Behind the Tracks - Stories of Producers

"Off The Wall" had raised the stakes. Ten million copies sold in the United States (twenty million worldwide) were the clear answer to anyone who thought Michael Jackson shouldn't leave Motown for Epic. It was the finest achievement yet of a solo career on a steady rise, with the record of four singles landing straight into the top spots of the Billboard Hot 100 and the resulting jubilation at his new label (controlled by Cbs), which now looked with far less interest at yet another Jackson Five tour with his little brothers.

But there was someone else who could rightly feel just as proud, and just as responsible, for having steered black music into the dimension of international pop: producer Quincy Jones.

A dazzling start to his career as trumpeter, arranger and orchestra conductor had led him, between the late 50s and early 60s, to work with almost the entire pantheon of African-American music (Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis) as well as a fair share of its white counterpart (Gene Krupa, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett). It was then Hollywood's call that turned him into one of the most sought-after film composers, landing his name in the credits of movies like "In Cold Blood", "In the Heat of the Night", "The Getaway", and TV series such as "Roots" and "Sanford and Son".

By the late 70s, Quincy Jones was a heavyweight name, and Jackson had done everything he could to bring him on board. There was no reason why the collaboration shouldn't continue for the eagerly awaited follow-up to "Off The Wall".

Quincy ("Q" to his friends) knew all too well that this time the game had to be played on different turf; the relentless decline of disco music had forced the pop industry business to stake out new ground elsewhere. Vast swaths of the audience were hungry for something new, and Q had no intention of skimping on quality.

He therefore decided to reassemble the same trusted team of collaborators, made up (besides the usual host of top-tier musicians) of the eclectic English songwriter/arranger Rod Temperton (former member and songwriter of the funk-disco band Heatwave, and co-writer on Karen Carpenter's first solo album), and Scandinavian-born sound engineer Bruce Swedien, with four months at their disposal to complete the record.

Around the same time, his Hollywood connections had brought him into contact with Steven Spielberg, and the two had struck up a good rapport. One day Spielberg, fresh off worldwide acclaim for his "E.T.", asked whether Michael would be interested in contributing a sung piece to the film's storybook album.

Jones and Jackson, reckoning that the commitment wouldn't interfere with the sessions for the new album, gladly agreed, but when the director, thrilled with the result, candidly asked them "Guys, why don't we do the whole storybook together?", it was clear they couldn't say no to him, and that the schedule they'd settled on until then was about to fall apart.

It took six weeks to complete the storybook project (which essentially had to boldly condense two hours of film into forty minutes of audio), and this ultimately shrank the window left to finish Jackson's album to little more than two months, causing no small amount of anxiety at Epic.

From that point on, everything moved at lightning speed.

Q and Temperton listened to nearly 600 potential songs in total before narrowing it down to a dozen possible picks. Rod then handed Quincy around thirty of his own songs in complete demo form, each accompanied by ten to twenty title variations along with a rough outline of the lyrics. This was Temperton's typically obsessive way of working, one of the reasons he was such an indispensable part of Jones's creative machine.

The choice of material that would end up on the album was shaped by the particular direction Q and Michael wanted to give the whole thing: an elegant blend of synthetic black pop, rubbery funk and soul ballads. It had to wink at dance music (the emerging technological heir to disco) while going easy on the saccharine side.

Jones also argued that they needed to keep the white audience in mind, and repeatedly pushed Michael to write something with a rock edge, something that could be remembered as his own "My Sharona".

In the end it was decided that only nine songs could make the final cut: three written by Temperton ("Baby Be Mine", "The Lady In My Life" and the one initially titled "Starlight" that would eventually become the title track), four by Jackson ("Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", "The Girl Is Mine", "Billie Jean", "Beat It"), one written by Steve Porcaro of Toto together with John Bettis ("Human Nature"), and one by Quincy together with James Ingram ("P.Y.T").

The first recording session for what would become the best-selling album in music history began at noon on April 14, 1982, in Studio A at Westlake Audio on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood, and it was the vocal duet with Paul McCartney on "The Girl Is Mine" (destined to be the first single) that christened the tape. The song's instrumental parts were performed entirely by Toto (as were those on "Human Nature"), by then session players of the highest caliber for years, who at that very moment were basking in the success of "Toto IV".

"Starlight" was recorded in full a first time but didn't meet Jones's expectations, who felt the lyrics were weak. He himself suggested a variation on the theme in a horror direction, finding fertile ground in Michael, who was growing fascinated with the genre and had just watched "An American Werewolf in London".

The title became "Thriller", and it was Quincy's wife, Peggy Lipton (an actress on the hit series "Mod Squad" and a former girlfriend of both Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney), who suggested bringing in Vincent Price, for whom Temperton dreamed up a kind of "horror story" to be delivered as three spoken verses during a spoken-word interlude.

The day Price arrived at the studio, he first had to get over the shock of wearing headphones to sync up with the music (as an actor, he'd never done that before), but it only took him a couple of takes to deliver, in his unmistakable style, the vaguely Edgar Allan Poe-esque sonnet that Temperton had written in a taxi the night before on his way to Westlake (in the end only two of the three verses were used in the final version).

Swedien brought his full, well-earned reputation to bear: the track's intro alone, built from "scary" creaks, thunder, footsteps and howls (the latter two performed by Jackson himself), took up all 24 tracks of a reel (Bruce was a perfectionist of stereophonic recording, so much so that he'd developed a method for syncing multiple tape recorders at once, which he dubbed The Acusonic Recording Process, giving himself as much room as possible - essential when every instrument takes up two tracks).

Such meticulousness had produced a layered, mesmerizing song that deserved to be more than just another track on the record. Q began to warm to the idea that it could give its name to the whole album.

Jones had a nickname for everyone: Temperton was "Worms", after the German town where he'd lived, Swedien was "Svensk" (basically the Swedish translation of his surname), and Michael was "Smelly", because whenever he felt something was grooving just right he'd say "That's some smelly jelly!"

Smelly and Q had no shortage of differing opinions on this front. A classic example is the intro to "Billie Jean", which Jackson insisted needed a long stretch of drums and bass before the vocals came in (because that's exactly what made him want to dance), while Q thought it was excessive (and Svensk was by this point growing generally worried about just how long nearly every track had become).

The last track to be recorded was "Beat It", the Jackson-style answer to "My Sharona", which Jones had been pushing hard for. To give the sound the right amount of aggression, Q once again called in the Toto trademark sound, in this case Steve Lukather (who played the driving guitar and bass riff), but for the solo he felt he needed someone capable of giving white audiences that famous chill down the spine.

And he got a chill of his own first, when he called up Van Halen, only to be met with a barrage of insults in return. Eddie was convinced it was a prank call and at that moment couldn't even recall knowing anyone named Quincy. Once he realized who he was actually talking to, he figured his bandmates weren't in town and thought to himself, "Why not? Who's ever going to find out?" (the band's internal policy strictly forbade guesting on other people's projects).

The guitarist showed up at the studio to find a couple of big Gibson amps waiting for him. He asked what he was supposed to do, and Quincy replied, "Do whatever you want."

Eddie, laughing: "Be careful saying something like that — if you know anything about me, you should be a lot more cautious about giving me free rein!"

The solo was improvised and nailed in a couple of takes, after Van Halen himself asked for — and got — permission to change the arrangement of the section he was playing on. All told, it took less than half an hour of work, for a fee that legend has it was estimated at two six-packs of beer (which, in all likelihood, Eddie brought from home himself anyway). Then again, no real financial arrangement had ever been discussed, since Van Halen saw the whole thing as simply doing Q a favor.

These were the final stages of production. Swedien barely had time to mix the definitive version of "Beat It" on his Harrison 4032 console and hand over the album master to Bernie Grundman for pressing within the deadline set by Epic. Getting everything finished in time had meant running as many as three Westlake studios simultaneously, at a punishing pace.

Meanwhile, expectations had grown to enormous proportions.

The moment came to listen to the first vinyl test pressing, with everyone present, Epic's top brass included.

And it was a disaster.

The vinyl captured very little of the album's dynamic brilliance (crucial for sounding powerful on the radio), because, caught up in the general enthusiasm over the groove, the whole team — apart from Svensk — hadn't noticed that too much material had been crammed on.

Twenty-eight minutes of music per side was an enormous amount for a format whose groove depth (and consequently its dynamic range) gets sacrificed the more you pack onto it.

A chill fell over the room, and one by one everyone slipped away as if someone had died.

What followed, in order, were silence, despair, and intense huddled discussions trying to salvage the situation.

In the end, after telling Epic that the record couldn't be released in that state, Quincy decided to take two days to clear his head, followed by a full revision of the material (one song a day), for a total of eight more days of work ("The Girl Is Mine" was already sitting at number two on the charts and couldn't be touched).

Rod cut a verse from "The Lady In My Life," and Q won out over Smelly regarding the extremely long intro to "Billie Jean." Every song was re-edited and re-mixed until they finally hit the fateful twenty-one minutes per side of the edition that eventually landed on store shelves.

The rest became history, and then some.

The public found themselves holding something new for the era, something to chew on like gum and cherish like a relic, an object made of groove and glitter, but also of chills and kicks to the shins. A record whose singles dominated MTV's rotation for months, reaching absolutely everyone - men and women, adults and children, Black and white (dichotomies Michael essentially seemed to embody for the rest of his life). It was Jackson's first true full-fledged portrait, and Quincy Jones was the one who framed it.

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