Today we'll be revisiting Michael Jackson's adult
years, both as a solo artist, as well as part of the Jacksons, otherwise known
as his Epic period, both in connection to the name of his label, but also in
connection to the scale and influence his music had on the world.
Epic initially placed the Jacksons with
Philadelphia producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and the first album they
released, on November
5, 1976, was simply titled The Jacksons. It was certified gold in the US, as well as reaching #4 in
Canada.
The first single to be released was called
Enjoy Yourself. Since Jermaine, who had married the boss' daughter, stayed with Motown, he was replaced by
younger brother Randy. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, together with the Jacksons, created
this hard-driving, disco-leaning Top 10 single, but the sessions left another
lasting impression on Michael. "Just watching Huff play the piano while
Gamble sang taught me more about the anatomy of a song than anything
else," he wrote. "I'd sit there like a hawk, observing every
decision, listening to every note."
The song was a #6 hit in the US (#2
R&B):
Their follow-up single, Show You the Way
to Go, was surprisingly the only #1 hit the Jackson had in the UK as a group.
It was also a #5 hit in Ireland and #28 in the US (#6 R&B):
Dreamer was a #22 UK hit:
There were only two songs actually written
by the Jacksons on this album: Style of Life was written by Tito and Michael,
while Blues Away was written by Michael alone. Let's listen to the latter:
Their next album, Goin' Places, also under the supervision
of Gamble and Huff, was released on October 8, 1977. This is considered their lowest-selling
album next to 2300 Jackson Street (their last studio album). The first
single, Goin' Places, only managed to reach #82 in the US Hot 100. It did reach
#8 in the R&B chart though, as well as #13 in Ireland and #26 in the UK.
Even Though You're Gone was only a minor
hit in the UK, peaking at #31:
Different Kind of Lady was written by the
group. It became a disco-hit and gave the brothers the confidence to write
and produce an entire album, their next, by themselves. The video of this song
has been withdrawn from the Internet, so we'll get to hear another single off
this album, Find Me a Girl, which peaked at #36 on the US R&B chart.
After the Jacksons' 1977 Goin'
Places tanked commercially, it took Michael Jackson to help rescue the
band – but not the one you think. Blame It on the Boogie, was co-written and performed by Michael
"Mick" Jackson, a bearded Yorkshire singer-songwriter, who released
his own version almost simultaneously. As the tracks battled for position in
the UK charts, the press hailed it ‘The Battle Of The Boogie’. Of course he
didn't stand a chance against the Jackson disco inferno, but harbors no hard
feelings. "The fact that the song made it, made it a lot easier for
me," said Mick Jackson. "And of course the Jacksons went on to huge
success."
Here's Mick Jackson's version:
Blame It on the Boogie (the Jacksons'
version) (#54 US Hot 100, #3 US R&B, #8 UK, #4 Australia, and #15 Ireland)
was the lead single from Destiny, their first self-produced album that
returned them to big success, selling two million copies in America
during its initial run and another two million worldwide.
The follow-up single was an even bigger
hit: Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground), a tremor-inducing jam, represents
the moment Michael Jackson was transfigured from the lead singer of a very
successful boy band into the King of Pop – or, at the very least, its young
prince. Taking the proto-disco single-mindedness of the J5's Dancing Machine,
it added a kinetic dose of Sly and the Family Stone-crossover soul and Stevie
Wonder-style synth funk, alongside percussive vocals and Michael's
still-teenage yet unmistakably post-pubescent exhortations and squeals. The
song peaked at #7 on the US Hot 100 (also #3 US R&B, #4 UK, and #9 Ireland),
but that belies its profound pop prescience. It would be memorably sampled on
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's Get on the Dance Floor, among other hip-hop songs.
And it was covered in 2013 by Justin Timberlake – a man who owes Michael quite
a lot indeed. The song was written by Michael and Randy. Here's the version by
the Jacksons:
... and here's Justin Timberlake covering
the song:
Also in 1978, Michael would play the Scarecrow
against Diana Ross' Dorothy on the film version of The Wiz (a reworking of The Wizard of Oz). Here they
are with the song Ease On Down The Road:
Destiny,
though, was merely a prelude: By the time the album was finished, Michael was
ready to make crucial changes that would establish his ascendancy as a solo
artist. He fired his father as his manager and in effect found himself a new
father, producer Quincy Jones, whom Michael connected with while filming The
Wiz. Jones was a respected jazz musician, bandleader, composer and
arranger who had worked with Clifford Brown, Frank Sinatra, Lesley Gore, Count
Basie, Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, and Manos Hadjidakis, among others, and he
had written the film scores for The Pawnbroker, In Cold
Blood and In the Heat of the Night. Jackson liked the
arranger's ear for mixing complex hard beats with soft overlayers. "It was
the first time that I fully wrote and produced my songs," Jackson said
later, "and I was looking for somebody who would give me that freedom,
plus somebody who's unlimited musically." Specifically, Jackson said his
solo album had to sound different than the Jacksons; he wanted a cleaner and
funkier sound.
On August 10, 1979, Off the Wall, produced by Quincy
Jones, was released. It was preceded by a couple of weeks by the album's lead
single, one of the two best MJ songs of all-time: Don't Stop 'Til You Get
Enough.
Jackson called the opening track on Off
the Wall "my first big chance," and he wasn't kidding. Six
minutes of joyous pop funk that whooshed like a jet stream, Don't Stop 'Til You
Get Enough was both an unstoppable hit and a milestone in Jackson's creative
life. "That song means a lot to me," he wrote in his memoir Moonwalk,
"because it was the first song I wrote as a whole." Indeed, it
embodied Jackson's new, hands-on approach to his music. He not only wrote it
but also sang all the multilayered backing vocals and devised the spoken intro
("to build up tension and surprise people," he said). He even played
the glass bottles (along with his brother Randy) that lend the song added
rhythmic sparkle. When his mother, Katherine, questioned the sexual undertones
of lines like "Ain't nothing like a love desire. . . . I'm melting like hot candle
wax," Jackson responded, "Well, if you think it means something
dirty, then that's what it'll mean. But that's not how I intended it."
The song was an international hit: it
peaked at the very top on the US Hot 100, the US R&B chart, Australia,
Denmark, Norway, South Africa and New Zealand, #2 on the US Disco chart, in
Belgium and the Netherlands, #3 in the UK and Canada, and #4 in Switzerland.
Follow-up single, Rock With You, a smooth
ballad with a dancing beat, was also a #1 hit in the US, and a big Top 10 hit
in most major markets. "So much uptempo dance music is threatening, but I
liked the coaxing, the gentleness, taking a shy girl and letting her shed her
fears rather than forcing them out of her," Jackson recalled, describing
Rock With You. Arguably the last hit of the classic disco era, this
chart-topper remains one of the great seduction jams in modern R&B, a
template for countless wanna-be mirror-ball lotharios, wrapped in vibrant
string arrangements and poised halfway between a silk-sheet ballad and a dance-floor
burner. "Songs like Rock With You made me want to become a performer,"
Usher said in 2009. It was the first song written for Jackson by key
collaborator Rod Temperton, of boogie merchants Heatwave, after a request from
Quincy Jones. (Temperton went on to pen Thriller, Off the Wall, Burn This Disco
Out, Baby Be Mine and others.) The video, with Jackson working his magic in a
silver outfit with little more than lasers and smoke as visuals, shows a solo
artist looking barely more than a kid but in complete control of his game.
His next single off the album was the
title track, yet another Top 10 in the US and the UK. "In the studio,
Michael was silly and fun-loving," recalled Rod Temperton, who began
working with Jackson during the late Seventies. "He never swore. He didn't
even say the word 'funky,' he said 'smelly.' So that was Quincy's nickname for him:
Smelly." His loose, playful side is on display during the title track,
written by Temperton. Off the Wall was an ode to "party people night and
day." It invited listeners to "hide your inhibitions/Gotta let that
fool loose deep inside your soul" by hitting the dance clubs and
"livin' crazy, that's the only way." But its succulent groove,
swathed in Jackson's sumptuous overdubbed harmonies, was as smoothly seductive
as the vision of dance music in his head. Temperton, who arranged the rhythm
and vocal tracks, re-created the dance-floor vibe of his disco band Heatwave,
and the song's growling funk synths were partly played by jazz and fusion
keyboardist George Duke. The song was also strangely prophetic: In the decades
after its release, the world saw how truly off the wall Jackson's life could
become.
The pairing of Michael and Quincy proved
as fortuitous as any collaboration in history. Jones brought an ethereal
buoyancy to Jackson's soft erotic fever on songs like Rock With You and Don't
Stop 'Til You Get Enough, and in a stunning moment like She's Out of My Life,
Jones had the good sense to let nothing obscure the magnificent heartbreak in
the singer's voice. The resulting album, Off the Wall – which
established Jackson as a mature artistic force in his own right – has the most
unified feel of any of his works. It was also a massive hit, selling more than 8
million copies in the US, and more than 20 million worldwide.
She's Out of My Life peaked at #10 in the
Hot 100, marking the first time any solo artist had ever achieved four Top 10
hits from one album. She's Out of My Life was an emotional ballad. The song has
a tempo of 66 beats per minute, making it one of Jackson's slowest songs. Jackson's
vocals on the record were considered by critics to be some of his best. It also
peaked at #3 in the UK, #4 in Ireland and #6 in New Zealand.
"Maybe that was too personal for a
party – it was for me," Jackson said of She's Out of My Life, the moment
of ballad heartbreak amid Off the Wall's disco celebration. The
song was written by Los Angeles musician Thomas Bähler, about the end of a
two-year relationship (Bähler had been with Karen Carpenter but has said the
song isn't about her). Quincy Jones had planned to record the song with Frank
Sinatra, but Jackson got a shot instead and dug deep for a stunning version.
She's Out of My Life was Off the Wall's fourth Top 10 single, and
Greg Phillinganes' electric piano set the tone for seemingly every hit ballad
of the next decade and a half. Famously, Jackson's mighty voice cracks and
wavers on the song's last few words. "Every time we did it, I'd look up at
the end and Michael would be crying," Jones said in 1983. "I said,
'We'll come back in two weeks and do it again. . . .' Came back and he started
to get teary. So we left it in." It was a staple of Jackson's set lists
from 1981 to 1993, always followed by a peppy medley to bring the mood back up.
Girlfriend was a composition of one of
Michael's greatest idols, Paul McCartney, who offered the song to Jackson to
sing. This would be the beginning of their fruitful collaboration.
Here are some great album tracks from this
outstanding album. First, here's Get on the Floor: Quincy Jones says it was a
leftover from a session by the funk group Brothers Johnson. One of the
Brothers, bassist Louis "Thunder Thumbs" Johnson, says it came from a
home-recorded cassette of bass ideas that he played to Michael. Either way, the
slap-happy collaboration is the hardest funking thing on Off the Wall.
Even though Louis Johnson would play on three other Jackson albums, it was a
high point he couldn't repeat. "What I'll always cherish is the fun and
excitement of playing live together on the Off the Wall sessions,"
he said. "Michael and everybody laughing, knowing we were making
magic."
The closing track on Off the Wall, Burn
This Disco Out bursts with giddy dance-floor flair. The wriggly guitar line
could've squirmed in from a Stevie Wonder record. Jackson, who'd worked
through a Saturday night memorizing the lyrics so he wouldn't have to read from
a cheat sheet on a Sunday recording session, bounces his voice around a melody
designed for his percussive vocal style. "He was very rhythmically
driven," said Rod Temperton. "So I tried to write melodies that had a
lot of short notes to give him some staccato things he could do . . . and came up with Burn This
Disco Out."
One of those monster Off the Wall grooves
that easily could have been a huge hit – except it never became a single, maybe
because the charts were already packed with hits from Off the Wall,
Workin' Day and Night sits halfway through the unstoppable Side One of the
original vinyl LP (the disco side), one of two tracks Jackson wrote solo. (The
other was Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.) The lyrics give an early hint of
MJ's combative side, with the standard bluesman's plaint about how hard his
woman makes him work. Yet the hyperactive Latin percussion, spiky horns and
gulping-for-oxygen vocals all reflect the fanatical work ethic MJ brought to
his solo breakthrough. "When he commits to an idea, he goes all the way
with it," Jones said. "It's ass power, man. You have to be
emotionally ready to put as much energy into it as it takes to make it
right." As a deep cut, Workin' Day and Night is prized among MJ
cognoscenti – thanks to all that ass power.
We've practically presented the whole
album, and we'll do the same with the next one. The reason is obvious: all the
tracks are worth presenting.
Michael Jackson had in effect become one
of the biggest black artists America had ever produced, and he expected Off
the Wall to win top honors during the 1980 Grammy Awards ceremony.
Instead, it received only one honor, for Best Male R&B vocal. The Doobie
Brothers' What a Fool Believes won for Record of the Year, and Billy Joel's 52nd
Street won Album of the Year. Jackson was stunned and bitter. "My
family thought I was going crazy because I was weeping so much about it,"
he recalled. "I felt ignored and it hurt. I said to myself, 'Wait until
next time' – they won't be able to ignore the next album… That experience lit a
fire in my soul."
In the meantime, Michael worked with his brothers
for their upcoming album, Triumph. It
was released on September 26, 1980 and sold over 1 million copies in the
United States and over two million copies worldwide. The album was produced by
the Jacksons and all of the songs were written by them. Lead single, Lovely One,
peaked at #12 in the US.
The future King of Pop took on the legacy
of the King of Rock & Roll on the Jacksons' 1980 take on Heartbreak Hotel
(US, #22). Written by Michael, it has little in common with Elvis Presley's
1956 classic; it's a lithe disco-pop tune that takes the original's theme in a
darker direction with lyrics about a hotel where relationships break up.
Heartbreak Hotel became a Number Two R&B hit; then somebody at the
Jacksons' label, perhaps sensing legal complications, changed the title to the
nonsensical This Place Hotel.
My favorite song from this album was their
third single, called Can You Feel It. It didn't do very well in the Hot 100
(#77), but it peaked at #1 on the US Dance chart, as well as in Belgium and
South Africa. It also peaked at #6 in the UK and at #12 in Ireland.
"I got a call at three in the
morning, it's Michael Jackson," says vocal coordinator Stephanie Spruill,
who had assembled the 30-voice choir for the Jacksons' Can You Feel It.
"He says, 'I know I asked you to get the choir of voices . . . but now I need a choir of
children. And I want them to be every race, creed and color.' Mind you, the
session was in two days." Spruill – who also sings the song's high notes –
pulled it off. The choir was triple-tracked, creating a triumphal disco
entreaty that, according to Tito, defines the Jacksons. "It speaks about
what we're about," he told Larry King. "Love and peace and harmony
for the world."
The song's video was voted one of the 100
best videos of all time in a poll to mark the 20th anniversary of MTV:
Walk Right Now similarly wasn't a big
mainstream hit in the US, but it made #7 in the UK:
Now it's time to speak of that album: You may recall (unless you
suffer from short memory loss, in which case, I'm sorry) how unhappy Michael
was over the perceived Grammy shun of Off
the Wall. Jackson told Quincy Jones – and apparently others as well – that
his next album wouldn't simply be bigger than Off the Wall, it
would be the biggest album ever. When Thriller was released in
November 1982, it didn't seem to have any overarching theme or even a cohesive
style. Instead, it sounded like an assembly of singles – like a greatest-hits
album, before the fact. But it became evident fast that this was exactly what
Jackson intended Thriller to be: a brilliant collection of
songs intended as hits, each one designed with mass crossover audiences in
mind. Jackson put out Billie Jean for the dance crowd, Beat It for the white
rockers, and then followed each crossover with crafty videos designed to
enhance both his allure and his inaccessibility.
Yet after hearing these songs find their
natural life on radio, it was obvious that they were something more than
exceptional highlights. They were a well-conceived body of passion, rhythm and
structure that defined the sensibility – if not the inner life – of the artist
behind them. These were instantly compelling songs about emotional and sexual
claustrophobia, about hard-earned adulthood and about a newfound brand of
resolution that worked as an arbiter between the artist's fears and the
inescapable fact of his fame. Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'? had the sense of a
vitalizing nightmare in its best lines ("You're stuck in the middle/And
the pain is thunder/Still they hate you, you're a vegetable/They eat off you,
you're a vegetable"). Billie Jean, in the meantime, exposed the ways in
which the interaction between the artist's fame and the outside world might
invoke soul-killing dishonor ("People always told me, be careful of what
you do/'Cause the lie becomes the truth," Jackson sings, possibly thinking
of a paternity charge from a while back). And Beat It was pure anger – a
rousing depiction of violence as a male stance, as a social inheritance that
might be overcome. In sum, Thriller's parts added up to the most
improbable kind of art – a work of personal revelation that was also a
mass-market masterpiece. It's an achievement that will likely never be topped.
Except, in a sense, Jackson did top it,
and he did it within months after Thriller's release. It came
during a May 16th, 1983, TV special celebrating Motown's 25th anniversary.
Jackson had just performed a medley of greatest hits with his brothers. It was
exciting stuff, but for Michael it wasn't enough. As his brothers said their
goodbyes and left the stage, Michael remained. He seemed shy for a moment,
trying to find words to say. "Yeah," he almost whispered, "those
were good old days…I like those songs a lot. But especially," and then he
placed the microphone into the stand with a commanding look and said, "I
like the new songs." He swooped down, picked up a fedora, put it on his
head with confidence, and vaulted into Billie Jean.
This was one of Michael Jackson's first
public acts as a star outside and beyond the Jacksons, and it was startlingly
clear that he was not only one of the most thrilling live performers in pop
music, but that he was perhaps more capable of inspiring an audience's
imagination than any single pop artist since Elvis Presley. There are times when
you know you are hearing or seeing something extraordinary, something that
captures the hopes and dreams popular music might aspire to, and that might
unite and inflame a new audience. That time came that night, on TV screens
across the nation – the sight of a young man staking out his territory, and
just starting to lay claim to his rightful pop legend. "Almost 50 million
people saw that show," Jackson wrote in Moonwalk. "After
that, many things changed."
He was right. That was the last truly
blessed moment in Michael Jackson's life. After that, everything became
argument and recrimination. And in time, decay. But more of that later. Now
it's time to celebrate Thriller.
Let's begin by listing the album's achievements:
it spent 37 weeks at #1 in the US, second only to the soundtrack of West Side
Story. In just over a year, Thriller became - and currently remains - the
world's best-selling album, with estimated sales of 66 million copies. It is
the best-selling album in the United States and the first album to be certified
33× multi-platinum, having shipped 33 million album-equivalent units. The album
won a record-breaking number of eight Grammy Awards in 1984, including Album of
the Year. Seven singles (out of nine tracks) were released from the album, all
of which reached the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, establishing a
record. Thriller also enabled Jackson to break down racial barriers in pop
music, via his appearances on MTV and meeting with the US President Ronald Reagan
at the White House. The album was one of the first to use music videos as
successful promotional tools, and the videos for the songs Thriller, Billie
Jean and Beat It all received regular rotation on MTV.
The album's first single, The Girl
Is Mine, was also its weakest, and led some to believe that the album would be
a disappointment and to suggestions that Jackson was bowing to a white audience.
Jackson called this Paul McCartney duet the "obvious first single"
from Thriller. But Quincy Jones has referred to it as a "red
herring," since it only hinted at Thriller's power. Jackson
offered McCartney the song, which has an easy, jazzy groove and shows off a
breezy rapport between Jackson and the ex-Beatle, as a duet to "repay the favor"
of McCartney giving him Girlfriend for Off the Wall. McCartney's
one concern was the word "doggone," which he felt some listeners
might consider "shallow." "When I checked with Michael, he
explained that he wasn't going for depth, he was going for rhythm, he was going
for feel," McCartney said.
It was the next single that sealed the
deal: Billie Jean was Michael's greatest song, which sums up all the
contradictions in his music: youthful exuberance, tortured nerves, pure
physical grace. As he told Rolling Stone at the time, Billie
Jean reflected his own sexual paranoia as a 24-year-old megastar: "Girls
in the lobby, coming up the stairway. You hear guards getting them out of
elevators. But you stay in your room and write a song. And when you get tired
of that, you talk to yourself. Then let it all out onstage." Although
Billie Jean was one of the first songs MJ wrote for Thriller, he
and Quincy Jones kept tinkering with it right up to the final mastering stage.
The miles-deep bass line comes from funk stalwart Louis Johnson of the Brothers
Johnson. Drummer Ndugu Chancler cut the drum track over Jackson's original
drum-machine beat, and jazz vet Tom Scott played the eerie lyricon solo. At
five minutes long, Billie Jean has the sleek sweep of disco, yet a classic-rock
sense of epic scale. Quincy Jones worried the intro was too long: "But
[Jackson] said, 'That's the jelly, that's what makes me want to dance.' " The world has been
dancing to Billie Jean ever since.
And here's his iconic performance, on May
16th, 1983, for the TV special celebrating Motown's 25th anniversary:
Billie Jean was an easy #1, all over the
world; in the US it held the position for 7 weeks. The follow-up, Beat It, held
the US #1 position for 3 weeks. (The song that hit Number One in between? Dexys
Midnight Runners' Come on Eileen.) The song was a visionary mix of metal
bluster and disco glitz, complete with a headbanger's ball of an Eddie Van
Halen guitar eruption. Beat It was the last song added to Thriller,
as the clock was ticking to the release date. As Quincy Jones told Rolling
Stone, "When we were finishing Beat It, we had three studios going. We
had Eddie Van Halen in one. Michael was in another singing a part through a
cardboard tube, and we were mixing in another. We were working five nights and
five days with no sleep. And at one point, the speakers overloaded and caught
on fire." The only person not blown away was Van Halen's David Lee Roth,
who scoffed, "What did Edward do with Michael Jackson? He went in and
played the same fucking solo he's been playing in this band for 10 years. Big
deal!" Shame on you David! The star line-up also included Steve Lukather
and Steve Porcaro, both members of Toto.
The fourth single was yet another suberb
song: Originally
written during the Off the Wall sessions, Wanna
Be Startin' Somethin, the opening track on Thriller was a
declaration of radical intent. Using the African chant "ma ma se ma ma sa
ma ma ku sa" from Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango's unlikely 1972
international pop hit Soul Makossa, Jackson widened the earlier song's
universal appeal, paying tribute to his own roots with a prescient
crate-digging hip-hop savvy. Foremost, it's a club banger, "something you
can play with on the dance floor and get sweaty working out to," as
Jackson described it. But it also has a dark lyrical drama and whip-crack
call-and-response vocal tension. Between the swirl of synth beats, Brazilian
percussionist Paulinho da Costa's friction drum colors, hot horn stabs, and
rhythms pounded out by Jackson and bandmates on a "bathroom stomping
board," the groove never stops coming. If Off the Wall had
been pop disco's crowning moment, this is the first great example of polyglot,
post-disco dance music – basically, what global pop has become.
Next came one more masterpiece: Human
Nature had the honour to be covered by jazz legend Miles Davis. One of
Jackson's most vulnerable R&B ballads, it had a surprising origin – the
rock band Toto, of Africa and Hold the Line fame. As I've already mentioned, some
of the band played on Thriller, including keyboardist Steve
Porcaro. Late in the sessions, Jones was still hunting for songs, so Toto sent
over a couple of demos. But at the end of the tape was an unfinished
instrumental that caught Jones' ear. "There was this dummy lyric, a very
skeletal thing," he recalled, "but such a wonderful flavor."
Jones sent it to lyricist John Bettis, who also co-wrote tender hits like the
Carpenters' Top of the World and Madonna's Crazy for You. The result perfectly
fit Michael's shy, breathy vocals, even if the plot involves hitting the clubs
and snagging a one-night stand ("If this town is just an apple," he
sings, "then let me take a bite"). Though it was a last-minute
addition to Thriller, Human Nature became its fifth single and a
Top 10 summer hit. It returned to the charts 10 summers later as SWV's 1993
Number One R&B hit Right Here/Human Nature, from Free Willy, a
kiddie movie about a killer whale. Here's the original version:
Here's SWV's version:
... And here's Miles Davis' version:
The next single was P.Y.T. (Pretty Young
Thing): Full of funky keyboard squiggles and playful slang like
"tenderoni," P.Y.T. was Thriller's most carefree single.
Quincy Jones wrote it with singer James Ingram after Jones' wife brought home
lingerie called Pretty Young Things. Ingram has said that he was astonished by
how Jackson actually danced in the studio as he was singing the song. That
energy comes through, as Jackson trades off "na-na-na's" with a few pretty-young-thing
backup singers he knew quite well: sisters Janet and La Toya. Artists ranging
from American Idol singer Justin Guarini to Jones himself –
with T-Pain and Robin Thicke – have covered the song, and the 25th-anniversary
edition of Thriller featured a completely refigured version of
the song by Will.i.am, but no one could capture the electric energy of the
original. "I love Pretty Young Thing," Jackson recalled. "I
liked the 'code' in the lyrics, and 'tenderoni' and 'sugar fly' were fun rock
& roll-type words that you couldn't find in the dictionary."
The seventh and final single was Thriller.
The epic video for the title track of Jackson's bestselling album has become so
iconic that it's easy to underestimate the song itself, one of the strangest
pieces of music he ever released. Written by Rod Temperton, the song was first
called Starlight until Quincy Jones asked Temperton for another title.
"The next morning I woke up and I just said this word [thriller],"
Temperton says. "Something in my head just said, 'This is the title.' You
could visualize it at the top of the Billboard charts."
Temperton also revised the lyrics to take in Jackson's love of horror movies.
The track took the percolating-funk feel of Off the Wall to a
grander, more theatrical level, with its supernatural sound effects – howling
werewolves and creaking coffins – and the creepy-crawly narration of actor
Vincent Price, a friend of Jones' then-wife, Peggy Lipton, who nailed his part in
two takes. The weirdness of Thriller didn't end there: While the song was being
mixed, Jackson's eight-foot-long boa constrictor, Muscles, slithered across the
console. The last of a mind-boggling seven singles from Thriller,
it hit #4 on the US Hot 100.
I thought that the Michael Jackson story would
be over today, but there's so much more to say and to hear; there will be a
third part. Till then, toodle-oo!
