Authors: Steve Knopper
At the time, Mesnick was also the Beach Boys’ accountant, and knew their lawyer, David Braun. As extraordinary as it sounds today, Michael’s landmark solo debut
Off the Wall
had come out as part of the Jacksons’ group recording contract. As
Off the Wall
began to take off, in early 1980,
Mesnick asked Braun if he could take a whack at extracting Michael from the Jacksons’ contract—giving him a solo CBS career in addition to the one he had with his brothers. Braun met Michael, and Michael hired him. Braun had leverage for a contract renegotiation. By contrast, Michael’s brothers had almost none. When negotiating with Dick Asher, Walter Yetnikoff’s deputy at CBS Records, on Michael Jackson’s behalf, Braun was almost openly gleeful.
“Suppose it sells
this
,” he would say. “Okay,” responded Asher, a tough former marine, each time, “if it gets to this, I’ll get you another half a point.” They kept at it—“suppose it sells
that
” . . . “Okay”—until they reached what they considered an outlandish ceiling of twenty-five million sales.
Michael Jackson’s royalty deal was north of 25 percent per album, a big contract even for established pop stars. “We kept using arbitrary numbers, never dreaming Michael would hit them,” Braun recalls. “It was probably the most expensive agreement ever in the industry, from a royalty point of view.” Mesnick, the accountant, says it was Michael’s idea to turn down a big advance and opt for royalty payments based on sales. It was a gut feeling, and it was correct.
“Michael was making
equal to what CBS was making toward the end,” Mesnick says, referring to Michael’s royalties per album sold.
Michael’s new five-album solo deal gave him financial independence from his family, although he remained part of the existing Jacksons’ contract as well. In 1980, David Braun quit his job as Michael’s attorney to become chief executive of PolyGram, one of the world’s biggest record labels. He didn’t last long.
“I left to make some money,” he recalls. “If I’d stayed with Michael, I would have made ten times as much.” Braun’s departure left an opening for a colleague at his firm, John Branca, a young, ambitious entertainment attorney in LA, to join Team Michael Jackson. In 1981, Branca helped MJ try to move out of Hayvenhurst, buying a three-bedroom condo in Encino. But in the end, Michael couldn’t leave his mother. He remained at his parents’ house while maintaining the condo as a sanctuary, for himself and his brothers, for years.
After
Off the Wall
, the power dynamics changed between Michael and his brothers. As the oldest, Jackie may have still been the putative leader of the family band, but he told Mesnick, the accountant:
“Michael puts us to shame.” The Jacksons nonetheless began recording their
Triumph
album in late 1979, at a point when the brothers were still wearing skintight outfits and dancing through smoke during the
Destiny
tour. They bought a mobile eight-track studio, and at night, after each show was over, they’d record in a hotel room. All the Jacksons began to buy recording
equipment. After the tour ended, they gathered at Tito’s house. He had a modern studio. Michael came over. He brainstormed songs. When they had some ideas sketched out, they called Mike Mckinney, the tour’s bass player: “Mike, what you doing today? Come on, let’s write.” Eventually they booked time at a few different professional studios and started hiring musicians to drop by to work on parts—one was Greg Phillinganes, who’d played keyboards on
Destiny
and
Off the Wall
and manned every
Triumph
track.
“There would be a lot of opinions on what it should be,” recalls Jerry Hey, the horn arranger whom Quincy Jones had recruited for
Off
the Wall
and Michael hired for
Triumph
. “It’s always difficult when you have that kind of family trying to work together like that.”
Wedged between
Off the Wall
and
Thriller
, 1980’s
Triumph
suffers by comparison. Although it feels programmed, it showcases Michael’s range. It opens with “Can You Feel It,” a rock anthem with an elaborate choir and strings that Michael would compare to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from
2001: A Space Odyssey
; covers the last breaths of disco with “Lovely One” and “Walk Right Now”; and contains a perfunctory ballad, “Time Waits for No One.” The centerpiece is Michael’s devastating song of fear and loneliness, “Heartbreak Hotel,” retitled “This Place Hotel,” most likely to avoid Elvis Presley confusion.
After they finished the album, Michael didn’t want to tour. He claimed to hate performing live. Whether or not this was true—this was the same man who had just declared he was barely able to live a sane life without being onstage—Michael succumbed to pressure from his family, promoters who stood to make millions of dollars, and Epic Records executives who saw the tour as marketing.
Michael made it to five days a week of rehearsals, all day, in a large space in a Van Nuys office park. The brothers worked well together, but they weren’t always united. Bill Wolfer, who had done some synthesizer overdubs for
Triumph
, signed on as the new keyboardist.
“The brothers had different ideas about what I should do,” he recalls. Jackie took him aside one day and asked him to play a certain part on a song, bringing him a Walkman to demonstrate a quirk in one of the alternate mixes. Wolfer dutifully learned it the new way, but as he started to play it in rehearsal, Michael stopped the band. “Bill, why you playing that?” Michael said. “Well, Jackie wanted me to play it,” Bill responded. The five brothers disappeared for a few minutes, convening to a break room to work out their disagreement—“so they could present a unified front,” Wolfer recalls.
Wolfer detected a sad aura surrounding Michael. On the Fourth of July, kids came by selling bottle rockets. Michael refused. “Buy some for your friends!” said one enterprising kid. “I don’t have any friends,”
he responded with a weary smile. Another time, Wolfer was sitting at a table in the break room, and Michael appeared in front of a vending machine. He stared at the potato chips and candy bars for the longest time, then reached into his pocket, pulled out some change, and purchased a granola bar. He studied the wrapper before concluding,
“I can’t eat this.” “The granola bar was not pure enough for him to intake,” Wolfer recalls. “He was just so obsessed
with what came into him and went out of his body.” He also talked a
lot
about colonics, which Wolfer took as a worrisome sign.
The Jacksons’ name was on the tour, but
Triumph
belonged to Michael. It began in Memphis on July 9, 1981, and concluded five months later with four sold-out Forum shows in Los Angeles. Like the
Destiny
shows,
Triumph
was meticulously programmed, so the set list was almost exactly the same every night. The Jacksons’ sparkly outfits from the
Destiny
tour gave way to eighties-style muscle shirts, black leather pants, skinny ties, and collars opened to the rib cage.
“Can You Feel It” was the perfect opening blast of dramatic rock and funk, with a familiar-sounding bass line that recalled the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” As before, Michael “argued” onstage with his brothers over the merits of new songs versus old songs. “Number one, it’s
old
, okay?” he told the crowd before “I’ll Be There.” “Number two, the choreography’s old!” He added (at the expense of his ancient thirty-year-old brother): “Jackie’s old!” The brothers continued to close with “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” and Michael indulged himself with just three songs from
Off the Wall
. That was frustrating, for the audience and the band, because the
Off the Wall
songs were clearly superior, and there was not yet a solo MJ tour. During one sound check, absent-mindedly noodling on his keyboard, Bill Wolfer started plucking out “I Can’t Help It” from
Off the Wall
. Michael zoomed over—“like a moth attracted to a flame,” Wolfer remembers—and instantly began to sing along. Afterward, singer and pianist agreed they loved that song. “We should do it!” Wolfer told Michael. “I wish we could,”
Michael agreed sadly. Then somebody called him away.
We
can
do it,
Wolfer thought.
Let’s get rid of the song about the rat.
He did not speak up, and “Ben” remained number four on the set list.
One omission was “Dancing Machine,” which by 1981 was seven years old and symbolic of the old days, when the Jacksons had no control over their music and were languishing as they grew up at Motown. That meant no Robot. During the
Destiny
tour, Michael had begun to fiddle with something new—something that looked eerily like he was moving forward and backward at the same time. He’d practice it in hotel-room mirrors. By
Triumph
, he was doing it onstage during rehearsals and sound checks. Only the band and crew got to see it.
“They cleared out the rehearsal space—just a few of us allowed in there,” recalls Reed Glick, the lighting man. “He started out doing dance steps, and the next thing I knew, he was floating across the stage.”
Also new were the effects. For the
Triumph
tour, celebrity magician Doug Henning’s Illusion Team created a breathtaking stunt involving a life-size cylinder covered with flash paper. Michael climbed nightly into the cylinder, which rose into the air, and once the flash paper burned away, he was gone. Then he reappeared on the other side of the stage, surrounded by six-foot flames. It took a few shows for the crew to get the timing right, and early in the tour, the crowd witnessed Michael
climbing back on top of the stage from underneath. Michael was furious.
“This isn’t working!” he despaired. “You guys aren’t trying real hard! I don’t understand what’s happening!” The crew calmed him down, and soon mastered the effects.
Michael’s look was changing. His Afro, which had survived through the
Destiny
era, was replaced with a trendy, frizzy mullet, and fans who paid close attention noticed something new about his nose, not to mention his body, which seemed impossibly skinny due to his strict vegetarianism and his nightly dance routines and nonstop rehearsal. His spins throughout “Things I Do for You” and the Motown medley were tighter than ever, more purposeful, beginning
with a
Soul Train
–style leg kick, ending with the walking-backward move that Michael was just starting to develop. As always, he came out at the end of every show in his black-and-white
Off the Wall
tuxedo, perfectly tailored to fit his body this time. It was this image that
Rolling Stone
would use years later to illustrate the show in its “Greatest Performances” issue.
Mike Mckinney noticed fans’ growing obsession with Michael in subtle ways. The bassist would send his clothes out to be cleaned, and they’d never come back to his room. That was puzzling, until Mckinney realized his first name had been printed on the clothes:
“Anytime they saw the name ‘Michael,’ it gets ripped off.” Girls screamed with the first note, launching themselves onto the stage, crawling toward the Jacksons until bodyguards flipped them back into the audience.
* * *
Although Michael had canceled two dates on the
Triumph
tour due to exhaustion, he was creatively energized when he returned to
Hayvenhurst in late 1981. He threw himself into renovating the family house, sketching out a white-marble lobby floor, emerald-green carpets, central chandelier, sweeping staircase, brick fireplace, and bedroom suites. His personal quarters would contain a hair salon with a barber’s swivel chair, large hot tub, barbecue area festooned with tile, a courtyard of cobblestones with a lamppost, a street sign that said
HAPPINESS
, and a mock toy store with a display window of porcelain dolls, toy soldiers, and teddy bears. Next to the garage he would install a facsimile of Disneyland, including a candy store and a talking Abraham Lincoln robot. His theater played Fred Astaire and Three Stooges movies. His bathroom faucets were brass swans. Workers
wouldn’t break ground until 1983, so his creative energy soon transferred into songwriting—
“like a machine,” Quincy Jones said. On Christmas Day 1981, Paul McCartney recalled:
“Michael rang me and said he wanted to come over and make some hits.” (They had befriended each other years earlier at a
party on a ship docked in Long Beach.) They met at McCartney’s London office, where they quickly invented the basic structure of “The Girl Is Mine.” Michael wrote most of the words later at his hotel.
Quincy Jones began to reassemble the gang from
Off the Wall
—the “A-Team,” including engineer Bruce Swedien and songwriter Rod Temperton—with bigger ambitions. They convened at Westlake Studios, a nondescript beige building on Beverly Boulevard in LA. Outside it looked like a plain, unmarked storefront, but inside it was sleek and modern, with large stones festooned on the walls and simulated tree bark lining the doors. It had the feel of the house in
The Brady Bunch
. Everybody liked it dark. If they were staying up all night recording music, the last thing they wanted to see was the sun—it reminded them daylight still existed, and the outside world went on without them.
Michael wanted to top
Off the Wall
, both creatively and commercially.
“No matter what you do, you are competing against your previous product, and everybody expects more,” he told a reporter at the time. “Just like motion pictures:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
,
Star Wars
,
Jedi
. You really try to top yourself all the time, and it’s hard.” He also felt snubbed by his peers in the recording industry, who had inexplicably given a Grammy Award for Album of the Year to Billy Joel’s
52nd Street
rather than
Off the Wall
(which wasn’t even nominated). Somehow, “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” perhaps MJ’s greatest dance song, received only one award, Best R&B Performance, while the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” scored Song of the Year.
“I felt ignored by my peers and it hurt,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Wait until next time.’ ”