Authors: Steve Knopper
The Wiz
cost $22 million and did not perform well at the box office. It was a spectacular, flawed experiment. Michael and Diana have terrific chemistry, but Ross is mismatched for the part. Not because she’s too old (although she is), but because she plays Dorothy the same way she played Billie Holiday, with an emaciated world-weariness, when the part, as Judy Garland had shown the world forty years earlier, called for a wide-eyed, childish wonder. A less obvious problem was that during
filming, Lumet’s wife at the time, Gail Jones, daughter of
Wiz
star Lena Horne, had approached the director on set and asked for a divorce. The usually exuberant Lumet became despondent—a quality that came out distinctively in the film, recalls production designer Tony Walton.
“Everybody has a crying jag—the Lion cries, and Diana Ross and the Tin Man,” he says. “None of which was really in the script.”
With Lumet in a dark mood, it fell to teenage Michael Jackson to keep the filmmakers upbeat. “Michael was the most high-spirited and vivacious of everybody on the movie,” Walton says. “As anxious as all of us were, Michael was a free spirit.”
The Wiz
has its timeless qualities, especially the lovingly rendered scenes to Lumet’s home city, prominently showing landmarks such as Coney Island, Shea Stadium, and the Brooklyn Bridge. But its reception was marred by racist backlash. Theater chains in white neighborhoods wouldn’t schedule
The Wiz
for fear of scaring off white regulars, producer Cohen recalls glumly.
“As big and as spectacular and as musical as it was,” he says, “we never got a real solid distribution.” Black films, aside from
Shaft
, were for black audiences. White films were for white audiences. Just as black music, despite brief exceptions such as Motown and disco, had been for black radio stations and white music for white radio stations.
Somebody needed to fix this problem.
* * *
First, though, Michael Jackson had to make another album with his brothers. After
The Jacksons
and
Goin’ Places
had essentially tanked, CBS executives were ready to abandon Jacksons Inc. One of Epic’s newest executives, Bobby Colomby, felt compelled to step in. His underling, an inexperienced A&R man named Mike Atkinson, called Colomby one day and said,
“Hey, boss, I got a song!” They listened to “Blame It on the Boogie,” by a white, bearded British singer named, of all things, Michael Jackson.
This led to a surreal
Top of the Pops
competition in which two
Michael Jacksons had the same hit on the British charts at the same time.
“There was wonderful confusion everywhere,” says the UK Michael Jackson, popularly known as Mick. “The press came out with this title: ‘The Battle of the Boogie.’ ”
The lyrics to “Blame It on the Boogie” were happy and strange—“Sunshine! Moonlight! Good times! Boogie!” went the chorus, oblivious to the fact that those four things were not quite related—but the song had enough lighthearted funk to reintroduce the Jacksons to disco dancers.
Colomby liked Randy Jackson, who had replaced Jermaine after joining the group onstage in Vegas just before they’d signed with CBS Records. He had a useful low voice and was,
Colomby felt, an underrated songwriter and keyboard player. He thought Marlon could sing. He took in Tito’s bizarre habit of licking a guitar pick and sticking it on his forehead. He considered Jackie a fun-loving womanizer.
Joe dropped by from time to time, and Colomby didn’t like his interrupting the band’s generally happy vibe: “The plants would wilt,” he says. One day, the door to the studio was locked, and Joe made such a commotion outside that the police showed up. Colomby went outside to talk to them. “Tell him I’m the father!” Joe shouted to the police. “I never saw him before,” Colomby declared, deadpan.
What Colomby noticed most at the
Destiny
sessions was the blossoming leadership of Michael Jackson. It was hard to miss. Rick Marotta, a session drummer called in to play on “Push Me Away,” remembers listening to playback while the Jacksons discussed what they thought of the early mix. Michael was still in the vocal booth in another part of the studio. Finally, one of the brothers hollered,
“Wait, wait, wait—‘Hey, Mike, can you dance to it?’ ”
“Yeah!” Michael shouted from the distance. “It feels really good!”
“If Michael can dance to it, it’s good,” the brother said.
In the middle of recording “Blame It on the Boogie,” Michael abruptly flung off his headphones and rushed out of the studio.
Colomby feared a blast of volume had come through his phones. When he found him in the hallway, Michael was dancing frenetically.
“I have to get this out of my system,” he said. “I can’t hold still and sing.”
For the distinctive “Sunshine! Moonlight!” bits in the “Boogie” chorus, Colomby decided to try a vocal technique he’d learned from Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker—instead of asking the musicians to sing their parts individually, more than once if necessary to “stack” the vocals onto the track, he set the boys up to sing them as a choir. They’d do one syllable at a time—“sun! shine! moon! light!”—to create a thick, layered effect that sounded energetic and bright on the record. One of the brothers, possibly Marlon or Tito, according to Colomby’s memory, didn’t sign on: “That’s not the way we’ve done it.” Michael won. “Guys, let’s just try it,” he said. “What’s your problem?”
One day, Colomby showed up at the studio to find Michael directing keyboardist Greg Phillinganes and drummer Ed Green on the same repetitive funky groove, with no variations, for twenty minutes. This wasn’t how Colomby did things. It didn’t sound like a song, just a groove, over and over. (
“It was a very strong, memorable melody,” recalls Phillinganes, who had come up with the original beat while dabbling on drums. “It wasn’t just a groove that rambled on and didn’t have anything to connect with.”) But Colomby went with it. After the musicians had cut the track, the producer called in Tom Washington, a well-known horn arranger who went by Tom Tom 84, and asked him to create a horn part for a staccato, Earth, Wind & Fire–type contemporary-soul feel. Over that, Michael sang the first line. Colomby considered it okay. Then he sang the second one—a tense, dissonant, subtle countermelody that fit perfectly. Colomby thought that was genius. The song became an eight-minute jam called “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” a shorter remix of which turned into a huge hit.
“I would have said, ‘It’s too long,’ ” Colomby recalls, “but they were building something.”
Destiny
, which came out in December 1978, was another one of those Jacksons albums with lyrics dealing exclusively with dance. The difference between it and
The Jacksons
and
Goin’ Places
was the dynamism of those dance songs—“Blame It on the Boogie” is a post–
Saturday Night Fever
nursery rhyme, sunny and goofy. But Michael’s enthusiasm adds rock ’n’ roll anarchy to what might have been a disco cliché. “I just can’t control my feet,” he sings repeatedly. In “Things I Do for You,” a midtempo song typical of lighthearted R&B of 1978, Michael delivers the first line like this: “
Ah
-people all over the world-
ah
! Are the same everywhere I go—
ah! ah!
I give in to THIS-
uh.
I give in to THAT-
eh.
Every day it bothers me so—
cha
!” These percussive verbal tics, which become an improvisational instrument for the first time on any Jacksons album, are derived from James Brown, but they are more than that. They are evolving into a crucial part of Michael Jackson’s musical identity. Of course the album’s centerpiece is “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” which opens with that incredible Phillinganes-Green groove, then one of those Michael whoops. It became a dance-floor smash, hitting No. 7 and selling more than two million copies at the time.
“If I could go back in time,” says Mike Sembello, a guitarist for the
Destiny
sessions who studied MJ closely, “I would take Michael Jackson out of the limelight and put him on an island. With all the instruments.”
* * *
Quincy Jones was so poor that he ate fried rats. His grandmother, who’d raised him briefly in Kentucky, cooked them after she’d caught them in traps. He had spent most of his youth on the South Side of Chicago, during the Depression, a family of four with his father, mother, and younger brother, Lloyd.
People called the brothers’ part of town the Bucket of Blood (not to be confused with the nearby Bucket of Blood in Gary, Indiana). The Jones boys fought, robbed, and joined gangs, wielding switchblades
and slingshots made of clothespins and inner tubes. Later, after Jones’s father had moved his family to Sinclair Heights, Washington, Quincy broke into a local rec center’s soda-fountain area with his friends and discovered an upright piano on a tiny stage. He played it and, he recalls, “Each note seemed to fill up another empty space I felt inside.”
Jones was destined to be a musician. He finagled lessons out of Clark Terry, the great trumpeter in Count Basie’s band, and played with Billie Holiday in 1948. He joined a barnstorming band run by Bumps Blackwell and befriended a young Ray Charles, who, Quincy says, “never acted blind unless there was a pretty girl around, then he’d get all helpless and sightless, bumping into walls and doors, trying to get laid.” Quincy wrote scores and carried them under his shirt, with his trumpet under his arm. “I had no control over where I lived, no control over my sick mother, no control over my hard-hearted stepmother and my overwrought father. I couldn’t change the attic where I slept, or stop the anguished tears of my little brother Lloyd, who sometimes cried himself to sleep at night; I couldn’t control the angry whites who still called me nigger when they caught me alone on the street,” he wrote. “But nobody could tell me how many substitute chord changes I could stick into the bridge of ‘Cherokee.’ ” Jones and his contemporaries bonded over racial indignities on the road, especially in the South, where jazz lions Ella Fitzgerald and
Dizzy Gillespie had to send white drivers out to pick up their food.
By the time Jones met Michael Jackson on the set of
The Wiz
, he had built up one of the great résumés in American-music history—he had written charts for Count Basie, Cannonball Adderley, and Dinah Washington, played in bands with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, arranged for Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, and Billy Eckstine, scored more than thirty movies—from
In Cold Blood
to
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
—and had numerous pop hits with singer Lesley Gore. He was forty-four, with a warm smile, an avuncular salt-and-pepper mustache, and half-open eyes that concealed the complex musical thoughts whooshing inside his brain. Q was colloquial and fun—he
gave everyone excellent nicknames, like
“Lily,” for white session musician Michael Boddicker—but at work he turned serious and pushed everyone around him to higher standards. Those few musicians who earned a spot in his inner circle were loyal forever.
Michael saw in Quincy’s calm-jazz-cat personality a father figure. The one he’d been born with wasn’t working out. Quincy was eight years younger than Joe Jackson. Both had struggled under the weight of segregation and racism. But Quincy had no patience for revenge.
“It’s about recycling energy,” he said. “It’s a bitch converting hate into love, but if you can do it, it’s your only salvation.” Also, in Quincy, Michael saw a producer capable of handling any kind of music according to his rainbow-coalition standards.
“Quincy does jazz, he does movie scores, rock ’n’ roll, funk, pop—he’s all colors, and that’s the kind of people I like to work with,” Jackson said.
Michael had been yearning for a solo career since his Motown days. Two barriers stood in his way: Joe and CBS Records. Joe’s agenda was to keep his family band together. His sons were easier to control that way. Joe had hired two new managers, Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann, and told them,
“I’ve got my boys. We don’t really get what we need out of the record company, so I need some white guys to help me out.” Overcoming their distaste for Joe’s approach to civil rights, Weisner and DeMann agreed to sign on. It became obvious to them, over time, that Michael was the star of the group, and they began to take
MJ’s side in meetings with both Joe and Epic executives. “There were a lot of problems, a lot of issues,” Weisner remembers. “A lot of it would start with Joe, because Joe wanted control of everything. What Michael wanted most was to not be under his thumb and to not have to deal with him.” The first battle for MJ’s independence involved Quincy Jones.
“It was very nasty and very divisive,” Weisner recalls. “You’ve got to remember, there was no Michael solo career. [CBS executives] figured, ‘If we give one of the brothers a solo album, we’re going to have to give it to all the brothers,’ which they didn’t want to do.”
Epic’s executives considered Quincy
“too jazzy,” given his background (which was most likely code for “too old”). “I don’t care what you think,” Michael responded, marching into the Epic offices one day with Weisner and DeMann, “Quincy is doing my record.” CBS capitulated.
By the time Jones and Jackson went to the Allen Zentz Recording studio in Los Angeles to record
Off the Wall
in December 1978, disco was beginning to decline, creatively if not quite yet commercially. Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson knew it. They were listening to artists whose albums were informed by disco but were pushing it into different directions: the Brothers Johnson’s Quincy-produced
Right
on Time
, Heatwave’s
Central Heating
, Chaka Khan and Rufus’s single “Ain’t Nobody,” and, of course, Stevie Wonder’s sprawling masterpiece
Songs in the Key of Life
.
“Our underlying plan was to take disco out. That was the bottom line,” Jones said. “I admired disco, don’t get me wrong. I just thought it had gone far enough. We needed to go someplace else.” Ron Weisner, Michael’s comanager at the time, recalls broader discussions within Team MJ about making hits with broad appeal:
“Part of the marketing was all about crossover potential and not limiting yourself to black-music departments.”