![]() During these takes, Michael comes out of his shell, rocking and stamping his feet. Smith goes back into the booth to deliver again, this time complete with funky grunts. Now Michael wants those grunts on tape, says he has to have them. After the playback, he hears Lola Smith ask if everyone picked up on Jimmy’s grunts while he was playing. He has knocked out one remarkable take after another, improvising solos with a wide, toothy smile.īut Michael wants something more. Inside the studio, Michael Jackson is pacing the floor as jazz organist Jimmy Smith lays down tracks for a song called “Bad.” It’s a leaping, driving, swaggering song about what a young man can do in bed, seemingly made to order for Smith’s hard-swinging style. But in the tight alley behind Westlake sit Mercedes, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and stretch limousines with judiciously darkened windows. No signs announce its location it blends perfectly with the neighborhood’s bland architecture. Westlake Studio is a well-kept secret, a nondescript, two-story red brick building with beige trim and draped, tinted windows. It’s the perfect spot for someone who craves anonymity. At night the area turns into a pick-up strip for male hookers and transvestites otherwise no one goes there. To the north, the Hollywood hills rise majestically over the splashy billboards, palm trees, car washes, burger stands, and mini-markets that dominate this seedy district. It’s a clear, sunny day in West Hollywood. Finding a way through this impasse to make an album that could possibly follow Thriller is the most difficult challenge that Michael has ever faced. All of this distracts him from making the album at the same time, all of it depends on the record’s completion. Michael Jackson makes more and more deals - movies, commercials, soft drinks, clothing, toys, perfumes. ![]() Since last fall, however, Jones has been losing the battle. Over the past year, Quincy Jones has devoted himself to saving Michael from Michael Jackson. ![]() He might have six or twenty sides to him, and they’re all competing against each other.” and certain quirks and personality disorders. “He is very bright and self-destructively brilliant. The first thing that people who know him tell you is that there is Michael and there is the corporate entity called “Michael Jackson.” “He has a split personality,” says a member of his staff. He’s reminded that everyone is waiting for this record and he goes into a shell. Quincy Jones could only keep him protected from it for so long, then he leaves the studio and it’s there. “The closer he gets to completing it, the more terrified he becomes of that confrontation with the public. “He’s afraid to finish the record,” says an associate of Jackson’s. And the pressure to restore himself in the public eye is paralyzing him. In record time, he has gone from being one of the most admired of celebrities to one of the most absurd. Even in seclusion, reports of his plastic surgery, his private menagerie, and his hyperbaric chamber conspire to make him a national joke - a joke repeated each time another line of irrelevant Michael Jackson merchandise hits the stores. There have been bitter family feuds, an acrimonious rift with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, broken friendships with Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, and the burden of a celebrity so unmanageable that it drove him into isolation. Since Thriller and the Jacksons’ disastrous Victory tour, he has managed to generate the most powerful backlash in the history of popular entertainment. The last four years have not been a good time for Michael Jackson. The new record has been in production for almost a year already and is long overdue. It is October 1986, and Michael Jackson is holed up in a West Hollywood recording studio trying to complete the follow-up to Thriller, the best-selling album of all time.
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