Fact #43258

THE MAKING OF THRILLER

When Michael Jackson started recording Thriller, he must have wondered how on earth he could top the extraordinary achievements of his previous album, Off The Wall.

On Christmas Day, 1981, perhaps assuming the only way was up, Michael placed a call to Paul McCartney and suggested that maybe they could, "write some hits together."

So, come April 14, 1982, Jacko and Macca found themselves rubbing shoulders at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles, working on 'The Girl Is Mine'. "It wasn't what I'd call serious collaboration," McCartney told Playboy some years later. "It was more like we were singing on one another's records. Michael and I happened to write a couple of songs together. But we never actually sat down and thought, 'We're now a songwriting team'. I think Michael and I both treated it as a kind of ... just a nice thing to do."

With 'The Girl Is Mine' in the can, Michael went home and demoed a bunch of new songs in his 24-track home studio. It was not until July 6 that he returned to Westlake and began a solid eight-week schedule that would deliver the most successful album of all time on a $750,000 budget.

Jackson had re-assembled much of the same crew as he'd had for Off The Wall. The revered Quincy Jones was back in the production hot-seat; Jones' longtime engineer Bruce Swedien sat at his trusty 32-input Harrison console; back too was Rod Temperton, who had written three songs on Off The Wall, plus many of that album's session players.

"Everybody who was involved in those records had a hand in it. If someone had an idea, we'd try it," Quincy Jones told Mixonline.com.

'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'' kicked the album off and immediately introduced a Michael Jackson we'd never heard before. Written by Michael himself, his tense, tortured vocal speaks volumes about the psychological torment he was suffering, while the dark, bitterly sinister lyric reveals hidden aspects of his character that previous material had barely even hinted at.

'Baby Be Mine', a Temperton contribution, cools the mood somewhat. Asked about the influence of jazz on popular music, Jones has said, "Take a close look at 'Baby Be Mine', the Rod Temperton song. Rod is a genius. It goes "Deedle, dee-do-dee-dee-dee…" That's Coltrane, man. It's got pop lyrics and a beat, but it's Coltrane. It all came from the same place."

'The Girl Is Mine' follows, its sweetness and light slyly setting up the listener for the nightmare tale that follows. 'Thriller''s opening funky bassline is typical of many a dance cut, but there's an overlay of howling wolves, and the mood darkens as Jackson sings of the dead returning to life. Then Vincent Price starts to intone "Darkness falls across the land…" Of course it's kitsch, but it's also creepy.

"I've known Vincent ever since I was 11 years old," Jackson told Mark Ellen of Smash Hits. "I mean, who's the king of horror who's still alive … I thought he was the perfect voice."

Price apparently knocked off his ghoulish rap in a couple of goes and, if 'Thriller' isn't musically as tight as, say, 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough', once it was presented to the MTV generation through the medium of Jon Landis's mini-horror-movie, it's easy to see why it captured the imaginations of a generation.

Now, though, we get to the real meat and potatoes, 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean', the reasons why this album stood head and shoulders above everything else at the time.

Those who fell on their knees to worship Aerosmith and Run DMC for their genre-busting 1986 version of 'Walk This Way', presumably hadn't noticed that MJ had already been there and done that by bringing in Eddie Van Halen to shred mercilessly on 'Beat It'.

Eddie admits he had to break the rules to play that solo. "Certain people in the band at that time didn't like me doing things outside the group," he has explained. Happily, the rest of the band was out of town "so I thought, 'Well, they'll never know'. Seriously: who's going to know that I played on a black guy's record? Michael said, 'I love that high fast stuff you do'. So I played two solos over it and said, 'You guys pick the one you want.' It was 20 minutes out of my day."

No sooner has 'Beat It' stormed to its conclusion than 'Billie Jean' slides in on its sinuous bass, whispery percussion effects and synth stabs. The song was inspired by crank phone calls Michael had been receiving from a demented fan who claimed he was the father of her child. He insisted, however, that, "There never was a 'real' Billie Jean."

It's a testament to his prowess as a singer that Michael's vocal on 'Billie Jean', angrily denying paternity in the same anxious, tortured vocal style he premiered on 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'', was recorded in one take.

In his autobiography, Moonwalk, Jackson uses 'Billie Jean' to illustrate the intense focus he maintained throughout the Thriller sessions. "During a break in a recording session I was riding down Ventura Freeway with Nelson Hayes, who was working with me at the time. 'Billie Jean' was going around in my head and that's all I was thinking about. We were getting off the freeway when a kid on a motorcycle pulls up to us and says, 'Your car's on fire'. Suddenly we noticed the smoke and pulled over and the whole bottom of the Rolls-Royce was on fire. That kid probably saved our lives."

Much of the album benefits enormously from impeccable playing by members of the band Toto, who were, back then, the definitive L.A. session crew. Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro, who co-wrote the wistful, delicate, 'Human Nature', recalled, "I had written the song for my daughter Heather. Something had happened at school and it just inspired me. I wrote the song while [Toto] were mixing 'Africa' and I was just tinkering on the piano. I had written the lyrics, which were the same verse I was singing over and over again. I had the 'why, why' chorus with the slap echo."

Singer James Ingram, who co-wrote 'P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)' with Quincy Jones after Jones' wife arrived home with some Pretty Young Things branded lingerie, told Ebony magazine, "Everybody I've ever seen, when they go into the studio, they put all of their energy into the microphone – but here was Michael singing his butt off and dancing at the same time. That blew my mind."

The album closes with another Rod Temperton composition, 'The Lady In My Life'. Although this was one of only two Thriller tracks that didn't become a single, it confirmed that Michael was still unbeatable with a smoulderingly soulful ballad.

Final mixes of Thriller were completed on November 8, and the album hit the shops on December 1, 1982. Nothing, however, prepared any of the contributors for what was to come. Thriller sold 40m copies in its first chart run, won eight Grammies, and saw seven of its nine tracks enter the US Top Ten.

It didn't hurt, of course, that Thriller's release coincided with the rise to dominance of MTV. The unforgettable videos for 'Thriller', 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean' broke MTV's all-white rock programming policy, and brought Thriller to a previously unimaginable crossover audience.

"It was a milestone," reckoned CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff. "I think it made MTV. It made Michael into something that I think had not existed before."

However, it was another Toto member, keyboardist and arranger David Paich, who perhaps summed Thriller up most succinctly, saying, "Michael Jackson is living proof of God-given talent, and Thriller is testimony to present-day miracles."



Production Notes

Tom Hidley, an audio innovator who has designed more than 600 studios, learned his chops as a studio engineer for the Mothers Of Invention and created Westlake Recording in the early '70s. The facility's acoustically standardised "interchangeable rooms", utilising a design that offered a fairly flat frequency response at the recording position, quickly found favour.

Jackson and Quincy Jones settled into Westlake's now legendary Studio A in July 1982 and established a working regime that saw them combining the highest audio standards with creative innovation at every stage. Unique drum sounds, for example, were achieved through microscopic attention to detail. Engineer Bruce Swedien says, "I had a special bass drum cover made, and I took the front head off the drum kit, put cinder blocks in there to hold it still, put the cover on and slipped the microphone through. Then I made a special little isolation flap that went between the snare mike and the hi-hat mike in order to give much better imaging."

'Billie Jean', in particular, found the team firing on all guns. "I remember Michael sang through these long cardboard tubes to get a particular sound," recalled Jones.

"He [Jackson] had me bring all my guitars to see how they sounded playing the part," remembers funkmeister Louis Johnson of the Brothers Johnson. "I tried three or four basses before we settled on the Yamaha. It's really live, with a lot of power and guts."

Disaster loomed towards the end, though, when pressure from CBS to have the album completed resulted in some sloppy work. "We cut so many corners that we almost lost the whole album," wrote Jackson in Moonwalk. "When we finally listened to the tracks we were going to hand in, Thriller sounded so crappy to me that tears came to my eyes."

Success was snatched from the jaws of defeat, however, with a marathon eight day re-mixing session, and Thriller want on to become the best-selling album of all time.

© Johnny Black, 2009