MJ (23 page)

For the dancers on the set, hired through laborious auditions in LA, Michael himself seemed almost as mythical as his
Captain EO
character. Eric Henderson, one of the dancers, was frequently shocked to turn around and spot Sophia Loren, Barbra Streisand, or Steven Spielberg. He once saw Elizabeth Taylor striding around, shouting in a “Yoo-hoo!” tone of voice,
“Where’s Michael? It’s Elizabeth!” Eventually Henderson
realized Taylor couldn’t find Jackson because he was in his trailer with a friend who couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve. Henderson never learned the boy’s name, but he may have been
Jonathan Spence, whom
Jet
described at the time as “a family friend” who accompanied MJ to Brotman Memorial Hospital when he sprained his hand on the set. Kevin Bender, another dancer, recalls a
boy holding Michael’s cape and delivering him refreshments.

During the week of the
Captain EO
premiere, in September 1986, Michael Jackson appeared in a strange photo in the
National Enquirer
, sleeping in a
hyperbaric chamber. The story turned out to be a plant, by publicist Michael Levine and Frank DiLeo, with Michael’s knowledge. But he underestimated just how damaging the story would be to his long-term reputation—it became one of those undead details in his biography, along with his purchasing the Elephant Man’s bones and his secret marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. Michael had been living in seclusion since the Victory tour in 1984, and the press had an interest in perpetuating rumors of his odd behavior.
“He was tabloid gold. Everybody around the world was interested in him,” says Tony Brenna, a veteran British reporter who covered Jackson for the
Enquirer
and others. “For a really good Jackson story, you could make fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.” MJ had fun tinkering with his persona, P. T. Barnum style, but the media experiment would grow far beyond his control. By the time
Captain EO
came out, he was not the funky Han Solo commander depicted in the film but a celebrity who was weird.

*  *  *

For his follow-up to
Thriller
, Michael hired synthesizer expert Chris
Currell for Synclavier lessons. Michael wanted to continue working with Quincy and Bruce—everybody wanted that, after the success of
Thriller
—but he didn’t wish to be dependent on them. Currell understood. He arrived at Hayvenhurst to give his first lesson, using Michael’s own Synclavier.

“First,” Currell told the star,
“you take this floppy disk, and put it in here.”

“Time out!” Michael interrupted. “I don’t know what a ‘floppy disk’ is.”

Currell had worked up a three-hour lesson in advance, but, realizing Michael’s underwhelming technical capacity, abruptly ditched it. Over three hours, he taught Michael how to turn on the device and noodle around with his own ideas. He went to Hayvenhurst regularly from ten
A.M.
to seven
P.M.
, making a double-union-scale salary from CBS Records. Along with keyboardist John Barnes, engineer Matt Forger, and others, Currell became a part of Michael’s home B-Team, which by 1985 had recorded fully formed demos of “Smooth Criminal,” “Speed Demon,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Liberian Girl,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Leave Me Alone”—all of which Quincy and Bruce later transformed into an extravagantly produced pop album. “He walked down twelve or thirteen stairs from his bedroom to the studio,” recalls Bill Bottrell, a songwriter, guitarist, and engineer who’d worked with MJ on the “State of Shock” duet, “and started humming stuff to me and John.”

After the team worked up a song, Michael added his vocals, and the process of building an idea into a finished track could be laborious. Currell recorded the results of his daily Synclavier experiments on a cassette tape and slid it under Michael’s bedroom door before he left for the night. Michael often called back at two
A.M.
:
“Wow, this is really cool. Did you do this?” The two processes—song
demos and experimental sounds—began to come together.

“He was very prolific,” Forger says. “We recorded a lot of material. Some were just very simple ideas—sketches. Others were completely, fully produced.”

Michael had already given “Another Part of Me” to
Captain EO
, but he also had the swaggering love song “Streetwalker,” the tranquil ballad “Fly Away,” and a snappy piano number called “Cheater.”
“He’d do it all himself, like a Bobby McFerrin thing. He’d sing all the parts—
keyboards, drums, bass—he’d demo these songs with his voice,” Currell says. “He was really specific about clap. Because of groove. The right sound and feeling, so it would really push the tracks.” At one point, Michael asked Currell to try out every drum machine on the market. MJ listened to every hand-clap sound, sometimes layering them together, before ditching the electronics and recording claps with his own hands in the bathroom. “Michael would go to the ends of the earth if he had an idea,” Currell says. “Money was never an issue with him.” During one of Michael’s Synclavier sessions with Currell, he began to scat-sing a bass line and the two fiddled with it. Currell provided simple drums; Michael added keyboard bits. That became the heart of the song “Bad.”

Everybody agreed
“Bad” should be the title track. Michael and Quincy conceived it as a duet with Prince, a sort of head-cutting contest like the great blues guitarists used to have on the West Side of Chicago—which explains the provocative opening line “Your butt is mine.” Michael had been listening to a lot of Prince. During the
Thriller
sessions, several people had caught him at Westlake spinning Prince songs on a record player. Also, his sister Janet, after putting out two albums of trendy pop music, had shifted into a more exciting, pointedly Prince-like direction with 1986’s
Control
.
“We wanted a tough album,” Jones said. “We wanted to get a tough image—it’s important that you keep trying to change up.” Finally, Prince himself met with Michael and Quincy at Westlake. The meeting was contentious and awkwardly quiet.
“They’re so competitive with each other that neither would give anything up,” an observer told
Spin
. “They kind of sat there, checking each other out, but said very little. It was a fascinating stalemate between two very powerful dudes.” In the end, Prince withdrew: “You don’t need me to be on this,” he told Michael’s team. “It’ll be a hit record.” Maybe he agreed with what
Bad
engineer Russ Ragsdale concluded:
“It would have been disastrous for Prince to have Michael beat him in a duel.”

Michael and Prince had “dueled” exactly once—on August 20,
1983, at the Beverly Theatre in Hollywood.
James Brown was onstage and both pop superstars were in the audience. (B. B. King had played the first set.) Michael, his brothers, and their friends took up the third row. Between sets, the Jackson entourage left the theater and waited in their limousines outside. Brown summoned Michael first. MJ feigned surprise, but he was obviously prepared, his Jheri curl perfectly coiffed and his costume immaculate, including aviator shades and a powder-blue military jacket. He pulled off a few easy spins and a brief moonwalk before hugging Brown. Michael then whispered in Brown’s ear, and the Godfather of Soul peered into the audience and called for Prince. Soon came a commotion down the aisle—Prince, in black leather, was piggybacking on his beefy, bearded bodyguard, Charles “Big Chick” Huntsberry. Prince then proceeded to blow Michael away, borrowing an electric guitar, stripping to his bare torso and screeching into the microphone. But Michael was gone.

This bizarrely passive-aggressive, too-cool-to-acknowledge-each-other rivalry continued through Michael Jackson’s death. Nearly twenty years later, when Michael was living in Las Vegas, his friend will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas received a call to rap onstage with Prince during his residency at Club Rio, which the singer had renamed 3121. Will invited MJ to the late show, arranging for a private taxi through Prince’s people. Prince didn’t acknowledge Michael’s presence, but he pointedly stepped into the audience to play an especially aggressive slap-bass line in the private section where Michael and Will were sitting.

The next morning, Michael invited will.i.am to his Vegas home for breakfast. Will barely walked through the door and Michael said,
“Why was Prince playing the bass in my face?”
^III
Will stumbled out an answer: “I don’t think he meant it as disrespect, Mike.” But Jackson
seemed sad and obsessed. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Prince—he’s always been a
meanie
. They always say we’re competing, and I’m not competing with Prince. They always say
he’s
the songwriter and
I’m
the performer. I wrote ‘We Are the World’! I wrote all these songs!” Will tried to soothe him, but MJ kept calling Prince a meanie.

Michael had a point. He’d written great songs, from “Billie Jean” to “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” and with
Bad
, his songwriting was about to dominate an album for the first time. In early 1987, as Quincy’s A-Team began to take over the project from Michael’s home B-Team, Jones and Bruce Swedien realized they needed a bigger studio. Coming off
Thriller
, they had more money to play with. They worked with Westlake Audio’s Glenn Phoenix to design a state-of-the-art facility on Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the smaller
Thriller
studio on Beverly. Studio D cost
$500,000 to $600,000 to build, an astronomical amount in those days, and Phoenix was careful to include plenty of rooms (seven), including a kitchen. “We were certainly hoping to create a facility that would keep the number-one client happy,” Phoenix recalls. Studio D was bigger than many single-family homes, with a 625-square-foot control room and a 1,120-square-foot tracking room. The studio’s covered windows were important. They meant Jackson, at a time when photos of him were invaluable, could work without interruption.

“Michael’s Room” was upstairs, a lounge with a skylight and a TV where he’d take meetings with lawyers and entertain visitors, from Emmanuel Lewis to Robert DeNiro to Jones’s children, Rashida, the future actress, and Kidada. It contained a king-size bed, an unusual feature for a recording studio, but, as Phoenix recalls,
“It was also unusual to have a chimpanzee in the studio.” Adds Jolie Levine, MJ’s assistant at the time:
“He would be in that room a lot. He kept it very, very warm. I mean, really sweltering.” Jackson could watch the musicians and producers downstairs from a window and listen to the
control room through his headphones.
“He was able to hear and see what was going on and monitor things,” recalls Cornelius Mims, who programmed drums on several tracks. “Periodically, you might hear on an intercom: ‘Quincy!’ Quincy would say, ‘Okay, guys, give me a second. Gotta talk to Michael.’ He’d go upstairs. Then he’d come back: ‘Okay, guys, let’s get back to it.’ ” Michael spent anywhere from three to six hours a day in the studio, while others were there much longer.
“I grew up watching him on TV,” recalls Eric Persing, who played synthesizer. “The first time I saw him, it was really bizarre. His whole body was just shining, bright orange. Because he had been on some sort of carrot [diet] thing. And he already had a lot of the plastic surgery, so he was starting to get that unusual look that he had. Seeing that with shiny, orange skin, it was like meeting E.T. or something.”

For the first time, Michael and Quincy began to divide into recording factions. Nobody recalls overt arguments, but it was clear the A-Team and the B-Team had separate agendas.
“Michael was growing and wanted to experiment free of the restrictions of the Westlake scene,” Bottrell told Joseph Vogel. “We would program, twiddle and build the tracks for much of that album, send the results on two-inch down to Westlake and they would, at their discretion, re-record and add things like strings and brass. This is how MJ started to express his creative independence, like a teenager leaving the nest.” Meanwhile, Quincy was having personal problems—his wife, actress Peggy Lipton, had divorced him after fourteen years of marriage, a process Jones likened to “having my arteries ripped out.” When Michael began to meet with him about
Bad
, Quincy was distracted. Creative tension set in. Michael took his B-Team tapes to Quincy and Bruce and insisted they integrate Bottrell and Barnes into the A-Team at Westlake. That didn’t go over well.
“There started to become a real problem between the two factions,” recalls Currell, the Synclavier expert, who worked with both teams and tried to stay out of conflicts. “Michael started
to feel that in the studio something was happening to the tracks that he didn’t understand. They were losing their punch and their aggressiveness.” In early 1987, about three quarters of the way through the album, Currell says,
“It hit the fan.” Quincy and Bruce issued an ultimatum: if Bottrell and Barnes continued to work on the album, the heads of the
Thriller
superteam would quit. Michael huddled with the A-Team and a decision was reached. Bottrell and Barnes could not come to Westlake.
“Either he goes or I go,” Swedien told Michael. Bottrell understood. “I just got fired,” he said. As a dejected Bottrell packed up to leave the studio, Michael’s manager Frank DiLeo intercepted him. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Michael wants you to produce on the next album.”

To those on Quincy’s team, Michael’s demos were obviously unfinished.
“Michael had fantastic ideas, particularly starts of songs, and needed a lot of help,” says saxophonist Larry Williams, a Quincy loyalist. “Michael got a little more insular—a little bigger ego, obviously, after
Thriller
, and really set up to do
Bad
by himself.” But others who worked on the album felt the opposite. Eric Persing, who played keyboard at Westlake on several
Bad
tracks, believed Jones and Swedien were so determined to put their own stamp on Michael’s demos that they made the album sound busy and flat.
“They had every studio guitar player play every song, and the same thing with drums—the hi-hat from one guy, the snare from another guy, the kick drum from another guy,” he says. “That was ultra overkill. It was the ultimate eighties session. Everybody called it the gravy train.” Engineers made more than
eight hundred multitrack tapes for
Bad
, and Jackson recorded vocal after vocal, leaving Jones and Swedien to tinker with the sounds until, sometimes,
3:30
A.M.