Ben had written many of the songs with Mariah, and in the beginning he was a good collaborator. But the public would never be able to recognize just how good those songs were because he didn’t have the skills as a producer or as an arranger. He just wasn’t capable of taking the songs past what I’d first heard on the demo tape. On top of that, the album needed more variety in the songwriting department.
I turned to my backup plan. We made a win-win agreement with Ben that gave him a handsome check and Mariah the freedom to record with any producer she pleased. Ben was named a cowriter on many of the songs that were released on that first album and received royalties. What’s fair is fair. Ben had believed in her, and worked with her, and he was rewarded. By the time Mariah’s second album came out, he’d received payments of millions of dollars.
Once Mariah was free, I called Narada Michael Walden, one of the greatest pop producers and drummers ever, to come in to produce. When you hear Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” and “I Want to Dance with Somebody,” you’re also listening to the work of Narada Michael Walden. He’d been awarded a Grammy for writing Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love” in 1985 and another in 1987 as producer of the year. Narada was at the top of his game. There was only one problem, at first. When I asked him to work with Mariah, he resisted. He thought Mariah was really talented, but he didn’t want to take on an unknown artist. It’s not often that the head of a large music company directly calls a producer, though, and I told him what a priority it was for us, how it was going to be something special, and how much we as a company really believed in her. To be perfectly honest, I really twisted his arm. Later on, he would thank me profusely for that twist.
We already had “Vision of Love,” which is a unique kind of ballad. In fact, it was one of the most unique songs I’d ever heard. It allowed Mariah to show all her vocal abilities, and gave the audience an idea of her full range. We knew it would be our first single.
But we wanted something more. We didn’t want to put out an up-tempo tune as the second single. We wanted another hit, of course, but we also wanted to make a statement. We wanted people to know that Mariah would be one of the best singers of all time. We wanted the second single to be another ballad. That was highly unusual, and highly risky. Nobody would ever release two ballads in a row. It could represent death. But I loved the unconventional approach. Once the world had an idea how good Mariah really was, then we could come out with an up-tempo hit.
Mariah was not comfortable with the switch to Narada Michael Walden. When I look back now, I can see that her whole issue of feeling controlled started right here. Because of the split between her parents, she’d spent a lot of time alone and was used to doing everything her own way. When she worked with Ben she pretty much did whatever she wanted.
I was trying to give her the freedom to go after her dreams. But that freedom came with responsibility—something she was absolutely not used to. She was, after all, nineteen years old. Now she had a very, very successful producer telling her how he wanted her to sing. Narada was the type of producer who’d ask Whitney Houston to insert a little laugh in “How Will I Know”—and he made that little laugh memorable. His suggestions worked for Mariah, too, and although Mariah was not happy complying with many of his requests, the album started to take shape. I asked her to please put up with the process because, the fact was, Narada was doing a great job.
The entire game plan was coming together. A unique promotional tour was being set up to introduce Mariah to radio and retail outlets. The concept was to give the people working in radio and retail a similar experience to what I felt when I first heard her in the Woodshop. We’d take her from city to city and have Mariah sing for them in carefully chosen intimate settings with only a piano player and three backup gospel singers. Our international team was prepped and on board. Our strategy was set, but just as everything was beginning to come together on Mariah’s debut album, I got a phone call. Life, of course, always takes its own direction and one never knows what will happen from one minute to the next. As the line goes: Man plans. God laughs.
I had asked Gloria and Emilio to take an extended tour to help promote the Cuts Both Ways album, and they’d gone along with the idea. They were heading for an appearance in Syracuse in March 1990 when a call came into my office. There had been a terrible accident. Gloria, Emilio, and their son, Nayib, who was nine years old at the time, were badly injured on the road in their tour bus.
I kept trying and trying and trying to reach Emilio, but couldn’t. It was all confusion in the first few hours. The news started coming in, and it was devastating. Their tour bus had stopped in traffic on a snowy interstate in Pennsylvania behind a jackknifed truck, and a tractor-trailer just plowed into them. There was an explosion. It must’ve been the equivalent of getting hit by a tank.
Gloria was thrown from the couch where she’d been sleeping and hurled across the bus. Her back was broken. The bus door ended up inches from a steep embankment, and paramedics had to lift Gloria out through the smashed front windshield. We got word that she might end up being a paraplegic.
Nayib had a broken collarbone. Emilio had minor head injuries and a cracked rib, and was badly shaken up. Finally, I got through to Emilio’s brother, who was running their business at the time. Then Emilio. He was obviously medicated, and he sounded like he was in shock.
“The doctors said Gloria has to have this surgery tomorrow,” he told me. “They say that there’s a good chance that she won’t be able to walk right again.”
As soon as he said those words, I begged him to hold off. “Please give me some time to research everything. Give me an hour. Let me see if there are better alternatives and get you options to consider.”
Emilio said he’d wait, and I got on the phone with all the doctors I knew until I had drilled down deep enough to find the man recognized as one of the best spine surgeons in New York at that time: Dr. Michael Neuwirth.
I called Emilio back. “Look,” I told him, “you’re in a community hospital that doesn’t ordinarily deal with this type of surgery. There’s an orthopedic institute at NYU that specializes in this type of surgery and that has one of the best surgeons in the world. This is the place to do the surgery.”
Emilio didn’t say yes at first. I’m sure he went back to Gloria, who was medicated and probably still in shock. But after calling back again and again and again, I convinced them to get on a medevac helicopter that we had standing by and fly to New York the following day. They landed at a heliport on the East River.
I met the ambulance at the hospital and saw Gloria strapped down to a gurney, her head in a protective cage. To go from “Get on Your Feet” to that gurney… I don’t want to linger on that image any longer than I have to.
We went inside and waited for Dr. Neuwirth to make a diagnosis and tell us what could be done. He came back and told us that Gloria was fortunate the break had come near the waist. But the nerves controlling movement in her lower body had been pinched, bent, and nearly severed when the impact fractured and dislocated the two vertebrae. The surgery would be delicate, but if it were successful, she might be able to walk again and possibly have full movement again. There was no guarantee of a complete recovery. One never knew what the outcome might be. But it certainly was better than thinking she’d be crippled for life.
Waiting through the surgery on the following day was agonizing. I never knew four hours could last that long. Dr. Neuwirth came out and told us he was very confident that it had been a success. That was a huge relief. But then the blood rushed out of us when we heard how he’d inserted two eight-inch surgical steel rods inside her to align her vertebrae and fuse them. I’ll never forget going into the recovery room and seeing Gloria lying there, helpless, through the tears in my eyes.
What can you do? You look for the little things to bring a smile. Emilio was able to go out, and I took him to one of my favorite Italian restaurants at the time—Sal Anthony’s on Irving Place. He loved the fo
od. He loved it so much that every night I would take bags of food from Sal Anthony’s over to the hospital for Gloria and Emilio.
After a couple of weeks in the hospital, Gloria was stable enough to get into a wheelchair and into a private plane that flew her home to Miami. The rehab was going to be brutal. She would have to retrain nearly all the muscles in her body—and she did. It took her more than one year. When she next returned to New York she was able to walk into Sal Anthony’s. For years and years afterward, until it closed, whenever she and Emilio were in town they would always go to that restaurant.
VOICES
EMILIO ESTEFAN
I’ve been lucky to have a lot of friends—some for more than forty years. Tommy is special.
Tommy was the right person when the accident happened. He’s the kind of guy who knows what he wants, and he got the doctor, the hospital, the helicopter—and he got them right away, all within one hour. You’re never going to go halfway with Tommy. You call Mottola, he’s going to be in charge. And he always comes through. I love him like a brother.
Looking back, I cannot remember a dull moment. Just when things seemed to be calming down and getting back on track, another storm would blow in. During this period, two new hurricanes were brewing: Hurricane George and Hurricane Terence. That is, George Michael and Terence Trent D’Arby.
I loved George Michael’s music. I thought his Faith album was one of the most outstanding pop albums of all time. He wrote and sang the songs, played various instruments, and produced nearly every track. The sparseness and sonics with which he recorded it was brilliant. It was so spectacular and complete that it served as a reference model for me on how to make great pop music albums. No words could express how excited I was to have a new George Michael album on the way.
George was like a modern-day British version of Elvis and had been ever since he was twenty years old, when he hit it big in a duo called Wham! He had hits like “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go,” along with a fantastic stage presence and looks to kill. Then he went out on his own and put out Faith. The sky was the limit for George Michael.
We were leaving him alone as he prepared his new album, so we had no idea about the concept, what the music was going to sound like, or what the visuals were going to be. Then we started to get tiny hints from our people in the UK, who pampered him, that something was not right, and that we needed to prepare ourselves for a new direction.
My antennae went up. When an artist becomes so big so quickly and then wants to make abrupt changes, there’s a good chance he’s going to take a wicked left turn. I’d seen it happen at the beginning of my career, having watched dozens of other artists do the same thing.
George Michael’s career had taken off like a NASA missile launch, and he had been denied the benefits that an artist like Bruce Springsteen got while developing over a long period of time. In the first five years of playing live and making music from his heart and soul, Bruce had a chance to evolve into a clear vision of himself. That clarity allowed him to change direction over time and develop into another clear vision. As Bruce kept growing, he took more turns, and even more diversity entered his music and performances. He allowed his audience to grow along with him. But there was always enough of what his audience got in the beginning that allowed them to go along with any new steps that he would make.
George Michael did not have that luxury. All he had was a rapid trajectory of success, and I believe it overwhelmed him. Living in London is like living in a little village filled with tabloids, and the fame that was cast upon him took over his life. Everything he did was written about on a five-times-a-day basis. Cameras followed him wherever he went, and it became unbearable for him. It overwhelmed him, to the point where he decided he was going to flip everything that had made him successful upside down. The only way for him to go forward, in his mind, was to put out his next album with no imagery. None. No visuals at all. Now, imagine Elvis Presley deciding to put out an album or filming a movie without putting his face on it. That’s where George Michael was headed. Worse yet, it was very clear with the elements he was choosing that he was abandoning his prior audience. It’s every artist’s choice to reinvent themselves—Madonna does it at every turn—but you don’t disrespect your prior fans.
When we got wind of this, a few of us immediately went to London to hang out with him, understand what was going on in his mind, talk it through, and listen to the music. I took some walks with him in the streets and tried to explain to him what he’d created and what the expectations were going to be from his audience. I was very direct. “What you want to do is going to be problematic,” I told him. “We are extremely nervous that your audience will not respond in a positive way. We think it could backfire.”
He didn’t care. He wanted change. Period. He didn’t use those words, but it was definitely not up for discussion.
Hall & Oates had made me a certified veteran of abrupt change, but this was severe. At the end of the day, though, I was back in the same place. Even if we didn’t think it would further the artist’s career, we stood together and supported George Michael’s vision. So my team and I went back to New York to deliver the news to the troops. “There is no way George is going to change his mind. We will figure out everything we can do to get behind him and make the album successful.”
The album art arrived in New York and we all stared at it in amazement. The cover was a cropped photo from a famous picture taken in 1940 called “Crowd at Coney Island.” The entire photo is jam-packed with people. It was as if George Michael had taken the lens off himself and turned it on the masses that had been looking at him. Then the video for the first single came in. The only appearance of George Michael was the back of a black leather jacket. No face, no head, no body. This guy was a sex symbol, and all there was of him was the back of his jacket! Maybe he didn’t even realize what he was doing. But it was clear to us. George was turning his back on his audience—figuratively and literally. That video was like watching a Kafka dream and a Fellini movie all in one. This isn’t really the video, right? There’s another cut of this somewhere and he’s in it, right? There was another essential element: the music. The music on this album was very good. But it certainly did not have the distinctive clarity and the undeniably clear pop hits that Faith did.
Then the album was released. It was called Listen without Prejudice, Vol. 1. To say it was not received well would be an understatement. It came out and hit a brick wall. There was backlash everywhere—from his fans to MTV—and the album predictably sold only a third of what Faith had sold.
There was only one way for George Michael to point a finger, and it was at Sony. So what did he do? He tried to get out of his recording contract by suing the company as if we were responsible for the terrible sales of this album. If you can imagine how personally disappointing the experience was for me, it would only get worse for both of us. I will get into all of this a little later.
My team went through a similar disappointment with Terence Trent D’Arby, but for different reasons. All of us had such great expectations for him, and I was in love with his music. In my eyes, Terence was positioned and destined to become one of the biggest stars in the world. He had potential to be up there in the Michael Jackson and Prince category. As a writer, singer, and performer, this guy was one of the most outstanding talents of all time.
He had been born in Manhattan and grown up in Florida, with a dad who was a Pentecostal minister and a mom who was a gospel singer, then gone off to Europe to serve in the Armed Forces, and then moved to London. He completely absorbed England and acquired a British accent. When I met him I would never have known he was from New York. But there was an incredible homogenization of styles and blends of music that filled his head and dreams, and ultimately created some awesome music and classic songs.
He put out his first album, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby, in the middle of ’87. It sold a million albums within the first three days of its release,
but I could sense it was still at the beginning of its trajectory when I arrived at CBS/Sony a few months later. I took the time to meet and connect with him. The more I saw, the more impressed I was. His star quality stood out the moment he appeared in the studio, a young handsome man, perfectly groomed, with a meticulous appearance. When you watched him live onstage, with his R & B band and horn section, it was like watching a cross between a male Tina Turner and Michael Jackson—but with maybe even more range. There was a freshness to him that made me feel as good as I did when I was fourteen in the Canada Lounge in Mamaroneck watching the Orchids. You’d listen to a classic ballad like “Sign Your Name” and then an up-tempo song like “Wishing Well” and realize it had come from his debut album, and you couldn’t even begin to contemplate what this guy could be capable of over the course of a long career.
I couldn’t wait to hear his second album. I called him up and asked him to bring it to New York. Stunning all of us, he showed up looking like Lou Reed after a “Walk on the Wild Side,” with his hair dyed into a yellow shade of blond. Looking at him gave me creepy flashbacks of a night at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, years earlier when Hall & Oates had opened for Lou Reed. The stage manager and road manager were frantically running around searching for Lou as Lou’s band started to play onstage. Nobody could find Lou. Finally his managers opened a dark dressing room door and saw him standing in a shower facing a wall.
We all tried not to let Terence’s physical appearance sway our take on his music. But as his next album began to play, everybody in the room thought: This same guy who made that first album can’t be the guy who actually made this one. The music was all over the place. Unfortunately, so was his personal life at that time. I could tell there were influences moving his mind and his creative process. Some of the songs felt like pure noise. By the time the album was finished, I knew it in my bones: Okay, we’ve got trouble. Big, big trouble.
Hitmaker Page 18