Mike Smallcombe's Blog, page 2

The making of Michael Jackson's Dangerous PART ONE

In January 1989, the Bad Tour ended with five concerts at the Memorial Sports Arena in Los Angeles. The tour grossed $125 million at the box office, of which Michael reportedly netted $40 million, making it the largest grossing tour in history. It also had the largest audience in history, with 4.4 million people attending the 123 shows.That January Michael's manager, Frank DiLeo, confirmed that his client would be retiring from touring in order to fulfil his movie dreams. “It’s time to pursue this in earnest,” DiLeo said. “We have stacks and stacks of scripts and proposals. We’ll sort through them and see what’s right for Michael.” But Michael’s older brother Marlon didn’t buy it. “I think he’s going to tour again,” he said. “I mean, you say something like that and then three or four years pass and you get the urge again.”After an exhausting 16 months on tour Michael spent some time at his new property, the Neverland Ranch, and evaluated theBadcampaign as a whole. The tour may have been a huge success, but Michael was disappointed with the commercial performance of theBadalbum. His target was 100 million sales, yet by early 1989Badhad ‘only’ sold one-fifth of that. The record label was ‘ecstatic’ whenBadshot past the 20 million mark, but Michael wasn’t –Thrillersold 15 million more copies in its first 18 months on sale.Frank DiLeo said everybody did ‘the best’ they could. “We made the best album and the best videos we could, we don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” he said in January 1989. But for Michael it wasn’t enough – a month later, DiLeo was out of a job. Somebody had to take the blame. It is estimated as many as 45 million copies ofBadhave been sold worldwide, placing it among the most successful of all time. But Michael wanted it to be the most successful. He also felt DiLeo had taken his wish to make his life ‘the greatest show on earth’ a little too far, with too many strange and false stories appearing in the press after 1985. As Michael was refusing to be interviewed during theBadera, much of his PR came through DiLeo. Michael’s hair/ make-up artist, Karen Faye, claims Michael fired DiLeo because he was stealing from him. Faye says John Branca provided proof to Michael that his own manager was stealing ticket revenue money from the Bad Tour.Read next:Author Mike Smallcombe discusses his book Making MichaelDiLeo himself claimed Michael was ‘talked into’ hiring another manager with a more established background in the movie industry, so he could fulfil his Hollywood dreams. By 1989, Michael was becoming more and more influenced by his business advisor, David Geffen. Michael looked up to Geffen, a hugely successful entertainment mogul, and listened to him carefully. At the end of the Bad Tour Michael also fired his accountant, Marshall Gelfrand, and replaced him with Richard Sherman, who worked for Geffen. DiLeo believed Michael’s decision to fire him wasn’t about the performance of theBadalbum (or the stealing of money, at least not publicly), but one instigated by his key advisors.In April 1989, the eighth and final video from theBadalbum, ‘Liberian Girl’, was filmed, although Michael only makes a very brief appearance at the end. The video was designed so Michael’s celebrity friends, including Steven Spielberg, John Travolta, and David Copperfield, were shown waiting on the set to get ready to film, only to discover that Michael was filming them all along. Michael’s short appearance shows him filming the set with a camera.Former Epic marketing chief Larry Stessel believes Michael only made a cameo appearance because he got tired of making videos by the end of theBadcampaign. “I was talking to Walter Yetnikoff about it and he said, ‘You gotta get him in the video’,” Stessel recalls. “So I called up Michael and I said, ‘You gotta be in this video someplace…’ He goes, ‘OK I have an idea’, and he goes, ‘You got one take, you got 15 minutes’.”When the single was released later that summer, it marked the end of theBadcampaign after two long years. Frank DiLeo estimates that betweenThriller,Bad, the tour and sponsorship deals, Michael earned as much as $350 million. Now the hugely successfulBadcampaign was over, it was time for Michael to ponder his next career move.For his next project, Michael made the decision to dispense with the services of Quincy Jones, even though the three albums the pair recorded together had sold over 70 million copies to date.One of the reasons Michael no longer wanted to work with Quincy was because he felt the producer was taking too much credit for his work. Walter Yetnikoff recalls Michael telling him he didn’t want Quincy to win any awards at the Grammys in 1984 for his role in producingThriller. “People will think he’s the one who did it, not me,” Michael told Yetnikoff. Quincy believes that key members of Michael’s entourage were whispering in his ear telling him that he had been getting too much credit.Quincy also felt Michael had lost faith in him and his knowledge of the market. “I remember when we were doingBadI had [Run] DMC in the studio because I could see what was coming with hip-hop,” he said. “And [Michael] was telling Frank DiLeo, ‘I think Quincy’s losing it and doesn’t understand the market anymore. He doesn’t know that rap is dead’.” Michael was also said to be unhappy after Quincy gave him a tough time over the inclusion of ‘Smooth Criminal’ onBad.Read next:Full interview with longtime Michael Jackson collaborator and friend Matt ForgerMost significantly, Michael wanted complete production freedom for his next project. OnBadMichael wasn’t always able to produce the way he wanted to, especially when it came to working with the Synclavier, because co-producer Quincy had his own methods. Future producer Brad Buxer said Michael wasn’t angry with his one-time mentor. “He has always had an admiration for him and an immense respect,” Buxer said. “But Michael wanted to control the creative process from A to Z. Simply put, he wanted to be his own boss. Michael was always very independent, and he also wanted to show that his success was not because of one man, namely Quincy.”MakingBadwas a stressful period for Michael; he was competing with himself in an attempt to make the album as successful asThriller. John Branca attempted to take some pressure off by persuading him to release a two-disc greatest hits collection (with up to five new songs included) to followBad, rather than an album of entirely new material.The collection was to be titledDecade 1979–1989and completed by August 1989, in preparation for a November release. In addition to the new songs, the original plan was to include four tracks fromOff the Wall(‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’, ‘Rock With You’, ‘Off the Wall’ and ‘She’s Out of My Life’); seven fromThriller(‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’, ‘The Girl Is Mine’, ‘Thriller’, ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Human Nature’ and ‘P.Y.T.’) and six fromBad(‘Bad’, ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, ‘Man in the Mirror’, ‘Dirty Diana’ and ‘Smooth Criminal’). ‘Someone In The Dark’ (from the 1982E.T.storybook album), ‘State of Shock’ (the 1984 duet with Mick Jagger), The Jacksons song ‘This Place Hotel’, ‘Come Together’ (a Beatles cover recorded during theBadsessions) and adult versions of two Jackson 5 classics, ‘I’ll Be There’ and ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’, were also set to be included.DecadeWith theDecadeformat in mind, Branca began renegotiating Michael’s contract with CBS Records. CBS was now under new ownership; the label was sold to the Japanese Sony Corporation for $2 billion in November 1987. The deal meant that artists contracted to CBS subsidiaries, in Michael’s case Epic Records, would see their music distributed by Sony. The company wouldn’t be renamed as Sony Music Entertainment until January 1991.In the summer of 1989, after a few months of rest at Neverland, Michael returned to the studio to begin recording new material forDecade. With the ranch over 100 miles away, Michael would mostly stay at his secret three-storey condominium in Century City – which he called the ‘Hideout’ – whenever he was working in Los Angeles.Now Quincy was out of the picture, Michael began working with Bill Bottrell and Matt Forger, just as he had done at the beginning of theBadsessions in 1985. Inspired by seeing the world, Michael had been writing songs while spending time at his ranch after the Bad Tour. Forger said Michael returned from his tour with certain impressions. “His social commentary kicked up a notch or two,” he said. “Most of the early songs we worked on were more socially conscious. His consciousness of the planet was much more to the forefront.” The most prominent of these were later titled ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ and ‘Earth Song’. Michael and Forger began working on these tracks in Westlake’s Studio C on Santa Monica Boulevard in June 1989.In addition to his engineering work, Forger was very much in charge of sound design. “Michael was getting me to get new sounds, all with different qualities, and there were some very unusual things,” Forger recalls. “One day, Michael said to me, ‘Hey Matt, my brother Tito collects old cars’. So we ended up using some of Tito’s old cars to make certain sounds. Michael loved metallic sounds, and sounds of nature. Another day, Michael had Billy [Bottrell] take a microphone to the back area of the studio, the loading area. They began smashing a metallic trashcan, and Michael had Billy record it. With Michael, you either had the sounds he wanted, or if not he would make you create those sounds. You never knew what sounds he would want.”While Forger was based at Westlake, Bottrell worked over at Ocean Way Recording, a short distance across Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. Bottrell had recently finished working with Madonna on her albumLike a Prayer, mixing and also helping to produce the title track. During their sessions, Michael would hum melodies and grooves and then leave the studio while Bottrell developed these ideas with drum machines and samplers. But none of the ideas they worked on at Ocean Way would develop much further, and after a short period Bottrell joined Forger at Westlake, taking over Studio D while Forger remained in Studio C. The pair worked together in both rooms and also operated independently.In July 1989, Bottrell brought in keyboardist Brad Buxer to join the team. Buxer had been in Stevie Wonder’s band for three years at that point and also worked with Smokey Robinson and The Temptations. “The first thing I remember is seeing Michael right in front of me in the studio wearing a black hat and looking like the ultimate star,” Buxer recalls. “I had been working with a lot of celebrity artists by this time, but what really blew me away was this was the first time I was truly star struck. I had a huge smile on my face and so did he. We hit it off immediately. This first session was for drum and percussion programming. Michael’s favourite colour was red and in the studio there was a bright red Linn 9000 drum machine. If a mistake was made in the session while we were programming I would look at him and he would look at me, and we would both laugh. We instantly took to each other.” It was the beginning of a close personal and working relationship that would continue for another 20 years.HEAL THE WORLD WE LIVE INAs soon as Bottrell moved to Westlake, he and Buxer began working with Michael on a song called ‘Black or White’, which Michael wrote in early 1989 in his ‘Giving Tree’ overlooking the lake at Neverland. Climbing trees was always one of Michael’s favourite pastime activities and often sparked creativity. “My favourite thing is to climb trees, go all the way up to the top of a tree and I look down on the branches,” he explained. “Whenever I do that, it inspires me for music.”The first thing Michael did was hum the main riff of ‘Black or White’ to Bottrell, without specifying what instrument it would be played on. Bottrell then grabbed a Kramer American guitar and played to Michael’s singing. Michael also sang the rhythm before Bottrell put down a simple drum loop and added percussion.Michael in his Giving Tree at NeverlandOnce Michael had filled out some lyrical ideas (the theme is about racial harmony) he performed a scratch vocal, as well as some background vocals. Bottrell loved them and strove to keep them as they were. “Of course, it had to please him or he would have never let me get away with that,” he said. Unusually for Michael, the scratch vocal remained untouched and ended up being used on the final version. The total length of the song at this stage was around a minute and a half, and there were still two big gaps in the middle to fill. Production of ‘Black or White’ would continue at other studios in Los Angeles later on.Bottrell was also asked to work on an idea Michael had previously started with Matt Forger, an environmental protest track which eventually became ‘Earth Song’. “I originally started that one with Michael, and then Bill continued working on it and developed it further, actually recording another version,” Forger said. “I don’t know if he used my version as a starting point or not. Sometimes Michael would work that way to get another person’s take on how they would interpret a song. But many of the elements were exactly the same as my version, so it seems he did at least hear it.”Read next:'Black or White' 25 years on: The story behind the song, video and THAT premiereMichael was on the Bad Tour in Vienna in June 1988 when he created the idea for ‘Earth Song in his hotel room. “It just suddenly dropped into my lap,” he recalled. “I was feeling so much pain and so much suffering of the plight of the Planet Earth. This [the song] is my chance to pretty much let people hear the voice of the planet.”Michael originally envisaged the song in the format of a trilogy, starting with an orchestral piece, then the main song and finishing with a spoken poem, which was later released as ‘Planet Earth’. He wanted a particularly powerful bassline, so Bottrell brought in Guy Pratt, a British bassist who was touring with Pink Floyd. “I basically stole the bassline from ‘Bad’ because I figured Michael would like it, but wouldn’t know why,” Pratt admitted. Andraé Crouch, who had previously worked on ‘Man in the Mirror’, brought in his choir to sing on the song’s epic finale. “They came in with the most wonderful arrangement,” Bottrell said.Bottrell remembers the very beginnings of another of his collaborations with Michael, a song which became the paranoid and despairing ‘Who Is It’. “‘Who Is It’ was Michael’s idea; he brought it to me, sang me parts and I produced them,” Bottrell recalls. “But I didn’t do as much arranging on this as the other songs.” Bottrell hired a soprano, Linda Harmon, to sing the main melody, which was recorded at his own studio in Pasadena, Los Angeles. ‘Monkey Business’ was another notable song the pair wrote together. “Michael talked like it [‘Monkey Business’] was purely fictional, a feeling, really, of poor southern country folk doing mischief to each other,” Bottrell explained.In the fall of 1989, Michael and his team began working on another environmental awareness anthem, ‘Heal the World’, which was originally called ‘Feed the World’. Michael was inspired to write ‘Earth Song’ and ‘Heal the World’ because he was concerned about the plight of the planet and global warming. “I knew it was coming, but I wish they [the songs] would have gotten people’s interest sooner,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to do with ‘Earth Song’, ‘Heal the World’, ‘We Are the World’, writing those songs to open up people’s consciousness. I wish people would listen to every word.” Famed primatologist Dr Jane Goodall said Michael was also inspired by the endangerment of chimpanzees. Goodall said Michael asked her for tapes of animals in distress because ‘he wanted to be angry and cry’ as he wrote.Michael created the lyrics and music for ‘Heal the World’ at the same time, which, like keeping his first ‘Black or White’ vocal, was another unusual way for him to work. “With ‘Heal the World’, it was just Michael and me at the piano and in that single two-hour session that song came into existence,” Brad Buxer said. “Billy [Bottrell] was in the control room recording the piano. Michael wrote the song and I executed it. The entire song was completed in that one session.”As part of his sound design work, Matt Forger was asked to help create the song’s intro. Michael wanted a spontaneous intro involving a child speaking about the state of the planet, so Forger went out to record ‘children just being children’. After recording over a hundred youngsters, Forger interviewed Ashley Farell, the daughter of his wife’s friend. “I just began asking her questions about planet earth without coaching her, and she said these lines so sincerely,” Forger recalls. “It was totally spontaneous and innocent, but after I started editing it to take out some of the hesitation and stammering, Michael said he wanted to leave it as it was. It was exactly what he wanted.”When Michael was once asked which three songs he would choose if he could only perform those for the rest of his life, ‘Heal the World’ made his list. “The point is that they’re [the three songs] very melodic and if they have a great important message that’s kinda immortal, that can relate to any time and space,” he explained.Keyboardist Michael Boddicker, who performed on ‘Heal the World’, believes the song says a lot about Michael. “It really represented his innocence when it came to his creations,” he said.After a few months of work at Westlake, producer/songwriter Bryan Loren, who was only 23 at the time, joined the team and worked in a third room at the studio. Michael liked Loren’s work in producing the 1987 Shanice albumDiscoveryand invited him to join the sessions.It was after songs such as ‘Black or White’ and ‘Heal the World’ were developed when Michael began entertaining the idea of recording a full album of new material, rather than a greatest hits package with only a handful of new songs. Michael was indecisive about theDecadeproject and unsure about which songs to include on it, and had already missed the August deadline for its completion. Yet no definite decision was made; Michael would keep creating and see how he felt later down the line.‘YOU WERE THERE’In early November Michael received a visit at the studio from a long-time friend, Buz Kohan, who was trying to persuade him to perform at an allstar tribute to Sammy Davis Jr’s 60 years in show business. Kohan was co-producing and writing the show, which was being taped for broadcast on November 13 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Kohan was joined on his studio visit by the show’s executive producer, George Schlatter.“George had promised the network four big stars to actually sell them the special and one of them was Michael,” Kohan said. “I don’t think we discussed what he would do that night we visited him at the studio, but Michael did commit to make every effort to appear and we would discuss what he was to do later. At the time, Michael was in extreme pain from the Pepsi commercial accident when his hair caught on fire.”Kohan and Schlatter hadn’t realised just how much distress Michael was in. “He took us into a back bathroom at the studio and asked us to feel his head,” Kohan recalls. “He told me he was in constant pain and on painkillers. Because of this, he truly didn’t know whether he would be able to perform at all.”Kohan went home and began thinking of the easiest, most gentle way of accommodating Michael’s needs and those of Sammy Davis and the show. “Suddenly this phrase popped into my head, ‘You Were There’,” Kohan said. “It applied so perfectly to Sammy and what he meant to so many young performers like Michael who were spared some of the pain and torment he went through to make things happen.”Michael Jackson performs 'You Were There' for Sammy Davis Jr:‘You Were There’ was originally just a poem, but could easily be turned into a lyric if music were added. Shortly after, Kohan wrote Michael a letter to tell him about the piece he had written. “I told Michael, ‘If the words strike a resonant chord in you; if they express how you feel about Sammy, and if you think you would like to spend an hour with me putting a melody to it before the show then give me a call’. And I said to him, ‘If you feel you just want to say the words without actually singing them I can arrange to have some lovely underscore under your voice’. Knowing how busy he was, I took it upon myself to write a tune to it and make a song out of it.”At around midnight the night before the show, Michael showed up at the Shrine Auditorium. Together with Kohan he went into the adjacent Shrine Exposition Hall, which was completely empty except for a grand piano and one light in the far corner. The producer, the arranger and a number of others involved in the show all stood outside – the arranger would have to do a chart by the next morning if Michael agreed to perform the song.“So Michael sat on the piano bench next to me,” Kohan said. “He used to call me ‘Buzzie Wuzzie’. I played the song for him on the grand piano, and Michael said, ‘Buzzie that’s beautiful’. We sat there for a while and made some adjustments to the melody line and changed a few words and chords, but Michael still wasn’t sure if he would be able to learn the song, agree to the arrangement, set his lighting and feel physically up to performing it. So I said to Michael, ‘This man, whether you are aware of it or not, has done so much for you, and if you pass up this last chance to say thank you, you will never forgive yourself ’.”Michael told Kohan he understood and that he would try, so at least the producers finally had a commitment of sorts. Everything then went into gear to prepare for the dress rehearsal, which by then was less than 12 hours away.“I knew Michael…he was such a perfectionist, he would spend days and weeks honing a performance or a song,” Kohan said. “But here he was, going on stage before an audience of millions to perform a song he had never sung before, which had an orchestration he would hear for the first time on the afternoon of the show. It was so out of character for him, but to his everlasting credit, he set the wheels in motion and went home with a piano track I made on a small cassette recorder to learn the song.”After rehearsing the song on the afternoon of the show, Michael went to his dressing room to rest and prepare. That evening he performed ‘You Were There’ for the first and only time, joining other stars such as Clint Eastwood, Mike Tyson, Whitney Houston, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Stevie Wonder in honouring Davis. Michael’s tribute brought tears to Davis, who was battling throat cancer. After Michael finished performing, he walked over to his idol and hugged him warmly. “Michael was brilliant, simple, eloquent and so powerful,” Kohan said. “The connection was made, the debt was paid, and it was one of the most memorable moments in a night that was overflowing with exceptional performances.”PROBLEMS, CHANGESBetween November 1989 and January 1990, Michael and the crew switched from Westlake to the Record One studio complex, located in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. They had exclusive 24-hour access to the studio, costing an estimated $4,000 a day. Matt Forger said the move was made because of studio scheduling; at the time they required two studio rooms full time for a year, as Michael was entertaining the idea of recording a full album of new material rather than releasingDecade.Bruce Swedien, who had recently finished working on Quincy Jones’s albumBack on the Blockand was now available for Michael, joined the production at Record One along with engineer Brad Sundberg. Swedien, who engineeredOff the Wall,ThrillerandBad, was given a production role by Michael, alongside Bill Bottrell and Bryan Loren. Incidentally, Michael rejected the chance to contribute a song to Back on the Block. “I asked Michael to be on it,” Quincy said, “but he said he was afraid to do it because Walter Yetnikoff would be mad at him. But I think that if Michael had really wanted to be on the record, it would have been OK.”Shortly after moving to Record One, Michael received a visit at the studio from American Football star Bo Jackson. “I remember that day,” Matt Forger said. “I was working in the Studio B control room and Michael brought Bo in to meet us. He was impressive to meet in person, so muscular; you could feel his athletic prowess. After a few pleasant words we continued with our work. Just another day in the studio, you didn’t know what might happen or who might drop by. It was great fun.”Michael and Bo Jackson at Record OneWorking at Record One at the time was a staff engineer called Rob Disner. “Michael didn’t say much to me at first, until one day he ran in screaming that there was a ‘vagabond’ sitting in the alley behind the studio,” Disner recalls. “I took a look, expecting Charlie Chaplin to pop out or something, but there was just some homeless guy sipping malt liquor out of a bag on the back steps.”Meanwhile, in late 1989 Michael’s earnings figures were released by Forbes magazine. It is estimated that theBadcampaign, as well the income from his music catalogues, saw Michael earn over $225 million between 1987 and 1989, a figure which made him the highest-paid entertainer of all time.As soon as the team moved to Record One and Bruce Swedien joined the production, many new song ideas were started. But by March 1990 Michael was still unsure about whether to go through with theDecadeproject – now due in the fall – or record a whole new album. “I’m not sure yet whether I’ll release a Greatest Hits album or a new album, it depends how I feel,” he told Adrian Grant, a journalist who visited him at the studio.Over the course of the first half of 1990 progress on Michael’s new project was very slow, with the uncertainty surrounding its format a major factor. Michael was also going through personal difficulties. In April a close friend of his, Ryan White, died from AIDS complications at the age of 18. His grandmother Martha Bridges also died a month later, as did one of his idols, Sammy Davis Jr. On June 3, Michael was admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Los Angeles with chest pains, which his publicist Bob Jones said were likely to have been brought on by his struggles. Tests later traced the pains to inflammation of rib cage cartilage. Although Michael was released from hospital five days later, the illness kept him out of the studio for several weeks. Michael was also unhappy with his CBS contract, which John Branca had been renegotiating for many months.By 1989 and 1990, Michael was becoming increasingly influenced by his close friend and business confidant, entertainment mogul David Geffen. After the Bad Tour he fired his accountant in favour of one who was working for Geffen, as well as his manager, Frank DiLeo. Michael finally hired a replacement for DiLeo in the summer of 1990. The new man, Sandy Gallin, who was brought in along with his management partner Jim Morey, was also a Geffen associate.Gallin recalls the first time he spoke to Michael at Record One. “John Branca called me and took me to the studio, and we clicked right away,” Gallin said. “We had conversations about his music, and where he could go with selling records and touring. That night, we got talking about how big a star he could become, and he felt we were on the same wavelength. Michael knew how to seduce people better than anybody, and he just told me how much he liked me, and that I made him feel good in the meeting.” Michael played some of his new music to Gallin, who was blown away. “It was unbelievable, spectacular, and I got really turned on. He really was, at that time, at the top of his game.”One thing the pair didn’t discuss was movies. “Our conversation was much more about Michael continuing to be the biggest record seller in the world,” Gallin said. “In his mind, he might have thought, ‘Sandy has produced many television shows and he’ll be able to get me into the movie business’. But we didn’t actually discuss that until later on.” Yet DiLeo believed it was the ‘promise’ of a movie career under Gallin’s stewardship that led to his own dismissal.Michael, Sandy Gallin and MadonnaAdvising Michael to replace DiLeo with Gallin was said to be part of Geffen’s wider agenda of avenging his enemy Walter Yetnikoff, the CBS president. The two were formerly close friends, but their relationship soured at the tail end of the eighties. They often fell out as Geffen headed his own rival record label, Geffen Records, but Yetnikoff started to take matters to another level.“He was pissed at me for a couple of reasons,” Yetnikoff explained. “At Michael Jackson’s whining insistence, I told Geffen he couldn’t use a Michael track [the unreleased ‘Come Together’ from theBadsessions] for theDays of Thundersoundtrack; and I kept circulating the story that I wanted David [who is openly gay] to show my girlfriend how to give superior blow jobs. In short, I showed him contempt at every turn.” Another bad move by Yetnikoff was making enemies of Geffen’s powerful attorney, Allen Grubman. Yetnikoff said he treated Grubman, who also represented many CBS artists, “like a schlemiel”.Yetnikoff said an infuriated Geffen then went on a ‘power tear’ after selling his label to MCA Records in March 1990 for $550 million (although he would carry on running it until 1995). One way of wreaking havoc for Yetnikoff would be to turn his most prized asset, Michael Jackson, against him by making Michael want to leave the label, which would alarm its new Japanese executives. Although Michael always had a good relationship with Yetnikoff, he listened to Geffen carefully because he looked to him like a father and admired him as a hugely successful business magnate.Geffen discussed with Michael his relationship with CBS, convincing him that the label was making more money on his albums and videos than he was making himself. Geffen said one of the reasons he didn’t have the best recording contract possible was because John Branca had a close relationship with Yetnikoff, much like Frank DiLeo did. “Rightly or wrongly, Michael was apparently unhappy – or at least concerned – with the way Branca was handling the renegotiation,” a ‘top level executive’ told theLos Angeles Times. “He seemed to feel he needed someone who wasn’t so closely associated with CBS as Branca.” Michael was also beginning to grow anxious over Branca’s representation of other artists, such as The Rolling Stones.Geffen’s supposed plan worked, as Michael was so annoyed that he began to think about leaving CBS altogether, with Geffen/MCA Records a possible destination. But Michael was unable to simply walk away because he still legally owed CBS four more albums, and the label would be able to sue for damages if he reneged on his contract.Michael told CBS he wouldn’t be delivering his new album until his contract was improved, and felt the solution was to fire Branca and hire a new attorney to secure a better deal. Convinced it was the right decision, Michael dismissed Branca in the summer of 1990 after ten hugely successful years of working together. Much to Yetnikoff’s dismay, Michael replaced him with a three man team including Bert Fields for litigation, and for negotiating his new record deal…Allen Grubman.Grubman began putting together a contract which Yetnikoff considered to be ‘outrageous’, but Michael refused to deliver his album until the label agreed to it. Word got back to the Japanese executives that Michael was unhappy, with Yetnikoff the reason. For Yetnikoff, the writing was on the wall. Michael had transferred his loyalty to Geffen, and with Yetnikoff’s relationship with other CBS artists – including Bruce Springsteen – also souring, his position as CBS president looked extremely vulnerable. Having lost the support of his key artists, and with his eccentric behaviour also worrying the executives, Yetnikoff was fired in September 1990 after 15 years in charge. He was replaced by his understudy, Tommy Mottola.Yetnikoff believes it was Geffen who influenced Michael to fire DiLeo and Branca, two of Yetnikoff’s close allies, and replace them with his own associates, in an attempt to turn Michael against him. One of Michael’s new attorneys, Bert Fields, admits it was Geffen who brought him and Michael together. Perhaps tellingly, Branca’s law partner Kenneth Ziffren also severed his ties with Geffen and his company in the wake of Branca’s dismissal. Geffen, however, said Michael made the decisions with his own best interests at heart. “Michael changed lawyers because he wanted to,” he said. “He felt John Branca was too close to Walter.” He also denied being behind a coup to get Yetnikoff fired. “People want to make me out as having more to do with all of this than I had,” Geffen said. “He shot himself in the head. None of us had anything to do with it.”NEW ALBUM, NEW SONGSIn the summer of 1990, Michael finally decided to shelve theDecadeproject in favour of an album of new material, due to an avalanche of song ideas. “Michael simply wasn’t interested in old material, he wanted to keep creating,” Matt Forger said. “We just had too many new ideas.” David Geffen was also said to have influenced the decision. The album was pencilled in for a January 1991 release.Once he recovered from his illness, Michael resumed work in the studio. After starting work on ‘Black or White’, ‘Earth Song’, ‘Who Is It’ and ‘Monkey Business’ at Westlake, Michael and Bill Bottrell developed more song ideas at Record One. Bottrell offered Michael something the other producers didn’t. “I was the influence that he [Michael] otherwise didn’t have,” Bottrell said. “I was the rock guy and also the country guy, which nobody else was.”Michael in his lounge at Record One studioWith ‘Beat It’ and ‘Dirty Diana’ featuring on the last two albums, Michael wanted to write another song with ‘a rock edge to it’. The idea for ‘Give In to Me’, a hard rock ballad, came when Bottrell played a tune on his guitar in the studio one day. Michael loved what he was hearing and added a melody, before the two performed a live take together with Bottrell on guitar and Michael singing.Michael added lyrics, and Guns ’N’ Roses guitarist Slash was invited to perform on the song as a special guest. “He [Michael] sent me a tape of the song that had no guitars other than some of the slow picking,” Slash recalls. “I called him and sang over the phone what I wanted to do. I basically went in [to the studio] and started to play it – that was it. It was really spontaneous in that way. Michael just wanted whatever was in my style. He just wanted me to do that. No pressure. He was really in sync with me.”‘Give In to Me’ was originally drafted as a dance track rather than hard rock, with a drum beat programmed to play while Michael sang and Bottrell played the electric guitar. The song evolved and ended up as a rock track, but Bottrell regrets changing it from its original concept. “We took that song too far,” he said. “It was me who got insecure and started layering things. Eventually, he [Michael] had Slash come in and add loads of guitars, and the song was transformed; not for the better, in my view. And that had nothing to do with Slash, but by virtue of the production that went into it.”It was at Record One where Michael and Bottrell also filled in the two large gaps that still existed in the middle of ‘Black or White’. Michael had the idea for a heavy guitar section, and Bottrell suggested they insert a rap.Michael sang the riff to the heavy guitar section to Bottrell, who then hired his friend Tim Pierce, as he couldn’t play that kind of guitar. “Tim laid down some beautiful tracks with a Les Paul and a big Marshall, playing the chords that Michael had hummed to me – that’s a pretty unusual approach,” Bottrell said. “People will hire a guitar player and say ‘Well, here’s the chord. I want it to sound kinda like this’, and the guitarist will have to come up with the part. However, Michael hums every rhythm and note or chord, and he can do that so well. He describes the sound that the record will have by singing it to you… and we’re talking about heavy metal guitars here!”Pierce recorded his parts for ‘Black or White’ at Record One in one day, and also played on ‘Give In to Me’. “Firstly we did the bridge for ‘Black or White’, and Michael was present for that,” Pierce recalls. “He wanted a heavy metal guitar part and that’s what I brought in. After we finished that part, I then did my part on ‘Give In to Me’. It was just Bill and me… Michael had gone by then. Michael was really sweet, nice, and looked me in the eye whenever we spoke. I liked that. He looked good as well, like a real superstar. He was definitely a fourteen-year-old wrapped in a thirtyyear-old body.”The rap for ‘Black or White’ was now the only section left to record. “All the time I kept telling Michael that we had to have a rap, and he brought in rappers like LL Cool J who were performing on other songs,” Bottrell said. “Somehow, I didn’t have access to them for ‘Black or White’, and it was getting later and later and I wanted the song to be done. So, one day I wrote the rap – I woke up in the morning and, before my first cup of coffee, I began writing down what I was hearing, because the song had been in my head for about eight months by that time and it was an obsession to try and fill that last gap.”Although Bottrell wasn’t a fan of white rap, he performed it himself and played it for Michael the next day. “He went ‘Ohhh, I love it Bill, I love it. That should be the one’. I kept saying ‘No, we’ve got to get a real rapper’, but as soon as he heard my performance he was committed to it and wouldn’t consider using anybody else. I was OK with it. I couldn’t really tell if it sounded good, but after the record came out I did get the impression that people accepted it as a viable rap.” In the credits, the rapper is named LTB. “LTB stood for ‘MC Leave It to Beaver’, an obvious reference to my cultural heritage,” Bottrell explained. “Lesson learned – never joke around with credits.”Matt Forger helped to design the ‘Black or White’ intro, with Slash playing guitar and Bottrell playing the dad. A young actor named Andres McKenzie was brought in to play the son. Many believed it was the voice ofHome Alonestar Macaulay Culkin, although he wasn’t involved until the video shoot.Michael wasn’t present for the recording session, much to Slash’s disappointment. Bottrell himself was frustrated that the credits portrayed Slash as playing the main guitar section throughout the song. Slash only played the ‘intro’ section, whereas Bottrell played the whole song. “I was frustrated by the printed credits on the album for ‘Black or White’,” Bottrell admitted. “Because of the way it worked grammatically, most people thought Slash played guitar on the song. Bad luck for my legacy.”By the fall of 1990, Michael had also come up with an idea for the music track Bottrell originally crafted from ‘Streetwalker’ two years earlier. The track Bottrell made had no title, melody or lyrics, but Michael listened to it many times, and one day a melody came to him.The song, about a predatory lover, would be called ‘Dangerous’. Seconds before Michael was about to record vocals for a demo in the studio, he attempted to move a makeshift recording booth wall behind him, but the legs became unstable and the wall fell straight on his head. “All the lights were off, and right before I started singing – I think it was seven feet tall – this huge wall fell on my head, and it made a loud banging sound,” Michael recalled. “It hurt, but I didn’t realise how much it hurt me till the next day, and I was kinda dizzy. But it’s pretty much on tape, if you played the demo of us working on ‘Dangerous’, it was even recorded.”After the incident, Michael continued to record for over an hour. When the session finished engineer Brad Sundberg called a doctor, who advised him Michael should be assessed for concussion, so Sundberg took him to hospital.Although Bottrell would continue to tweak the song over the coming months, Michael still wasn’t fully satisfied with it.Over the course of 1990, Michael also worked with Bruce Swedien on a number of new songs. The majority of these were written by Michael and co-produced by Swedien. The pair brought in former ‘A-Team’ musicians Michael Boddicker, David Paich, Steve Porcaro, Greg Phillinganes, Paulinho Da Costa and Jerry Hey to play on the tracks, and newcomer Brad Buxer also contributed heavily.Michael and Bruce SwedienThe idea for ‘Jam’ – which was originally called ‘Time Marches On’ – came from Swedien and his writing partner Rene Moore, a Los Angeles musician. “In the late eighties, we began experimenting with extremely high-energy drum and rhythm tracks,” Swedien said. “We worked on one of these ideas to use on Rene’s solo album for Motown Records.” Swedien even used sleigh bells from his grandfather’s farm in Minnesota as a rhythm element. “After a while we realised that we had a toe-hold on a genuinely killer groove, and the song was really beginning to shape up. We were working in Rene’s home studio and one afternoon we both looked at each other and said, ‘Wow! This is really great, maybe we had better play this one for Michael’. The next day Rene came with me to the studio, I asked Michael if we could play a track for him, and he said ‘Absolutely, call me when you’re ready’.”A couple of hours later, they entered the studio. “Michael came into the control room with his pal, Emmanuel Lewis,” Swedien recalls. “I played the track really loud and Emmanuel and Michael danced all over the control room, he absolutely loved the concept.”Another track Swedien co-produced was called ‘Gone Too Soon’. In April 1990, Michael’s close friend Ryan White died from complications from AIDS. Michael had previously discussed this friendship with another close friend, Buz Kohan, and confided that he wanted to do some kind of special tribute to White to honour his life.Upon hearing of White’s death Kohan had his friend, archivist and videographer Paul Seurrat, put footage of Michael and White onto a video cassette, with Dionne Warwick’s rendition of ‘Gone Too Soon’, a song written by Kohan and Larry Grossman, playing over the footage. “Paul owed me a favour, as I had introduced him to Michael years before and he became his ‘go-to-guy’ for gathering footage for projects, keeping records of Michael’s appearances on TV and in general becoming the ‘keeper of the files’ for his personal footage as well,” Kohan said.‘Gone Too Soon’ was a song Kohan and Grossman had written for a TV special in 1983 called ‘Here’s Television Entertainment’, a special honouring variety TV performers from the past. Dionne Warwick sang it on the show as a tribute to those who had passed on, and after Michael saw the show, he immediately called Kohan. “He told me he loved the show, especially the song ‘Gone Too Soon’ and that someday he was going to record it,” Kohan recalls. “I thanked him but having been there before with Michael, I didn’t put much stock in the idea that he ever would.”Fast forward to 1990, and Michael called Kohan once more after receiving the tape from Seurrat. “He said he watched the video, that he loved it, and that ‘Gone Too Soon’ was going to be his tribute to Ryan,” Kohan said. “The only thing was, he said he never does cover records, so he asked me if anyone else had ever recorded the song. I told him that when Dionne Warwick sang that song back in 1983, she said, ‘I love it, I want to record it’. But she never did. Other performers, including Patti LaBelle and Donna Summer, also sang it at charity events and said they definitely wanted to record it, but also never did.”Michael and Ryan WhiteKohan told him that no one had ever recorded it, and that his people have a word, ‘bashert’. “That word, it means, ‘It was meant to be’,” Kohan said. “I told him, ‘Michael, this song has been waiting for you, it was meant for you’, and he agreed. I had written other songs for and with Michael that never made the final cut, so I was leery when he said it would be on the album he was preparing. He knew I had been disappointed before, and assured me it would be on the album, as promised.”Other tracks Swedien co-produced include the epic ‘Will You Be There’, which is another song Michael wrote in his ‘Giving Tree’ at Neverland, and ‘Keep the Faith’, which is about overcoming barriers. At the very end of ‘Will You Be there’, which is nearly eight minutes long, Michael performs a spoken part with words that would later take on a much deeper meaning than when he originally wrote them. ‘Keep the Faith’ was written by the ‘Man in the Mirror’ songwriting team of Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett. Garrett said Michael received a songwriting credit on ‘Keep the Faith’ as he made changes that became an ‘integral part’ of the finished product. “It seemed only fair to include him as a writer on the song,” she said.When young producer Bryan Loren began working with Michael, he hoped to return to the ‘organic’ feeling ofOff the WallandThriller. The pair recorded more than 20 songs together, including ‘Men in Black’, ‘Superfly Sister’, ‘Verdict’, ‘Call it Off’, ‘Truth on Youth’, ‘Stay’, ‘Fever’, ‘Serious Effect’, ‘To Satisfy You’, ‘Work That Body’, ‘She Got It’ and ‘Seven Digits’. “Sadly, many of these we never finished,” Loren said. “But when we did do vocals, beyond his lead work it was always a pleasure to listen to this man lay background harmonies. His voice was truly unique. Really pure tone, and great intonation.”The pair also created ‘Do the Bartman’ for the albumThe Simpsons Sing the Blues, released in December 1990 on Geffen Records after David Geffen had the idea to record an album based on the hit animated sitcom. Loren wrote the song, while Michael came up with the title. The vocal was performed by Bart Simpson’s voice actor Nancy Cartwright and went to number one in the United Kingdom, although it was never released in the United States.Michael and Loren spent much time together outside of the studio; the producer was a regular visitor to both Neverland and Michael’s Hideout in Century City. “I remember once being on the 101 freeway coming from the Hideout on the way to the studio in my car, with Michael in my passenger seat,” Loren recalls. “At some point, a man driving on the passenger side of my car looks in the window at Mike, curly hair and fedora in tow. Does a double-take and shrugs his shoulders as if to say ‘Nah, couldn’t be’. Now that was funny.”Loren also remembers the fun times in the studio. “I still have the fedora I took off his head while he was annoyingly poking at a plate of food I was eating at the studio one day, making him recoil because he had ‘hat-hair’.”By late 1990, Michael had been working on new music for 18 months, but he still wasn’t satisfied with the sound of some of the material. To complement the best of what he had recorded so far, he was looking for something more contemporary and modern, something with ‘fire’ and a ‘driving snare’. As Bruce Swedien put it, Michael’s desire was to “present something very street that the young people will be able to identify with.” Michael identified another young producer, Teddy Riley, as the man who would be able to bring that sound to the project.Read next:The making of Michael Jackson's Dangerous, PART TWORETURN TO THE BLOG PAGEFIND OUT MORE ABOUT MAKING MICHAEL

Full interview with longtime Michael Jackson collaborator and friend Matt Forger

Matt Forger was one of Michael Jackson’s most trusted collaborators; few, if any, have more knowledge of Michael’s adult recording career and creative process.Over a period of 15 years, Matt worked closely with Michael on several projects as a sound engineer. Matt was working with Quincy Jones when he first met Michael during theThrillersessions in the summer of 1982.The pair then developed a close friendship as Matt went on to work with Michael on The Jacksons’Victoryalbum in 1984, before transitioning into theCaptain EOproject in early 1985. He then spent two years working at Michael’s home studio in Encino, California, as they created and sculpted the songs that formed theBadalbum.After Michael’s professional split with Quincy Jones, Matt went on to play a central role as they recorded theDangerous,HIStoryandBlood on the Dance Flooralbums in studios in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.Read next:Author Mike Smallcombe discusses his book Making MichaelMaking Michaelwould not have been possible without Matt's kindness, generosity, memories and knowledge. Since I first met Matt in Los Angeles in February 2012, he has made an outstanding contribution to the book by answering hundreds of questions, reading chapters and contributing the best foreword I could possibly wish for.It was February 2012 when I visited Matt at his studio in Sherman Oaks. Little did I know that the interview would last more than three hours, and our conversations would continue until I finished the book three years later. The full transcript of our conversations is over 5,000 words long. Here it is in full.THRILLERYou didn’t meet Michael until he began work onThriller. How did that come about?I met Michael because I was working with Quincy [Jones] at the time, and Michael’s project was simply the next one on Quincy’s schedule. In the studio at Westlake, it was me on the right hand side of the console, Bruce [Swedien] in the middle and Quincy on the left. Westlake A was the main studio we used, we also used studio B when the deadline crunch put us in a tight position for time, keeping both studios booked full time until we finished.It started with the sessions for 'The Girl Is Mine' sessions, which were in April 1982 because that was when Paul [McCartney] was available; it was a good time for all parties involved. Then we had a couple of months break when Quincy, Bruce and I did the Donna Summer album. After that was released, in August we set up at Westlake and began theThrillersessions.How did theThrillersessions begin; which songs did you work on first?TheThrillersessions began with two of Michael’s songs, 'Billie Jean' and 'Startin Somethin’. Then we had Rod [Temperton] come in with his three songs.From what Quincy has said, songs like ‘Beat It’, ‘P.Y.T’ and ‘Human Nature’ didn’t come into play for a long time during those sessions.That is correct; I believe 'Carousel', 'Hot Street', 'She's Trouble' and 'Got The Hots' did exist before 'Human Nature', 'P.Y.T', 'Beat It' and 'The Lady In My Life'. The key word being exist. They came to the project at Westlake in that order.So how did ‘Beat It’ come about?The album seemed to be heading in a certain direction, until Quincy asked Michael to come up with something that had a real edge. The deadline for finishing the production was drawing ever closer, and it appeared that although Quincy had been asking him for months to try and write a rock song, Michael couldn’t come up with anything. Suddenly, he came in with ‘Beat It’, and everything changed.Read next:The making of Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean'Can you remember the Eddie Van Halen session?Very well. It was funny because when Quincy called Eddie, he thought it was a joke and hung up on Quincy. Quincy kept calling but Eddie kept hanging up. In the end, Quincy said, ‘Look Eddie, this really is me!’ He had to almost beg to be believed.So then it was time for the main session. I said to Quincy, ‘We should bring Eddie’s engineer Donn Landee in for the session, so Eddie feels comfortable and can really be himself.’ Quincy thought it was a great idea.So Friday came around, and it was time for Eddie to come in and do his bit. When they saw it was just me in the session Donn and Eddie looked around and said, ‘So is Quincy not coming in?’ I said, ‘No, Quincy wants you guys to do the session like you usually would.’ Donn said, ‘I haven’t worked on this console before’. But it was already set up and ready, and I was there if theyneeded anything.”Eddie did four or five takes, and felt happy. So he says, ‘Great, is Quincy coming in to pick the take?’ To which I again said, ‘No Quincy isn’t coming in, he wants you to pick the take’. They seemed surprised at how in control they were of the session. In the end they chose part of one take and part of another, and the two were put together.There have been many rumours as to what the knocking sound is at the 2:45 mark, just as Eddie is about to begin his solo. Was that an engineer knocking on the door?No, that was actually Eddie knocking on his guitar.How did the E.T album come about?He [Michael] felt like this was a window of opportunity and took up the offer. But the project wasn’t as quick and easy as they thought – it took up a few weeks right during the middle of theThrillersessions, which meant we were working on both albums at the same time.BADAfterThrillerMichael went on tour with his brothers and also did 'We Are the World'. How did it all begin withBad?Well, afterThrillerMichael and me struck up a great friendship. I worked with Michael on several projects that he was developing, including theVictoryalbum with The Jacksons, the Victory Tour and the song ‘Centipede’ for his sister Rebbie. I then transitioned intoCaptain EOin early 1985, working on ideas with Michael at Westlake studio, before we transitioned toBadat Hayvenhurst.So when did thoseBadsessions begin?In mid-1985; maybe May or June. Michael’s new studio at Hayvenhurst was ready and myself, Michael, Bill Bottrell and John Barnes began working on demos for a new album. Michael came back from the Victory Tour with some new song ideas.I was mostly a recording engineer and sound designer; I helped do whatever Michael wanted to accomplish creatively. Bill was an engineer as well as a producer and musician, and worked at whatever task or on whatever song Michael directed, sometimes suggesting ideas. John Barnes worked as a musician, programmer and aided Michael with developing ideas.Which songs did you work on first?Two of the earliest songs in those sessions were 'Dirty Diana' and 'Smooth Criminal', which was titled 'Al Capone' then. The songs we worked on later included ‘Hot Fever’, ‘Speed Demon’ and ‘Leave Me Alone’. ‘Liberian Girl’ was also around the same time, but Billy (Bottrell) and John (Barnes) worked on that one. As we began working on song ideas, the songs developed and grew. Michael would never stop creating and he had an endless supply of song ideas.Is it true that Michael re-worked the song 'Al Capone' after hearing about the murders committed by Richard Ramirez, termed ‘The Night Stalker’ and the song ultimately became 'Smooth Criminal'?Not to my knowledge, it may have happened around that time but I don't know of any direct connection. On a personal note I saw Richard Ramirez hanging out in a corner of the Glendale Galleria before he was captured. I recognized him when his picture was shown on the news here in L.A and they mentioned that it was a place he frequented. Weird.What about ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, did that start at Westlake?Yes, it did. I believe that Bill did the work on that song demo.How about ‘Bad’?‘Bad’ was worked on by Bill Bottrell and Chris Currell at Hayvenhurst if memory serves me correct.Matt Forger and Michael at Hayvenhurst during theBadsessionsThere have been rumours that Michael was inspired to write ‘Speed Demon’ after getting a speeding ticket on the way to the studio. Is that true?Yes, it happens [Matt says, smiling].You said 'Al Capone' and 'Dirty Diana' were the earliest Hayvenhurst songs, and then the rest came in after. When would you say 'Streetwalker', 'Fly Away', 'Cheater', 'Make or Break', 'Don't Be Messin' Round', 'I'm So Blue', 'Free' and 'Price of Fame' came in?'Don't Be Messin' came from the song originally written by Michael in theThrillerera as a groove and then further developed duringBad. The rest were started and then worked on intermittently for the two years of the project as Michael would often do. Sometimes a song would be worked on for a day or two and sometimes he would revisit it many times with no specific pattern.'Price of Fame' was supposedly an option for Michael's Pepsi advert at one point?Yes, and at one point later (forDangerous) it was going to be used, but I don't know why not.Any recollection of 'Bumper Snippet' or 'Crack Kills'?I don't know what you are referring to as 'Bumper Snippet', as that was a working title for several of the interludes that were proposed during theBadSpecial Edition reissue project in 2001. It could be one of many. 'Crack Kills' was a track that Michael started that was left unfinished. While I remember it, I don't have a specific memory of what the decision was or why, it was just left unfinished.Michael was to collaborate on 'Crack Kills' with Run DMC in 1986. Did Michael ever mention to you that he possibly wrote 'Bad' as a replacement for the Run DMC song when that fell through?I know that at one time the Run DMC thing was an idea. I don't know as to 'Bad' being a replacement. At one time it was considered as a duet with Prince, but that didn't work out. Prince thought the song would be a hit without him.When did the Westlake sessions start?We were at Hayvenhurst for about a year in total. When Michael felt he had enough material to present to Quincy, he began working at Westlake with Quincy and Bruce. I wasn’t there for the Westlake sessions, I only worked at Westlake for a few days. I continued to work at Hayvenhurst at the same time Michael was working with Quincy and Bruce at Westlake.In mid-1986, I came back to theCaptain EOproject to conform music to picture and mix his music for the film. That was followed with my overseeing the installation at the various Disney 3D theatres. Although we did a lot of the initialCaptain EOwork at Westlake in '85, we had to wait until the movie was close to completion for editing and special effects before we went back in to conform the tracks and mix in '86.I was then back at Hayvenhurst to work on more song ideas forBadwhich was in its final stages. I moved around a lot between projects and studios but continued working with Michael for a considerable time.What about Bill Bottrell and John Barnes, did they stay at Hayvenhurst as well or move over to Westlake?Both Bill and John were working at Hayvenhurst when the Westlake sessions began but were fired, for lack of a better term, before the work at Westlake finished. I think John left in the summer of 1986, while Bill continued to work with Michael at Hayvenhurst through early ‘87.How did Quincy feel about Michael working on songs at Hayvenhurst for such a long period of time?It was something Quincy actually encouraged, he felt Michael should make his next album more his own. Michael was beginning to develop a real creative growth and gaining skills, not only in writing, but also in the production area and just taking more control over his music. My role during the Hayvenhurst sessions was to draw or pull the ideas out of Michael’s head.A couple of musicians have said they believe Michael wanted to record and produce the entire album without Quincy. What’s your take on that?Quincy signed a contract to produce a third album with Michael. There was never any mention of doing it without Quincy, just a desire to have a greater part in the direction of the music and style of sound.Read More:Inside the Bad sessions and Michael Jackson's split with Quincy JonesSome musicians also stated to me that Michael'sBaddemos lacked bass and strings. Would you say Michael deliberately left these off knowing they would be added later on at Westlake?I don't know of any songs that lacked bass and strings by design. All the songs I worked on that were submitted to Quincy at Westlake for theBadalbum, such as 'Dirty Diana', 'Smooth Criminal', 'The Way You Make Me Feel', 'Speed Demon', etc, all had bass and strings.They may have been synth elements, but these were important components to Michael’s arrangements and they were included. It may have been possible that a song idea was without bass and strings, but that only would have been because of the need to get something to Quincy in a hurry meant there wasn't time to do that at Hayvenhurst.A few of the musicians I have spoken to also dismissed Michael as a songwriter and believe the likes of Greg Phillinganes, John Barnes, Bill Bottrell and Brad Buxer did most of the writing. Having worked with Michael at Hayvenhurst forBad, you have experienced first-hand Michael creating songs from their very beginning. What's your take on this?These were situations where Michael worked with different people to help him realise his ideas; sometimes the people working with him contributed ideas as well. It would have to be a case-by-case evaluation. I worked on many songs that Michael created from scratch. Others may have opinions of their own, but other people were not responsible for writing his hit songs. They may have played a part, but it was usually in support of him.Going back to Westlake sessions, we know the likes of ‘Just Good Friends’ and ‘Man in the Mirror’ started there. There was a late decision to include ‘Another Part of Me’, which was worked on forEO. Did you finish that for the album?No, Bruce took my recording of 'Another Part of Me' and made into an album track during the main sessions at Westlake.Michael and Matt Forger recording at Westlake studio in 1985:Out of the songs that didn't make the final tracklist, 'Streetwalker', 'Price of Fame', 'Fly Away', 'Cheater' etc, which would you say (apart from the obvious one 'Streetwalker') were closely considered for inclusion at the end in July 87?'Streetwalker' was the most seriously considered track, others were still considered demos and probably not polished enough for serious consideration.There was talk Michael wanted to makeBada three-disc album with 30 songs, but Quincy wasn't keen on the idea. Any idea if that is true?There was the possibility that it could have been a three-disc set, but the time and effort alone to finish that much material made it impractical. The idea was to make it a single disc of just the strongest songs for the best possible success in the marketplace.DANGEROUSNow we are on toDangerous, which started out life as a greatest hits album. How did that begin for you?In June 1989, I began working with Michael at Westlake Studio C on a few new songs for that greatest hits album. Billy [Bottrell] was over at Ocean Way and joined us at Westlake later. I was in Studio C, and Billy was in Studio D. We worked together in both those rooms, as well as working independently in both rooms. Brad Buxer came in towards the end of the Westlake sessions. Billy recommended him.Did Bruce Swedien ever work at Westlake?I don't believe that Bruce ever worked at Westlake on theDangerousalbum aside from an individual day or two. I believe he may have recorded the Andre Crouch choir there or something of that nature. He came in later when we began at Record One.What was your main role?I was working a lot on sound design. Michael was getting me to get new sounds, all with different qualities, and there were some very unusual things. One day, Michael said to me, ‘Hey Matt, my brother Tito collects old cars’. So we ended up using some of Tito’s old cars to make certain sounds.Michael loved metallic sounds, and sounds of nature. Another day, Michael had Billy [Bottrell] take a microphone to the back area of the studio, the loading area. They began smashing a metallic trashcan, and Michael had Billy record it. With Michael, you either had the sounds he wanted, or if not he would make you create those sounds. You never knew what sounds he would want.Read next:Donald Trump and Michael Jackson: The full story behind a mysterious friendshipSo what were the early songs?The early songs that we worked on include ‘They Don’t Care About Us’, and Billy worked on ‘Earth Song’. In the late summer and early fall, we worked on ‘Heal The World’. The original title for that was actually ‘Feed The World’.I actually originally started ‘Earth Song’ with Michael, and then Bill continued working on it and developed it further, actually recording another version. I don’t know if he used my version as a starting point or not. Sometimes Michael would work that way to get another person’s take on how they would interpret a song. But many of the elements were exactly the same as my version, so it seems he did at least hear it.‘Black or White’ must have been around as well?Yes. For 'Black or White', I designed the intro section, that first minute where Billy plays the dad and Slash plays guitar. We had a young actor come in to play the son. Macauley wasn’t involved until the video shoot. Now that I think of it, Michael and Billy started 'Monkey Business' at Westlake as well.Could you tell me a little bit about you going out to record that young girl for the intro to 'Heal the World'?She was the daughter of my wife's friend. I just began asking her questions about planet earth without coaching her, and she said these lines so sincerely. It was totally spontaneous and innocent, but after I started editing it to take out some of the hesitation and stammering, Michael said he wanted to leave it as it was. It was exactly what he wanted.WhenDangerouswas only a greatest hits package, can you remember which new songs were going to be included? I presume all the pre-Record One songs, 'Feed the World', 'Black or White', 'They Don't Care About Us'...Yes.Michael at Record One studioWhere was Michael was staying when he was recording in L.A at that time?He had a condo, where I don't know. He would he would refer to going to the condo. That's all I know.When was the transition from Westlake to Record One duringDangerous, and why did Michael want to switch to Record One?Everyone didn't just walk in the door at Record one on a specific day. Everyone gravitated there over a period of about a month, roughly from November 1989 to January 1990. There were holidays at this time of year too.After looking more closely at my records it seems that Bill Bottrell and Bruce Swedien appear to have started their work at Record One earlier in November than I did. I know I was working at Westlake until the middle of November and my records show I was working at Record One from November 20 on. So the answer is the month of November in a staggered fashion.I believe the move was because of studio scheduling, at the time we moved to Record One we needed two studio rooms full time for a year. Also, Record One was a two room facility; the entire building was closed to anyone not in our production team. So we had total privacy.I remember the day I was working in the Studio B control room and Michael brought Bo Johnson in to meet us. He was impressive to meet in person, so muscular; you could feel his athletic prowess. After a few pleasant words we continued with our work. Just another day in the studio, you didn’t know what might happen or who might drop by. It was great fun.Read next:'Black or White' 25 years on: The story behind the song, video and THAT premiereWhat were the working arrangement at Record One?Record One only had two studio rooms, A and B. I had a lounge room converted into an editing suite with an Opus digital work station and playback speakers for editing and sound design work, and I would work in whatever room I needed for a specific task. At Record One I was in studio A for the most part, the smaller of the two rooms, sometimes Bill would work in that room, mostly he worked in studio B, occasionally I would work in B as well.We would all trade, or work in whatever room was free, or sometimes the room that best suited the needs of that session. You see in the course of the 2 1/2 years we worked onDangerous, we did not all work full time every day, sometimes one of us would be at another location for a specific session.Bruce occupied studio B for the majority of the time, which is why in the effort to find an open studio, Bill could have worked at any one of a half dozen places, including Smoke Tree Studio, Toad Hall, and possibly others. He also had other work to fill his time so he wasn't only working with Michael for the entire time.So now you’re at Record One; is this when the greatest hits idea was shelved?As soon as we were all working there many new songs were started, obviously more than would be needed for a greatest hits album. Michael simply wasn’t interested in old material, he wanted to keep creating. We just had too many new ideas.Which songs did you work on there?As Michael was working with Billy, Bruce and I were also working on songs with Michael. In early 1990 we worked on 'Will You Be There'. Towards the middle of 1990 Bruce and Michael worked on 'Gone Too Soon'. 'Jam' and 'Keep The Faith' were also started at Record One. Michael and Billy worked on 'Give In To Me', 'Who Is It', 'Dangerous'.What about Bryan Loren, when did he come in?Bryan Loren began working on a few ideas at Westlake, I don't remember which studio he worked in, it may have been Studio E. He did most of his work at Record One in the second half of 1990, although none of his songs made it to the album. He did The Simpson's 'Happy Birthday Lisa' and 'Magic Show' or 'Mind Is The Magic' for Siegfried And Roy.Fast forward to 1991, and Teddy Riley came in. Was that why the move to Larrabee studio was made?There wasn't a move to Larrabee, so to speak. When Teddy Riley joined the project he needed a studio to work at. There was a lot going on at Record One, so it was decided to find an additional room. I believe Teddy already knew Kevin Mills who owned Larrabee. It was a matter of finding a good studio not too far from where the centre of operations was located at Record One. Larrabee was only about a 10- or 15-minute drive away. It also gave a separation of work spaces, and I know Michael liked that.It provided another good room that could handle the style of music that was Teddy's. During mixing there were two control rooms at Larrabee and sometimes both were being used, as well as the mixing that was happening at Record One. It was a necessity when the deadline approached and the crunch time got really hectic. By the time the team moved to Larrabee, I stayed at Record One with Bruce. Larrabee was mainly Teddy’s studio.Do you have any idea if there was a pre-Teddy Riley version of 'In The Closet'?I think that was all Teddy.HISTORYHow did it all begin withHIStory?In January 1994 we were reviewing tapes for the greatest hits that would be on the album and then, when the earthquake happened, Michael wanted out of town.So you moved to the Hit Factory in New York?Yes, Bruce [Swedien] and Rene [Moore] began working on song ideas at the Hit Factory. Bruce and his wife Bea were older and found the idea of moving to New York very attractive. Brad Sundberg and I had more difficulties, we both had families, so we took turns to work two-week shifts in New York, while the other would stay in Los Angeles. Whoever was in California would act as the Los Angeles consultant if the team needed tapes or equipment sent over. Brad did the first two-week shift.Michael didn’t join us until a couple of months later. Maybe he was waiting for the weather to warm up so he could avoid the cold weather. Before Michael came to New York, he and Brad Buxer were communicating via telephone.Read next:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONEThe HIStory team at Larrabee studio, 1995. Matt Forger is top left.How did that project begin in terms of songs?'Stranger in Moscow' was the very first song we worked on. Michael also liked some of theDangerousouttakes and wanted to complete them. We pulled two songs out from theDangerousvaults, 'They Don’t Care About Us' and 'Earth Song'.Read next:Full interview with Michael Jackson's HIStory producer Jimmy JamWhen was the decision made to record an entire album of new songs?We had a few new songs, and around halfway through the project, likeDangerous, so many new ideas came in, so after Michael spoke to Bruce Swedien, the decision was made to have a whole disc of new songs.David Foster came in in the fall of 1994. At the same stage, Michael asked Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to bring a song to the project. By then, the decision had already been made to record a whole new album. Michael brought these guys in to contribute the extra tracks that would complete the album. There were a lot of different producers; we had David Foster, Teddy, Jimmy Jam, R. Kelly, Dallas Austin and then the likes of Bruce and Brad Buxer.Eventually you moved back to L.A?Yes, in December 1994, Michael felt it was time to move back to Los Angeles. Winter had arrived in New York, and I think Michael was getting tired of the cold. He wanted to come home, and most of the team lived in Los Angeles too.BLOOD ON THE DANCE FLOORAfterHIStorycameBlood on the Dance Floor. That was a strange one. How did that start?The practical thing then was a record to support the second leg of the HIStory Tour, which was international. So the album filled that purpose as the remixes had a much more international dance sound. Those remixes at the end of theBloodalbum filled out the album. I think it was a Sony idea.The album was deliberately aimed at the international market as Michael was going to tour Europe as part of the second leg; the idea of the album was to further boost the tour. For example, both the album and song hit number one in the UK. The album was never promoted in the US. Apart from Hawaii, Michael didn’t tour the US.AfterGhoststhere was a plan to doHIStory Book II, with a similar concept to Part I. Apparently Sony asked Michael to do ten new songs, but Michael didn't want to record another full album so soon afterHIStory, so he and Sony settled on five new songs and then the remixes to fill out the album. Is this correct?I'm sure Sony would have loved to get another full record of new tracks, but that was impractical. There wasn't enough time for full production of a new album. As I understand it the practical thing was a record to support the tour, which was international so the albumBlood On The Dance Floorwith five new tracks and remixes filled that purpose as it had a much more international dance sound.When did recording begin?After Hawaii, when the first leg of the tour was completed, there was a large break. It was then that we set out to complete the album. I was there to make sure the album got finished – the idea was to have it ready and released in time for the second part of the tour.So first of all you went to Switzerland to record?Yes, we took the Teddy Riley DAT of 'Blood on the Dance Floor' to Montreux. Michael did the vocals there. I think the trip enabled him to get away from Los Angeles. It was quieter there. There was the Charlie Chaplin thing as well.When we came back, we headed to Record Plant. We had multiple studios going, Keith Cohen was over at Larrabee. Ocean Way was used for orchestra. There was another room going at Record Plant for the movie [Ghosts] mixes. The songs we hear on the album are of course CD versions, whereas some of the songs in theGhostsfilm were altered so Michael could dance to them.During those Record Plant sessions, did Bryan Loren work on those sessions for 'Superfly Sister' or was his work done duringDangerouson that one?'Superfly Sister' was mostly completed during theDangeroussessions. I believe a few new elements were recorded in ’97 and the mix was fleshed out for the album.So let’s talk about 'Ghosts' and 'Is It Scary', both of which made it onto that album. I know 'Ghosts' was a Teddy Riley track from the early nineties. Do you know if Michael worked on either 'Ghosts' or 'Is It Scary' during 1993 for theAddams Family Valuesshort-film?He worked on a track for theAddams Familymovie at Larrabee in 1993 with Teddy, and others worked on ideas as well. I don't believe 'Ghosts' or 'Is It Scary' were developed yet, one of the ideas may have evolved into what became 'Ghosts' later. There were many tracks titled 'Scary' or 'Is It Scary' from that time. Even whenAddams Familydidn’t work out, over the next couple of years, Michael had several people like Bruce [Swedien] develop music for the film.'Ghosts' became an extension of the originalAddams Familyidea. In early 1996, before the HIStory Tour started, the filming of theGhostsfilm was completed. Whilst the tour was being prepped, Michael was also shooting the film. At this time, Brad Buxer worked on grooves for the film, like the '2 Bad' version we see in the film, as well as the 'Ghosts' song. Brad developed songs that Michael could dance to in the film.Read next:The story behind Michael Jackson's GhostsSo did Michael ever work on 'Ghosts' at the Hit Factory duringHIStory? It's listed as a studio used for 'Ghosts' in the credits.Not to my knowledge. There may have been some elements that were created at the Hit Factory that were later used in the track, but not the track itself.Michael did 'Is It Scary' at Larrabee with Jam and Lewis in '95. Was it ever up for consideration forHIStory, or did he work on it with them knowing he would continue theGhostsfilm afterHIStory?Steve Hodge, who worked with Jam and Lewis, mixed 'Is It Scary'. His mix may have been done either at Larrabee at the end ofHIStory, but it’s more likely that he did a mix especially for the album back in Minneapolis. It's difficult to say if he was planning ahead, he may have had the idea to bring it back later as he made a big investment in time and expense.So there we have it. For you and Michael, that was the end of your work together on studio albums.Yes, I didn’t work onInvincible. For this album, Michael looked to the younger hip-hop style producers. But I was involved with the pre-production research for the "Special Edition" album versions ofOff the Wall,Thriller,BadandDangerousin 2001, and I also contributed to the [2004] ‘Ultimate Collection’ box set, working on the outtakes and demos and overseeing various aspects of the project.Find out more about Making MichaelReturn to the blog page

'Black or White' 25 years on: The story behind the song, video and THAT premiere

After recordingBadMichael Jackson made the decision to dispense with the services of Quincy Jones for his next project, even though the three albums the pair recorded together had sold over 70 million copies to date.Read More:Inside the Bad sessions and Michael Jackson's split with Quincy JonesMakingtheBadalbum was a stressful period for Michael; he was competing with himself in an attempt to make the album as successful asThriller. His attorney, John Branca, attempted to take some pressure off by persuading him to release a two-disc greatest hits collection (with up to five new songs included) to followBad, rather than an album of entirely new material. The collection was to be titledDecade 1979–1989and completed by August 1989, in preparation for a November release.In the summer of 1989, after a few months of rest at Neverland, Michael returned to the studio to begin recording new material forDecade. Now Quincy was out of the picture, Michael began working with Bill Bottrell and Matt Forger, just as he had done at the beginning of theBadsessions in 1985. Inspired by seeing the world, Michael had been writing songs while spending time at his ranch after the Bad Tour. Forger said Michael returned from his tour with certain impressions. “His social commentary kicked up a notch or two,” he said. “Most of the early songs we worked on were more socially conscious. His consciousness of the planet was much more to the forefront.” The most prominent of these were later titled ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ and ‘Earth Song’. Michael and Forger began working on these tracks in Westlake’s Studio C on Santa Monica Boulevard in June 1989.While Forger was based at Westlake, Bottrell worked over at Ocean Way Recording, a short distance across Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. Bottrell had recently finished working with Madonna on her albumLike a Prayer, mixing and also helping to produce the title track. During their sessions, Michael would hum melodies and grooves and then leave the studio while Bottrell developed these ideas with drum machines and samplers. But none of the ideas they worked on at Ocean Way would develop much further, and after a short period Bottrell joined Forger at Westlake, taking over Studio D while Forger remained in Studio C. The pair worked together in both rooms and also operated independently. In July 1989, Bottrell brought in keyboardist Brad Buxer to join the team. Buxer had been in Stevie Wonder’s band for three years at that point and also worked with Smokey Robinson and The Temptations.Matt Forger and Bill BottrellAs soon as Bottrell moved to Westlake, he and Buxer began working with Michael on a song called ‘Black or White’, which Michael wrote in early 1989 in his ‘Giving Tree’ overlooking the lake at Neverland. Climbing trees was always one of Michael’s favourite pastime activities and often sparked creativity. "My favourite thing is to climb trees, go all the way up to the top of a tree and I look down on the branches,” he explained. “Whenever I do that, it inspires me for music.”The first thing Michael did was hum the main riff of ‘Black or White’ to Bottrell, without specifying what instrument it would be played on. Bottrell then grabbed a Kramer American guitar and played to Michael’s singing. Michael also sang the rhythm before Bottrell put down a simple drum loop and added percussion.Read next:Author Mike Smallcombe discusses his book Making MichaelOnce Michael had filled out some lyrical ideas (the theme is about racial harmony) he performed a scratch vocal, as well as some background vocals. Bottrell loved them and strove to keep them as they were. “Of course, it had to please him or he would have never let me get away with that,” he said. Unusually for Michael, the scratch vocal remained untouched and ended up being used on the final version. The total length of the song at this stage was around a minute and a half, and there were still two big gaps in the middle to fill. Production of ‘Black or White’ would continue at other studios in Los Angeles later on.In the summer of 1990, Michael finally decided to shelve theDecadeproject in favour of an album of new material, due to an avalanche of song ideas. “Michael simply wasn’t interested in old material, he wanted to keep creating,” Matt Forger said. “We just had too many new ideas.” Michael's business advisor, entertainment mogul David Geffen, was also said to have influenced the decision. The album was pencilled in for a January 1991 release.Michael at Record One studio in 1990By the now the team was recording at the Record One studio complex in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles,where Michael and Bill Bottrell filled in the two large gaps that still existed in the middle of ‘Black or White’. Michael had the idea for a heavy guitar section, and Bottrell suggested they insert a rap.Michael sang the riff to the heavy guitar section to Bottrell, who then hired his friend Tim Pierce, as he couldn’t play that kind of guitar. “Tim laid down some beautiful tracks with a Les Paul and a big Marshall, playing the chords that Michael had hummed to me – that’s a pretty unusual approach,” Bottrell said. “People will hire a guitar player and say ‘Well, here’s the chord. I want it to sound kinda like this’, and the guitarist will have to come up with the part. However, Michael hums every rhythm and note or chord, and he can do that so well. He describes the sound that the record will have by singing it to you… and we’re talking about heavy metal guitars here!”Read next:Donald Trump and Michael Jackson: The full story behind a mysterious friendshipPierce recorded his parts for ‘Black or White’ at Record One in one day and also played on another track Michael and Bottrell worked on together, ‘Give In to Me’. “Firstly we did the bridge for ‘Black or White’, and Michael was present for that,” Pierce recalls. “He wanted a heavy metal guitar part and that’s what I brought in. After we finished that part, I then did my part on ‘Give In to Me’. It was just Bill and me… Michael had gone by then. Michael was really sweet, nice, and looked me in the eye whenever we spoke. I liked that. He looked good as well, like a real superstar. He was definitely a fourteen-year-old wrapped in a thirty-year-old body.”The rap for ‘Black or White’ was now the only section left to record. “All the time I kept telling Michael that we had to have a rap, and he brought in rappers like LL Cool J who were performing on other songs,” Bottrell said. “Somehow, I didn’t have access to them for ‘Black or White’, and it was getting later and later and I wanted the song to be done. So, one day I wrote the rap – I woke up in the morning and, before my first cup of coffee, I began writing down what I was hearing, because the song had been in my head for about eight months by that time and it was an obsession to try and fill that last gap.”Michael and Slash perform 'Black or White' at MTV’s 10th Anniversary Special in November 1991Although Bottrell wasn’t a fan of white rap, he performed it himself and played it for Michael the next day. “He went ‘Ohhh, I love it Bill, I love it. That should be the one’. I kept saying ‘No, we’ve got to get a real rapper’, but as soon as he heard my performance he was committed to it and wouldn’t consider using anybody else. I was OK with it. I couldn’t really tell if it sounded good, but after the record came out I did get the impression that people accepted it as a viable rap.” In the credits, the rapper is named LTB. “LTB stood for ‘MC Leave It to Beaver’, an obvious reference to my cultural heritage,” Bottrell explained. “Lesson learned – never joke around with credits.”Matt Forger helped to design the ‘Black or White’ intro, with Guns ’N’ Roses guitarist Slashplaying guitar and Bottrell playing the dad. A young actor named Andres McKenzie was brought in to play the son. Many believed it was the voice ofHome Alonestar Macaulay Culkin, although he wasn’t involved until the video shoot.Michael wasn’t present for the recording session, much to Slash’s disappointment. Bottrell himself was frustrated that the credits portrayed Slash as playing the main guitar section throughout the song. Slash only played the ‘intro’ section, whereas Bottrell played the whole song. “I was frustrated by the printed credits on the album for ‘Black or White’,” Bottrell admitted. “Because of the way it worked grammatically, most people thought Slash played guitar on the song. Bad luck for my legacy.”FILMING THE 'BLACK OR WHITE' SHORT-FILMIn September 1991, at the same time as trying to finish his album, now calledDangerous,Michael began shooting his most ambitious and extravagant music video to date. The 11-minute video for the lead single, ‘Black or White’, cost $4 million to create, making it the second most expensive of all time, behind Madonna’s $5 million effort for ‘Express Yourself ’.Rare behind the scenes footage of the making of 'Black or White':‘Thriller’ director John Landis teamed up with Michael once more to work on the video. Landis was initially reluctant to work with Michael again, as he was still owed money for the ‘Thriller’ project, but eventually he was swayed. “Michael called, and he kept coming over to my house, pleading, ‘John, come on, come on’,” Landis recalls. “So finally I said, ‘All right. But I want to be paid weekly’.”The video kept Michael out of the recording studio for many days over the course of more than a month. On some occasions, when Michael was due on set, he would be busy with other projects; once Landis was told that Michael was doing a commercial for Sony Television, Japan. Director Vince Paterson, who worked with Michael on the ‘Smooth Criminal’ video and choreographed ‘Black or White’, said it was difficult to shoot while the studio work was still ongoing. There were days when work on the video was put on hold so Michael could work on the album. “The album had to take precedence,” Paterson said. “So the video got scrambled. And if Michael was in the studio for eighteen hours, there was no point in then bringing him out to the set and trying to shoot him. He would have been dead, he would have been exhausted, and we would have just had to re-shoot it anyway.”Michael and John Landis on the set of 'Black or White'The huge budget reflected Michael’s desire for extravagance. The brief segment in which he dances with Native Americans in full tribal dress, filmed at Vasquez Rocks north of Los Angeles, took five days to rehearse. A freeway was re-created in Sun Valley for the scene in which he dances with a female partner in the middle of a busy road, and 50 stunt drivers were hired. The Red Square set was constructed on a Culver Studios sound stage. Michael’s friend, eleven-year-old child star Macaulay Culkin, also made a cameo appearance.Read next:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONEAt the end of the song, several people of differing races and nationalities, including model Tyra Banks, dance as they morph into one another. The morphing technique had only been used previously in a handful of films, such asTerminator 2. “We’ve pushed this one step further than what has ever been done before,” Jamie Dixon of Pacific Data Images in Los Angeles, which created the visual effects, said. “Michael wanted to put just about everything in the whole universe in this thing.”Michael atop the Statue of Liberty in the videoWhen the song finishes, Michael appears as a black panther before morphing into himself and dancing alone in a city back street. He then morphs back into the panther, before the video ends with a specially created scene from The Simpsons, in which Homer tells his son Bart, who is wearing a Michael Jackson t-shirt, to turn off the television.THE VIDEO PREMIEREThe ‘Black or White’ single was released on November 11, 1991 andshot up to number one on theBillboard100 in just three weeks, making it the fastest chart topper since The Beatles' 'Get Back" in 1969. It remained at the top of the chart for a total of seven weeks. In the UK, ‘Black or White’ became the first single by an American to go into the chart at number one since 1960, where it stayed for two weeks.Three days after the single hit the shelves, the ‘Black or White’ video premiered simultaneously in 27 countries amidst unprecedented hype. Michael was so determined to get it right that it was still being edited the night before, nearly three months after shooting began. The networks, including Fox, MTV, Black Entertainment Television (BET) and VH1, had little time to review the product before broadcasting it during its prime time slots.The response was extraordinary, with an estimated audience of 500 million worldwide, the highest ever for a music video. But the video’s four-minute ending, in which Michael morphs from a black panther into himself before dancing alone in a back street, created much controversy in the days following the premiere. In these dance scenes, Michael simulates masturbation, zips his pants up, destroys the windows of a car and throws a garbage can through a shop front. The networks were besieged with calls from angry parents, and media all over the world covered the controversy.Entertainment Weeklyeven devoted its cover story to ‘Michael Jackson’s Video Nightmare’.Michael dancing in the infamous four-minute endingMichael chose to cut the four-minute scene from subsequent broadcasts, and issued an apology. John Landis says the controversial ending was Michael’s idea. “He wanted it to be even more sexually explicit [than it was],” the director said.Despite the statement, those close to Michael and at least one top Sony executive seemed overjoyed at all the attention. "No story ever got this much play on the news but a war," one member of Michael’s team said a few days after the premiere.Michael used his bargaining power to convince the networks to refer to him as the King of Pop on screen when premiering the video. By 1989, Michael was perhaps the biggest pop star the world had seen. But while Elvis Presley was dubbed ‘The King’ and Bruce Springsteen ‘The Boss’, Michael had no such nickname. He was desperate for his own moniker, so his publicist Bob Jones came up with ‘the King of Pop, Rock and Soul’. Both theNew York Postand theChicago Sun-Timesfirst used the shortened name ‘King of Pop’ in articles in 1984.Read next:The story behind Michael Jackson's GhostsJones said he had written a speech for his namesake, Quincy, to read when presenting Michael with an award at the Black Radio Exclusive Awards in March 1989, referring to him as the King of Pop, Rock and Soul. But Quincy didn’t use the name, and it was left to Elizabeth Taylor to use in another speech at the Soul Train Awards a month later. Taylor said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the 1989 Heritage Award and Sammy Davis Jr. Award recipient and in my estimation, the true King of Pop, Rock and Soul, Mr Michael Jackson.”Michael, Macauley Culkin and John Landis after a foodfight on setFast forward to late 1991, and the PR offensive to call Michael the King of Pop had truly started. Fox, MTV and BET received memos shortly before its premieres of ‘Black or White’ directing all on-air personnel to refer to Michael as the King of Pop at least twice a week over the next two weeks. “Michael loved the King of Pop name, just loved it,” his manager Sandy Gallin said. “He became obsessed with it. I found myself negotiating with several people about how many times they would mention the name King of Pop on all sorts of platforms. It was of prime importance to Michael.”Once news of the memos leaked toRolling StoneMichael received criticism for ‘self-proclaiming’ himself as the King of Pop, even though media out-lets had used the name before. Regardless, the public took to the name, and its origins soon became irrelevant.In the days following the ‘Black or White’ premiere, Michael filmed a two-song performance (‘Black or White’ and another song fromDangerous, ‘Will You Be There’) inside Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar for MTV’s 10th Anniversary Special, which was aired later in the month. After filming was completed, producer Joel Gallen only had 24 hours to edit Michael’s performance. “Michael came into the edit room and sat with me for all twenty-four hours,” Gallen recalls. “There was a moment when he wanted a certain edit, and I said, ‘Michael, if we do it that way, your mic will be in your right hand in the first shot and then in your left the next’. And he said, ‘But the children will think it’s magic’.”Find out more about Making MichaelReturn to the blog page

Donald Trump and Michael Jackson: The full story behind a mysterious friendship

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in what is seen as the biggest shock in the country's electoral history.Before trying his hand at politics, Trump was known as a billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star.Trump was also no stranger to parading around with A-list celebrities and he long courted personalities from sports and entertainment, including pop superstar Michael Jackson.It may come as a shock to Jackson’s daughter Paris that her father spent a significant amount of time in Trump’s company in the 1990s, with Trump going so far as to call Jackson “a very good friend of mine”.As many Americans struggled to come to grips with a Donald Trump presidency, Paris took to social media to share a picture of a man staring at a noose, revealing that she had a “feeling of impending doom” surging through her entire body. She also made the point that those who voted for Trump were defying her entire family.Read next:Author Mike Smallcombe discusses his book Making MichaelIt is important to remember that Jackson’s association and ‘friendship’ with Trump existed many years before the property tycoon turned to politics, and Jackson never had the opportunity to pass judgment on Trump’s professed beliefs and agendas.Trump and Jackson on a private jetThe story of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson begins in March 1988, when the pair met backstage at a concert at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Trump recalls: “I spoke to him for a little while, he was low-key, and I’d think, ‘There’s no way this guy is going out to that stage to perform’. And then you see him moonwalk across the stage and the place would go crazy.”The two became properly acquainted in 1990, when Trump opened what was then the world’s glitziest casino, the Taj Majal in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Dubbed the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’, the 1,250-room casino hotel was constructed at a total cost of $1.1 billion, making it the most expensive casino ever built.Trump and Jackson goof around at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic CityOn Friday, April 6, 1990 Jackson travelled to Atlantic City to assist Trump with the grand opening, and stayed in the hotel’s $10,000-a-night ‘Alexander the Great Suite’. “If I ever needed him for something, he’d always be there,” Trump later said. “He was very loyal to his friends.”Jackson’s arrival at the Taj that afternoon caused pandemonium; thousands of screaming fans and dozens of photographers chased the pair as Trump gave his star guest a guided tour of the facilities.“There were thousands of people literally crushing us,” Trump said, recalling the bedlam. “We had 20 bodyguards, but it was really dangerous.Trump gives Jackson a guided tour around his Taj Mahal casino hotel in Atlantic City“He dropped to his knees and started crawling to the exit. He did it so routinely, I thought he fell. And I said, ‘Michael, is it always like this?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, this is nothing. Japan is much worse’."The next day Trump gave Jackson a tour of the Historic Atlantic City Convention Hall arena, adjacent to his Trump Plaza casino hotel. On the Sunday, Jackson was due to leave for Indiana to be at the bedside of his close friend, 18-year-old Ryan White, who was losing his brave five-year battle with AIDS.Read next:Inside the Bad sessions and the split with Quincy JonesAs he arrived at the airport, Jackson was told that Ryan had passed away. Trump, who was about to board his private jet to return to New York, told Jackson he would accompany him on the journey to the White family home, seemingly sensing a golden public relations opportunity.Trump and Jackson on the tarmac at Atlantic City before flying to IndianapolisThe pair flew to Indianapolis together aboard a private jet provided by Jackson’s record label, before travelling the 20 miles to Ryan’s hometown of Cicero in a motorcade of three limousines and several police vehicles.After arriving at the home, a grieving Jackson sat briefly in the back of a red Ford Mustang GT, which he had given to Ryan as a gift a year earlier. He told the waiting media: "He was a personal friend. It's sad.”After extending his condolences to the family, Trump returned to New Jersey. Jackson remained at the house until the evening, reminiscing and looking through scrapbooks with Ryan's mother, Jeanne.Jackson spent the next 18 months working on hisDangerousalbum, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. He and Trump crossed paths again in June 1992, at a charity gala held at the iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York. Trump and his future wife, Marla Maples, accompanied Jackson as he collected an award for his efforts in helping economically disadvantaged children.Read next:The making of Michael Jackson's DangerousJackson, Trump and his future wife Marla Maples at Tavern on the Green in New York in June 1992The Trump-Jackson friendship was at its strongest in 1994. In March that year, with a gruelling world tour and damaging child molestation accusations behind him, Jackson relocated to New York City to work on his next album, which becameHIStory.Read next:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONEJackson reportedly paid $110,000 a month to rent a four-bedroom apartment near the top of Trump Tower, high above Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The apartment, which offers spectacular views over Central Park, was put on the market earlier this year for a cool $23 million.Trump Tower in New York CityJackson’s friend, Frank Cascio, recalls the stay: “Michael’s apartment at Trump was over the top, with dramatic views and gold fixtures in the bathrooms. On the second floor there were three bedrooms. He transformed one of them into a mini dance studio by having all the furniture removed and putting in a dance floor.”Jackson was living just a few floors below Trump's own $100m penthouse, where the pair would often spend time together. “He’d come into my apartment and we’d talk a lot about business,” Trump said. “He was actually a very, very smart businessman.”Jackson's apartment boasted dramatic views of the Empire State Building and Central ParkOne night, they went for dinner at Manhattan’s Le Cirque restaurant. “It was as if he had never seen a menu before, and we carefully went over each item,” Trump recalls.“But what was most amazing were the looks on the distinguished faces in the room as they came over to our table practically begging for an autograph. These are people who had probably never asked for anyone’s autograph before, and I can guarantee you, it was not easy for them to do. They would always start by saying, ‘I have a son who is a big fan of yours, Mr Jackson. Could you give him an autograph’?“But I believe it was for them, not their sons. One woman, one of the most socially prominent in New York, known for her attitude approached our table trying to look cool, then slightly tripped. She grabbed the table for support and asked in the same breath, ‘Mr Jackson, can I have your autograph’? It was amazing to see this woman, whom I have known for years, so flustered and nervous.”Jackson hold Trump's daughter Tiffany in 1994Trump says he was surprised when Jackson told him he had a new girlfriend. “I congratulated him and asked, ‘Who is it’? He was very shy and looked down into his napkin, then put the napkin over his face and said, ‘Trump, Trump, I don’t want to talk about it, I’m so embarrassed’. I chided him. When he finally looked up, he said that it was a girl named Lisa Marie [Presley, Elvis’s only child].”A couple of weeks later, Jackson asked his host if he could bring his new love interest to Trump’s sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. “We flew down in my plane together,” Trump said. “On the flight down, he asked if it would be possible for his girlfriend to come over and stay. I said absolutely, I looked forward to meeting her. He said she would be arriving sometime around eight o’clock, about an hour after we got to the house.”Trump's sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, FloridaTrump said that when Lisa Marie arrived, Jackson ran to the living room and greeted her with a hug, before they took off to look at the ocean. “When they came back, holding hands and hugging, they seemed very much in love,” Trump said.During their week-long stay, Jackson and Lisa Marie spent nearly every evening in a part of the mansion called the Grand Tower, and left the house together just once.“He was up there one week with her, and he never came down, so I don’t know what was going on, but they got along,” Trump said.“People often ask me whether or not the relationship was a sham and I give them an emphatic no. I can tell you, for at least a period of time, these two folks were really getting it on.”Jackson with Trump's children Ivana and Eric at Mar-a-Lago in 1994Jackson married Lisa Marie in a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic in late May 1994, but they divorced 20 months later. Meanwhile, in December 1994 Jackson finally checked out of Trump Tower after a nine-month stay and returned to California to complete theHIStoryalbum.Read next:Full interview with HIStory producer Jimmy JamJackson even included Trump in the lyrics of one of the album’s tracks, ‘Money’, which is an attack on the family he accused of extortion after the molestation allegations. The background vocals feature the words, ‘If you want money, then earn it with dignity’, before Jackson speaks the names of Vanderbilt, Morgan, Trump, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Getty, portraying them in a positive light.Jackson and Trump met again half a decade later, when Jackson was staying in New York to record hisInvinciblealbum. Jackson called Trump and invited him and his partner Melania for dinner at the luxury Pierre Hotel.A note Jackson wrote to his assistant in 1990: 'Where's footage of Trump's speech about me'?Melania, who married Trump in 2005 and will become the next First Lady of United States, recalls how she hit it off with Jackson. Melania said: “Just after dinner, we were chatting on the sofa and my husband went into another room to see some art somebody wanted to show him. And Michael said to me, 'Hey, when Trump comes back, let's start kissing so he will be jealous’!” The two didn’t kiss. "But we were laughing so hard,” she says.In 2004, Trump publically defended Jackson ahead of his child molestation trial. “I'm going to stick up for him, because nobody else is,” Trump told Larry King. “But I don't believe it.“He lived in Trump Tower. I knew what was happening with Michael Jackson. You know what was happening? Absolutely nothing. I had many people that worked for me in the building, and believe me, they would tell me if anything was wrong.Trump with (L-R) Jackson's mother Katherine and sisters Janet, Rebbie and La Toya“And if you look at the mother of this young man [Gavin Arvizo], she has had plenty of experience at going after people. And she goes after them viciously and violently, and I saw a story and I read another story about some of the things she's done.“It's tough to win [a trial]. But I have a feeling he is going to win.”Trump later reiterated his point, and said his young children were often in Jackson’s company when he was living in Trump Tower in 1994. “Michael would spend a lot of time with my kids,” Trump said. “Michael would come, play with the kids. He just loved children. He was not a child molester and I am certain of that. He’d play with my son Eric and my son Donald and he’d just play with them forever.”Trump and Jackson at the Taj Mahal hotel casino in April 1990Earlier this year, Trump was criticised by Jermaine Jackson after claiming Michael lost self-esteem due to “bad surgery”.Trump said: “He lost tremendous confidence because of, honestly, bad-bad-bad surgery. He had the worst. He had people that did numbers on him that were just unbelievable. Believe it or not, when you lose your confidence in something, you can even lose your talent."Read next:The story behind Michael Jackson's GhostsBut Trump also paid tribute to his friend.  “He was an amazing guy, but beyond all else, he was the greatest entertainer I've ever known,” he said. “He had magic. He was a genius. He was also a really good person, and when you got to know him, you realized how smart he was. He was brilliant.“Now, Michael wasn't the same Michael for the last 10 years. He was not well. He had a lot of problems, a lot of difficulties. He was embarrassed by it. He was embarrassed by what was happening to him.“But he's not going to be remembered for the last 10 years; he's going to be remembered for the first 35 years. Michael in his prime — there's never been anybody like him.”Find out more aboutMaking MichaelhereTo return to the blog page clickhere

The story behind Michael Jackson's Ghosts

Michael loved songs with a spooky theme, including his most famous one of all, ‘Thriller'. But in 1996 he also created another scary music video, the lesser knownGhosts, featuring the hits ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Is It Scary’. Here is the story behind the project.It was early 1996. Although the campaign to promote theHIStoryalbum was in full swing, Michael was still thinking about the scary themed short-film he began shooting in mid-1993 to promote theAddams Family Valuesmovie. He had invested a large amount of money in the project, which was shelved in the wake of the child molestation allegations. Michael’s love of film and directing meant he adopted the project for himself, and at 12–15 minutes it became an extension of the original idea. Initially titledIs This Scary, Michael renamed itMichael Jackson’s Ghosts(shortened toGhosts).None of the original footage was retained when filming resumed in the spring of 1996 in a hangar at Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles. Michael had now lost his original director, Mick Garris, who was about to begin shooting the TV mini-seriesThe Shining. Garris recommended Stan Winston, who did the special effects for the 1993 production, to take over the reins. Apart from some minor details, the new concept barely changed from the original. “That theme of the outcast stranger that he and [Stephen] King created was important, and stayed the focus,” Garris said. “I was not there when the production continued in 1996, [but] I’d get midnight calls from Michael, who was so passionate about finishing it, making it special.”Read next:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONEIn the light of the events of 1993, which stopped production of the original in the first place, finishingGhostsbecame even more important to Michael. The most significant script change saw the introduction of a town mayor, likely based on the figure of Santa Barbara district attorney Tom Sneddon. Originally a regular resident – played by actor Ken Jenkins – led the townspeople to the mansion of the maestro, but the mayor took over the role. “There’s some pathos in this and I insisted on it,” Michael said. “Well here’s a guy, he doesn’t really like to hurt anyone or offend anyone, but they find him to be strange and eccentric and weird, the older people do, the grownups because they’re kind of bigoted.” The film ends with the maestro scaring the mayor out of the mansion and winning over the people of the town. “When they start to challenge me, they make me territorial, and I start to challenge them back,” Michael explained.The dance choreography was the biggest change from the original. ForGhosts, Michael chose ‘2 Bad’ fromHIStoryfor a dance routine his character performs with his family of ghouls. Although the song was already finished and recorded in 1995, it still had to be edited to fit into the film in the way Michael wanted, so a version that he could dance to was chopped up by Brad Buxer and engineer Eddie Delena. Buxer saidGhostswasn’t designed to promote ‘2 Bad’, which was never released as a single. “Michael just always envisioned all of the dance scenes in the short-film to be centred around the groove in that song,” Buxer said.A special video featuring rare footage of the making of Michael Jackson's Ghosts:Michael, Buxer, Delena and fellow engineers Andrew Scheps, Matt Forger and Rob Hoffman camped out at Record One studio in Los Angeles to develop the film music; Michael split his time between the studio and theGhostsset. “I worked onGhostsfor quite a while,” Hoffman said. “Michael would have ideas, much the way he makes a record, and he would dictate to one of the crew what he wanted – singing, and beatboxing. As the film progressed those ideas would be refined, often while filming was taking place. We would get video from the set and need to edit and make changes, sometimes with Michael there, sometimes without.”Michael also resumed work on ‘Ghosts’, a track which developed from theAddams Family Valuessessions in 1993 and was pulled up briefly during theHIStorysessions. Unlike ‘2 Bad’, there were no plans to incorporate the song into the actualGhostsdance routines. Instead, it would be played in its entirety over the end credits in a promotional format. “The song ‘Ghosts’ was never meant for theGhostsshort-film, Michael wanted to develop the song for future album release,” Buxer said.Read next:Author Mike Smallcombe discusses his book Making MichaelGhostswas completed in the summer of 1996 after six weeks of production. Originally it was only supposed to run for 12–15 minutes, but in true Michael style it grew and grew during filming and ended up being over 39 minutes long. Although Michael saw it more as a film, in 2002 the Guinness Book of World Records honoured it as the longest music video ever, a record that was broken by Pharrell Williams in 2013. The entire project cost Michael a reported $15 million, but he wouldn’t see much of a financial return. Television stations were offered the film as part of an hour-long special, but were put off by the high price.Given the issues raised in the film it was very important to Michael, but for his record label, it was an idea that didn’t serve a purpose. “It wasn’t connected to theHIStoryalbum, and it wasn’t a film, and it wasn’t a music video, it was kind of in the middle,” Dan Beck said. “Sometimes we needed to ask him, ‘Why are we doing this’, and sometimes it allowed him to refocus, but this was a situation where Michael rolled on with something and we couldn’t stop him, it was happening.”Ghostspremiered at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts in Beverly Hills in October 1996, alongside Stephen King’s horror movieThinner, although Michael didn’t attend as he was away touring. His new track ‘Ghosts’, which was completed in studios in Amsterdam and London during the tour, debuted during the end credits.​By the time Michael attended a screening ofGhostsat the Cannes Film Festival on May 9, 1997, the film had changed from the one released in the fall of 1996. Michael revealed that director Stan Winston thought the dance sequences should contain more music. As a result a short segment of ‘Ghosts’, originally played only over the end credits, was edited into one of the sequences. A portion of ‘Is It Scary’, a song with a similar theme which was mostly recorded during theHIStorysessions with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis producing, was also used.Read next:The making of Michael Jackson's Dangerous“We needed more music and neither me, Stan Winston or anyone else could understand why we were not using ‘Ghosts’ or ‘Is It Scary’ in the short-film,” Brad Buxer said. “We talked Michael into what seemed an obvious choice – why not use ‘Is It Scary’ and ‘Ghosts’ in a film about… ghosts?”But as the dance scenes had already been filmed, incorporating the songs wouldn’t be an easy task. “No dance scenes were ever shot to the music of ‘Ghosts’ or ‘Is It Scary’ during the entire course of making the film,” Buxer said. “The work we did was before all the plugs were available that make work like this easier these days.”Read next:Inside the Bad sessions and the split with Quincy JonesAt the last minute, over a course of three days – a Friday through to a Sunday – Buxer, Matt Forger and programmer Matt Carpenter had to change the tempo of ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Is It Scary’ to fit the pre-shot dance segments. “We made new music work with pre-existing Michael Jackson choreography that was much slower than the original music, and it worked beautifully,” Buxer said. “We did all the work at my house and when Stan Winston came over to view and listen to the work we had done, he loved it.”Michael, however, was satisfied with the original version, which featured only ‘2 Bad’. “Stan thought we should put more songs in the film, so we did, but I thought that the first version was good, I was satisfied,” he said.Making Michael also includes the story behind the shelvedAddams Family Valuesproject from 1993, which becameGhoststhree years later.Find out more aboutMaking MichaelhereTo return to the blog page clickhere

News: Making Michael author Mike Smallcombe to attend Kingvention, the MJ event of the year

The author of new Michael Jackson biographyMaking Michaelwill be attending the MJ event of the year in London in September.Kingvention is the first European convention dedicated entirely to Michael Jackson.This year Kingvention will celebrate theDangerousalbum, which was released 25 years ago in November.Making MichaelauthorMike Smallcombewill attend Kingvention as an exhibitor, selling and signing copies of the book and chatting about it with MJ fans.Kingvention will take place on Saturday, September 10 at London's Park Plaza Victoria Hotel.Find out more aboutMaking MichaelhereTo return to the blog page clickhere

News: Making Michael author to attend Kingvention, the MJ event of the year

The author of new Michael Jackson biography Making Michael will be attending the MJ event of the year in London in September.Kingvention is the first European convention dedicated entirely to Michael Jackson.This year Kingvention will celebrate the Dangerous album, which was released 25 years ago in November.  Making Michael author Mike Smallcombe will attend Kingvention as an exhibitor, selling and signing copies of the book and chatting about it with MJ fans. Kingvention will take place on

Interview with Michael Jackson's HIStory and Ghosts engineer Rob Hoffman

In January 1994, Michael’s team of producers and engineers spent a week preparing the Record One studio in Sherman Oaks, so work on new material for the delayed greatest hits package could resume. That album eventually becameHIStory, which was released 21 years ago this week.But when the Northridge Earthquake struck in Los Angeles on January 17, 1994, Michael was terrified, and chose to move production to the other side of the country, to New York City.His production team, including Matt Forger, Bruce Swedien and Brad Buxer, all relocated and began setting up for preproduction at the Hit Factory studio on West 54th Street in central Manhattan around two weeks after the earthquake.Working at the Hit Factory at the time was a young staff assistant named Rob Hoffman, who became a freelance engineer after Swedien and co arrived. Hoffman was soon in the thick of the action.I knew from my early research onHIStorythat Rob was very involved and that he had extensive knowledge of that project, with a very good memory to boot. When you're trying to research projects that were recorded 15, 20 or 30 years ago, it's important to speak to people who remember intricate details. Rob was brilliant, and played a very key part in my research onHIStory.Rob invited me to his Downtown L.A apartment for this interview when I visited California for the first time in February 2012.Here is the interview in full, with many outtakes which weren't published inMaking Michael.So work on theHIStoryproject began in January 1994?Yes, after the Northridge earthquake in January 1994, the pre-production team decided to come to New York. Around 7 to 10 days after the earthquake, we began setting up at the Hit Factory. The idea was to work on anything between one and four new songs for a greatest hits package.I was an engineer at the Hit Factory when Bruce Swedien and the team came in to set up.Bruce occupied Studio 4, the big mix room, and another room was a writing room where Bruce and his writing partner Rene Moore began writing and churning out song ideas for Michael.One of those songs became ‘2 Bad’. Bruce and Rene had put a lot of track ideas together by the time Michael later arrived in New York.When did Michael arrive?We were already in New York for at least two months before Michael arrived in New York.When he arrived, he started working in a third room over at Sony. There was a lot of political rambling, so Michael did most of his early work over at Sony with Brad Buxer. It was to appease Sony, so they could keep an eye on things. But they were quickly back over at the Hit Factory with us! We would do odd bits there, including mixing.What was it like recording Michael’s vocals?Vocals were mostly recorded by Brad Buxer and [his assistant] Eddie Delena. When Michael left the studio, Andrew Scheps [another engineer] and myself would help and assist Brad. A lot of the time, we would stay up all night working. Eventually Bruce would get whatever we were working on so he could change things and mix.So what was the first song you recorded forHIStory?The first song we did was 'Stranger in Moscow'. Michael and Brad Buxer worked on it over at Sony, and we did some work at the Hit Factory.The next one was 'They Don’t Care About Us'.  Although the idea for this song existed from the earlier sessions, I think Michael and Matt Forger started on the song again from scratch.After this came 'Money' and '2 Bad'.There was also 'Much Too Soon'. It’s totally different to the posthumous release. Although it was dropped fairly quickly after work began on it, it was simply one of the greatest things I had ever heard. Brad Buxer and [orchestrator] Geoff Grace worked on it.Towards the spring and the summer came 'D.S', and then 'Morphine'. 'Morphine' was actually inspired by Nine Inch Nails. Michael was a big fan of the Nine Inch Nails albumDownward Spiral. Obviously I was shocked to learn this, but it was clear that Michael loved the sounds, and ‘Morphine’ was an example of this.When we had these songs, the decision was made to make a whole new album. This would have been in the summer time. It was before David Foster and Jimmy Jam came in.Talking of David Foster, when did he come in?Foster came in towards the end of the New York run. He came in so he and Michael could write together. We set up a writing rig in Studio 1 at the Hit Factory.What was fascinating was that two of the most talented persons out there were sitting at the piano, trying to write a song, but nothing came of it. Everyone left the room, apart from [engineer] Andrew Scheps, who was in there with a DAT, waiting to capture anything that came. When Andrew came out, we all said, ‘Well, have they got anything?’ And Andrew turned around and said, ‘Nothing at all’!”Michael and David were actually at the piano when they began talking about their favourite old songs. Michael loved the song 'Smile' by Charlie Chaplin, so Michael and David decided to record a version.'Earth Song' was pulled up in the summer before David Foster came in, but when David came in, Michael wanted him to work on it. Songs that we worked on in the summer include 'Earth Song', 'Little Susie' and 'Childhood'.'Childhood', like 'Earth', was cut before David came in. But David did his thing on the orchestra.Michael had a lot going on outside the studio didn’t he, he married Lisa Marie Presley and he went to Hungary to film an album trailer…Yes, I remember Hungary. One day, when Michael left the studio, he said to Eddie Delena, ‘See you tomorrow’. The next thing we hear is that Michael is in Hungary doing a video commercial! He would disappear at times unexpectedly, for example to Hungary or to get married.We’ve spoken about David Foster… Jam and Lewis and R Kelly also came in. Can you remember much about those sessions?When Jimmy Jam came in, he brought three ideas with him from Minneapolis. One was 'Scream', the other was a song that Janet later did called 'Runaway', and there was another track. 'Scream', musically, was mostly completed.For 'Scream', Michael sang his lead vocal in New York. Michael and Janet sang background vocals in New York, but Janet’s lead sections were left empty. She did her lead over in Minneapolis where she was more comfortable. The track was mixed later in Los Angeles.I remember R Kelly didn’t like to fly. So when he came up with 'You Are Not Alone', his programmer Peter Mokren came over to New York to record the song with Bruce. Michael’s vocals were done in New York, and the song was also mixed in Los Angeles.When did you all pack up and go to California?We got to Los Angeles in mid-December 1994. It took us about a week to get fully set up and functional. I think Michael was tired of the cold in New York. He wanted to come home.I remember a funny story about that changeover. In New York, there were dozens of fans sat outside the Hit Factory every day waiting to get a glimpse of Michael. But there were these two women in particular. They were amazing; they were there every day. They seemed to know as much about our whereabouts as we knew ourselves. When we moved to Los Angeles, the first day back in the studio, they were already waiting outside for Michael. How they knew we were moving operations back to Los Angeles I do not know, but they were there before us!So you’re in L.A now, which songs were worked on next?After the New York to L.A transition, Jimmy Jam brought 'Tabloid Junkie' and 'HIStory' with him from Minneapolis. Those songs were pulled up at Larrabee. Jimmy Jam had a room there and spent a lot of time there. Andrew and I were there with him.'Tabloid Junkie' was mostly completed by Jimmy before we heard it. At one point, Jimmy brought Steve Hodge in from Minneapolis to help with the mixes. Steve would work in the front room at Larrabee.At Record One, Brad Buxer worked in the back room, and Bruce worked in the front room. Dallas Austin came in and worked in the back room as well.With 'HIStory', we needed both rooms at Larrabee to mix it.'Childhood', 'Smile' and 'Little Susie' were mostly completed in New York. 'Stranger in Moscow', 'Money' and 'They Don’t Care About Us' were very close as well. There was nothing major done on these tracks in New York. 'Morphine' wasn’t touched again after New York either.The big L.A songs were 'Tabloid Junkie', 'HIStory', 'This Time Around' and finishing '2 Bad'.‘Come Together’ was fairly last minute. We did very little work on it during theHIStorysessions. Any slight alterations were done by Eddie Delena and Michael.When did Dallas Austin join?Dallas didn’t join us until we were in Los Angeles, maybe the end of January or February. He came in with 'This Time Around'. He came in with a tape of 10 or 12 rough ideas. 'This Time Around' was pretty much complete musically. Bruce and Rene Moore liked the song, so they added a bridge to it and Michael liked it.Do you remember Teddy Riley working onHIStory?Teddy was in New York for a couple of months, but nothing was really happening with that so he didn’t stay around any longer.What can you remember about working on ‘Is It Scary’ duringHIStory?I first heard 'Is It Scary' towards the end ofHIStory, around the same time as 'Tabloid Junkie' and the song 'HIStory'. All three were Jimmy Jam songs. To my knowledge, ‘Is It Scary’ was in the running to be included onHIStory, but at a meeting with the entire crew two weeks before finishing the album it was not considered close enough to being finished. It seems that most of 'Is It Scary' was done by April 1995, with Steve Hodge mixing.What were the final weeks like?The last weekend of mixing was at Record One. On the last Thursday Michael came up to me and Eddie Delena and said, ‘Sorry, but none of us are going to get any sleep this weekend. We have to go to Bernie's [mastering engineer] on Monday morning’.For the whole weekend, we were camped out at Record One. Michael was singing, and there was a lot of mixing going on. The final night of recording was late on the Saturday night into Sunday morning, and this was when Michael sang the huge ad-libs at the end of ‘Earth Song’. It was the last vocal of the record as Michael knew it would kill his voice. Before that vocal, we all thought ‘Earth Song’ was finished. Michael turned around and said, ‘I have to do the ad-libs on Earth Song.’ So we turned around and said, ‘What do you mean? What ad-libs?!’ We were all so busy during those few days I think Michael just forgot about it.On that last Sunday and Monday, we were literally printing the last few mixes so Bruce could drive the tapes over to Bernie’s. The album was mastered that Monday.I read on a forum that you mentioned Michael throwing a pie in the face of a producer because he was treating people badly. Who was that?That was Brad Buxer. As a producer, Brad was under a lot of pressure so probably didn’t realise it. Michael didn’t like to be negative, so rather than shout at Brad, he called him to his lounge and threw a pie in his face!So afterHIStory, you worked on theGhostsfilm and theBlood on the Dance Flooralbum?At the end of August 1995, I got the call to go to New York and work on some remixes of Michael’s songs. I wasn’t told why, I was just told to go! It was myself, Bruce Swedien and Rene Moore. We pulled up the 'Ghosts' track and worked on that at the Hit Factory. The short-film was on the agenda.Within a couple of weeks we flipped to the HBO show Michael was going to do in December.Then, in early 1996, I was working with Steve Porcaro. I was back in L.A after being in New York for the HBO thing.At the end of March and beginning of April, I went from working with Steve straight to Record One, where the production of musical numbers for theGhostsshort-film began. We worked on the song 'Ghosts', on which we had already done some work in New York a few months earlier.Eddie and Brad chopped up a film version of '2 Bad' forGhosts.By the time the filming of theGhostsshort-film was completed, I was camped out over at Record Plant, where 'Ghosts' [song] was pulled up again. Michael was touring by now. This was the last time I worked on any Michael Jackson material.I left the project that fall, and Eddie Delena and Andrew Scheps carried on. They were doing some great work and I didn’t really need to be there. Mick Guzauski [engineer] came in as well. At this stage, no one knew about theBloodalbum.It was after filming ofGhostswas completed that the attention flipped to theBlood on the Dance Flooralbum. When it came out, it was a total surprise.They were planning to doHIStoryPart II, with a similar format to the first part. It would have included new songs and more old hits, because there were songs such as ‘Human Nature’, ‘Dirty Diana’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Dangerous’ that weren’t on part one, and then there were the big songs fromHIStory, like ‘You Are Not Alone’ and ‘Earth Song’, that they were going to add.Apart from 'Ghosts', did you work on any of the other songs that madeBlood on the Dance Floorin 1996, before you left?No. The only song we worked in 1996 that made that album was 'Ghosts'. My work on 'Morphine' and 'Is It Scary' was done during theHIStorysessions.Did you do any work on the song 'Blood on the Dance Floor' duringHIStory?We listened to the multitracks for 'Blood on the Dance Floor' in New York in 1994, but the song wasn’t worked on.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Look out for more full transcripts from the 65 interviews I conducted with Michael's collaborators forMaking Michael in the coming weeks.Yesterday, I published myfull interview with HIStory producer Jimmy Jam.A short-film on the making of 'Stranger in Moscow' is currently in editing. Coming soon.Read:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONERead:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART TWORETURN TO BLOG

Interview with HIStory and Ghosts engineer Rob Hoffman

In January 1994, Michael’s team of producers and engineers spent a week preparing the Record One studio in Sherman Oaks, so work on new material for the delayed greatest hits package could resume. That album eventually became HIStory, which was released 21 years ago this week. But when the Northridge Earthquake struck in Los Angeles on January 17, 1994, Michael was terrified, and chose to move production to the other side of the country, to New York City.His production team, including Matt

Interview with Michael Jackson's HIStory producer Jimmy Jam

By October 1994, Michael had been working on his new album,HIStory,for six months. As he continued to come up with new ideas, super producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were asked to contribute a track, as Michael wanted to record a first ever duet with his little sister, Janet.Jam and Lewis had been working with Janet since 1985, and by 1994 they had produced her last three solo albums – includingRhythm Nation 1814, which Michael loved.Jam and Lewis have moreBillboardnumber one singles than any other songwriting and production team in history, and have won five Grammy Awards.For my research onHIStory, I wanted to speak to Jam, who had more involvementon the album than Lewis. In February 2012, I visited the pair's studio in Santa Monica, but they were out of town.Finally, in May 2013, I spoke to Jam on the phone. It was a long interview which went on for over an hour. Jam spoke about each subject at length, and was a pleasure to interview.Here is the interview in full, with a few outtakes which wern't published inMaking Michael.You worked with Michael on theHIStoryalbum. How did that collaboration come about?Myself and Terry Lewis first met Michael in Minneapolis in 1988, when he played a show there for the Bad Tour. We actually recommended the hotel in which he was staying and he loved his suite. He invited us to the show, which was great, and then for dinner after at the hotel. It was just surreal to be in his presence.Then, in 1994, Janet called us and said, ‘My brother wants to do a duet’. So we asked her how she felt about it, because obviously we were very loyal to her and didn’t want to create a conflict of interest. But she was fine with it and said Michael wanted us to produce the song. Because Janet was fine with it, we were fine with it.Michael didn’t really give us any direction. He just said, ‘Come up with a bunch of tracks and I’ll listen to what you come up with’. So over a period of three or four days we began creating about five different tracks at our studio in Minneapolis. We had Janet come over because we wanted her here for inspiration; we felt it was important for the tracks to have a Janet vibe. So Janet listened to the tracks and for one of them, she said, ‘This is the one he will like’. So Terry and I were like, ‘How do you know?’ And Janet just said, ‘I know my brother’. And then after listening to another one of the tracks, she said, ‘I hope he doesn’t like this one, because I want it’!So we flew to New York and met Michael at the Hit Factory studio. Now the Hit Factory studio had great speakers, but Michael brought in his own speakers, which were even bigger, he had an entire wall of speakers. It was literally the loudest thing I have ever heard. Ever. So Michael greeted us… Janet was there and we began listening to the tracks, which we had narrowed down from about eight to six. They were all just music, no lyrics. I thought Michael would listen to each track for about a minute, but I was surprised because he listened to each song the whole way through. He really liked what he heard, he was like, ‘Wow I like them all, you guys really listened to me’.So he chose his favourite track, and we played it back, and sure thing, Michael’s favourite was the one Janet said he would like. Michael said, ‘This is the one I want, it’s angry, aggressive, that’s what I wanted’. Janet just started laughing and said, ‘Told you so’. She was just glad he didn’t like the track she wanted for herself, which actually ended up being ‘Runaway’ from her albumDesign of a Decade,and she recorded it about a year later. I actually thought that would be a great choice for them to sing together. But Michael had other ideas, and the track he chose was perfect for what he wanted to do.So what happened next?The next day, we went to Michael’s apartment. So Michael said, ‘I have an idea’, and began coming up with a melody and rhythm for the track, but no words. Then he started singing the melody, but we realised it was too low for Janet. It was more to his strengths than hers and we needed to make sure Janet fared well, but she just said, ‘It’s his album, his song and his feeling, and I’m just the guest’. She had no expectation beyond helping her brother.”Michael came up with most of the actual lyrics, he knew exactly what he wanted lyrically, something aggressive. Because he knew what he wanted, he wrote everything very quickly. He was very fast, very intense.Then we went into the studio. So we were sat there, Terry, Janet and myself, and Michael is wearing these hard shoes and some kind of jewellery, which you’re not really supposed to in case it interferes with the vocal. Everything is fine…Michael said his headphones are OK, and his voice is smooth after he drank his usual hot water with Ricola cough drops. So he says, ‘Let’s give it a go’. The music comes on, and for about ten seconds, Michael just starts dancing around, stomping…snapping his fingers…clapping, which is really unusual. And suddenly, he just started singing.We were blown away. I had never seen or heard anything like it in my entire life. We had to almost hold onto our chairs due to the sheer energy and force of his singing. And when it was over, Terry and I were speechless. So Michael’s like, ‘How was it?’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah…great’, and Michael then asks us if we want him to do another vocal, and we’re like, ‘Sure!’ And he nailed it in about four or five takes. Then Janet turns to us and says, ‘I think I’ll do my vocals in Minneapolis!’ I mean, how do you follow that?! When Janet was leaving, Michael said to her, ‘Are you not doing your vocals now?’ And Janet says, ‘No, I’m doing them in Minneapolis’.Michael and JanetSo we went back to Minneapolis, where Janet did her vocal, and she did great even though the song wasn’t her key or style, and we sent Michael a rough mix. Michael loved Janet’s vocals and the mix and then said, “I want to redo my vocals in Minneapolis”! He said, “Maybe there are different things I can do”. It really showed his competitiveness and his perfectionism.Of course we told Michael that he was welcome to come to Minneapolis. He came and rerecorded his vocal. It was good, but it didn’t have the same feel or anger that his New York vocal had. Or the initial energy, The final vocal pretty much ended up being the vocal he recorded originally.When the time came to mix, Bruce [Swedien, engineer] was ready but Michael wanted to use our guy, Steve Hodge. In the end the mix was a collaboration between Bruce and Steve because Steve knew Janet’s sound and Michael’s vocals were Bruce’s domain.There were a few hiccups with the mix. Coincidentally, I was at Neverland for the album wrap party. Janet called, and she said, ‘Jimmy, have you heard the mix of ‘Scream’ they put on the master tape?’ I said, ‘Yes, what’s wrong with it?’ After hearing the new mix they put on the masters, it was clear someone had gone in on Michael’s behest and turned down Janet’s vocals, because they were now lacking their original power. So I said to Michael, ‘This isn’t the right mix.’ And he said, ‘Oh really? I didn’t know.’ But I think he knew – there was just a real element of sibling rivalry. Michael was really competitive with Janet, even though she was his sister. He wanted perfection. So we went back in and corrected the problem, tweaked her vocals and put some handclaps in.Did Michael and Janet work differently?Yes, their approach to making music was completely different; Janet works very simply and very quickly, whereas Michael was a little more methodical. He’s a perfectionist and tends to cut a million songs, then pick the best of what he has.You have a production and writing credit on the song ‘Is It Scary’. Did you work on that song forHIStory?While Michael was in Minneapolis, he told us about the lyrics and melody for this song idea he had. I think he had already worked with Teddy Riley on a track with a similar theme. He asked us to write the music track for this song he had in mind, and we just created this sort of sinister track. We weren’t sure if Michael was going to include the song on the album or what he wanted to do with it.Although Michael had done his lyrics, the track wasn’t fully finished so we went in later and finished the track and mix.Were you involved when Michael tweaked the song to include on theBlood on the Dance Flooralbum?No, the only work we did with him on that song was duringHIStory.You also worked with Michael on three more songs forHIStory;'Tabloid Junkie', 'HIStory' and '2 Bad'. Did Michael tell you at the beginning that he wanted to work on more music with you after the Janet duet?No, we were originally brought in just for the Janet duet, but Michel really liked another of the tracks that we played for him in New York, He said it sounded similar to Janet’s song ‘The Knowledge’, which he loved. That was ‘Tabloid Junkie’. The song was really simple, Michael had a concept for it already and wrote the melody and the lyrics, and we brought in the completed track and did all the blurbs that feature on it.What about 'HIStory'?Michael needed a title tune, and wanted a really big, anthemic song. I think he gave it a couple of tries himself but then asked us to give it a go. So we went back to Minneapolis and made the music track, and then Michael did his thing on the melody.Mixing that song was a bit of a nightmare. We were all under extreme deadline pressure, so with about a week left we still had to mix ‘Tabloid Junkie’ and ‘HIStory’. We knew ‘Tabloid’ would only take about one or two days, but ‘HIStory’ would take four or five days to mix. But then Michael asks for the DAT of the mix, and after he heard it, he wanted some minor handclaps or finger snaps turned up. So we were like, “Sure Michael”, and did what he wanted doing. The next day, the same things happens, Michael asks for the DAT and still wants changes made to the handclaps. These weren’t major changes but it took about four days before Michael approved the mix, which didn’t sound any different to one made four days previously, and we really need to mix ‘HIStory’, which was going to take a long time.We wanted to pare it down to 96 tracks so mixing would be easier but Michael did not want to sub mix anything. It was a logistical nightmare and we were running out of time. We were saying to each other, ‘How do we sync these machines together?’ So somebody suggested we link the boards together. The problem of course became the time constraints, but we needed to get it done, so we stayed at the studio and barely slept.I wasn’t happy; you shouldn’t rush a production like this. And then Michael began altering the mix, turning up claps and snaps again. There were elements of that song that I just didn’t feel were right. We needed more time, but it is what it is, in the end we just gave up and let Michael have his way.Did you play a big role in the production of '2 Bad'?I played bass on and helped to produce ‘2 Bad’.Did you advise Michael on things like the album tracklist?I was just around, I felt I could be trusted. It was mostly me there and not Terry, I wasn’t an advisor as such, just a confidant. I could make musical decisions and Michael was always inquisitive as to how I did certain things.What was Michael like to work with on a professional level?Working with Michael was a great and unique experience. He was a guy who loved being in the studio, he would work all hours; he didn’t care. I’ve never seen anybody work any harder than he does, and that’s coming from somebody who has worked with Prince – now Prince is a hard-working guy.Michael worked with all these top producers in his career, which was both a gift and a curse. The gift was that Michael grew up with Motown, and learnt from the best of the very best, such as Berry Gordy, Freddie Perren, Gamble and Huff, and then after that Quincy Jones. So he would have absorbed their ways of production like a sponge and made mental notes. That meant production wise Michael learnt from the very best, but that quest for perfection was the curse, and as a result Michael was not good at making definite decisions. Michael would always say, ‘We need to really challenge ourselves, push ourselves as far as we can go’. He just did not want to commit – he could not let go of a song or an album. In his eyes it was never ready.He needed a producer around him who could put his foot down and make those calls, and when he stopped working with Quincy that stopped. Michael would work meticulously, whereas Prince would be more prolific and record whole songs in a single day, and you can’t argue with either approach. But Michael never had natural constraints – who is going to tell him that his budget is restricted or that he only has a certain amount of time when he keeps making record-breaking albums?What are your favourite anecdotes from working with Michael?We used to have long conversations about all sorts of stuff. Once Michael said to me, ‘Jimmy, how do you want to be remembered when you die?’ I said to him, ‘I want to be remembered as a nice guy’. So Michael goes, ‘No, I mean how do you want to be remembered?’ He meant how many number ones I made, what kind of producer I was, just statistics. And I said, ‘Michael, they’re just statistics. They aren’t who I am.’ He just didn’t get it…he was totally puzzled.A year later, I needed to get a sample cleared with Michael for using ‘Billie Jean’. Before I could ask him anything, he said, ‘Remember what you said about how you want to be remembered? Every time someone asks me about you, I just say, he’s the nicest guy.’ And I said, ‘Michael I’m glad you understood.’ And he just got it in that one moment. It’s a conversation that I’ll always remember. Although Michael had all those groundbreaking hits, albums, tours and videos, he was simply one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and worked with.One day when we were in the studio we were waiting in the lounge for Michael and my wife was there, as was Lisa Marie Presley, who we knew through Janet. And my wife asked Lisa Marie what she saw in Michael. Lisa just gave a genuine response. “He is the kindest, nicest person I have ever met”, she said. And it was accurate; he was just a great dude.You were on set for the filming of the ‘Scream’ video. What was that like?Michael and Janet were very competitive, and I was the only person accepted by both camps. It was funny, because I would be asked to go into Michael’s trailer, and then somebody would tell me that Janet wanted me in her trailer, and I would be going back and forth. When I went into Michael’s trailer, he had a new video game, he thought he could beat me but I kicked his ass! Then the next thing I know, I’m back in Janet’s trailer.I actually disagreed with Michael and Sony on what should be the first single from the album. They wanted ‘Scream’, but I felt it should have been ‘You Are Not Alone’.Firstly, Michael was very much in love with Lisa Marie and they were happy. I thought they should have let people see that they were in love and ‘You Are Not Alone’ was the perfect song for that and perfect for a big ‘Welcome Back’. The public were excited about Michael’s new music and I think what had happened with the accusations was beginning to drift away. I just felt that the nature of ‘Scream’ would bring everything that had happened back up, just as it was slowly being forgotten about. But Michael was angry about what had happened and wanted ‘Scream’. I’m not the record company, but I just felt it reopened the wounds a little.I also felt ‘You Are Not Alone’ was perfect for following Michael’s previous tendencies to open an album with a ballad, like ‘The Girl Is Mine’ onThrillerand ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ onBad.I have also publishedthe full transcript of my interview with Rob Hoffman, an engineer who worked closely with Michael during the entireHIStoryrecording process.A short-film on the making of 'Stranger in Moscow' is currently in editing. Coming soon.Read:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART ONERead:Michael Jackson's HIStory in the making, PART TWORETURN TO BLOG