Michael Jackson

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Still, Michael could not ignore the fact that The Wiz was a failure at the box office. He was shattered by it; he had never suffered such a high-profile failure. ‘Did I make a mistake?’ he asked Rob Cohen a few weeks after the movie was released. ‘Maybe I shouldn't have done the film? Maybe I should have listened to my family. What will it mean to my career?’

  ‘Look, you followed your instincts,’ Rob told him. ‘We all did. Don't second-guess yourself now. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We did the best job we could.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘But nothing,’ Rob said. ‘Go on with your life and career. Be a star. You've only just begun.’

  Joseph also supported Michael during this disappointing time. When one of the brothers said something disparaging about the movie, Joseph gave him a sharp punch on the shoulder. ‘Ouch! Joseph,’ said the brother. ‘That hurt.’

  ‘Ouch, my ass,’ Joseph countered. ‘You don't criticize your brother. At least he tried. How many movies have you made, big shot?’

  Transition

  At the end of 1978, Joseph Jackson severed his ties with Richard Arons. In Richard's wake, Joseph recruited Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann as managers. Both were experienced in the entertainment field, Weisner as a business manager and DeMann as a promoter. Joseph felt that he needed the assistance of these men, both white, in order to insure that CBS would promote The Jacksons as the company did its white artists. He believed that the company considered his sons a ‘black act’ and was, therefore, restricting the way it promoted and marketed them. Joseph's concern is a common, and often justified, complaint of black acts signed to record companies, like CBS, which are manned predominantly by white executives. Like Joseph, many black managers maintain that white executives don't know how to market black entertainment ‘across the board’, meaning to white record buyers, as well as to black. Of course, Richard Arons is also white, so it was clear that Joseph felt the new managers were more experienced as well, and had more clout in the music business.

  Joseph's strategy worked in America. Destiny sold over a million copies and reached number eleven on Billboard's album chart, not bad for a group that hadn't had a major record in some time.

  Destiny didn't do as well in the UK, however. It took six months for it to be released there, and the highest it hit was number thirty-three. But it was now accepted that the Jacksons had sporadic sales in the UK; there was little anyone could do about it. They simply weren't as hot in England as in the States. That was fine with Joseph; the focus at this time was on US sales anyway, not European.

  However, Michael was still unhappy. Despite what his brothers tried to promote, he knew in his heart that he and they were not fully responsible for the success of Destiny. CBS had whipped up quite a publicity frenzy about how terrific the brothers were as producers, yet it was not true. They hadn't actually produced that album on their own; Michael hated living the lie. He was too old for such nonsense, he felt. Gone were the days when it was acceptable to promote such untruths.

  Michael had never been dismayed about his life and career as he was when he finished the 1979 Destiny tour. While on the road, he had lost his voice making it necessary for Marlon to sing his higher-register parts while Michael just moved his mouth. He found the process humiliating. Eventually, two weeks of performances had to just be cancelled because of Michael's throat problems.

  Throughout the tour, Michael was tired and discouraged and couldn't seem to find the unlimited supply of energy he had always relied upon in the past. As enthusiastic as the audiences were to the show, Michael felt that something was missing from it. Barely twenty-one, he felt he'd stopped growing professionally; he was frustrated by being in a group. ‘It was the same thing over and over,’ he told me in an interview after the tour. ‘It was all for one and one for all, but I was starting to think that maybe I should be doing some things on my own. I was getting antsy.’

  To make matters worse, Michael loathed having to answer to Joseph and was getting to the point where he didn't even want to be around him.

  Though many industry observers believed that, based on the success of Destiny, Joseph Jackson had become a brilliant entertainment manager, Michael was not one of them. In Michael's view, his father used a shotgun approach to his work: ‘If you shoot enough bullets, one will hit the target, eventually,’ Michael explained. ‘But you can also waste a lot of ammunition and maybe hit some targets you would rather not,’ Michael explained. ‘Look at the way Joseph alienated Berry and everyone else at Motown.’ Some people, Michael argued, determine their target, stalk it as long as necessary, and then get it cleanly with one shot. ‘That's the way to go,’ Michael reasoned.

  In truth, Joseph would never be able to win with Michael, no matter how many bull's-eyes he scored. Getting the group away from Motown was the best thing he'd ever done, but Michael could not see it that way. His perception of Joseph was understandably clouded by his personal views about him, and his judgement of his father as a child abuser and philanderer. There was no way Michael would be able to credit Joseph Jackson… with anything… ever.

  Michael didn't feel that the group had made an impact after leaving Motown and signing with CBS, even though they had a hit with ‘Shake Your Body’. It wasn't enough. He was tired of The Jackson 5 image. He knew what he wanted to do: record another solo album, one for CBS that would fulfil his ambition, expand his artistry and ease the restlessness that had plagued him since the Destiny tour ended. Day after day, Michael stayed alone in his bedroom pondering, as Marlon would later say, ‘who knows what, he's very secretive.’

  His brothers soon realized that something was different about Michael, and it scared them. ‘Mike was acting strangely,’ Tito would remember. ‘It was as if something had snapped in him. He stopped showing up at family meetings, and when we discussed our future plans, he had nothing to offer. Maybe he was plotting to go out on his own, I don't know. He never did say much. You never really knew what he was thinking.’

  ‘I just didn't think it was fair that I had stopped recording solo albums,’ Michael would say years later when looking back on this time. ‘Part of our contract with CBS was that I would get to record on my own. When that wasn't happening because we hadn't been able to find the time, I started getting nervous and upset.’

  When Michael told his father that he wanted to record a solo album, Joseph's reaction was predictable – supportive but with qualification. ‘Why not?’ he remarked. ‘You know how I feel about it, Michael. Do what you want as long as it doesn't interfere with group business.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Michael wanted to know.

  ‘You know what it means,’ his father warned him. ‘Family is the most important thing.’

  Perhaps Joseph wasn't overly concerned about Michael doing a solo album because, in truth, his albums never amounted to much: his first two for Motown, Got to Be There and Ben (1971 and 1972 respectively), each sold a little over 350,000 copies, which wasn't bad. However, his third album, Music and Me (1973), sold only 80,286 copies, a dismal showing. His last solo album for the company, Forever Michael (1975), did a little better (99,311 copies). Albums featuring all of the Jacksons always sold better than solo albums; let's not even get into the statistics for sales of Jackie's solo album which, incidentally, was terrific. Joseph always felt it was in everybody's best interest to keep the act together.

  Therefore, if Michael felt the need to record a solo album in order to ‘get it out of his system’, it was fine with Joseph – as long as the Boy Wonder remembered that his first allegiance was to his family and to the group, not to himself.

  Off the Wall

  When Michael Jackson set out to make his new solo album, he didn't know what he wanted to be the final result. However, he knew what he didn't want, and that was to make a record that sounded like a Jacksons' album. From the start of his professional career, someone had decided the sound of Michael's music. First, it had been Motown's crack production staff and then the artist and repertoire ex
ecutives at CBS/Epic. Though the family was given the freedom to write and ‘produce’ the Destiny album, Epic insisted that they record a song they didn't write, ‘Blame It on the Boogie’. Other concessions and compromises were made along the way with the three albums for that label, and Michael never felt totally responsible for the results. While Destiny's hit single, ‘Shake Your Body’, re-established The Jacksons in the marketplace, many observers in the music business felt as Michael did, that the brothers had left their magic at Motown.

  Now, Michael wanted more creative freedom. He wanted to do his next album totally outside the family, even though the brothers tried desperately to make his solo album a group production as soon as they heard about it. They were hurt that Michael wanted to exclude them from the project, but he stood firm. ‘I'm doing this on my own,’ he said. ‘They're just going to have to understand. For once.’

  Uncertain as to how to proceed, Michael called Quincy Jones, who had offered a helping hand during production of The Wiz. The two had their first exchange one day on the set as Michael rehearsed a scene in which, as the Scarecrow, he pulled a slip of paper from his stuffing and read a quote by Socrates. He attributed the statement to Soh-crates, as if it rhymed with ‘no rates’. ‘That's the way I had always assumed it was pronounced,’ Michael said later. When he heard the crew giggling, he knew he had it wrong.

  ‘Sock-ra-tease,’ someone whispered in his ear. ‘It's Sock-ra-tease?’

  He turned and saw Quincy, the film's musical director. *

  The older man extended his hand. ‘I'm Quincy Jones,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘Anything I can do to help…’

  Michael would remember the offer. A little more than a year later, he called Quincy and asked him to suggest possible producers for his solo endeavour. Quincy suggested himself.

  Quincy seemed an unlikely choice of producer for Michael. He had found success in the pop-R'B arena with his own albums, which were virtual music workshops of musicians, writers and arrangers with Jones overseeing the entire programme. Quincy had also found mainstream success with the Brothers Johnson, a sibling duo out of Los Angeles, whose platinum albums he produced. Still, most industry observers privately felt that Quincy was too musically rigid to make a great pop record; many of these people believed that his records with the Brothers Johnson, for instance, though successful, sounded too homogenized.

  However, Quincy had a long and varied show-business career, starting as a fifteen-year-old trumpet player and arranger for Lionel Hampton. Over the years, he immersed himself in studio work, arranging, composing, and producing for Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, Big Maybelle, Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie. In the early sixties, he was a vice-president of Mercury Records, the first black Executive at a major label. In 1963, he began a second career in Hollywood, where he became the first black to reach the top rank of film composers, with thirty-eight pictures to his credit, including The Wiz.

  ‘I didn't even want to do The Wiz’ Quincy has said. ‘I thought, There's no way the public is going to accept a black version of The Wizard of Oz. I kept telling Sidney Lumet I didn't want to do it, but because he's a great director and because he hired me to do my first movie soundtrack [The Pawnbroker, 1965], I did it. Out of that mess came my association with Michael Jackson.’

  When Quincy and Michael came together in a recording studio in Los Angeles to start laying rhythm tracks together in 1979, the artist and producer turned out to be a perfect match. Quincy's in-studio work method was to surround the artist with superior songs and fine musicians and then let that artist have free reign. Michael had been so accustomed to being on a short creative leash, he was ecstatic when Quincy began taking his ideas seriously. Quincy recalled that, at first, he found Michael ‘very, very introverted, shy, and non-assertive. He wasn't at all sure that he could make a name for himself on his own. Neither was I.’

  Quincy, on the other hand, hadn't worked with unharnessed brilliance like Michael's since his days with some of the jazz greats. In Michael, he'd finally found what he'd been looking for in a talent. As he would tell me, ‘Michael is the essence of what a performer and an artist are all about. He's got all you need emotionally, and he backs it up with discipline and pacing. He'll never burn himself out. Now I'm a pretty strong drill sergeant when it comes to steering a project, but in Michael's case it's hardly necessary.’

  Quincy was also amazed at Michael's versatility. ‘He can come to a session and put down two lead vocals and three background parts in one day,’ he said at the time. ‘He does his homework, rehearses and works hard at home. Most singers want to do everything in the studio – write words and music, figure out harmonies, try different approaches to a song. That makes me crazy. All I can see is dollar signs going up. Studio time is expensive, and that's why someone like Michael is a producer's dream artist. He walks in, prepared. We accomplish so much in a single session, it stuns me. In my opinion, Michael Jackson is going to be the star of the eighties and nineties.’

  The two developed a close rapport outside the studio as well, and over the years, Michael would think of Quincy as a hip father figure. Michael would confide in Quincy and take direction from him in a way that reminded many observers of the kind of relationship the public thought Michael had with Joseph. However, Quincy was the antithesis of the natural father who used to hit Michael to get him to perform up to expectations.

  ‘When I'm in the studio, I don't believe in creating an atmosphere of tension or hostility,’ Quincy once told Oprah Winfrey in an interview. ‘That serves no purpose. I believe in creating an atmosphere of love.’

  Finally, after listening to hundreds of songs, Michael and Quincy decided on a batch to record. Among them were three Michael Jackson compositions: the funky ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’, the dance-floor scorcher ‘Working Day and Night’, and the prowling, urgent ‘Get on the Floor’ (co-written with Louis Johnson, bassist of the Brothers Johnson).

  Quincy sought to balance the mixture of songs with melodic pop ballads like the emotional and symphonic ‘She's Out of My Life’, contributed by songwriter-arranger Tom Bahler; the bright, melancholy ‘It's the Falling in Love’, written by David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager; the cute, sugary Paul McCartney song ‘Girlfriend’ and most significantly, the romantic, mid-tempoed ‘Rock with You’, the driving ‘Burn This Disco Out’, and the mighty ‘Off the Wall’, (which would end up as the title of the album), all written by Rod Temper-ton, chief songwriter and keyboardist for the Britain-based pop-R'B band, Heatwave.

  With the songs selected, Quincy Jones then summoned a handful of crack session players – keyboardists Greg Phillinganes, George Duke and Michael Boddicker; guitarists David Williams and Larry Carlton; bassist Louis Johnson; percussionist Paulinho DaCosta; and the Seawind Horns, led by Jerry Hey – and they all went to work.

  During ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’ (which would become Off the Wall's first single), Michael unveiled a playful, sexy falsetto no one had ever heard from him before. All of the right elements were in place on this song: an unstoppable beat, a meticulous, well-balanced delivery of lyrics and melody and a driving energy. Michael explained that he couldn't shake the song's melody when it came to him one day. He walked throughout the house humming and singing it to himself. Finally, he went into the family's twenty-four-track studio and had Randy put the melody down on the piano (Michael can't play). When he played it for Quincy, it was a done deal: it had to be on the album.

  ‘Don't Stop’ was released on 28 July 1979. In less than three months, it was top of the charts, Michael's first solo number-one record in seven years. It soared to number three in the UK, a huge hit for him. It was also the subject of his first solo video. When compared to the kind of musical videos Michael would do in just a few years, ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough’ comes across as primitive. In the only attempt at innovation, Michael appears briefly dancing in triplicate. Still, it's fun and memorable because, after all, it's the first one.

  The album th
at resulted from all of Michael's work with Quincy, Off the Wall, was released in August 1979. Almost as much attention had been lavished on the album jacket as on the record itself. The cover photograph showed Michael smiling broadly and wearing a natty tuxedo – and glittering white socks. ‘The tuxedo was the overall game plan for the Off the Wall album and package,’ said Michael's manager at the time, Ron Weisner. ‘Michael had an image before that as a young kid, and all of a sudden, here was a hot album and somebody very clean-looking. The tuxedo was our idea as managers,’ Ron concluded. ‘The socks were Michael's.’

  Fans and industry peers alike were left with their mouths agape when Off the Wall was issued to the public. Engineer Bruce Swedien had made sure Quincy Jones's tracks and Michael Jackson's voice showed to their best advantage. Michael's fans proclaimed that they hadn't heard him sing with such joy and abandon since the early Jackson 5 days. The album showcased an adult Michael Jackson, for the first time a real artist, not just someone's vocal stylist.

  Michael Jackson had officially arrived. The performances revealed sides of him never before heard by record buyers. For instance, no one knew Michael could be as smooth and sophisticated as he was on the album's outstanding track, Stevie Wonder's ‘I Can't Help It’. The song was important to the project because its luscious chord changes were the closest Michael had ever come to singing jazz on record.

  Even more revealing was an emotional Michael crying real tears on the tail end of ‘She's Out of My Life’. (Jones would later comment that Michael cried every time they cut the vocals. After several attempts with the same results, the decision was made to leave the tears on the track.) The understated arrangement of this song, also a crowd-pleaser with its sparse keyboard accompaniment, allowed Michael to soulfully plead his regret of lost love in a touching, sometimes searing, delivery.