in place.” Jackson loved it so much he told Barnes and Bottrell, “This can’t go on Victory. I’m saving it for my record.”

  To make these songs as fresh and compelling as possible, Jackson was constantly on the lookout for new sounds. Around this time he reached out to members of Kraftwerk, the German electronic band credited with revolutionizing the use of synthesizers in music in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Jackson loved their futuristic sound—especially the album The Man-Machine—and hoped to collaborate with them for his new album or possibly on the songs for Captain EO. According to Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür, Jackson did indeed meet with Ralf Hütter in New York, but a collaboration never came to fruition.

  That same year, in a handwritten note dated April 5, 1985, Jackson wrote, “Emergency,” in red pen, followed by: “You must find the guy who played guitar on the record ‘Dance Floor’ for the band ‘Zapp’ the album credits will tell you his name no matter where he is find him.” Whoever the note was sent to apparently found the man Jackson was looking for: Roger Troutman, singer and multi-instrumentalist for the synth funk band Zapp. Within days of his note, Troutman was at Hayvenhurst, working with Jackson on a song called “Tomboy” as well as “Smooth Criminal.” While his parts ultimately didn’t make the final cut of Bad, it was indicative of Jackson’s far-reaching approach. “Thanks for allowing me the great privilege of visiting your home and studio,” Troutman wrote to Jackson in the liner notes to Zapp’s next album, Zapp V.

  Meanwhile, Jackson was so interested in the Synclavier that he invited Chris Currell, a brilliant young synth programmer John Barnes had met at New England Digital, to come out to Los Angeles and help him learn how to operate it himself. Currell quickly put together a training schedule for Jackson and began meeting with him regularly at Hayvenhurst. In their first session, recalled Currell, “after three hours, I had taught Michael how to power up and boot up the Synclavier, call up his sound library and showed him how to call a sound down to the keyboard for him to play.” The technology was a bit overwhelming at first, but gradually the artist began to better understand how to use it.

  Jackson asked Currell to come back every day to teach him more. The artist also challenged the young programmer to come up with new, unusual sounds on his own that Jackson could listen to and use in his songs. Currell found the work exhilarating and began to develop a massive archive of not only random sounds, but also correlating “grooves and various musical pieces that would demonstrate the possible uses for the sounds I was creating.” When he was finished, he would record them on a cassette tape and slide them under Jackson’s bedroom door before he went home. “Many times,” noted Currell, “he would call my house at 2:00 a.m. and would be all excited about some sounds or groove. I could hear the tape I had made blasting in the background!”

  In addition to his Synclavier work, Currell began the huge task of organizing Jackson’s scattered tapes and archives. Because Jackson had worked with so many different programmers, engineers, and musicians, Currell pointed out, “his sound library was in chaos. I thought that no matter if it is me or someone else that uses Michael’s Synclavier, the sound library had to be in some logical order that can be accessed easily.” Jackson agreed, so Currell went to work. “I was at his studio from about 10:00 a.m. to about 1:00 a.m. every day. This job ended up taking me six months, seventeen hours a day, seven days a week!”

  FREE

  Session calendars show in fascinating detail how Bad unfolded over time. For Jackson, 1986 was a particularly busy year of recording. He typically arrived at the studio at 10:00 a.m. and often didn’t leave until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. In the month of February he spent twenty-two days in the studio, working on songs like “Price of Fame,” “Turning Me Off,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Smooth Criminal.” “The vision came from Michael,” explained Bottrell. “He beatboxed the grooves and I would try to make it happen; same with John Barnes. Michael’s grooves came out of his mouth into my cassette recorder, and they were awesome from the beginning. It was brilliant to soak up his approach, which was one of extreme focus on the song and the outcome of the song.”

  Sometimes those ideas would come together quickly, as with “Liberian Girl” and “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” And other times it would take a while. Barnes remembers a part he did for one song that Jackson decided he needed to hear in about a hundred other variations. Jackson still wasn’t satisfied so he had Barnes reach out to Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro. Ultimately, said Barnes, they used the first part he played. “But it taught me something really, really interesting—that the exploration is sometimes just to confirm it’s the best. I came out of the session world where we had three-hour blocks of time. Time was money. We didn’t have days to explore something. But with Michael, I wasn’t on the clock like that. He was open to whatever it took to get it right.”

  The B-Team members also enjoyed surprising Jackson with their own ideas. One day, Barnes thought of splicing James Brown’s vocals onto an early version of “Al Capone.” When the artist came to the studio and heard it, his face lit up. Barnes laid out his vision for the song: “I said, ‘Michael, imagine—we get James Brown, Prince, Roger Troutman on this song—it’s going to be the funkiest goddamn record ever!’ He just fell on the ground laughing, ‘You’re crazy. You’re crazy.’ ”

  According to the four main members of the B-Team, most days a
t the studio were pure joy. They were on fire with the passion of the project. They would have impromptu jam sessions, long discussions, sometimes even pop in a movie. When Jackson got an idea, they would go to work, fleshing it out as far as they could. Jackson developed a special trust and chemistry with each member of the team. “After a few weeks of working closely together,” recalled Currell, “we both realized that our ability to communicate together was a bit unique. We just both understood each other about musical ideas and grooves. We noticed that words were used less often and we just ‘knew’ what we were feeling or thinking. It quickly got to the point where Michael would say to me ‘make me a sound that makes me do this’…and he would do a dance move. I got it right away…and I could make him the sound that he was feeling. I have never worked with anyone else where we had this kind of musical rapport.”

  Barnes, Bottrell, and Forger felt the same way—not only with Jackson, but with each other. “John and I developed a strong process,” noted Bottrell. “We worked fast, John working on synthesizers and me running the console….He was amazing at finding the right sounds and playing the parts while I mixed and affected the tapes.” The atmosphere was loose but invigorating. Somehow, even though they were working for the biggest star on the planet, it felt intimate, like a garage start-up. “There were not a lot of people; no egos to deal with; a lot of sidetracks down rabbit holes, but that was the point,” Bottrell recalled. “I think Michael was quite relaxed the whole time….It was really magic.”

  Matt Forger remembered one simple song they were working on in particular that captured the vibe at the time, appropriately called “Free.” “When you listen to this song,” he said, “you hear Michael’s spirit and joy. It’s raw, it’s loose, it’s him in his element, doing what he loved to do. The first time I listened to it [again] I broke down. This is what it was like every day.”

  CAPTAIN EO

  The original plan was to release Bad in 1986, but as the date approached it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen. For one, Quincy Jones still wasn’t available. For another, Jackson wanted to develop more tracks and was juggling his time and attention with other projects—most significant, Captain EO. A seventeen-minute film attraction for Disneyland and Disney World with cutting-edge 4-D effects (a 3-D film with additional physical effects), Captain EO was a massive project. A longtime admirer of all things Disney, Jackson couldn’t have been more excited about it. The feeling was mutual. Disney was struggling to stay relevant in the mid-’80s and saw the prospect of a Michael Jackson–themed attraction as the perfect way to revitalize its parks and brand.

  The project went into production in June 1985 at Laird Studio. New Disney CEO Michael Eisner invested $17 million into Captain EO, assembling a creative Dream Team that not only included Jackson but also Star Wars creator George Lucas and The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. On a per-minute basis, it was, at the time, the most expensive film ever made.

  “It was great, exciting stuff,” recalled Matt Forger, who worked on the project with Jackson from its infancy. “It was the first discreet 5.1 film in continuous playback [this was several years before digital surround sound became the norm in theaters]. The Disney people developed the equipment. It didn’t exist before. It was full bandwidth with six digital tracks of audio.”

  Jackson came up with two songs for the short film: “We Are Here to Change the World” and “Another Part of Me.” Both were developed and completed with the B-Team. Barnes remembered continuing to work on “We Are Here to Change the World” while Jackson was in the hospital after his hair caught fire during a Pepsi commercial. “It has a special kind of significance to me,” he said, “because it represented integrity—an effort to not waste his time in the studio and have nothing to show for it.”

  Jackson wanted the songs to sound like the future. He and Barnes used a range of synthesizers—the Fairlight CMI, the Roland Jupiter-8, the Rhodes Chroma, and the Oberheim Xpander—to achieve that sound. This was not done haphazardly, said Barnes. “We weren’t just piling synths. Michael and I approached it like orchestration.” Barnes saw it as opening up a new frontier in music, particularly for R&B. “With all the new sounds and textures, it was definitely on the edge. There weren’t a lot of people doing that. In black music, there were almost none.”

  The Captain EO songs sounded great coming out of a boom box, but even better in theaters. Forger, who helped design the setup and acoustics in four different theaters, was particularly pleased with the sonic experience at Tokyo Disneyland. “Tokyo was just kickass,” he recalled. “They had a playback system that just totally rocked. It was like being at a rock concert. The room, physically, just shook. It sounded phenomenal. All the theaters sounded great, but Tokyo was just incredible.”

  Jackson continued to record new music while working on Captain EO. Even in several visits to Orlando in 1985 and 1986, he recorded out of his hotel suite on the sixteenth floor of the Royal Plaza and at Bee Jay Recording Studio. An early version of “Streetwalker,” in fact, was called “Florida Groove” and recorded in the spring of 1986.

  That spring, Jackson and Quincy Jones were finally able to meet up and discuss the progress of the new album. He had dozens of songs ready, he told Jones. Jones told Jackson he was heading to Tahiti for a couple of months, but as soon as he returned they could get to work at Westlake. When Jones returned in July, however, Jackson was still putting the finishing touches on Captain EO. Finally, in August, their schedules aligned. It was time to put the album together.

  THE B-TEAM IS SHUT DOWN

  The early days at Westlake were equal parts tense and exciting. Jackson wanted the B-Team to continue working with him, but it soon became apparent that wasn’t going to happen, at least not at Westlake. Initially, Jackson had Barnes and Bottrell come to the studio, but it was obvious to both that their presence wasn’t welcome by the A-Team—especially by Quincy Jones. “Next,” recalled Bottrell, “Michael asked Quincy to come out to Hayvenhurst and work with me. The first time, I waited around all day and he never showed. The second time Quincy showed up and we worked on one of the songs, probably vocals. It was just Michael and Quincy and me.” After that session, Jones issued an ultimatum: “Either Bottrell goes, or I go.” From that point on, Bottrell was cut out of the “official” Bad sessions at Westlake.

  Barnes suffered a similar fate. “I believe Quincy viewed us as threats,” said Barnes. “One day MJ asked me to work on an orchestral arrangement for a string section. He called me at eleven at night. He said, ‘Have everyone there at Westlake at ten in the morning.’ So I go in the next morning and we were in the middle of recording when Quincy comes storming in the booth. He said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Who told you to do this?’ I said, ‘Mr. Jones, I work for Michael. That’s who told me to do this. This is really out of place to interrupt a session.’ ” Soon after, Barnes was no longer welcome at Westlake as well.

  Jones did grudgingly concede that one B-Team member could continue—Chris Currell. Jones viewed Currell more as an operator than a producer or engineer, and therefore felt less threatened by him. Currell set up the Synclavier, filled with the enormous archive of tracks the B-Team had created, in a small room just outside the control room. The keyboard and terminal were placed by the desk where Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien operated. Its presence symbolized a tension that would persist over the next year: between the work of the B-Team and the A-Team; between the old guard and the new guard; between technology and tradition; and between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones.

  Jones didn’t know much about the Synclavier, other than what Jackson had told him about using it to make most of his demos. Jones’s approach, going into Bad, was much the same as it had been on Off the Wall and Thriller: assemble his A-Team and have them rerecord Jackson’s demos with mostly live instrumentation.

  But this time things were different. For one, Jackson’s demos, even more so tha
n those for Off the Wall and Thriller, were fully realized songs. And for another, Jackson now often liked the sounds he had come up with over the past two years better than the overdubs of live musicians. Chris Currell remembered several A-Team session musicians coming in one day to work on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and eyeing him suspiciously. One of them, bassist Nathan East, said bluntly: “So you’re the reason why no one was being called.” Currell felt bad about it. “What a great introduction to LA’s finest studio musicians! Yikes! Actually, I had never even considered that I was taking away work from anyone. I was just using the Synclavier as a creative tool for manifesting Michael’s musical ideas.”

  Jackson had thoroughly developed his demos precisely because he wanted more say in how they were produced. The artist respected the session musicians—many of them were close friends. He wanted them featured on the album; but he also wanted the new sounds. This came to a head after Jones changed the production on several tracks and Jackson simply didn’t think they sounded as good. “Michael was concerned that the ‘punch’ of the music was being lost somehow,” recalled Currell.

  Jackson first brought his concern to Bruce Swedien. When the situation wasn’t addressed, however, he turned to his manager, Frank DiLeo, who spoke with Jones. Jones was miffed. Clearly, his role as producer had changed. He and Jackson had occasionally butted heads on Thriller, but then the artist still often compromised with Jones. Not anymore. Jackson was driving this album: he had written all the songs and knew how he wanted them to sound. Jones had to take a backseat, which was not something he was accustomed to.