Authors: Steve Knopper
Janet had agreed to the project only if her
choreographers, Tina Landon and Sean Cheesman, could create the dance steps. Although Michael used his own people for choreography, he agreed to Janet’s condition. When he met with
Landon and Cheesman, he gave them one instruction:
“Make it magical.” The lack of specificity confused them, but they designed something that involved a lot of jumping up and down and rolling on the floor, with an element of movie special effects that would make the Jackson siblings appear to fly into space. When Michael signed off on the steps after a meeting with Janet and the choreographers at Neverland, he had Landon and Cheesman teach the “Scream” routine to his longtime tour dancer, Travis Payne, who in turn taught it to Michael.
By the time Janet and Michael arrived at the set, in separate trailers, a competitive spirit was in the air.
“It wasn’t a good vibe at all,” Landon recalls. Michael’s team stationed people on set with video cameras to shoot behind-the-scenes footage. When Landon, Janet’s choreographer, gave directions, the cameramen paid no attention; when Payne, or another MJ dancer, LaVelle Smith, gave directions, the video people snapped into action. Landon felt humiliated. Also, when Michael did his moves, his people draped his dancing area with dark curtains so nobody on set could watch; when Janet danced, everything was open. Cheesman, who had started his career as a seventeen-year-old dancer in Michael’s “Bad” video, detected a change in
MJ’s personality.
“When I first met him, I felt him being very open, and he just loved being around dancers, and we could talk freely,” he says. “During ‘Scream,’ he was very guarded, very competitive.” Janet was so taken aback by her brother’s behavior that she was frequently in tears. “You would see Janet [go] from being Janet Jackson the superstar to Janet Jackson the little sister who adores her big brother,” Cheesman recalls. Added Janet herself:
“Everything gets worked out in the end. But yeah, the camps were butting heads.”
“Scream” would become symbolic of the record industry of the mid-nineties, where pop stars and their labels could blow millions of dollars on art projects with almost no return. But the video remains a classic. Despite the personal politics between Michael and Janet on set, the video captures a genuine sibling camaraderie in the few seconds they’re on screen together.
“It was a dream,” recalls Berg, the art director.
Nick Brandt, who conceived and filmed the “Earth Song” video not long after “Scream” came out, ran into the same MJ complications every director endured—Michael neglected to show up on schedule, or at all, for expensive shoots, and occasionally he’d fall asleep while a makeup artist propped up his chin in the palm of her hand.
(“When we subsequently found out about all those painkillers he was on,” says Brandt, who also directed “Childhood,” “Stranger in Moscow,” and
“Cry,” “I began to understand why, so often, he would turn up and seem to be a bit out of it.”) But the redemptive moments were worth the ordeal. It was Brandt’s idea to position Michael as the last line in a defense against loggers and foresters, hanging on to burned-out tree stumps in what appeared to be a raging hurricane. Brandt had received orders to capture MJ in his black-and-red outfit in exactly one take. (He successfully begged for a second one.) And Michael Jackson nailed the performance.
“It was absolutely electrifying in a way I’d never seen before,” Brandt recalls. “I had these wind machines in his face, with all the shit flying in his face, and his eyes were streaming. People were just hypnotized and transfixed. That was glorious to see in a New Jersey field at four in the morning.”
* * *
As with every Michael Jackson album since
Thriller
, the final touches on
HIStory
were rushed. Although the album would contain fifteen tracks, the Hit Factory team worked on at least forty. For some songs, the recording crew labored on them for months—after recording “Little Susie” with a full orchestra, Michael changed his mind and asked Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro to rebuild it with a synthesizer orchestra instead, and for “Childhood,” Michael changed arrangers and arrangements.
“On another budget, where every orchestra session is fifty thousand dollars, that’s a panic moment,” says Rob Hoffman, one of the engineers. “But with Michael, that’s more a speed bump: ‘We’ll do it right, and that’s the way I want it.’ ” The only truly spontaneous song was a sparse version of Charlie Chaplin’s ballad “Smile,” which Michael and arranger David Foster knocked out after a fruitless writing session. “[Songs] would come in and out of favor at any point over the course of the record,” Hoffman says. “We might think a song was hot, in the running, and literally completely disappear, never to be heard from again.” One of the orphans was “Much Too Soon,” a teary ballad about people who’ve died.
The
HIStory
crew labored for sixteen to
eighteen hours a day until the last month of work.
“I’m sorry,” Michael told engineers Hoffman and Eddie Delena, “but I don’t think any of us are going to sleep this weekend.” Work hours expanded to twenty per day. Sony wanted to put out the album in winter 1994, in time for holiday shopping season.
“Michael was like, saunter, saunter, saunter, saunter, and then: emergency finish!” says CJ deVillar, an engineer who worked with him later.
After Michael was satisfied that LA earthquakes were no longer a threat, he moved the team back to more familiar terrain. Chuck Wild, the effects man, arrived at Record One just about every night at midnight to personally show Michael the four or five sounds he’d come up with that day. Michael was always asleep when Wild arrived, so Wild would wait around. When Michael woke up, Wild played his sounds and they talked about Thomas Edison. It seems the famed inventor deliberately deprived himself of sleep, a creative method that fascinated Michael Jackson.
“It was a conscious decision,” Wild says. “He chose not to sleep continuously . . . just to go on this odd schedule.” One night at three
A.M.
, after five hours of last-minute work on one song, they finished the album, and Grundman speedily mastered it—this time, fully, in his own Los Angeles studio.
The
HIStory
album
cost $10 million to make, and in spots it sounded like it. The songs MJ had labored over for months on
Thriller
and
Bad
were restrained and minimalist compared to the title track of the all-new second disc. It opens with a huge-sounding classical orchestra, with ringing bells and tympani rolls—actually a sample from the Classical Kids album
Beethoven Lives Upstairs
. Then it mashes up bits of historic radio broadcasts about Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig, and Charles Lindbergh, and splices in a few Chuck Wild electro effects before getting to the pretty-sounding motivational speech (“Don’t let no one get you down / keep movin’ on higher ground”) that serves as the chorus. The title track represents the grandiosity of Michael’s ambitions—the cover of the two-disc album is an MJ statue, fists clenched, with dark
clouds breaking into a pink sunrise in the background. In fifty-one pages of liner notes, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O, and Steven Spielberg celebrate Michael in lofty prose—Liz says he’s
“filled with deep emotions that create an unearthly, special, innocent, childlike, wise man.” Given the greatest hits on disc one, the album serves not just to sum up MJ’s career but to deify him.
The new songs on
HIStory
have a punk-rock quality of personal rebellion. “Stop pressuring me!” MJ and Janet plead throughout “Scream.” He aims the Broadway-style ballad “Childhood” at his parents and the machine-gun drums of the Jam and Lewis “Tabloid Junkie” at the media. Michael’s most tortured lyric is “Stranger in Moscow,” which uses Kremlin imagery to draw a parallel between oppressed Soviet citizens and Michael himself.
“They Don’t Care about Us” takes the concept over the top—the children’s playground chorus quickly gives way to Michael’s pleading
Beat me, hate me
/ Will me, thrill me
. But then comes
Jew me, sue me / Everybody do me / Kick me, kike me.
The lyrics incensed Jewish activists. Reporters demanded an explanation. Michael never quite came around to one, although many critics would interpret the song as MJ empathizing with victims everywhere, responding to the very invectives he lists in the lyrics. Although he apologized, he said it was for the pain he’d caused rather than for the words he spoke. Given Michael’s background as a humanitarian who claimed to transcend segregation and prejudice, many Jewish leaders were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Jackson
“never intentionally meant to be offensive, yet the anti-Semitic words cut deeply,” and his Jewish manager, Sandy Gallin, would say he felt the same way. But Michael’s Jewish friends in showbiz, including Geffen and Spielberg, did not rush to defend him. (Spielberg’s silence was particularly notable, given his soliloquy on MJ’s greatness in the
HIStory
liner notes.)
“He tried to convince me to do it,” Gallin said, years after refusing to justify MJ’s behavior in public. “I knew it was
the wrong thing to do, I wouldn’t do it. He was very upset about all of this, and he thought that maybe I thought he was anti-Semitic. And he fired me.” Jackson severed ties with Gallin, Geffen, and Spielberg. Epic’s Dan Beck had to promise reporters that Michael would change the lyrics for a new version of the song. After meticulously working on
HIStory
with dozens of people on both coasts for nearly three years, Michael walked into Sony Music’s New York studio one day with Beck, his comanager Jim Morey, an engineer, and a video cameraman and laid down replacement lyrics in half an hour.
For all its weird megalomania and confusing lyrical bursts,
HIStory
was an effective Michael Jackson album—it’s pointed and personal, melodic and funky, persistent in some places (“Money”) and soothing in others (a version of the Beatles’ “Come Together”). It aspires to sound big, and frequently succeeds—notably “Earth Song,” his most effective save-the-world ballad, trumping “Heal the World” and “We Are the World” with stronger lyrics, better melodies, and “Man in the Mirror”–style ad-libs at the end. Had
HIStory
ended after eight songs, it might have been a masterpiece of angry self-righteousness. But the last several songs are among the least electrifying in Michael’s catalog—“Childhood” is unconvincing self-justification in the form of a treacly ballad; “2 Bad,” “Little Susie,” and “Tabloid Junkie” are retreads of
Dangerous
-style new jack swing; the title track is a mishmash of jumbled-up sounds and fractious lyrics; and while the closing “Smile” shows a more personal MJ, it relies not on intimacy but a Broadway-style distance between the singer and the audience.
To promote the album, Michael had a
$30 million Sony budget. “I wanted everybody’s attention,” he told Diane Sawyer, and he got it with thirty-two-foot statues of himself, which Sony officials installed on top of a
MICHAEL JACKSON HISTORY
vessel and sent down the River Thames, as well as Cape Town, South Africa, and elsewhere.
He was still at his peak creatively. Many dance aficionados believe Michael’s watershed moment as a dancer was not the classic
Motown 25
performance but his
fifteen-minute appearance at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards—the one where he drops to his knees as Slash plays a guitar solo, jamming in a cloud of smoke even after a roadie tries to stop him. The tour de force is “Dangerous,” in which he leads an ensemble of gangsters in black suits and skinny ties through a series of impossible body-bending moves. Janet, caught on camera in the audience, shakes her head in stunned disbelief.
After viewing this performance, Sony executives were excited about a two-hour HBO special Michael had agreed to do in December 1995, three months after the MTV awards. The plan was for the new MJ to be like the old MJ, doing his best-known dance routines at the Beacon, an art deco theater on New York’s Upper West Side.
“It was going to be the man and his music, as opposed to lightning, flash pots, or gags,” said his comanager, Jim Morey.
To produce the show, Jackson picked
Jeff Margolis, with whom he’d worked on TV tributes to Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor. Jackson and Margolis spent nearly four months sketching out the show in all-night sessions in MJ’s hotel suite before moving to a
Sony Studios soundstage big enough to accommodate the cast of one hundred rotating dancers. The show would have an orchestra and one special guest—Marcel Marceau, who was to appear on a dark stage, improvising mimes in a spotlight as a motionless Michael sang “Childhood” in a smaller spotlight.
“It would have been one of those moments on TV that everybody would talk about forever,” Margolis says.
While MJ’s longtime collaborator Brad Buxer worked on the music, coordinating the orchestra away from the Sony stage, Margolis hired
Dangerous
tour veteran Kenny Ortega to supervise six choreographers, including Debbie Allen, the dance great who’d appeared in
Roots
and
Fame
, as they designed new routines for signature songs such as “Thriller,” “Smooth Criminal,” and “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Some were old MJ hands, such as longtime dance partners Travis Payne and LaVelle Smith Jr., who designed a new, stripped-down look for
“Dangerous” based on
A Clockwork Orange
, with bowler hats, jockstraps, and combat boots. Another was Barry Lather, who’d danced in
Captain EO
and took over the HBO-show redesign for “Thriller”—
“a futuristic, gritty, industrial feel” involving trench coats and high-powered flashlights, he says. MJ’s schedule was absurdly complex, as he dropped in to learn new steps from all the choreographers in different studios. After twelve days, Michael showed up at Sony to watch Lather and the dancers perform the new “Thriller” routine, twice in a row. He and Lather then worked together, one-on-one, and Michael mastered the moves after six separate days of three-hour sessions.
Finally, Michael and his various choreographers and dance companies were ready for full rehearsals on the Beacon stage. A few days
before the show, although
Marceau believed MJ to be in fine health, choreographer Lather could see Michael wasn’t feeling well. To Epic’s Dan Beck and manager Jim Morey, too, he seemed on the brink of illness. They met with the singer over dinner at Sony’s studios, where he sipped some kind of broth. The two music-business veterans mothered their star client as best they could—
“You need to eat! Don’t worry so much about the show!” They figured he was anxious. For rehearsals, they strategically placed
heaters between the Beacon’s door and Michael’s trailer, a preemptive measure to prevent the star from catching a full-blown cold.