THIS FILM CONTAINS SOME STRONG LANGUAGE
I feel rejuvenated, kind of, because after working on it so long,
it's so much work.
A lot of people, they're used to just seeing the outcome of work.
They never see the side of the work you go through to produce
the outcome, and I feel, you know, rejuvenated and happy,
it's a jubilation, is what it is.
It's like a celebration, it's like, "We're done!"
People were holding on to the fact that Thriller was the biggest selling record in the world.
How are you going to follow up on something like that?
It's almost impossible. Try telling that to Michael Jackson, though.
Thriller is the blockbuster behemoth in the era
of blockbuster artists. You know, that was the era
when you had Madonna, Springsteen, Whitney Houston,
so big stars, big albums, MTV era, music videos are in ascendance.
And that's the signature album of that era.
Thriller sold over 100 million copies worldwide to date.
35 million in the US, over 70 million outside the US,
and that's not even counting singles.
There was a mania around Michael
and Thriller for those three years that was very difficult to
capture again, and you go back to Elvis, or Frank Sinatra,
or the Beatles, even today with Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga,
it's a space and time, the window's only opened so far,
and Thriller captured that. It was magical.
MUSIC: "Want to Be Startin' Somethin'" by Michael Jackson
♪ Startin' somethin'
♪ Startin' somethin' Startin' somethin'... ♪
Thriller broke every record that existed, and it sold more records
than any other album in the history of the music industry.
To most of us he's just Wacko Jacko,
and if some of the press are to be believed, he bathes in
Perrier water, eats flowers for lunch, and sleeps in an oxygen tent,
often with a chimp, a snake,
and an alien, in a sort of bizarre love triangle.
All that stuff is trash,
and it all comes from the fact that Michael Jackson doesn't do
interviews, and they have nothing else to write about him.
What surprises me sometimes, the people that get distracted
and myopic about Michael's eccentricities, when they listen to
his music and watch his performance, that's like someone saying,
"Hey, there's a cobweb on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."
This article is from Playboy magazine, January 1985.
It's called Freaks And The American Ideal Of Manhood, by James Baldwin.
"He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables,
"for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring."
People tend to reduce the backlash to Michael Jackson to these
eccentricities, but I think that the James Baldwin quote
suggests that it was more than that. Michael Jackson became
one of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, and
certainly he was the most powerful African-American to that time.
And in addition to that, 1985, along with John Branca,
he acquires the Beatles catalogue.
When we announced the acquisition of the Beatles' catalogue,
it was almost a feeling that Michael didn't have the right
also to be a savvy businessmen.
It was a misconception that Michael went behind Paul McCartney's back
to bid on the catalogue, but that was absolutely not the case.
I remember when he bought the Beatles' catalogue.
He came to me and he said they want whatever it was at that time,
52 million, it sounds like too much money. He said, "I think you're wrong."
A lot of those Beatles' songs are considered sacred songs by people.
They are really just more than pop songs on the radio,
they meant something in their lives beyond almost any songs they heard.
I mean, Sergeant Pepper, particularly right?
And for him to take that catalogue and use it the way he's used it,
it's going to have some kind of backlash.
After Thriller, you know, Michael had a few extra dollars to invest,
and we had an investment committee, and we used to look at
all sorts of possible deals for Michael,
and he never had interest in buildings, tax shelters,
the kinds of things that other people
were interested in at the time.
One day Michael came to me and he said,
"I saw Paul McCartney's song catalogue.
"He showed it to me. Do you think you can help me buy copyrights?"
And I said, "Absolutely, Michael."
We bought a couple Dion & The Belmont's songs,
Runaround Sue and The Wanderer.
Then we bought the Sly & The Family Stone catalogue,
which was a major acquisition for Michael.
Michael's 28 years old now. He's not a baby dumpling now.
He's grown, he's listened, he's going up,
and those are the kinds of things he wants to say now.
I feel the stretches are there,
but they don't feel like they've been conscious stretches.
I think that things have just occurred along the way to say that
this is the way I feel like thinking,
and I feel like feeling at this time.
And one thing we've really tried not to do, to sit down and worry about
competing with Thriller,
because that's really self-destructive, you know.
And it's dishonest.
He would always write with a red Sharpie
on his mirrors in his rooms, wherever he was.
He would write 100 million albums sold for Bad, to remind him,
when he would stand in front of the mirror, brushing his teeth,
brushing his hair, doing himself up, that that was his goal.
I remember sitting on Michael's mirror,
he wrote the big note, 100 million albums.
And that was a goal that he set for himself, but I remember one time,
I was in Hong Kong with Michael, and it was in between the records,
and I said, "you know, Mike, there's a lot of pressure.
"Maybe you should think,
"why not do an album of cover songs that inspired you?
"Jackie Wilson, James Brown, just going little left of centre,
"so you don't feel like you have to compete with yourself."
And he looked at me like I was from Mars.
Because Michael thrived on that pressure,
he thrived on pushing himself, and everybody else around him.
If this record doesn't do as well as Thriller, and doesn't win
a whole bunch of Grammy awards, he's going to be very unhappy.
He would call during the Thriller and the Bad days.
"My record's not number one.
"My record's not number one, what are we going to do?"
I said, "Michael, we're going to go to sleep, we're going to get up tomorrow,
"and we're going to work on getting you a number one."
Michael didn't have limits, Michael thought bigger than anyone.
Off The Wall was a huge hit, and when he told people after
that album, "I'm going to follow this up with an album that's going
"to sell twice as much as Off The Wall, people didn't believe him." And he did it.
And so with Bad, he said, "OK, I'm going to do it again."
Bad has the special distinction.
It's the first album in history to generate five consecutive
number one pop singles, and that record was only recently
tied by Katy Perry, with her Teenage Dream album.
It started with I Just Can't Stop Loving You, in the summer of 1987.
- Bad. - Then you had The Way You Make Me Feel. - Man In The Mirror.
And finally, Dirty Diana.
It's a testament to his swag, really, that he
even made another record after Thriller.
It did take in five years.
I was 16 years old when the Bad album came out.
I remember being highly obsessed with every aspect of that album.
We were just like, "What is this going to be?"
Because this was a humongous deal.
I guess in some way or another, my education of the industry,
and those inside it and outside it really starts with that record.
The original album title was Smooth Criminal.
That was the original name of the album,
and again, Michael called me up, and said this is what he wants to do.
A couple of days later I got a call
from Quincy Jones, "Larry, I got a problem with the album title."
I go, "Why? It's kind of cool, it's edgy, it's kind of cool."
He says, "I understand Larry, but I will not allow this album to be called Smooth Criminal."
He felt that the connotation was inappropriate at this time.
So I said, "Let me call Walter, I'll get back to you."
Because Walter Yetnikoff was very involved with this project.
And Walter says, "I don't care what you call it, just put it out!"
This was the most published music image of the year.
We prepared for it for three days. We were shooting the video in the subway in New York.
Every day after shooting, we would go, "OK, let's do it."
"I'm tired. I got something to do." Next day. OK.
"No, no, no, no, I'm tired." OK, last day, Frank says,
"Mike, he's been sitting here for three days, you got to take this picture."
"OK, Frank." Three rolls of 12 shots later he goes, "That's enough."
And this is what we came up with.
There was an album cover shot,
and it was done in a very '30s style.
It was a copy of a Vogue photograph of Gloria Swanson that had
been shot back in the '30s.
And they took a piece of lace, and they stuck it
in front of the camera, and they shot through the lace,
Michael's face, it was just a headshot, so it looked like
Michael was wearing a veil, or a piece of lace on his face.
He did have a veil, and I said "I'm not putting out an album cover
"with that all over his face."
He called me up, and he went, "That is not the album cover!"
We wanted a tough album. We wanted a tough image, anyway.
You know, because,
because it's important that you keep trying to change, change up.
And this is the one where I'd asked him to write all the tunes.
This room was built for Michael.
This studio D in Westlake
was built for Michael Jackson.
For specifically the Bad record.
I was in this big room here, we had Phillinganes in the other room,
E, I believe it was, doing all the synth parts.
We had Jerry Hey and the other guys doing other arrangements
in the other rooms.
We had this whole building locked up. Locked out!
Everybody's working on different tunes on the same record.
Well, the Bad song really sets up the entire album,
because this is a song in which Michael's addressing
the huge backlash that had taken place since thriller.
The whole world has to answer right now, "Who's bad?"
Well... It is quite different from anything I've ever recorded,
or I've ever written.
It's a bold statement to say, but I mean it in all goodwill.
You know, so don't take it too seriously.
I'm saying, it's like a way of saying you're cool, you're all right,
you're tough. I'm not saying I'm like criminally bad.
Of course, that's how people will take it.
It's a bold statement to make.
Opening line is, "Your butt is mine," that's extremely...
You know, like, let's get it on!
So, I wanted to do a duet with Prince,
and have the video with him coming to kick Michael's ass.
The rivalry between the two of them, between Prince and Michael,
for real music lovers at that time, and real music fans,
that's a rivalry that is unmatched,
and will go unmatched for many, many years.
Michael impacted dances.
Nobody can touch him dancing.
When I try to dance, I'd try, not to mimic him,
but I try to, you know, not let him down, in a way.
Prince impacted musicians.
Michael Jackson and Prince were the polarising figures of the '80s.
Are you a Michael fan or a Prince than?
You can't do that! You know why? Because I think that Michael
and Prince came into our lives at a different point.
They're synonymous to me, they're equal.
Michael and Prince are our heroes, they're our musical heroes.
My annual Michael Jackson versus Prince party,
that's something I've been doing for a while,
really just to pay homage and tribute to those two artists.
I'm Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson.
I met Michael once at, ironically enough, a Prince concert.
I was performing with Prince in Vegas.
After the show was over was when I met him backstage.
I thought that they had nemeses all these years,
but it turns out that Mike was a pretty big fan of Prince as well.
So Michael said,
"Branca, set up a meeting. I want Prince to come over."
The meeting took place at Hayvenhurst, 4641 Hayvenhurst.
And Bob Cavallo went over with Prince...
So, you actually met then?
They met in Michael's study, and I recall, I wasn't there that night,
but I remember, I was told the next day, it was not a happy meeting.
Apparently Prince brought over some sort of voodoo box, and Michael
was convinced that Prince was trying to cast a spell on him.
If Quincy has gone to Prince and said, "Write a song for you
and Michael to do," that song would have gotten recorded.
Not by Michael!
But Michael wouldn't have done it!
Now Prince wasn't doing no song with Michael Jackson. All right?
That was a very optimistic view that he would get down...
At that point, in the Sign O' The Times era, he's rolling.
Oh, the cool thing about playing on the title track, Bad,
was I shared a solo with Jimmy Smith.
Jimmy Smith played on that, jazz organist, played on that.
He was great.
That was the groove, you know.
And then Jimmy did this organ solo on top of that.
And here he comes...
ORGAN SOLO
And here I come after that. Watch out!
By '86 and '87, hip-hop is now becoming the dominant thread
in a lot of aspects of American pop culture.
Michael's responding to that to some degree with the Bad video,
and imaging of Bad, but it's done in a Michael Jackson way.
The first step that was taken was to bring in Martin Scorsese.
Martin Scorsese to direct the first video from the album, and
Michael never called them videos, it was the short film from the album.
You'd never hear him say "music video".
"I'm doing short films."
He wanted people not just to hear the music, but see it.
We had a meeting with Quincy and Michael in Los Angeles,
and I found that really nobody had... They were wide open to ideas.
Nobody had ideas what kind of story we could make up,
what kind of issue we could deal with.
And so I suggested that I hire Richard Price,
who just wrote Colour of Money for me to do the script.
I just thought, Michael Jackson and Marty Scorsese, that's way too...
That's way too bizarre for words, absolutely I will do it.
If it's to be anything, it should be something very,
very different from what he's done before, and that means
a dramatic piece, and something with a lot of style, a lot of grit to it.
I don't remember exactly who said this, but he said Michael
wanted to make a video to show the brothers he's down.
So he goes to the, you know, the Italian asthmatic, who goes
to the Jewish asthmatic, and we're going to make Michael a homie!
We gave him these three ideas.
Michael and I both loved the one called Pressure -
that was the working title of this one.
About peer pressure.
I had just read this article that a friend of mine,
Robert Sam Anson, had written about Edmund Perry.
Within the hour, police revealed more information about the death
of a young man from Harlem.
He had graduated with honours from an exclusive New England prep school.
Edmund Perry was killed by a police bullet on Morningside Drive.
They had read stories like this before, too many of them.
Black kid, 17, from Harlem, poor,
with another black youth, tries to rob a white man,
who turns out to be a plain-clothes cop.
Edmund Perry was a kid from Harlem.
He and his brother, Jonah, had both gone to prep schools,
said they were like, not privileged, but they were exposed to privilege.
And this was a kid that was very much kind of dealing with
what is becoming a more common kind of internal conflict
among black kids who were put in isolated environments...
I want to say before you go, you know, you did a real good job this term.
Thanks.
..and are asked in that passage
to let go of the culture that spawned him.
Yo, the black is back, my man...
So, I just ran off, and I wrote this thing, and I rate in like two days.
You know, it's only ten pages, and Marty thought it was great.
Oh, yeah.
He did ask me,
he took me aside, and said, "Do people live here?"
I said, "Oh, yeah, this is a good one,
"because we went to some others, and I was pretty..."
- Was he scared? - A little bit, I think.
For him, I thought, it was a shock to see that.
Folks, I think we better go through a walk, man.
How did I get cast in this?
Audition, you know, we all had to audition.
Were there a lot of people?
It was quite a few guys, I don't know exactly how many.
Wesley came in, there was no... Yeah, there was no question.
And the guys I went in with,
they all approached the characters kind of B-boy-ish.
You know, characteristic of B-boys, with the, "Yo, man, yeah."
This type of thing.
And that's not my particular style, so I went the opposite direction
of what they did, and I played it very, very subtle.
Yo, college? What's your major, man?
This is high school, there ain't no majors.
Then what's your minor?
Wesley Snipes, his appearance in a video was probably one of
the most notable acting debuts,
(and the fact that he made his mark known in a music video,
everyone remembered Wesley Snipes after that moment.
Are you bad?
Or is that what they teach you up in that little sissy school of yours?
How to forget who your friends are.
Let me tell you something, I don't care what
they teach you up there, you either down, or you ain't down.
And one of the things that I found was this piece of paper,
which he wrote "Bad Film" on there.
And it's titled, "Today's Motto."
"Let nothing be a take unless I'm extremely satisfied,
"unless I felt it in my soul."
You want to see who's bad?
You want to see who's bad? Well, come on, come on, let's do it.
Let's see who's bad, man. Come on. Come on! Let's go.
As we're putting the piece together,
working on the choreography,
it's towards the middle of it that they say, "We have a location,"
so they took us to Brooklyn, to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station.
There is a place where the train is actually running under us.
There's a midsection, that's the place we went to.
The first time we walked in, we were with Martin Scorsese, Quincy Jones,
myself and Michael, and we're walking through there,
and Michael goes, "Wow, this is great.
"Yeah, it looks real. Look, there's even some pee stains over there.
"Wow, it's really nasty, yeah, that's great."
Well, even if we catch them with the last two steps.
No, that's OK. That's OK. Oh, sure, because he's hiding as well.
It's ideal if we don't see it.
And then we come back, and he's hiding.
He's frozen again, that would be great if we could do that.
FOOTSTEPS
- That move is in Taxi Driver. - Yeah, I like... Yeah, I like that.
Right, let's go again, same thing. Same thing.
Speak. 19, Kansas, take five. And action.
Give me a quarter. Run, move, go! Run!
Cut.
I mean, there was a moment there with the old man,
when he said, "Gimme a quarter."
Give me a quarter. Run! Go! Run!
And the guy... Something happened, sort of hurt his arm a little bit.
- No, no, it's all right. It's all right. - What can we do?
We're going to take care of it. I promise you it won't happen.
No, please, do it in the same way, I mean, it has to be done in that way.
The only time Michael really became, I think, very,
very concerned was at that moment, where he begged me,
"Please don't do another take on the guy.
"I didn't want to hurt anybody." I mean, really begged me.
I said, "No, no, no, it's all right. Actually it's all very good."
"Please, I beg you." It was true, we did have it, so...
You know, I went with that.
That's what I want to see. It's going to be like this.
- He can't touch me though. - No. - He can't touch me.
OK, so just run through the lines this way.
That's the way it's going down. Huh? That's it?
Well, you ain't down with us! You ain't bad, you ain't bad at all.
LAUGHTER
You know, Wesley's talking to him, and Wesley's got this fierce
kind of profile and everything like that, and it's almost like
I felt scared from Michael, like he was going to get eaten.
I was so happy to see Michael Jackson being tough.
I was so happy to see him in what seemed like regular surroundings.
I think I was a little bit caught off guard, because it was
like Michael talking, Michael sort of being very rough, a little bit.
I don't know if he was trying to reaffirm his connection with
the black community, or what he was trying to do, but it was successful.
It's one shot. Whatever is best for him.
Whatever is good to him at this point, it's only one shot.
The thing is also, when he drops down into it.
And everybody starts surrounding him.
If we drop down in front of the three guys the opposite way,
the three guys will be in the way of the camera.
What I didn't realise is that, you know,
I have this like earnest social drama, and all of a sudden it's
going to end in this choreographed big song, and it was like, "Huh?"
Oh, I remember this, yeah.
Now, the thing is... Oh, this is pretty much, you know...
What are you going to do, dance us to death? I think he says...
What, y'all going to dance us to death?
You got to be kidding me.
He probably was going to dance them to death.
Because you ain't saying nothing here. Raise up.
I think the Bad moment, outfit wise,
was far more influential than the Thriller moment.
Like, the Thriller moment might have been more iconic,
but Bad was more influential.
So, I like almost dress like that today.
When everybody's out, they're all staring, and the pipe breaks.
- Yeah, right. - Everybody looks.
So, what's up?
We're going to hold that a while.
Michael was very interested in incorporating body popping
into his videos.
So, he feels like the dancers themselves know more
about what we're doing, so he chose to use the street dancers
to co-choreograph the videos with him.
♪ I'm giving you on count of three
♪ To show your stuff or let it be... ♪
Now hit those little things like - boom!
Do the little moves, those little up rhythms.
He would work with the dancers in the daytime, but me and Casper
would go up to the Helmsley Palace hotel and work with Michael
at night, and we'd be working to 2.30, 3 in the morning.
And, you know, we'd take turns creating different things,
making different things happen, and then he'd get in there,
and he do his thing, I'd get in to do my thing,
and we would take turns doing that.
It wasn't like a dance-off, like competing against each other,
but like pushing each other, inspiring each other,
and pushing each other to the next limit.
So at first it was myself and Casper and Michael only,
then after I got hold of Gregg Burge,
and Gregg Burge started coming over to the rehearsals with us
as well. And we were just gelling, just coming up with ideas,
so there was nothing constructive yet.
♪ You know I'm bad, I'm bad Come on... ♪
- I know people made a lot of, "What's a shamone?" - Shamone.
Shamone is basically his hat nod to Mavis Staples.
♪ Shamone, shamone. ♪
He could have went with James Brown, and being like, "Lookee here,"
or Marvin Gaye and "Hoooo!"
I love the fact that he played that homage to one of
the under-championed soul singers of her day.
♪ Shamone, shamone, shamone... ♪
Michael has this scooting move, where he scooting forward.
That's a Michael signature step.
I said, "Michael, that has never been done in a group before.
"Could you imagine if all of us
"were scooting across the camera like that?"
So now it's looking like a train, "chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka..."
with a group of us doing it. And it worked out beautifully.
♪ You're throwing stones to hide your hands
♪ Well, they say the sky's the limit
♪ And to me that's really true
♪ And my friends you have seen nothing
♪ Just wait till I get through
♪ Because I'm bad, I'm bad Shamone... ♪
Were you familiar with the Michael Jackson "grab the crotch"?
No, I was not familiar with that at all!
It's all through the whole piece.
The whole thing, it's all throughout.
Within the moves, it's right, I mean, what can I say?
- The way he's moving. - But it was a surprise, though, right?
Yes, it was, yeah.
♪ You know I'm bad, I'm bad
♪ You know it
♪ You know I'm bad, I'm bad
♪ You know it, you know... ♪
He took what was formatted as a choreography,
and he learned it to the point where he could break out of it when
he wanted to, and get right back into it, without skipping a beat.
Michael would just spin and snap out of it, and grab himself, "Hooooo!"
We never knew any of this was going to happen,
and that goes to show you his genius.
What makes one go out and mug a person?
I mean, there's so much involved in a person who does that.
Insecurities, frustration, resentment, all of these things.
In one movement, I had him lifting the leg up, with that feeling
of wanting to fly, like we all want to do, we want to fly, and the
next movement, it's just anger, and the next movement, its tenderness.
Michael's seen West Side Story.
Michael knows Jerome Robbins' choreography, I mean, I know
he does, because that's where that looked like it came from, to me.
Gregg, he contributed, because he's a technical dancer, you know,
he's into jazz, and stuff like that, so all the really
West Side Story-looking stuff is what Gregg put into the piece.
I tried to keep some street stuff in it.
HE GRUNTS
You see those type of moves in there.
♪ You know I'm bad, I'm bad
♪ Shamone
♪ You know I'm bad, I'm bad... ♪
- The crane down... - Oh, yeah.
Low ceiling, I mean, the ceiling was low.
♪ You know, you know Come on
♪ And the whole world has to answer right now
♪ When I tell you once again... ♪
- There it is. - Oh, my God!
I get that it wasn't funny, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Something my daughter, when she saw this, she said,
"Dad, you were in jail?" I said, "No, no, no, no!"
It was my intention to make this dance move throughout this
subway, I wanted things to move.
The big issue of course, ultimately, was for such a master of dancing,
the concern was to show from head to toe.
I had to try and convince him
that I think the camera moves could work all together.
♪ And the whole world has to answer right now
♪ When I tell you once again Who's bad? ♪
It does come back at the end to a reality in which they split.
And of course, it's all summed up, which is an interesting idea,
that Jackson came up with, to do what he calls a breakdown.
A breakdown which turned out to be in the tradition of a preacher,
doing a sermon. And we did that three cameras, live.
And Michael goes, "OK, guys, I want you to just follow me."
I think I had to be one of the only singers in the group,
because a lot of the guys were studying dance.
- Who's bad? ALL: - Who's bad?
Oh, my God, it was church, it was James Brown.
If any place reaffirmed him, or if he was trying to reaffirm to
people who he was, and where his roots were...
HE SCREAMS FOLLOWED BY BACKING SINGERS
And the soulfulness that he has, and frankly,
the blackness that he was, it is those last 30 seconds...
- # You know - You know
- # You know it - You know it
- # You know - You know
- # You know it - You know it... #
- Sometimes he lost us, you know... - HE GARBLES SPEECH
THEY CHANT
"So, guys, naaa, naaa, na..."
- # Ask your mother - Your mother
- # Ask your sister - Your sister
- # Ask me - Ask me
- # You've been doing wrong - You've been doing wrong
- # You're doing wrong - You're doing wrong
- # You're doing me wrong - You're doing me wrong
- # You're doing wrong - You're doing wrong... #
And this is something that he envisioned,
and he was feeling, and it finally got to that...
HE HISSES
So, that's the way it goes down, hey?
There was a lot of talk at first of doing a different thing,
maybe everyone smiling, and being happy with it.
18 apple, take three.
And action.
Yo, it's cool, all right.
I mean, there ain't no hard feelings or nothing.
But then I just said, "It just doesn't seem to work."
The fellas have to more or less except him,
and they accept them, and they go their own way, that's it.
Last week Michael Jackson re-entered human history,
to gladden mankind with his latest album,
thus triggering a wave of media silliness and cross-promotion.
CBS television let off the festival of foolishness Monday night.
IT broadcast a half-hour special on Jackson and his new album.
I mean, when that video comes on Monday night,
everyone's going to be glued to their TV screen,
with their friends saying,
"did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see that?"
It was before the age of the internet, I mean,
the most that I could do was call somebody else's house
to have three-way, who called another friend to have three-way,
like seven of us watched this short film, one three-way, in dead silence.
I was just transfixed in front of the TV.
We took all the documentary footage we could find on Michael,
from the very early stages, when he joined Motown records,
it ended with a video clip of him in London,
with hundreds of girls screaming and yelling, and we put this rumble
track underneath the screaming and yelling to really enhance it.
It was just like this with the Beatles.
And Michael just loved this comment
by this woman of comparing him to the Beatles.
He lit up when he saw that, he just turned to me from the chair
and said, "I love it, Larry. I love it."
If you saw it, you witnessed one of the great bold-faced
masterpieces of promotional hype in this hype-splattered decade.
This video is sending out some
very strange and mixed signals, social signals,
the cry for some critical analysis in the media.
Some people in the press got down on it because,
firstly they were making fun of Michael Jackson in it,
and then some people got onto the note of, "Is this racist?
"Are you exploiting a tragedy for the sake of a music entertainment?"
You know, Marty's in Morocco,
Quincy Jones is on the red carpet somewhere
and I'm the idiot in Long Island that getting all the calls.
"No, it's not racist, what are you talking about?!" Freaking out, like a good liberal.
There was a ballad that was released,
the first track from Thriller, which was a duet with Paul McCartney.
He duplicated that by doing a duet with Siedah Garrett.
25 years ago, I sat at this very spot,
and played this very piano to record I Just Can't Stop Loving You.
MICHAEL: I just wanna lay next to you for a while.
You look so beautiful tonight.
Your eyes are so lovely.
Your mouth is so sweet.
A lot of people misunderstand me.
That's because they don't know me at all.
I just want to touch you.
And hold you.
I need you.
God, I need you.
I Just Can't Stop Loving You is an interesting song
because it's the first single released off the album,
and so the firing squad was ready.
They would have ripped anything apart because they were ready,
they were ready to attack whatever he threw out there.
In spite of that, it goes number one.
To me, I Can't Stop Loving You is like,
close to his Burt Bacharach song.
It was actually intended as a duet with Whitney Houston.
This award honours you for your consistent artistic
and technical excellence in all forms of video
and for raising the standard of the art form to new horizons.
- Thank you, Whitney. - You're welcome.
To all the fans around the world, thank you very much, and I love you.
So Arista Records says, "We don't want Whitney to be over-exposed."
Clive Davidson!
CHUCKLING
When I see Clive, I'm going to give him hell.
Just kidding, just kidding, everybody calm down.
I remember when it came out I was really disappointed
because I was like, you're going to put out a slow song
after this whole run of Thriller and all these songs,
you're going to put out a slow song?
Come on, this is the big comeback. Where's the music video?
And who's that girl singing?
I only later found out it was Siedah Garrett.
And there weren't very many people in the studio.
It was just Michael, Quincy, Bruce Swedien and me.
And Quincy just sort of over his shoulder said,
"Hey, Sid, you like the song?"
And I'm going, "Yeah." Knitting. "Yeah, I like it."
He said, "You think you can sing it?" I'm like, "Yeah."
So I walked in this room and I see these two mic stands
and there's music sheets on the mic stands
and in the moment that I saw the music sheets where it said,
"Michael, Siedah, Michael, Siedah," that was the moment I realised,
oh, my God, I'm doing a duet with Michael Jackson!
♪ I hear your voice now
♪ You are my choice now
♪ The love we bring
♪ Heaven's in my heart
♪ At your call, I hear harps
♪ And angels sing. ♪
I'm singing, my eyes are closed, # You know how I... #
And Michael started tossing, I think it was popcorn.
I'm singing, my eyes closed and I'm feeling this,
and then Quincy, all Quincy sees is me, you know,
he said, "Sid, this is studio time, you're wasting time, Siedah,
"you're wasting an expensive studio."
And Michael is cracking up.
I Just Can't Stop Loving You started at 3am.
That's one of those you get the phone call to wake up
and, "We need to record right now."
And we were done probably in an hour and a half.
On the album version of I Just Can't Stop Loving You,
you make some very strong sensuous remarks to a woman
that you're lying next to.
- I was in a bed when I was doing that. - Really? - Yeah.
I was lying in bed, the cover and everything.
♪ At night when the stars shine
♪ I pray in you I'll find
♪ A love so true
♪ When morning awakes me
♪ Will you come and take me?
♪ I'll wait for you
♪ You know how I feel
♪ I won't stop until
♪ I hear your voice saying "I do"
♪ I do
♪ This thing can't go wrong
♪ This feeling so strong
♪ My life ain't worth living if I can't be with you. ♪
When I was recording my bits, I didn't need any charts,
I would just listen to the demo,
really, internalise the parts that way
and in talking a little bit with Michael and getting his wishes across, musically,
I just translate all that and play it.
♪ Hee-hee-hee, won't you, girl. ♪
APPLAUSE
I was slated to be on the Bad tour.
I was convinced by my record company and other people
that I needed to do a record cos the duet had just come out.
I'd rehearsed with them for a week
when I decided I wanted to do my record so I pulled out.
♪ At night when the stars shine
♪ I pray that I'll find
♪ A love so true. ♪
The band used to bet on whether Michael was getting excited
during the song. Now...
- Singing to you? - Yeah. I say that's a stretch.
♪ I'll wait for you
♪ You know how I feel
♪ I won't stop until... ♪
Working with Michael and doing the duet is really, it's intense.
Every time we do that, it's a different experience, you know.
And he draws you in so much and just singing a song into his eyes
and having him look at you, it's really exciting.
♪ This feeling so strong
BOTH: # My life ain't worth living
BOTH: # If I can't be with you
♪ I just can't stop loving you
♪ Oh! I just can't stop loving you
♪ And if I stop, tell me just what will I do?
♪ I just can't stop loving you. ♪
Michael Jackson has such a great instinct for the groove,
like the groove in Michael Jackson, he was rocking at all times,
he could hear the groove.
So if you take that groove and you put it to orchestration,
it makes it bigger, it makes it more powerful.
Quincy Jones/Michael Jackson collaboration was historic.
It was a match made in heaven because first of all,
there was a tremendous amount of mutual respect.
There is no-one in popular music history like Quincy,
as an orchestrator, as a composer.
Coming from all of his background, Count Basie,
Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, playing trumpet in Lionel Hampton's band.
The most beautiful part about the love affair, and that's what it is,
the love affair between a producer, whatever you want to call it,
the person that's on the other side,
a person that loves that artist enough to never want to see him in trouble,
and only wants to see the best for that artist,
to come up with the best results,
is an incredible trust, where you can say,
"Jump, Michael, there's no parachute, there's no net,
"there's nothing there, there's 34 stories down, jump."
One of the great things about Quincy is that he has this ability
of mixing all kinds of different genres
and personalities into one beautiful blend.
Because he only uses the best, the creme de la creme of musicians.
Working with Quincy was like being at school.
I learned so much about separation,
in trying to make a record where everyone,
he used to say, "Everybody can't come in the door at the same time."
And he used to always say, "You can't polish doo-doo."
You can't polish doo-doo. You know, you've got to have a great song at the beginning.
When we look at the end of a day and I have goosebumps,
and Michael has goosebumps and Bruce Swedien, the engineer, has goosebumps,
then I think we've got something special.
And Quincy just puts his little fairy dust over it
and it's a Quincy Jones project and it's kind of, as he says,
"Leave space for God to walk through the door and create some magic."
Michael Jackson had been into champagne music.
You know how in St Tropez when you order champagne
they bring the sparklers out with the champagne? Michael saw that 20 years ago ahead and made a sound.
Michael Jackson made the sound of fabulous. Him and Quincy.
And Michael was one of those sources of energy where he brought so much,
so much originality but also an amazing collaborator.
He's so disciplined and he's got that perfect balance
of soul and science. He knows the working parts of his craft.
And he has total trust in an intuitive part of his craft,
and so that's the balance. The head and heart.
Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad.
They created three hurricanes that basically went through the globe
and everybody got caught up and danced.
Well, we're here today to try to finish up a session
with Michael Jackson singing in Spanish and in French.
We've spoken about this for years and years,
from when we were doing Off The Wall and we were doing Thriller,
but we never got around to it because by the time
we finished the album, we'd do disco versions and we'd do videos et cetera
and I think inside we weren't really sure whether we could make it work.
♪ Como la briza... ♪
The one thing I didn't think was possible
was just to do a translation of the song.
- Word for word, you mean, right? - Yes.
So what I said was, "Let me understand the song
"and I'll be as close as I can to what the song was about."
♪ Tu me haces sentir
♪ Deseos de vivir
♪ Junto a ti por siemp're
♪ Tu amor es mi suerte. ♪
One more. I think I need more level in the phones,
like I'm drowning the track out.
It was a privilege for me to watch the way he performed
and the way he handled this.
He felt perhaps a bit vulnerable.
I'm sorry. You can continue. Here we go.
When you control the whole thing,
all of a sudden now somebody's telling you how to do something
in a language that is not yours, and so you are vulnerable.
And I made it my main effort to make him feel comfortable,
not to feel that I was in any way mocking him because it's not easy.
This is the first time he ever tried to do anything in Spanish that I know of.
I wanted Michael to sound like, you don't know who that is.
The pronunciation was so good,
that...I was stunned.
♪ Y cuando no estas
♪ No hay felicidad. ♪
Both of them: "Mi vida no es vida."
My life is not a life. Si tu te vas, if you leave.
♪ Si tu te vas. ♪
Todo me amor eres tu - all my love, you are all my love.
♪ Todo mi amor eres tu. ♪
When people found out that Michael Jackson had sung a song in Spanish,
they were very, very, very proud and happy.
Well, The Hayvenhurst studio is located in a guest house here
at the Jacksons' property, at their home,
and the studio was used for recording demos
and I worked with Michael recording and developing his ideas, his songs,
his arrangements, his productions for the Bad album.
Over a two, three year period of time,
it was just a non-stop work in progress.
The number of demos that we worked on for Bad was 60, maybe 65 demos.
When I received the demos, they were in really good shape at that time.
I guess I didn't realise at the time but what we were doing
was we were forming the B team.
Quincy always called his team the A-Team. His engineer, Bruce Swedien...
John Robinson on drums...
- ..arranger Jerry Hayes... - ..Nathan East on bass...
Keyboards would have been Greg Phillinganes.
I started with Michael here at Hayvenhurst.
We were the kind of initial team which was John Barnes,
myself, Michael, Bill Bottrell, Chris Currell.
And then at times other musicians would come in,
most prominent would be David Williams, who is no longer with us.
And in some ways I think Michael kind of liked that vibe.
He kind of liked the vibe of, you know, having a little competition
to see who could come up with the best thing.
I think this is one of the things that he learned from his Motown days,
something he learned from Berry Gordy.
We weren't making demos, we were making records.
Anybody else would be perfectly happy
to accept a Michael demo as a finished record,
let me put it that way.
We would work every single day on creating individual sounds for songs
that were going to ultimately be on the record.
We'd record them, re-record them, different keys,
different speeds, different instrumentation,
and so that became kind of an experiment in how far can we push.
Michael would say, "You know, it starts in this very room."
And from this room it goes out and it spreads over the entire world.
It's...quite an experience to be back here,
at Hayvenhurst studio,
just as it was when I last left it, almost 25 years ago.
DOG BARKS
We never knew what we were going to do when we showed up.
If Michael was inspired, we followed it.
So this is Michael singing multiple harmony parts.
This is Michael double-tracking, the mid, the low, the high parts.
There is actually ten tracks of Michael singing his own backgrounds on this song.
♪ The way you make me feel
♪ You really turn me on
♪ You knock me off my feet. ♪
You can hear the difference in sound quality from being out here
in the music room, to walking into the bathroom.
Now this room was one of Michael's favourite places
because of the nature of the surfaces in this room.
One of the things that we would do is we would record with the door to the shower open,
much more reflective, a lot of what we call early reflection,
a lot of brightness, a lot of reinforcement to how things sound.
HUMMING AND SCATTING AN APPROXIMATION OF THE LYRICS
♪ I like the style of your walk your talk, your dress
♪ I feel your fever from miles around
♪ I'll pick you up...
♪ ..paint the town
♪ Just kiss me baby and tell me twice
♪ That you're... ♪ I know this part!
♪ The way you make me feel. ♪
Ha, I know that!
♪ It really turns me o-o-on
♪ Knocking me off of my feet now, baby
♪ Lonely days are gone. ♪
I met with Quincy, Quincy Jones and Frank,
to find out what they were looking for in the video.
And they said, basically, we want to take Michael to another level,
especially with his relationships with women.
And then I talked to Michael and I said, "Where do you want it to happen?" He said, "Skid Row."
We wrote a long prequel, just like they did in Bad.
- I contacted August Wilson. - Yeah?! - Yeah.
Cos I'm from Pittsburgh and so was he.
- What did August say? - No. He said no.
I did this little documentary about the guys on the street,
real, real stuff, and showed it to Michael.
He looked at it and actually said,
"Can we make the video look like this?" Because it was all handheld and jerky.
And I said, "If that's what you want. You're sure you want that?" He said, "yeah."
Get out of here, man!
Check out that rear end! Whoo!
Don't touch my head! No!
You're acting like a little tramp!
And we actually used real gang members in the video.
We had the V13s down here on this corner
and the Crips on this corner, and some of the guys were smoking
and Michael came and he said, "Jo, the guys are smoking down there.
"It's kind of bothersome." And I just turned and said,
"Will you fucking guys quit fucking smocking?!"
And Michael, he almost panicked, he almost hid behind me
because this is all these gang members,
we had cops everywhere, though. It wasn't a problem.
Hey!
When he sees the girl, he did a thing with his fingers going...
FINGERS CLICKING
It happened once, my brother was operating the camera and caught it. I said, "Oh, my God, thank God."
Michael had the best-sounding fingers, didn't he?
I don't remember which song it is,
but on Bad he has a credit for finger snaps.
One of the most amazing moments that I remember was Michael walking,
walking, walking, and catches up to Tatyana,
and sings for the first time...
♪ You knock me off of my feet now, baby, hoo!
Everything stopped. We had to stop shooting because people just froze.
They actually froze.
♪ Hoo! ♪
To play a shuffle like that for 12 minutes is not easy.
Michael's mother, she has this song in mind.
She says, "Michael, you've got to come up with a song
"that has this real shuffling kind of rhythm."
And Michael says, "OK, I'll see what I can come up with."
Shuffles have a unique rhythm. Most songs you hear are kind of linear.
Shuffles have an extra rhythmic element going on.
You can have a cowbell underneath the backbeat to reinforce the sound.
None of the backbeat that you hear on that album
is going to have just a basic, typical snare drum sound.
I recorded the drums on a wooden platform.
It minimises what is called secondary pick-up,
which is where the other mics in the room
pick up from those sound sources.
And then we got the idea,
why doesn't Michael stand on that when he sings?
And he did, and it sounds glorious.
♪ Hey, pretty baby with the high heels on
♪ You give me fever like I've never ever known... ♪
This was my first album ever as a little girl.
I cried and cried to my mom, begged her to please buy this for me.
I would play this like crazy, and dance with it.
I mean, this was a dream come true. This was something I had fantasised
and dreamed about since I was five or six years old.
♪ You're the one for me
♪ The way you make me feel... ♪
The girl that we finally chose, Tatiana, wasn't in my first five.
I didn't like her.
And I showed Frank DiLeo, his manager, the casting tape
and he said, "That girl's running around with Prince.
"If Michael finds out, he'll be upset.
"And that girl's running around with so-and-so,
"I'm not going to name names."
He said, "I can't say." Cos it was Quincy Jones.
I think. As I remember.
She seemed physically to be the female version of Michael Jackson.
There may have been, in his head, an interesting idea about,
"Wow! This is almost kind of my perfect complement."
♪ I like the feelin' you're givin' me
♪ Just hold me, baby and I'm in ecstasy
♪ Oh, I'll be workin' from 9 to 5... ♪
She was the finest thing around at that time. I wanted to be Michael.
I wanted to be Michael, walking right beside her,
standing on cars and being... I wanted to be Michael that day.
♪ Promise, baby, you'll love me for ever more
♪ I swear I'm keepin' you satisfied
♪ Cos you're the one for me
- # The way you make me feel - The way you make me feel
- # You really turn me on - You really turn me on
♪ You knock me off of my feet now... ♪
I first got hooked up with Quincy through a band I was playing in,
in Los Angeles, called Seawind.
We were playing at a club.
Quincy, always being at the forefront of finding new talent,
heard about us as a horn section, called up one night.
"Jerry, this is Quincy Jones." "What?"
"Yeah, you want to play on a record?" "Of course."
"You want to do an arrangement?" "Oh...OK."
He said, "And how about tomorrow?"
And that was kind of the beginning
of this 30-plus year relationship with Quincy.
Our horn players are two saxophone players,
Kim Hutchcroft and Larry Williams. The trumpet player, Gary Grant.
The trombone player, Bill Reichenbach.
Vamp out.
MUSIC: "The Way You Make Me Feel"
Again, two trumpets, two saxes.
The day of the audition, I wore a dance skin,
a black dress with boots and bracelets, bangles,
which was kind of like my signature thing at the time.
And I heard that Michael liked my look.
He liked the whole style of what I had done, so he kept that.
We created a complete look for her.
Hair extensions, we changed her make up completely.
I had two dresses at that time. One was pink, one was black.
And the black one was kind of reminiscent of a Tatiana dress.
That's the way I was living.
♪ Go on, girl
♪ Go on
♪ Ow!
♪ Go on, girl
♪ Oooh!
♪ Ooh! ♪
The Way You Make Me Feel video, um, you know, when he's chasing
the girl around, that was kind of how I pictured my Baby video.
We kind of based it off of that.
In my video, you can see I'm in a bowling alley
but it's kind of like a modern version.
I'm chasing her around, trying to get her to like me.
♪ The way you make me feel
♪ You really turn me good... ♪
Mike called me and said, "I told Joe Pytka,
"who's directing it, that I wasn't doing any dancing.
"But the more I listen to it, I think I want to put some dancing in there.
"Could you go to a studio and work on some stuff,
"then I'll come in and join you."
Joe came in to see, heard this music going on
and was like, "What the heck's going on in here?"
I see this beautiful piece being choreographed,
but the idea that I'd had for the video didn't have a place for that.
We had to very quickly improvise where to put that.
That's where the fire hydrant idea came from.
HE SCREAMS
♪ The way you make me feel
♪ You really turn me on
♪ You knock me off my feet...♪
Fans were always bombarding me with the question,
"Why does he chase you throughout the video only for a hug and not a kiss?"
Joe Pytka, the director, he whispered in my ear right before the
very last scene where we hug, and he told me, he said, "Don't kiss him."
I thought the kiss was too corny.
I'm not even sure I wanted him to get that close.
I wanted him to maybe stop like here.
But it worked out with the caress and the hug.
He says, "Because you were originally supposed to kiss,
"but Michael is too shy for that so don't kiss him."
When Michael did finally come out and we got close and we hugged,
I could smell like a minty, minty fresh scent from his breath.
< That was a signal!
I kind of think he came prepared but...
Being told not to kiss him, and that he couldn't handle it,
he was too shy, I didn't want to take advantage like that.
Oh, listen, Tatiana was not shy. She was not a shy girl.
And in fact, going on with this story is little bit,
she was told, "Definitely don't kiss Michael onstage."
He was complaining she'd become too aggressive on stage and everything.
I made a joke, "Is this going to be X-rated, this thing?"
I said, "Michael, why don't you just go fuck her? Fuck her one night.
"Get it over with."
He started laughing and Frank said, "What the hell are you doing?
"I've got enough Goddamn trouble without you trying to get him
"involved with this girl."
But for me, it became policy because I said,
"OK, if Michael doesn't kiss in the video,
"I don't think anybody should kiss in the video."
So since that day, I always edit out kisses in videos
and one in particular, Justin Bieber made a video.
He was going to kiss the girl and I went crazy.
And I went crazy, A - because he wanted to kiss the girl,
and B - she was a black girl.
And I was like, "OK, you're about to mess up your whole thing, man."
HE LAUGHS
Oh, oh, look, Granny. It-it's...
Ah...it's-it's... Mmm...mmm...ah! M-M-M...
Mantovani?
No. Michael Jackson!
ALL: Michael Jackson!
Speed Demon is a song that maybe people aren't as familiar with
on the album, but actually serves as a metaphor for the entire album.
Because what Michael is trying to do with this album is escape,
escape from all the things that are confining him,
all the things that are suffocating him.
There he is! Hey, buddy, how about an autograph?
THEY LAUGH
Would you autograph my tummy? THEY LAUGH
Speed Demon was my song.
I'm a percussionist and that song was 100% syncopated adrenaline.
In the James Brown mode of rhythm arrangement where you use
instruments as percussion.
♪ Speed Demon
♪ Speed Demon... ♪
It was pretty much clay-mation, you know,
matted into live action settings. It was a real mix.
The whole idea of that music video, that short,
was really to merge live action and clay-mation together.
There was one place in the story where, you know,
he turns into our character Spike Rabbit,
you know, as a way to sort of get away from the paparazzi and so forth.
Our Spike character wanders through in this incredible chase,
but when they come back and they separate, they separate like this and
so Spike's still there and Michael's right there and they do a duet.
A little dance thing.
So we had to make Spike Rabbit dance right alongside Michael.
That was really, really fun because, for one thing,
we had to work out the choreography between what he was going to do
and how we were going to do it, and figure out exactly how the
moves were going to work, and work it right to the music and so on.
Instead of easing into it, maybe just really hit it. Full load.
I wish I could. I feel so limited. This stuff is so tight on me.
Upon finishing with Speed Demon, he called up one day,
he got around to saying how much he loved the California Raisin
commercials, so I realised where he was going.
And I said, "Michael, you should be a raisin."
"Yeah!"
'Will, I really need you to call me pertaining to the backup guys,
'the character's got to be much stronger.
'It doesn't hit it right on.
'This is very important. Thank you. Bye.'
The rap raisins materialising behind me,
I want to define their character.
And from his expression, which is 99% of it.
The one guy has the glasses, and he has the type of attitude that
he's so cool that I'm fortunate that he's here.
And he's much too cool for, like, one of these.
And the other one is like a sarc...sarcasm.
It's like, "What you looking at?"
The other raisin would be this style. No glasses.
So his eyes are most of the expression. Like...
Like that.
♪ I heard it through the grapevine
♪ Raised in the California sunshine
♪ Heard it through the grapevine, baby
Michael!
♪ Oooh
♪ And I think I'm about to lose my mind
♪ Oooh!
HE GASPS
Wow! Must have been something I ate.
Right now on the decks I have the 12-inch single to Liberian Girl
and Run DMC's beats to Sucka MCs.
It sounds something like this.
INTRO TO LIBERIAN GIRL
Quincy wanted some kind of African little intro thing here.
So this was Michael Boddicker on synth
and all these effects
are kind of giving an African sunrise sort of thing.
♪ Naku penda piya-naku taka piya-mpenziwe.
HE MIXES TRACKS
I mean, people underestimated how radical that was.
Nobody else was writing songs about African women
as beautiful in 1987-1988.
- It's so nice to see you again. - Nice to see you too.
I've had the time of my life here. I'd had so much fun.
I hate to leave.
Here's the biggest pop star in the world,
who quote-unquote is making himself look white, and yet he's very
engaged with beauty and the idea of Africa as a site of beauty.
It's just speaks to the fact that Michael had a very strong
African consciousness. He went to Africa a lot.
He was very engaged with the continent.
Is there a Liberian girl in your life?
No. I wrote that at my house, in the game room.
I guess I was playing some pinball or something.
And the song just popped into my head.
I think I ran upstairs, put it on tape and it became Liberian Girl.
When it was created, it just happened like lightning.
It was just an instant thing.
Normally, it took a lot of time to put things together.
That one happened in three or four hours.
I'm a great believer in sonic fantasy.
Not sonic reality.
Sonic fantasy means creating a soundscape that exists
only in your imagination. That only you can see.
So I could see these incredible soundscapes, and I thought...
Liberian Girl?
- Liberian girl is... - My man!
..Is a perfect example.
I did a little synth work on that.
That part right there.
And it's got a little bird thing happening there on the end of it.
Quincy said, "Give me some of that bird stuff, Boddicker."
That's got a little bit of it. The next time is even more so.
So...there's this part that I wrote.
I played drums Speed Demon, Liberian Girl.
That was good, Liberian Girl was a fun song to do
because everyone would always ask me,
"Why did Michael write a song about a lady working in a library?"
Yeah, there's a little sexy lady behind the counter with
the glasses and the pencil in her hair.
Then she drops her hair and does that thing.
I thought that's what he was talking about.
HE LAUGHS
No, that's not...
That was just...he thought that was the funniest thing he's ever heard.
The video for Liberian Girl is probably the point where
they may have run over budget.
It just has a bunch of celebrities
that are waiting for Michael to show up.
♪ With two lovers in a scene
♪ And she says, "Do you love me?"
♪ And he says so endlessly
♪ "I love you, Liberian girl"... ♪
Michael was not in Liberian Girl
because I think he got tired of making videos.
I was talking to Walter Yetnikoff about it and he said,
"You've got to get him in the video."
So I called up Michael and said,
"You've got to be in this video someplace."
And he goes, "OK, I have an idea."
And he goes, "You got one take. You got 15 minutes."
One sec. Just let me tell you when I'm ready. One sec.
- Ready? - Almost.
And he got in the chair, they raised it up in the air, and said, "Action!"
Action!
HE GIGGLES
OK, everybody. That's a wrap.
Cut!
They didn't even shut the engine off.
They got out of the car, no make up, got in the chair.
It was one take. In, out, and Michael left.
HE MAKES NOISES
I'm going to mock myself.
♪ I watch you on the floor
♪ Cheek to cheek
♪ She's getting to you
♪ You didn't see her eyes on me, no... ♪
More time, please.
How did Just Good Friends make that album? Well...
Michael or Stevie could've written a better song.
- Exactly. - Taken something from their back catalogue.
An album should be built with peaks and valleys.
Michael Jackson with Bad actually tried to achieve 11 peaks.
I believe that in Michael's head everything had to hit you
out the box, and absolutely become a monstrous single.
And because they were attempting to go for the single,
and the summit meeting between two former child prodigies
from the Motown school, that you expected fireworks.
You know, Just Good Friends just wound up being a little
coffee break in between Liberian Girl and Another Part Of Me.
I think there was a lot that did exist at that point that
would have been...as strong or stronger.
I mean, his vault has got to be staggering.
- My man Stevie wonder. - I mean, unbelievable talent.
And he's another worker like that.
He'd be working and recording every day.
I had on my album that I wanted him to do...my character's album,
which was Get It.
So we sort of both did each other a favour, favour, favour.
But I made sure the song he did of mine I wrote.
HE LAUGHS
Yeah.
♪ My baby love me
- # I'm her doggone lover - You don't know... #
That one, we couldn't get the right song.
I know I didn't have the right song so...
If somebody says that didn't work, I know it didn't work.
- # Hoo-hooo! - Doot-Do-Do-Doo
- # Hoo-hooo! - Doot-Do-Do-Doo... #
- It's starting to get stinky now. - I can just punch that part in.
Excuse me? Great.
Can we go home?
- Is that it? - I just ran off, didn't I?
Another Part Of Me. My favourite cut on the Bad album.
All the instruments incorporated in that song,
as well as just his vocals, nobody can kind of, you know, teach that.
I think that's just natural.
So whatever he was on at that time, when he was just like,
"Yo, I'm in this. I feel this. I need to do this."
Like, I just think that's his blessing.
The song itself actually wasn't going to make it onto the album
because he'd recorded it earlier.
And he actually preferred a song called Streetwalker.
♪ Pretty baby I got kisses for you, lover
♪ I really get it when you're next to me... ♪
The litmus test is always, what song gets Michael dancing?
So when Quincy saw Michael dancing all round the studio to
Another Part Of Me said, "That's what makes this song go on the album."
Michael Jackson's Bad is black music,
dare I say, pop music's first stadium album.
Every song, I can hear it being thought of in his head as,
"This is what I want it to be
"when I perform it in front of 60,000 to 80,000 people."
Hey! Hey! Hey!
SHE SCREAMS
♪ We're taking over
♪ We have the truth
♪ This is a mission
♪ To see it through
♪ Don't point your finger
♪ Not dangerous
♪ This is my planet
♪ You're one of us
♪ We're sending out
♪ A major love
♪ And this is our
- # Message to you - Message to you
♪ The planets are lining up
♪ We're bringing brighter days
♪ They're all in line
♪ Waiting for you
♪ You're just another part of me
♪ Heee-heee
♪ Ow!
♪ Over the nation
♪ Fulfil the truth
♪ The final message
♪ We're bringing to you
♪ There is no danger
♪ Fulfil the truth
♪ So come together
♪ We mean you
♪ I'm sending out
♪ A major love
♪ And this is our
- # Message to you - Message to you
♪ The planets are lining up
♪ We're bringing brighter days
♪ They're all in line
♪ Waiting for you
♪ They're just another part of me
♪ Heee-heee
♪ Ow!
♪ Do-do-do-do
♪ Ow!
♪ Hee-hee-hee!
♪ I'm sending out
♪ A major love
♪ And this is my
- # Message to you - Message to you
♪ The planets are lining up
♪ We're bringing brighter days
♪ They're all in line
♪ Waiting for you
♪ They're just another part of me
♪ Hee-hee!
♪ Ow!
♪ Another part of me
♪ We're taking over
♪ This is my plan, baby
♪ Hee-hee!
♪ Ow!
♪ Another part of me. ♪
People forget that Michael Jackson's a soul singer.
Michael Jackson grew up watching Jackie Wilson,
James Brown and the whole circuit,
so his default move is always to go raw.
- I love Dirty Diana. That's probably one of my favourites. - Why?
Because it's a life story of a groupie,
I hate to say the word groupie but that's what it is,
and it's something that I've experienced
and a lot of people who grew up on the road.
Dirty Diana.
Who knew that one day I would live that song in real life
so many times over.
I like Dirty Diana. I've met her. I've met Dirty Diana many times.
Thank you.
Thank you, Michael, for making that small piece of the soundtrack
to my life on tour.
When we were kids, we thought, "Was he talking about Diana Ross?
"Did he have an affair with Diana Ross?"
No, that wasn't the case at all.
But as kids we didn't know what was going on. Who was Diana?
What she did dirty!
I got a phone call out of the clear blue from Quincy
and I thought somebody was fucking with me.
So he goes, "Um...it's Quincy Jones.
"We're working on Michael's follow-up to Thriller. We've got a rock track."
I'm not a session guitar player, man.
I don't, you know, I'm not that world.
So I said to Quincy, "The only thing I ask is that Michael
"be in the studio and we work together."
He said, "Of course he'll be in the studio. It's his fucking record, man.
"He's going to be in the studio."
I opened up the studio door in Westlake and three guys,
Bruce Swedien, the engineer, Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson,
and the first thing I noticed was Michael had penny loafers on
and they were like pristine and I was like,
"I'll be all right. He's wearing penny loafers."
This is the actual guitar that I recorded Dirty Diana with.
By and large, I'd say it's probably been in the case.
Maybe it's only been opened one time,
I don't really play this kind of guitar that much.
The backing track was about eight minutes long
and as the track is playing down,
Michael is like right here and he's going...
HE SINGS TUNE OF DIRTY DIANA
And he was really adamant there's that little space
on the third phrase, it's a subtle thing
and I didn't catch it right away.
That little thing was
so important to Michael, to catch that little space there.
I was like, "Why is he making such a big thing about it not playing?"
It's brilliant though.
It's as important what you don't play as what you do play.
♪ Dirty Diana, nah
♪ Dirty Diana, no
♪ Dirty Diana... ♪
It's still good.
♪ ..Dirty Diana, nah Dirty Diana, no... ♪
We wanted to do Dirty Diana
and so both videos were to kind of change
the public's perception of who he was.
First one was to get him a girl and the second was to make him
a heavy metal kind of guy.
♪ ...Diana!
♪ Diana...! ♪
The original idea was to have...
The thing finished in a monsoon or a rainstorm.
The second day, we were going to have the whole stage blow away
and have him finish in the rain totally...
The wind and rain and stuff,
and I think we were going to sweep away the audience and everything.
But the first day he was doing these knee slides and didn't put pads on.
He came to me the second day when we were ready for all this rain stuff
and said, "I can't dance any more."
So we couldn't resolve it that way, but it didn't matter.
You see the wind and stuff on the first day,
it starts, and I guess there was going to be a deluge after that.
They didn't even tell me that
It showed up one day and I went, "I can't... Are you kidding?"
Michael always was able to think outside the box of what
black artists were supposed to do and create his own space.
There was this internal mechanism that Michael had when he felt
the music. When the rhythms were right and when the beats were
happening, when the correct emphasis was happening and the syncopation,
he'd have to move, he'd have to dance and when he'd start to dance,
we would know that the balance was correct, the elements had
the right character, the syncopation was hitting in the right fashion.
Michael gave me the music and he said, "Listen,
"don't impose your opinion, or your feelings, or your choreography,
"or your thoughts on the music.
"Let the music talk to you and tell you what it wants to be."
First time we discussed it, he had got these
visions in his mind of what he wanted to do.
The robot, the car, the kids, the drugs.
Every kid in this whole world can take drugs because of me.
And how do we bring it all together into a story that had
a piece in the middle, which was the song and dance.
So we started working on some stuff, it was called Chicago Nights,
which was really Smooth Criminal.
He was a huge fan of Fred Astaire and wanted to make sure
that he paid homage to Fred Astaire in the movie.
"For Criminal Dance, look at all the great dances on tape.
"Study the great and become greater.
"Get all Bob Fosse movie, dances.
"Study these inside out, knowing every cut, move, music etc.
"Flashdance, All That Jazz, Band Wagon, girl hunt..."
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
This is a drawing titled "Criminal Jacket,"
and you can see that he has created the basic outline for the jacket
that he wound up wearing in that short film, including the armband.
And he also made a note to himself that he needed to
get his Kenny shoes now so that he could break them in.
But when it came to style, I showed Michael an all-time favourite
of mine which was The Third Man, because it's sort of gangster-ish.
"We should shoot it in that kind of style,"
and he just loved that style.
And making use of the shadows that they had with that
sort of film noir look.
♪ As he came into the window It was the sound of a crescendo
♪ He came into her apartment
♪ He left the bloodstains on the carpet
♪ She ran underneath the table He could see she was unable
♪ So she ran into the bedroom
♪ She was struck down It was her doom... ♪
There's a story actually that Quincy told me years ago
and what he said was that Michael had the ability to come in, he could
lay down the lead vocal of a track and then he could sit there, listen,
just put the time in and figure out where all the harmonies should go
and then do that, not leave until he had the harmonies right.
When I think of Smooth Criminal, I will just impress again the vocal.
He could sing bass, baritone and tenor,
but he chose to sing mostly tenor.
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. ♪
He goes straight down to bass low C, that is low, that is a bust out
pitch and Michael would go right on down there with vibrato
and clear up to a G above high C.
I mean, that's enormous, that's more than three and a half octaves.
He really didn't want to grow up. He wanted a child's voice
and I always tried to encourage him to use his beautiful speaking voice.
I was in Europe one time and the phone rang and he said,
"Hello," in a perfectly male voice, baritone and I said,
"Michael, why don't you use that."
He said, "I don't like it down there. I like it up there."
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.... ♪
How long you want to stick with this?
I want to be all the way open.
With some of the songs that he was singing,
he needed a much wider vocal range and with the exercises that
Seth Riggs provides for him, it enabled
him to open up his range so he can sing much higher and much lower.
♪ Mah, mah, mah, mah, mah... ♪
I had to make sure he and his voice
was even from bottom to top.
I have some very strange exercises
that are different from most people's,
they're called speech-level singing,
so we started doing these crazy things.
♪ Brrr-brrr-brrr... ♪
♪ Rrr-rrr-rrr... ♪
♪ Gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee... ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh... ♪
Sometimes there is...
♪ Ahhhhh... ♪
I sampled P.Y.T for Good Life.
I actually met him at Leo's house.
He said he liked my voice and then
I think I took that too seriously
and I did a whole singing album. HE LAUGHS
This is the mic that are used on Michael at about this distance
through for all the recordings.
Except one, Earth Song.
- # What about yesterday? - What about us?
- # What about the seas? - What about us? - #
This is actually a mic that is designed for narration recording,
however, I knew that the sound of this mic would work
well with Michael's voice.
♪ Annie, are you OK?
♪ Annie, are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?
♪ Annie, are you OK? Annie, are you OK?
♪ Are you OK, Annie? ♪
I've never quite understood who Annie was and why did it matter
if she was OK or not.
Who is Annie? I never knew that as a kid. Let me know who Annie is.
Over in this corner there was a green fibreglass case
and there was a CPR dummy in the case.
Michael had been given CPR lessons.
The first thing that you do when you're going to administer CPR
is you make a determination of the condition of the victim.
He's about to do CPR on someone, he's like, "Are you OK? Are you OK?"
Wow! Whose life did he think he was going to have to save?
HE LAUGHS
CPR dummies are all named Annie.
He just kept asking was Annie OK?
How many different ways can you say, "Annie, are you OK?"
And he found like 15 different ways to say, "Annie, are you OK?"
It's like, "Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?
"Annie, are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK, Annie? Annie, are you OK?"
It's like, OK, I don't think she's OK.
I've got to be honest, I was never a big fan of that song.
You know, Michael loved it to pieces.
I remember we went to do the video on that, I never heard...
It must have then 135 decibels. Loud! Man, ears were falling off.
We started with maybe like 10 or 12 dancers and he then
introduced me to Jeffrey and he said, "I'd like Jeffrey to be
"part of this and maybe there's some street stuff, because I've been
"working with Jeffrey privately and he is teaching me some staff."
The thing about it is Michael can go out to clubs and hang out
because he's Michael Jackson.
So through me he was picking up what was happening in the hood
and I'm taking it to his gallery over at the Jackson house in Hayvenhurst.
My name is Phyllis Brooks
and I want to direct my question to all you guys.
Who taught you guys your dance steps?
♪ She's gonna really blow your mind... ♪
This one guy I saw on the show, Don Campbell, he changed my life.
He did not dance like everybody else,
he didn't move like everybody else, he was
just walking to the beat, walking. Walking. Walking.
Jump up, stop, stick out his own hand, give him some five,
hunch his shoulders, point it, pop.
And that was locking.
You could see Michael doing like...
You could see him doing those...
He's putting this locking in his...
He was just incorporating little things into his...
Stepping like that, you know.
Funky chicken, that's the funky chicken,
so these dances came from Soul Train too.
Michael Jackson, he loves it,
he loves the locking, he loves the popping.
When you see him on stage and he is ticking,
Michael is deep into the urban contemporary dance because I don't
call it street dance no more. It left the streets years ago.
I'd created movement for Michael from his passage in to his passage out.
There were a couple of places where I said, "OK, you know, Jeffrey,
"why don't you do this? When he comes around the pool table,
"I'd love you to do something here and make this work over here."
I'd got this from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
These gangsters with these gangster hats
and they are all bouncing like this, coming.
I was just trying to capture that kind of animated thing.
OK, here we go, same thing. Boom, boom.
And again right after the hat, I think it's the hand. Boom, boom.
Bang!
Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba!
Bang, bang, boom!
Some of the moves they did...
Maybe you'll find out. I still don't know how they did that thing.
The whole thing with the lean - I had done the lean
in a Paul McCartney movie called Give My Regards To Broad Street.
When I'm on the plane, when we take private jets,
we always, when it's taking off,
we lean forward to try to do the same move as Michael,
so it kind of looks the same!
So what, you want to know how it was done?
Even to this day,
I will reference the Smooth Criminal lean...
..and people instantly know what I'm talking about.
There was a break in Smooth Criminal that was never supposed to be there.
The music breaks down.
Everything gets cool.
They show a cat walking across the piano, the lights go blue.
We did not know about this.
Ssh!
- Oh! O-o-oh! - O-o-o-oh!
For that break in the middle,
he just wanted to let the dancers feel the set.
I mean, we'd been shooting for quite a while by then,
and he just said, you know, "I don't want anything to disturb us,"
and I said, I was shooting five cameras at the time,
plus Jerry had five cameras,
so it was ten cameras shooting
and you know, we didn't know how long it was going to go on for.
- THEY WHISPER: - Annie, are OK? Are you OK, Annie?
Annie, are you OK? So Annie, are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?
- BUILDING: - Annie, are you OK? So Annie, are you OK?
Are you OK, Annie?
Annie, are you OK? So Annie, are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?
Annie, are you OK? So, Annie...
A lot of the songs he writes about being observed,
either from the point of view of, he's the object
or that he becomes the person looking at someone like him,
or the objective person.
♪ Are you OK? Are you OK, Annie?
♪ Annie, are you OK? So Annie, are you OK?
♪ Are you OK, Annie?
♪ Annie, are you OK? So Annie, are you OK?
♪ Are you OK, Annie? You've been hit by... ♪
For someone who grew up in the spotlight,
being watched is a very big part of how you see the world.
This is a guy who
was never not in the newspapers
every single day
being ridiculed, "Wacko Jacko,"
I mean, he's a kid - on the inside, he's a kid.
How that stuff doesn't penetrate you and hurt you, hurt your spirit.
"Michael Jackson's got a shrine to Elizabeth Taylor.
"He's got an amusement park. He's had a lot of facial surgery,"
so I said, "Michael, when you're in the school yard
"and you are the smallest and you get teased a lot,
"it's really only fun to tease you if it bothers you.
"If it doesn't bother you, they move on,
"so why don't we just take all this crap being said about you
"and why don't we say at? Why don't we put it to visuals?"
Leave Me Alone - it was a lot of fun to play that. It had that intro.
But there was also a string part
that kind of played the same thing but was just accenting that...
And he was just kind of saying, "Dig in," you know.
I remember him standing right next to me, going...
See, a lot of people that misunderstand me,
it's because they don't know me.
I guess that's true.
People probably have a lot of crazy stories they read.
You ever want to lash out in any type of way
and say, "Hey, that's not true"?
Yeah, a lot of times.
♪ I don't care what you talking about, baby,
♪ I don't care what you think... ♪
You can see, you know,
how he's starting to feel like he's a spectacle.
In the video, he's tied down.
It's inspired by Gulliver's Travels
and he's tied under a roller coaster
and you see these dogs with corporate suits,
banging the pegs, trying to tie him down
in this big kind of amusement park setting.
I only got a glimpse of what his life must have been like
when I would be in Europe
and our limousines would be attacked by mobs,
with them thinking that Michael was in our limousine
and if that's your initial introduction to the universe,
when you're a five-year-old,
then that has got to inform what you feel like the world is like.
I'm waiting for Michael, and a guy comes up
and I don't see Michael. He goes, "Hi, Jeffrey, how you doing?"
"All right." He says, "Are you ready to start?"
I go, "Yeah," but I'm not looking at Michael.
I'm looking at these bushy eyebrows,
a short Afro wig and these sideburns and this make-up on.
Michael had been out going door-to-door
for his Jehovah's Witnesses. He put on a disguise,
so people wouldn't know Michael Jackson was knocking on their door.
I'm sure some people were slamming the door in his face,
like, "Jehovah's Witness, get out of here!"
Sometimes I want to sneak into places
and not have any hoopla or, you know...
and it doesn't work all the time.
I went to the shrine auditorium
and a guy tapped me on the back
and I turned around and it was an old man.
I said, "What is this?" He said, "It's Michael!"
I said, "Man, you scared the mess out of me!"
I have incredible disguises.
I can fool my own mother
and I enjoy doing it
because I get to see life the way it really is sometimes.
One day, he said, "You know, my brothers are in town
"so I'm going to see them tonight." I said, "That's cool, all right."
So the next day I came onto the set
and Michael goes, "Yeah, I waited for my brothers all night.
"I fixed my hair and everything but they didn't show up."
Sorry this bothers me,
but he said, "I would give anything just to be able to go to a party
"and stand in a corner somewhere,
"stand behind a curtain and put my head out and be able to see
"what it's like for real people to just be real people."
♪ The choice that we make and the choice you will take
♪ Who's laughing, baby?
♪ Just leave me alone
♪ Leave me alone! Leave me alone... ♪
When you see that film,
with all of those images,
every image that you see of Michael
started out as 35mm movie film,
which then turned into a stack of photo prints this tall,
which people sat around for two weeks, cutting out.
There was one guy whose job was just cutting out Michael's hair.
The Charlie Chaplin ball and chain idea was Michael's.
We knew we had a sequence where
we wanted to have a dance sequence with the Elephant Man's bones,
and so Michael showed up the day of the shoot with that piece.
Leave Me Alone was extremely ahead of its time.
Leave Me Alone was my favourite video and song off that album.
Just, even the amusement park setup
and the way they chop the graphics up.
There is nothing that compares to that, even to this day,
as far as visuals go.
Michael's quest for creative independence,
which started when he and his brothers left Motown,
continued through Off The Wall and Thriller,
reached a high point with the Bad album and the Bad tour.
He didn't tour with Thriller,
and then with Bad, he finally had an opportunity
to create the kind of show he wanted to create,
the kind of show that represented him as a solo artist.
It was Michael's first solo tour
and in fact, it was the only tour in the US that Michael ever conducted.
What a night! What a crowd,
what a gig, what a venue.
Who'd have thought Wembley Stadium,
the home of Live Aid, the home of Nelson Mandela
and now, the home of the king of it all!
It's a gruelling tour.
It starts in September 1987 and goes until January 1989.
He did 15 different countries,
123 different shows,
and it proved to be one of the most successful concert tours in history.
The Bad world tour set three Guinness Book of World Records.
One was the highest grossing tour of all time,
the most attended tour in history
and then, the shows that he did at Wembley in London
were the most consecutive shows an artist had ever sold out in history.
The tour generated a lot of income
and Michael Jackson donated a lot of that income
to charities of his choice.
We're making a very, very large contribution
to the Prince's Trust fund
and it will go to the Ormond Street Hospital.
Camp Goodtimes, Ronald McDonald House...
The United Negro College Fund
and the Burns Center, the Michael Jackson Burns Center.
I love you!
CHEERING
This is hard, um...
My brother, the legendary King Of Pop, Michael Jackson,
passed away on Thursday, June 25,
2009 at 2.26pm.
I...
had performed about a year or so before then in Australia,
and I remember having this dream
that I was listening to the radio and...
..on the radio came that Michael Jackson had died.
Then I woke up, you know, sweating and nervous
and just really going crazy.
Where were you when you heard Michael died?
Um, I was in Montreal.
I was directing a project for Cirque du Soleil.
I was sitting here in this chair in this room.
I was in Savannah, Georgia.
I was at my own studio.
When he died, I was supposed to go meet him.
I was supposed to see him at the Staples Centre.
I think I was in a car.
I was actually driving in the car.
I know I was home that day.
So I turned on the radio.
Then I hear...
I was on a radio promo tour and I was just in the car,
going to my next radio station.
I was on the set.
I was shooting...um, Boardwalk Empire.
At my job, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
I was in London, going to get some bottled water from the store.
I was at my house in LA.
Los Angeles. No, no, no. I was in Panama.
I was actually working.
I had a Blackberry I picked up in Moscow and the person said,
"He's gone."
Wow. I was in Sony when I heard Michael Jackson passed.
I was in my office, having an audition with some artists.
My doorman said to me,
"Mrs Robinson, Michael Jackson died".
Actually, my security guard at that time came in and told me that
and he's just wrong all the time.
I just didn't buy into it for one second.
I couldn't believe it and there was nothing on the news up there,
telling me that this was true.
I said, "What? Come on... Don't listen to that."
I didn't believe it.
It just didn't seem real.
I thought it was...a lie.
I couldn't believe it.
People must've called, I must've gotten 50 calls.
Don't call me and tell me that!
Because it's not true!
I think I started crying on the spot.
I couldn't even breathe, man.
I couldn't even breathe, I just collapsed right there on the ground.
We all kind of stayed in a daze.
Everything just became a blur.
I immediately called my friend Bruce Swedien...
and he was in shock as well.
Everything stopped. Couldn't do anything.
(Sorry.)
It was like...
Sorry.
Sorry, man. I...
I really loved the guy.
I miss his hugs.
Just his friendship.
Um...
Just being around him.
Uh...
Just to know he's around.
And I had just seen Berry Gordy several days earlier
and we sat at the Mandarin Oriental hotel and we were just talking
and I said, "Think Michael's going to do those shows in London?"
And he went, "I don't know."
I, er, was at the funeral, and I sang...
I've never sung at a funeral before, ever.
So, this is Michael Jackson's funeral, and they come in
and go, "Mariah, you're on first."
I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer was a song that myself
and Syreeta Wright -
well, she was my first wife, Syreeta - wrote together.
When I sang it, at Michael's...homecoming service,
I never, ever imagined that I would be outliving Michael Jackson.
Um...
It's very, very painful.
It's still unbelievable to me that he's actually dead
and we should all be ashamed. Each of us to a one.
And I don't know who to look at.
Michael said, I guess, look at the man in the mirror.
Just like when John Lennon died, people turned to Imagine,
when Michael Jackson died, people turned to Man In The Mirror.
It really doesn't have that inspirational pop anthem on it,
like Greatest Love of All, Whitney Houston, Saving All My Love For You,
that kind of thing, and it's interesting that Bad does.
We kept talking about how nice it would be to get an anthem
that had a good feel to it, you know, just like
some sunshine on the world.
So he called a meeting with his West Coast songwriters,
I think there were like, six of us.
He said he wanted something upbeat,
he said he wanted something that felt good...
Whitney Houston's second solo album was storming the charts
and I think she provided a little bit of heat,
and I think that the label was concerned about how to kind of
appeal to this audience that had gravitated to Whitney Houston.
Went to Glen Ballard's house, who was my writing partner at the time,
I said, "This is what Quincy wants".
He said, "Well, let's just see what we come up with".
He stands up, goes over to the keyboard,
turns on the keyboard
and starts playing...
HE PLAYS INTRO
So I'm flipping through my lyric book...
While he's playing these...
Just getting sounds on the keyboard.
Cut to two years before this meeting.
I'm writing with John Beasley, jazz pianist.
His phone rings,
and he picked the phone up instead of letting the machine pick it up.
"Yeah, what's happening? I'm not doing nothing.
And I'm thinking, "He's doing something!"
And I'm flipping through my book,
no, he didn't say he's not doing nothing. No, he didn't.
So I'm flipping through this book and I hear him say, "The man?"
"What man? Oh, the man in the mirror."
I wrote, "man in the mirror".
So two years later, I'm at Glen's house and the phrase
"man in the mirror" just popped out at me
and I started writing these lyrics
that I couldn't write them fast enough,
I couldn't get it all out fast enough and in like, 15 minutes,
we had the first verse and the chorus for Man In The Mirror.
"I'm certain there will be a change
"and starting with that man in the mirror..."
The lyrics evolved into what they are,
but these are the humble beginnings.
Glen said, "You go finish the lyrics,
"and I'll finish the track and we'll demo the song on Friday".
Friday night we finished it after the Quest publishing was closed.
♪ I'm starting with the man in the mirror
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways... ♪
So I called Quincy at home.
He said, "I'm having a meeting, I can't...
"You can't drop it off. Just take it to the office on Monday."
I said, "I...
"I can't wait till Monday.
"Let me just, let me just drop it... "Sied..." "Quincy, let me just..."
"All right, shit."
And I go to his house...
I give Quincy this really quickly, this cassette, I say just,
"All I ask is you just call me as soon as..."
He said, "All right, shit".
Two, three hours later, I get a call and Quincy goes,
"Sied, this is the best song that I've heard
"in ten years".
- And I'm like... - MOUTHS
The key...
was one step too high for Michael,
so Quincy wanted me to re-sing the demo in the new key.
So I come here and I'm singing the demo in the new key
and Michael...is filming me.
Whenever you're ready, Miss Siedah.
FINGERS CLICK IN TIME
♪ Gonna make a change
♪ For once in my life
♪ Gonna feel real good
♪ Gonna make a difference gonna make it right
♪ As I turn up the collar on
♪ My favourite winter coat
♪ This wind is blowing my mind
♪ I see the kids in the street
♪ Not enough to eat
♪ Who am I to be blind?
♪ Pretending not to see their need... ♪
♪ A willow deeply scarred... ♪
I got that image
cos I was walking down the street in New York, walking past
this brownstone that had been torn down and it was fenced.
Just a lot with broken glass
and this tree...
that someone had carved their initials into this tree...
♪ ..Somebody's broken heart
♪ And one man's soul
♪ They follow each other on the wind you know
♪ Cos they got no place to go
♪ That's why I want you to know. ♪
It was really a great song from inception,
but I think what Michael did is he took that song
and he made it his own.
In popular music, there's often this idea that you are either
the songwriter of your own material
or you are the interpreter.
The interesting thing about Michael Jackson is that he was both.
You may not even know what he's talking about,
a broken bottle top, all kinds of images are floating,
but it's the conviction and the fervour with which
he brings to the song that is really spectacular.
He said, "Andrae, I got a song.
"If you were listening to this and wondered where a choir should be..."
He said, "I would love to have a choir and I've heard your music."
♪ If you wanna make the world a better place
♪ Take a look at yourself and then make that... ♪
"Change," I said, "Right there, you're exactly right".
And the choir sang...
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ Oooh oh-ooh-oh
- # Ow! - Yeah!
Oooh oh-ooh-oh
Make that change... #
Andrae Crouch's choir seriously threw it on the end
and it featured all kinds of singers, including, I didn't realise the Winans were on there!
My brother Marvin asked him,
"Exactly what do, how do you want us to do it?"
He was whispering into Quincy Jones' ear
and Quincy would actually...
..relay the message to us
and my brother Marvin said, "Well, Michael, can you talk?"
Mike broke out of the shell, sat down on the piano,
started playing the part... I didn't even know Michael PLAYED piano.
OK, here's my favourite link, right here.
Whoo!
That's when I was hot, back in the day!
Man In The Mirror, Quincy said give me the masterclass.
Those handclaps, that's what you hear.
The three of us would surround the mic, we'd nail it in real-time.
Then, what we would do,
we would speed this machine up maybe 15%,
so the track's going by really fast
and we're still clapping the same thing, then when you play back at a regular speed,
it's fat, so we have two sets of claps - in real-time
and the fat claps underneath which are exactly in the same time.
That's why if you listen to all those records we've done -
some of the best clap sounds you'll ever hear.
Once we cut the track, Andrae Crouch and his wonderful singers
came in here and Bruce Swedien had them all up on this stage.
Bruce is such a genius - he would have them
actually stand along this side, then stand along the side,
then they'd stand in the middle, cos he wanted to get all this really incredible imaging.
That's why it sounded like 57,000 people!
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ You got to move, chamon... ♪
OK, now bring the choir in, gently there...
Yeah, baby!
When the session was over, everybody was going back to their cars
and I was listening to it with Quincy.
I said, "Quincy, you know what? We should have put "change" at the end.
He said... "Yeah".
They were getting into their cars in the parking lot and I whistled,
I said, "Come here, we've got to do something else."
And they came in. I said, just say...
♪ Change... ♪
And then Michael said, "Make that change!"
- "Make that change." - Ah!
Somewhere between Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Bruce Swedien,
the musicians - Greg Phillinganes, and all these guys -
something took place in those sessions that...
..technically sounds better than any record ever made to this day.
Michael Jackson meant that the unachievable was achievable,
that you could be respected,
you could be successful on a global level as a person of colour.
There's no-one that will take his place.
The discipline imposed upon him
for good or for bad, from the time he was a baby,
it's not even legal to replicate that in today's world.
Michael is the most professional performer I've ever worked with in my life.
He made it all look so simple.
He made it all look so natural.
And he really worked so hard to do that.
I remember watching...
..him on stage, perform and how he would...
..just glide and...
..make it seem like...
..the music was just going through him. I mean, he would close
his eyes and walk across the stage
and I'd sometimes wonder to myself,
he could fall, he could trip, he doesn't know where he's going.
But he never did.
Whether it's Beyonce or Lady Gaga or Chris Brown or Usher
or will.i.am or Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake,
there isn't a musician
that doesn't quote Michael Jackson as being their idol.
I don't think there's anybody who comes close to having
that type of work ethic.
They say that Willie Mays was one of the only five-tool players
in the history of baseball.
A player that could run, field, hit, hit for power and throw.
And in the music business,
I'm not sure there was ever a five-tool player
other than Michael Jackson.
Michael could write the songs, he could produce them,
he could sing them, he could certainly perform
and dance them and he set fashion trends with his sense of style.
That's six tools you just named.
Well, I consider performing and dancing one and the same.
Hey, I'm with you all the way, six tools, I'm wit' you!
- Willie Mays and Michael Jackson, that's great. - There it is.
He did everything. He wrote, he performed, he danced,
he did the business part of it, he counted his royalties!
Sometimes, it's hard to believe he's even gone.
Just the amount of music that I hear,
the number of times that I hear people telling me
about children that are discovering Michael for the first time,
all these things, it's like this energy that just does not go away.
The divinity that that guy was so tapped into.
There was a reason that he was unique
and he was different than any other artist that we've ever seen
and he had something that was not definable to me.
Whenever he stepped out and sang, whenever he made that connection
with people, the molecules changed in the room.
You know, that was what he could do.
There are people that can go out
and you can be wowed by their technique,
but he changed the molecules.
No-one can quite say what the creative process is,
because I have nothing to do with it, almost,
because it's created in space, it's God's work, not mine.
♪ Gonna make a change
♪ For once in my life
♪ It's gonna feel real good
♪ Gonna make a difference
♪ Gonna make it right
♪ As I turn up the collar on
♪ My favourite winter coat
♪ This wind is blowing my mind
♪ I see the kids in the street
♪ With not enough to eat
♪ Who am I to be blind
♪ Pretending not to see their need?
♪ A summer's disregard
♪ A broken bottle top and one man's soul
♪ They follow each other on the wind, you know
♪ Cos they got nowhere to go
♪ That's why I want you to know
♪ I'm starting with the man in the mirror
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways
♪ And no message could have been any clearer
♪ If you wanna make the world a better place
♪ Take a look at yourself and then make the change
♪ Nah nah nah
♪ Nah nah nah, nah-nah, nah-nah
♪ Oh-ho
♪ I've been a victim of
♪ A selfish kind of love
♪ It's time that I realised
♪ There are some with no home
♪ Not a nickel to loan
♪ Could it be really mean
♪ Pretending that they're not alone?
♪ A willow deeply scarred
♪ Somebody's broken heart
♪ And a washed-out dream
♪ They follow the pattern of the wind, you see
♪ Cos they got no place to be
♪ That's why I'm starting with me
♪ I'm starting with the man in the mirror
Ooh!
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways
Ooh!
♪ And no message could have been any clearer
♪ If you wanna make the world a better place
♪ Take a look at yourself and then make the change
♪ I'm starting with the man in the mirror
Ooh
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways
Ooh
♪ And no message could have been any clearer
♪ If you wanna make the world a better place
♪ Take a look at yourself and then make that
Change!
♪ I'm starting with the man in the mirror
Oh, yeah
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways
♪ You better change
No message could've been any clearer
Whoo-hoo
♪ If you wanna make the world a better place
♪ Take a look at yourself and then make the change
♪ You gotta get it right while you got the time
♪ Cos if you close your heart then you close your, your mind
♪ That man
That man in the mirror, oh yeah
♪ I'm asking him to change his ways
♪ You better change
♪ No message could have been any clearer
♪ If you wanna make the world
♪ A better place take a look at yourself
♪ And then make that change
♪ Whoo! Whoo!
♪ Nah-nah-nah Nah-nah-nah, na-na, na-na
♪ Whoo! Whoo!
♪ Oh, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
♪ Nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah
♪ Na-na, na-na
♪ Gonna make that change
♪ Gonna feel real good, come on
♪ Change
♪ Just lift yourself, you know it
♪ You got to stop it yourself, yeah
- # Whoo! - Make that change
♪ Gotta make that change today
Man in the mirror
♪ You got to move, you know it
♪ You know it, ow!
♪ Yeah!
♪ Make that change
♪ You know all about it.
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ You know it, you know it
♪ You, you
♪ Yeah!
♪ Make that change
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ You know it, you know it
♪ You do, you, you
♪ Yeah!
♪ Make that change
♪ Gonna make that change today, yeah
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ Na-na-na, mm, yeah, yeah
♪ Yeah, you gotta
♪ Yeah, make that change
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ You know it, you know it You, you
♪ Whoo!
Yeah, make that change
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ Stand up
Yeah, make that change
♪ Stand up for each other
♪ Man in the mirror
♪ You know it, you know it
♪ You know it, you know
♪ Change... ♪
Make that change.
WILD CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
WILD APPLAUSE CONTINUES
I love you!
MUSIC: Intro to "Bad"
♪ Hee-hee-heee
♪ Chamon! ♪
MUSIC: "Don't Be Messin' Around"
♪ Are you ready for a real good time, my love?
♪ Are you ready for a good treat?
♪ There'll be so much as it singing
♪ Uh, uh, uh
♪ You, yeah, what you mean to me
♪ So don't be messin' round
♪ Don't be messin' round with me
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ With me, hey hey
♪ So don't be messin' round
♪ Don't be messin' round
♪ Don't be messin' with With me
♪ Hey hey
♪ Don't be startin' nothin' then if
♪ If you say this really ain't your crowd
♪ I'll be so proud if you let me
♪ Only girl let me love you for a little while
♪ But don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' round with me Hey hey hey
♪ So don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' round with me Hey
♪ Aha, yeah
♪ Oh-ho yeah
♪ Aha, yeah
♪ Oh-ho yeah
♪ Ooh ooh
♪ Now she's started finger-poppin' to the beat
♪ So I said, "Let's do that on the floor"
♪ She said to keep your mind on dancin'
♪ Won't be no romancing
♪ Lord no, don't mess around with me
♪ I ain't playing
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with me
♪ Don't be messin' round with me
♪ Hey hey So don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' round with me Hey hey
♪ Bridge
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Pu pu pa-rup pa-rup
♪ Pu pa-rup pa-rup
♪ Pa pu pa pa pu pu pa-rup pa-rup
♪ Pu pa-rup pa-rup
♪ Pa pa-rup pu pa-rup
♪ Ba-ba ba buh
♪ Chi pah chi pah chi pah chi pah
♪ Ooh... ♪
VOCAL IMPROVISATION AND INSTRUMENTAL CONTINUES
♪ ..So don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with me Hey hey hey
♪ So don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with me
♪ Don't be messin' with, with me Hey hey
♪ So don't be messin' round
♪ Don't be messin' with me
♪ Don't be messin' with, with me Hey hey
♪ So don't be messin' with
♪ Don't be messin' with me
♪ Don't be messin' with me Hey hey... ♪
This is the thing.
VOCAL IMPROVISATION
CROWD CHEERS
CHIMES TINKLE
MICHAEL CHUCKLES
Whoo!