MJ (37 page)

Although the
HIStory
tour had officially ended in 1997, Michael flew overseas in 1999 for two shows for children’s charities—one in Seoul, South Korea, and one in Munich. They were more or less the same shows he’d done on the tour, only with a few added effects, like a levitating, mechanical bridge during the finale to “Earth Song.” In Munich, while singing on the bridge, high above stage center, the pyrotechnics went off as scheduled and the curved structure steadily fell some thirty feet to the bottom of the “hole,” a section of the stage where the orchestra pit normally goes. It looked like part of the act—Michael kept singing as he landed—but it wasn’t. Wayne Nagin, Michael’s bodyguard, and assistant stage manager
Anthony Giordano noticed the problem right away and charged off the stage into the hole. “There were a lot of guys going,
‘Oh, no, we’ve killed the pop star!’ ” recalls Trip Khalaf, the sound engineer. Astoundingly, Michael finished the song, albeit slower and more slumped than usual. But the moment represented his decline as a performer. The spirit he’d shown at the beginning of the song seemed snuffed out. After the show, he collapsed in his dressing room, then went to the hospital. He was never formally diagnosed with anything, but Karen Faye, his makeup artist, would say:
“He suffered back pain from that moment on.”

*  *  *

Michael reserved expensive studios all over the world so he could pop in and record song ideas from Los Angeles and New York to Norfolk, Virginia, and Montreux, Switzerland. During this period, he worked
with his largest collection of producers, engineers, songwriters, and collaborators. As the album-making process dragged on, Michael brought in pop star R. Kelly, DeVante of hit R&B duo Jodeci, Babyface, and his old friends Bruce Swedien and Brad Buxer. Teddy Riley worked in a studio inside a bus, alternately stationed at the Hit Factory studios in New York and Miami.
“We would all have our different planets where we would work, and Michael would fly to the different planets and add his own flavor to them,” Dr. Freeze says. “He kept everybody on their feet. We had to be in our different worlds to give him a different perspective of the record. If we all sat in the same room every day, every song would be the same.”

“Look what Teddy did, Freeze,” Michael would say, teasingly.

“Oh, shit,” Freeze invariably responded.

“A lot of egos going around, and a lot of competition,” Freeze continues. “It’s kind of a psychological thing. I had to worry about Rodney Jerkins. Rodney Jerkins had to worry about Dr. Freeze. We had to worry about R. Kelly. . . . ‘Oh my God, I got to do it better.’ [We were] creating this, like, Frankenstein of an album, with one piece of an arm, a leg, another leg, until the body was formed and it could get up and walk away.”

After tinkering for months on several songs, Dr. Freeze finished his work. “Break of Dawn,” a smooth, easygoing soul song that recalled the work of nineties rappers PM Dawn, would be Freeze’s main contribution to the album.

Rodney Jerkins emerged as the main producer, and he immediately bonded with MJ over melody and workaholism. In his first meeting with Jerkins, Michael gave the producer unconventional instructions:
“I want you to go to your studio and I want you to take every instrument, and every sound that you use, and throw it away. And I want you to come up with some new sounds. Even if it means you’ve got to bang on tables and hit bottles together.” Jerkins dutifully found trash cans to slam at a junkyard, recording them via DAT for use on the album. “It
was a lot of ‘Do it again,’ ‘Let’s try something new, something different,’ ‘We’re not there yet,’ ‘Let’s mix it again,’ ‘I want to do another vocal,’ ” Jerkins recalls. “His style of perfection helped cultivate me as a producer and songwriter.”
Invincible
’s opening three-song funk punch—“Unbreakable,” “Heartbreaker,” and “Invincible”—showcases how Jerkins surrounded MJ’s layered harmonies with electro snaps, crackles, and pops. Over three years, Michael recorded a total of a hundred songs with Jerkins and his Pleasantville, New Jersey, production crew, including
“You Rock My World,” the first song Jerkins wrote for MJ; it began with a conventional rhythm, and Jerkins kept adding to it until it was finally ready for producer LaShawn Daniels to come up with the story and write the words. The producers installed beds in the studio so they could work uninterrupted for weeks.

Jerkins and his people internalized Michael’s money-is-no-object approach.
“It cost a fortune to record that project,” says Jerkins’s cousin, Robert “Big Bert” Smith, part of the family production crew known as Darkchild. He meant that as a compliment, but others saw it as a deadly inefficiency.
“Most of the record could have been done in two months, but went through the Michael Jackson Process,” says Brad Gilderman, one of the album’s recording engineers. “ ‘Let’s see what Dr. Freeze is up to.’ ‘Let’s go back to good old Teddy Riley and see what he comes up with.’ It was just going around the horn again to see what other producers, other writers [would] come up with for him.” Michael put up his studio staff at “way too expensive hotels,” as Gilderman recalls, when they weren’t living in the studios. The engineers remade Sony’s biggest rehearsal room into an MJ bedroom-and-living-room combo, including a large TV, couches, and beds, some of which were earmarked for tiny Prince and Paris. “If inspiration happens at two in the morning, at least we’ll all be here and be ready,” Michael would tell his people. But, Gilderman says, “[That] never really happened. It turned into a bunch of people sleeping there, not getting any work done. I wasn’t allowed to go back to my hotel room to change and shower. You’re paying a lot
of money for a hotel room I never see, and you go up to the Gap to buy me clothes.”

For Michael’s hopeful, midtempo song “On the Line,” Babyface commissioned a fifty-voice choir and a fifty-voice orchestra. Michael heard it and loved it, but the next day, he returned to the studio with a new instruction:
“Everything should be a key change—we should go up half a step.” This was before Pro Tools editing, and changing the tone of live orchestras and choirs involved reconvening singers and string players, an expensive process. Michael still wasn’t satisfied. He kept tinkering with the keys, adding new orchestral parts, until the changes cost more than $50,000. “Everything was one hundred percent over-the-top,” Gilderman says of the album. “Hundreds of takes.”

As Jackson, Jerkins, and their engineers alternated between studios, Sony’s Mottola kept showing up to check on the album’s progress—and his multimillion-dollar investment. “Where’s my record?” engineers heard him say. Finally, Mottola couldn’t take it anymore, and toward the end of the recording process, he abruptly cut off production: “We like it the way it is.” Michael responded, “
No
. I’m not finished. We have to keep recording.” They were at a tense impasse for a week. Jackson and Mottola worked out some kind of compromise, allowing the engineers to keep recording for about six more months.
“We were advancing Michael tens of millions of dollars to rent all this studio space, pay an army of producers and writers and directors to create his short films,” Mottola later complained. Jerkins found himself in the middle. He had a recording contract with Sony, but he was emotionally invested in his creative process with Michael.
“Tommy was calling Rodney for days, and Michael’s like, ‘Yo, nobody gets anything—no music or nothing,’ ” Robert “Big Bert” Smith recalls. “Rodney had a very unique pressure.” Smith empathized with Mottola, but Harvey Mason Jr., who coproduced portions of
Invincible
, came away admiring Michael’s artistic principles.
“He did not succumb to pressure as it pertained to creating art,” Mason says. “ ‘I don’t care how
much time it takes, I don’t care how much money it costs, I want a great record.’ ”

As the album began its final push into Bernie
Grundman’s ever-reliable mastering process, Michael continued to add songs at the last minute. John McClain, one of his managers at the time, had played Michael some unreleased songs from a new British poetry-and-soul duo called Floetry, particularly a puffy, hypnotic soul jam called
“Butterflies.” In March 2001, McClain summoned the group’s two young women, Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart, and brought them to the Sony studio. Michael was at a piano when they walked in, warming up with his vocal coach, Seth Riggs, and he flashed the peace sign before introducing them to his children as “Miss Marsha” and “Miss Natalie.” Ambrosius, who wrote the song, took over the session, instructing Michael on his vocals from the studio booth, while Stewart sat back and took everything in. “He had a natural harmony within his voice—like three voices harmonizing, a lower, middle, and upper range,” Stewart recalls. “He was very precise. He didn’t try to sing the whole song down, he focused on areas, the chorus and the verse, then the next verse, then the bridge.” Michael wanted to duet with Marsha, something he rarely did with another singer. She pushed Michael to a new place—in the dreamy song, his verses suggest a more reflective MJ, a falsetto middle ground between angry “Billie Jean” and teary “She’s Out of My Life.”

Invincible
, which came out October 20, 2001, was more relaxed than anything Michael had done, even on the three heavy Jerkins funk tracks that set the tone. He seemed to inhabit the songs rather than take them over, as he’d done in the past. In “2000 Watts,” Riley steps into his own thumping production, reciting a deep mantra of “bass note, treble, stereo control,” before Michael begins to swirl in and out of the empty spaces. Michael commandeered the most personal songs for himself: “Speechless” is a sparse, theatrical love-and-spirituality ballad; “The Lost Children” returns to the old “Heal the World” well,
but it’s more of a hymn akin to Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.” If any Michael album is the anti-
Thriller
, it’s
Invincible
—heavily produced, full of elaborate beat-box sounds and layered vocals, but somehow it captures Michael as if he’d sung the whole thing in a room with a piano.

Still, people who worked on the record wondered what might have been.
“By the time it came out, it was dated,” Robert “Big Bert” Smith recalls. “The music is timeless, but the industry changed. At that particular moment, that’s when we really first started feeling the effects of the Internet. Electronic music just started to hit the States. The album was probably five years in the making.” Mottola’s assessment, after Sony went $40 million into the red for the album, was more blunt:
“good, but by no means Michael’s best work.”

Jerkins outtakes (such as the ominously funky “Can’t Get Your Weight Off of Me” and “We’ve Had Enough,” a slowed-down, more topical “Billie Jean” dealing with violent crime), Brad Buxer collaborations (including “Hollywood Tonight,” an upbeat noir story that sounds like a sequel to “Smooth Criminal”), and many other gems went straight to the vault.
“There were some songs that we loved, loved, loved,” recalls engineer Harvey Mason Jr. “We recorded a lot more than were on there.” Mottola said Michael wound up with
twenty to thirty outtakes from every album: “Every time that he recorded, he over-recorded. Any of them could have been as big a hit as the ones that came out and were hits.”

Michael had big marketing plans for
Invincible
, but Mottola thwarted him. It became obvious to Sony executives that MJ was no longer the immortal King of Pop, and
Invincible
was a lower priority than any of his albums had been in the past. Michael didn’t do nearly as much as he’d done in the past to draw attention to the album—no big Diane Sawyer or Oprah interviews, and no international tour, although he hinted at the possibility a couple of times. And Michael clearly felt Sony didn’t do enough to promote it. He wanted to do a video for
“Butterflies.” Mottola didn’t, and the two clashed in a Sony conference room. “They just had disagreements,” recalls Henry Aubrey, Michael’s bodyguard at the time, who witnessed the conversation.
“Tommy said things he probably shouldn’t have said.” Aubrey would not elaborate, other than to call Mottola’s comments “very inappropriate.”

Sony execs invited Michael to the label’s Santa Monica office, buying
Invincible
billboards and bus-stop signs along his travel route to give him an exaggerated impression of the marketing campaign. (This was a common trick among major record labels and Hollywood studios.) Waiting for Michael were longtime Epic executive Polly Anthony and Cory Llewellyn, the label’s head of digital-music strategy, who set up web pages and Internet chats. Michael pulled up with a phalanx of vehicles and strode into the hallway with his people.
“All you heard were radios: ‘Garage is cleared! Second floor is cleared!’ ” Llewellyn recalls. “You expected light to burst in the room. It was like, ‘Wow, this is a serious entourage. He doesn’t move freely in a Prius.’ ” Michael finally arrived, wearing mirrored sunglasses, even during a slide show in the dark. Llewellyn had been given instructions on how to behave when talking to Michael—one of the first items on the list was to refer to a music video as a “short film.” Llewellyn nervously botched that instruction within minutes. Through his sunglasses, MJ regarded Llewellyn and said, “Oh no, they’re not videos. They’re films. Films are thirty minutes long and they have actors.” Via video conference from New York, Sony’s top executives, including Mottola, patiently waited for Michael to finish his explanation so the meeting could begin.

Llewellyn met Michael Jackson a second time not long afterward. He was organizing a chat room, through
Yahoo! and GetMusic, in which MJ answered questions from his fans. When one requested Michael’s favorite
Invincible
song, Michael asked if he could pick three. The host, music journalist Anthony DeCurtis, said he could do whatever he wanted. (The answer: “Unbreakable,” “Speechless,” and “The Lost Children.”) During the interview, Michael talked for an
hour about the spirituality of his songwriting process, how he pushed Rodney Jerkins aggressively to get the sound he wanted over repeat takes and long hours, how he likes to hear music loud, and how in his show-business career he’d
“been through hell and back.” A fan asked where the inspiration for “Speechless” came from. Michael gave an unexpected answer. “I spend a lot of time in the forest,” he said. “I like to go into the forest and I like to climb trees. My favorite thing is to climb trees. I go all the way up to the top of a tree, and I look down on the branches. Whenever I do that, it inspires me for music.”