by Joseph Vogel
Not surprisingly, Jackson didn’t like this arrangement. Within a matter of weeks, he moved the team over to the legendary Hit Factory studio a few blocks away. He did promise, though, that the album would be completed efficiently. He was motivated to make a statement.
The artist liked living in New York. He had fond memories of his time there during the filming of The Wiz. In the early months of the HIStory recordings, he would stay up late into the night, working on songs or talking to Lisa Marie on the phone. Mornings he would travel incognito, whisked to the studio in a black SUV (occasionally, he would even wear a disguise and go on foot), passing unsuspecting New Yorkers as they walked to work. The artist primarily operated out of Studio 3 and often stayed for the entire day, having meals brought in so he could keep working.
As with Dangerous, Jackson assumed the role of executive producer, assembling a team of musicians, producers, and engineers to help him carry out his creative vision. From the outset, those who worked on the album remember the atmosphere being positive and exciting. There seemed to be surprisingly little residual hangover from the events of the past year. From the creative crew, there was not only support for the artist, but a sense of protectiveness. “If people knew the Michael we know…” was perhaps the most common refrain among those involved with the album.
For HIStory, Bruce Swedien set up with his writing collaborator René Moore in one studio; Brad Buxer worked with a host of talented young newcomers, including Eddie DeLena, Andrew Scheps, and Rob Hoffman, in another. Matt Forger and Brad Sundberg, meanwhile, took two-week shifts overseeing the operation, since both had families back in Los Angeles.
As usual, Jackson wanted the new music to be at the cutting edge sonically. One day at the studio he asked Bruce Swedien if he could think of anyone “who was truly original in the crafting of synthesizer sounds and colors.” Jackson emphasized, “And I mean truly original.” Swedien thought about it, and recommended Chuck Wild, from the revolutionary ’80s new wave group Missing Persons.
Jackson told Swedien to call him up and bring him onboard. Wild, stunned by the offer, accepted, and for the next few years found himself doing experimental sound programming for the King of Pop. “I’ll never forget the first conversation Michael and I had in 1994,” recalled Wild. “He said, ‘Chuck, I want you to manufacture sounds the ear has never heard. I want them to be fiery and aggressive, unusual and unique.’ ” During the HIStory sessions, Wild estimated that he worked with about twenty-five synths, three samplers, and a couple of Macintosh computers, creating “a library of sounds and soundscapes.”
Meanwhile, Jackson had numerous other musicians and producers come in to work on particular songs. He flew in members of Toto for “Stranger in Moscow.” Steve Porcaro, the man behind “Human Nature,” ended up staying another month, while the rest of the band left on tour, helping out with songs like “Little Susie” and “You Are Not Alone.” “They were so nice to me,” Porcaro noted. “They even gave me my own studio and my own assistant engineer, and I was being paid $2,500 a day to just sit in a room and write…Every day they had the best food brought in from the best restaurants in New York for us to eat, steak, lobsters, everything. There was so much money flying around.”
Within a few months, Jackson and his collaborators had generated some impressive new material. In addition to “Stranger in Moscow,” this included songs like “Faces,” a drum-driven anthem about creating a new world without divisions (with a planned spoken part by civil rights icon Nelson Mandela), and “In the Back,” a haunting, atmospheric piece about betrayal. Jackson wrote both songs. The early lineup also included songs like “Money,” “Morphine,” “Innocent Man,” “Much Too Soon,” and “2 Bad,” as well as resuscitated Dangerous tracks like “They Don’t Care about Us” and “Earth Song.”
Back in his element, Jackson was on a roll. Sony was thrilled with some of the new songs, but also wanted Jackson to stick to the time line they had set and wrap up the project by the summer. Instead, the artist suddenly left the country. He was gone for months. Most of his collaborators had no idea where he had gone. The instructions were to simply keep working until he got back.
As it turned out, the artist had secretly flown to the Dominican Republic to get married. He was so worried that word would get out that he essentially eloped in the middle of recording. That spring and early summer, he honeymooned and traveled the world with Lisa Marie. Somehow the secret of their marriage was kept until August, when he returned to New York with his new wife.
Lisa Marie often came with Jackson to the studio. “They acted like two kids in love,” recalled assistant engineer Rob Hoffman. “Held hands all the time, and she [would] hang out for quite a while.” Presley was impressed by Jackson’s talent, but she also wasn’t afraid to be honest with him. She didn’t want him to play victim on this album; she wanted him to fight back. Jackson agreed. He was ready to release more than a year of pent-up rage and indignation.
SINGING WITH JANET
That August, Sony executives held a big meeting, laying out their promotional plan for the album. While some sponsors had dropped Jackson amid the allegations, most prominently Pepsi, Sony stood behind him publicly throughout 1993 and was all-in for his comeback. They envisioned an enormous marketing blitz in time for the holiday season. At Jackson’s behest, they had already green-lighted a $4 million (which eventually ballooned to $8 million) video teaser to generate buzz for the album. The teaser, which featured the artist leading a massive military parade before unveiling a towering honorary statue, was filmed in Budapest that month.
Jackson assured Sony executives he could wrap up the album in time. He just wanted to develop a few more songs he felt the album was missing. For that, he turned to legendary Minneapolis producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
Replacing New Jack Swing mastermind Teddy Riley with Jam and Lewis surprised some people. Given their success working together on Dangerous, many assumed Jackson would repeat the formula for at least one more album. The artist did reach out to Riley, but he never planned to feature the producer prominently on HIStory. He admired Riley’s talent, but he didn’t want to tread water sonically. The sound of R&B had moved forward and he wanted to stay one step ahead of it.
In any case, Jackson had wanted to work with Jam and Lewis for years—since he’d heard Rhythm Nation 1814 in 1989. The producers would have loved to produce Michael’s last album, but their first loyalty was to Janet. They didn’t believe it would be fair to her to work with her brother—at least not unless she said it was okay.
In the summer of 1994, Michael called Janet and asked if she would record a duet with him. In prior years, she would have said no. She didn’t want to be perceived as riding his coattails. Michael understood. But by the mid-’90s, Janet was probably more popular than Michael (at least in the United States). Her landmark 1993 album, Janet, produced six Top 10 hits, and its music videos were ubiquitous on MTV. So when Michael asked that summer, especially after what he had gone through the previous year, she said yes.
It was Janet’s suggestion that they enlist Jam and Lewis to help develop and produce the track. Given the green light from Janet, the producers began developing ideas that September. Once they had six or seven solid grooves, they shared them with Janet and asked her which one she thought Michael would pick. She picked the groove that became “Scream.” “How do you know?” asked Jam. “I know my brother,” she responded, laughing.
Jam and Lewis arrived at the Hit Factory—with Janet—that October. Michael was excited to hear what they had. “He’d listen to each track for a couple of minutes,” recalled Jimmy Jam. “ ‘I like this….This is real good,’ he’d say. Then at the end, he told us: ‘All of these really work, you did a great job.’ ” Then he asked to hear track five again. Just as Janet predicted, he picked “Scream.”
When the producers met with Michael the next day, he had
already worked out most of the melody, arrangement, and lyrics. “It was amazing,” Jam pointed out. “The writing process was like that on all the songs we did together….He was very fast, very intense. Everything was written in a whirlwind. It just came to him. It was exhilarating.”
How was working with Michael different from working with Janet? “Janet is a little more spontaneous,” said Jam, “whereas Michael’s very methodical. Janet will hear something the first time and know that it’s cool. Michael will say, ‘Give me a day to think about it and make sure it’s cool.’ ” What they shared in common, said Jam, was “an ability to elevate the work of everyone around them—through hard work, sheer talent, and a desire to not be second-best.”
For Jam and Lewis, working with the two legends was the highlight of the album—and possibly of their careers. Not only seeing their talent up close and in person, but seeing them as brother and sister: “They were reminiscing about the old songs Michael had written a long time ago, and Janet would start singing, and Michael would go, ‘Oh, you remember that song,’ and they’d start singing it together.”
Originally enlisted just for the duet, Michael convinced Jam and Lewis—with Janet’s approval—to work on a handful of other tracks. One of these was Jackson’s second favorite of the demos the producers had shared with him at the Hit Factory. As with “Scream,” Jackson took the groove and added the melody, arrangement, and lyrics. It turned into “Tabloid Jungle” (eventually changed to “Tabloid Junkie”). Jam and Lewis also helped the artist with previously recorded songs like “Is It Scary” and “2 Bad,” as well as the mammoth project that was the title track, “HIStory.”
Working with Michael, Jam and Lewis discovered how relentlessly the artist pursued the potential of each track—fine-tuning each minute element and exhausting its possibilities. “He was a perfectionist,” reflected Terry Lewis. “He would ask questions: ‘What do you think about this or that? Are these lyrics the best lyrics?’ He analyzed and cross-analyzed everything he did musically. Because he wanted to make sure he was always doing his best.”
HITMAKER
Around the same time, Jackson reached out to legendary Los Angeles “hitmaker” David Foster. Foster had first worked with Jackson back on Off the Wall, cowriting “It’s the Falling in Love” with Carole Bayer Sager. Throughout the ’80s, he’d produced multiplatinum records for pop rock acts like Chicago, Peter Cetera, and Kenny Loggins. He also composed the score for St. Elmo’s Fire. By the ’90s, he was producing for Whitney Houston and Céline Dion. While Rolling Stone dubbed him the “master…of bombastic kitsch,” he was a specialist in pristinely produced power ballads and orchestral pop. For certain songs on HIStory, that’s exactly what Jackson wanted.
As with other collaborators on the album, Jackson rolled out the red carpet for Foster when he arrived in New York. “Michael asked me to bring my family along,” noted Foster. “He was big on making sure everyone was comfortable. I took three of my daughters and my two stepsons who, of course, were all very excited. Michael puts us up in this incredible five-bedroom suite at the Plaza [Hotel].”
Foster found Jackson much more complicated than the man he’d worked with in 1979. “The better I got to know him, the more elusive he seemed,” Foster reflected. He remembers observing the artist’s childlike behavior one minute and then his suddenly shifting into a normal adult the next. With Lisa Marie, meanwhile, he was a bit of both. “I know that he and Lisa Marie were absolutely 100% in love because I was around them, and it was amazing. It was a great love story. I know that.”
In the studio, Foster quickly saw what made Jackson special as an artist—not just the natural ability (Foster compared Jackson to “Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly rolled into one”), but the work ethic. “He actually worked,” remembers Foster. “He was always engaged and focused, and my biggest complaint is that he had a tendency to do dozens of takes of every song. I can’t think past eight takes, so it made me crazy.”
Jackson and Foster tried to come up with some original material together, but, according to recording engineers in these sessions, the chemistry wasn’t quite right and nothing materialized. Instead, Foster helped Jackson complete two mostly finished songs—“Earth Song” and “Childhood.” After a conversation about Charlie Chaplin, he also convinced Jackson to finally pursue his dream of covering “Smile.” Jackson ended up recording his vocals for that song and “Childhood” on the same day, both accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Those who witnessed the performances remembered it as one of the biggest highlights of working on the album.
“THE MOST INTENSE PERSON I’VE WORKED WITH”
As the fall of ’94 came and went, so too did Sony’s hopes of getting the album out for the holiday season. As usual, Jackson wasn’t satisfied with it and wanted to keep recording.
As the weather got colder in New York City, he also decided to move production back to California. Work on the album stopped in early December and commenced again in January, back at Record One and Larrabee Studios, where Dangerous was born.
At this point, approximately thirty-five songs had been recorded. In addition to his work with Foster, Buxer, and Jam and Lewis, Jackson had flown out to Chicago in November to work with R&B singer-songwriter R. Kelly on what became “You Are Not Alone.” In the mid- to late-1990s, R. Kelly was at the peak of his career, generating hits like “Bump N’ Grind,” “You Remind Me of Something,” and “I Believe I Can Fly,” while collaborating with superstars like Jackson, Céline Dion, Mary J. Blige, and Jay-Z. Since then, of course, he has come under fire due to allegations of sexual misconduct with several teenage girls. In 2018, women mobilized to create the “Mute R. Kelly” movement, which aimed to draw attention to the singer’s abuses and put pressure on streaming services and corporations to no longer give him a platform. In early 2019, the documentary Surviving R. Kelly provoked widespread condemnation of the singer, leading many former collaborators, including Lady Gaga, to remove their duets with Kelly from streaming services. Kelly was indicted on ten counts of sexual abuse in 2019.
Jackson also reached out to Babyface, resulting in a handful of solid songs, including the lush ballad “Why” (which Jackson ultimately passed on to his nephews’ group, 3T, lending his background vocals to their version as well) and the inspirational anthem “On the Line” (which Jackson decided to give to Spike Lee for his 1996 film Get on the Bus).
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, he brought in hot young Atlanta producer Dallas Austin. Austin offered a handful of demos, one of which became “This Time Around.” While working on the song, Jackson decided to reach out to legendary New York rapper Notorious B.I.G. about contributing a rap solo. Many were surprised that Jackson would think of someone like Biggie—on the same album that featured David Foster, no less. But this reflected Jackson’s wide-ranging, maximalist approach—particularly in the ’90s. “I think very few people realized how deeply [Michael] was involved in his records,” said assistant engineer Rob Hoffman. “He had an incredible music vocabulary—from show tunes to jazz, and whatever was on the radio. He studied, and I think you can hear it in his music.”
Many other celebrated musicians were brought in to participate on the record, from Nile Rodgers to Slash, Boyz II Men to Wyclef Jean. “He’s the only person in my life where, when I saw him, my whole voice-box went,” recalled Wyclef of his first meeting with Jackson. “I didn’t know what to say. My hands were trembling.”
One of the most overlooked aspects of Jackson’s artistry is how effectively he worked with such a diverse range of talents and personalities. Nearly every one of his collaborators on HIStory enjoyed their time in the studio with Jackson and felt that their contribution was valued. “Michael’s the most intense person I’ve worked with,” reflected Jimmy Jam. “For him, everything is about the music and how to make it better. [But] he also makes work a lot of fun. He’s a kid at heart—his office is not like
a normal office. He has all the kids’ toys. A lot of times we’d be in session, in the middle of playing a video game, and he’d be, like ‘Well, we got to do this. But go ahead and finish your game, though—I don’t want to mess your game up.’ ” Producer Dallas Austin likewise appreciated Jackson’s balance between flexibility and relentless commitment to his craft. “Working with Michael is a different type of work,” he explained. “You’re pressured by time, but not by creativity or money. So you’re left with mad freedom. You’d think he’d be very controlling, but if he likes you enough to work with you, he wants your expertise.”
HISTORY COMPLETED
After multiple missed deadlines, the heat from Sony was getting intense. As with Dangerous, Jackson had spent an enormous amount of money (over $10 million) and had recorded about forty songs in all—some twenty-five more than could fit on the album. That meant many great tracks were once again left on the cutting-room floor, including “In the Back,” “Faces,” “Morphine,” and “Is It Scary.”
Over the final stretch, Jackson tried to focus on the unfinished songs he felt had to be on the album. That included the title track, which had grown so big it spread over ninety-six tapes and featured more than a dozen collaborators. It also included “Earth Song,” Jackson’s ambitious rock opera lamentation that had been cut at the last minute from Dangerous. On one of the final nights of recording HIStory, Jackson delivered the breathtaking ad-libs in the song’s three-minute finale. “Later that night, while mixing,” Rob Hoffman explained, “everyone left the room so [Michael] could turn it up. This was a common occurrence during the mixes, and I was left in the room with earplugs, and hands over my ears, in case he needed something. This particular night, all the lights were out and we noticed some blue flashes intermittently lighting up the room during playback [because of the volume and intensity]. After a few moments we could see that one of the speakers was shooting blue flames. [Michael] liked this and proceeded to push all the faders up.”