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In this interview, Dan Beck discusses the difficulties he experienced as part of Michael Jackson's marketing team during a time when the 'King of Pop' began to go off the rails.
When Michael Jackson declared himself the "King of Pop," Dan Beck fought it. Beck was an executive at Epic Records who was part of Jackson's marketing efforts in the '90s, a time when his bizarre behavior was overshadowing his talent. By the time the HIStory album was released in 1995 (Beck came up with the title), Jackson was both the biggest star on the planet and the most scandalous.
In his decades working in the music industry, Beck pulled the levers that shaped the trends (he takes credit and blame for the Lambada) and made the hits. These days, he's doing some songwriting, most recently for the Gary Lucas & Jann Klose album Stereopticon.
We spoke with Dan about some of his behind-the-scenes adventures in the industry, including how Jackson crowned himself "King of Pop."
----------
Carl Wiser (Songfacts): You've had a very interesting career. You were working on the Michael Jackson HIStory album at a time when he was clearly coming unhinged, and you were in charge of the marketing. How did you handle that?
Dan Beck: It was unbelievable, really Carl. Everything changed all the way along. You think you're in charge but you're really not. More and more things would happen and it was just a really, really challenging experience and I was very concerned that the album would come out and it would just be the absolute biggest disaster in the history of the music industry... and it had my name on it.
When I started working with him on the Dangerous album [released in 1991], we were still thinking about how we could rehabilitate his career. He did the Super Bowl halftime and he did the Oprah interview at the ranch, and there were all kinds of really good things going on, but it just started to slide downward. And it's frightening to work with such a magnificent career and see it crumbling. It was just a sad situation and a very intense time.
Carl: In that very last documentary that Jackson did, it becomes clear he's very strong-willed. So, if he would make a decision, he was going to push that through pretty much no matter what. Is that what happened when you were doing the work on these albums?
Dan: It was a culmination of things. If Michael got things in his head, they became very fixed and he was very focused to move forward. A lot of what we tried to do was to establish a perspective and reasons to do things before he would get positioned on it. He was very open-minded to those kinds of ideas when he didn't have something fixed in his head, and I thought he was a wonderful collaborator in the sense that he always appreciated ideas and was very thoughtful. That's why so many really talented people liked to work with him - from Quincy to the choreographers to the video directors, the big names that were involved through his career - because in that collaborative effort he was just a pleasure to work with.
Carl: The other thing that really surprises me about the guy is that he was such a wonderful songwriter, and it seems like you need to have some kind of grounded life experience to write these really relatable songs. Jackson was born in a bubble, yet he was still able to write songs that moved ordinary people.
Dan: Very much so. I was around him when he was in the studio, and he was never particularly a musician in the technical sense - he was a guy with ideas in his head and he would interpret them through musicians. But I think so much of songwriting comes from isolation. Even as a child performer he had a lot of isolated time where he wasn't like everybody else, and I think that's why he became such a good writer. He was also a student of the whole business and I think that is part of it too.
There are people who overwhelm you with what they have contributed creatively, whether it's John Lennon or Kris Kristofferson, and I think Michael was inspired that way.
Carl: Did you have any musical training?
Dan: I played piano but I was not technically very good. I started trying to write songs - simple chords and that sort of thing - early on, and then I had a passion for writing lyrics and decided to collaborate and write with other people. I wrote a lot of lyrics initially with my own melodies in my head, and if I ever used those with people I generally didn't tell them what my melody was, because my hope was that they would come up with something that exceeded my own idea, and that's usually what happened. But I had a sense of meter that really helped when I collaborated.
But I was not a very good musician and I thought I was going to hold myself back as a writer if I tried to do the music as well.
+
Dan: You're not looking for the ultimate tag. Maybe you're coming up with something for an advertising campaign for the record or something to give some definition.
People say, "Oh, that's a combination of such-and-such a band and..." Why? Because it just seems that people need some direction - they need something to hang their hat on: "What kind of band is that?" So, we get into these descriptions. I think it's rare that it just really works. Michael Jackson manufactured "King of Pop," and believe me, we were trying to talk him out of it.
Carl: Why did you try to talk him out of it?
Dan: Well, our feeling was that radio was going to just roll their eyes and say, "Screw you!"
This was around the time of Dangerous, the late '80s and beginning of the '90s, and here was a guy that the tabloids were starting to talk about his skin color, they were starting to talk about the plastic surgery and the Elephant Man and the hyperbaric chamber – I guess those were probably the first four aspects of Michael starting to take hits in the media.
A lot of people in the media were unhappy with Michael because he didn't talk to them and Frank DiLeo [Jackson's manager] essentially kept him away from the press, I think with good reason because Michael only had so much to say and he also was a very vulnerable guy. He wasn't media savvy in the way of sitting down with a journalist and really having that engaging conversation. He was just too much in a bubble.
Frank kept him away, so with all the success that he had there were some media people who were very frustrated that they couldn't talk to him. So, when things started to crack and there were more odd entities in his life, it started to turn negative.
Well, now, Michael starts to evolve the idea of "King of Pop" and he passes that along to his new manager, Sandy Gallin, who starts presenting this idea that we're going to call Michael "King of Pop." At Epic, we were saying, "Sandy, stop, please. This is going to hurt him and we could have people turn against us."
Were we over-concerned? Probably. We were all trying to make our own lives simpler. In the meantime, if you look back on the whole thing, he did become "King of Pop." I guess in immortality he established it and maybe he was working on that while he was alive.
Carl: Yeah, and Michael Jackson's an artist that you don't need to have out there promoting his new album because it's a news event in and of itself, but most artists aren't like that. And some artists will promote themselves relentlessly, which in the '80s and '90s was this dog and pony show where you'd have to go to all the radio stations and play their silly events and do the meet-and-greets. The Barenaked Ladies would suck it up and do it, hit every town, whereas other acts would just have complete disdain for this [remember the Primitive Radio Gods?]. Did you encounter any acts that were one way or the other and see how it affected their careers?
Dan: Well, we encouraged artists to get involved, to do the stuff they needed to do to ingratiate themselves with the market. You didn't want an act to be out there begging, since that was a bad image. But a hardworking act that knew how to say thank you and was interesting to speak with was a huge plus. We would sit down and evaluate the pros and cons of an artist. We certainly worked with acts who weren't good interviews or weren't good live: "Let's make a great video and keep them off the road!"
We think of Living Colour breaking from the "Cult of Personality" video on MTV. We actually shot a video before that [for "Middle Man"] which floundered, and the band went on the road and built enough momentum going that I was able to go back in and ask my boss if we could try doing another video. So, it was their live thing that actually saved us in terms of marketing, and the video exploded but the fact was it was the band playing New Haven and Albany and Poughkeepsie - that's why the band succeeded.
So, it was really looking for that "thing." Some acts in the meet-and-greets would just overwhelm people with how good they were at it, so we'd do that in every city we could.
-----------------
MORE OF THIS INTERVIEW HERE - http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2016...ml#comment-6a00d83451b36c69e201bb08af7ff2970d
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE
This is a reply of Dan Beck to my comment on the hypebot article/interview through Facebook accounts :
https://www.facebook.com/dan.beck1
+
The second reply from Dan Beck on FB
When Michael Jackson declared himself the "King of Pop," Dan Beck fought it. Beck was an executive at Epic Records who was part of Jackson's marketing efforts in the '90s, a time when his bizarre behavior was overshadowing his talent. By the time the HIStory album was released in 1995 (Beck came up with the title), Jackson was both the biggest star on the planet and the most scandalous.
In his decades working in the music industry, Beck pulled the levers that shaped the trends (he takes credit and blame for the Lambada) and made the hits. These days, he's doing some songwriting, most recently for the Gary Lucas & Jann Klose album Stereopticon.
We spoke with Dan about some of his behind-the-scenes adventures in the industry, including how Jackson crowned himself "King of Pop."
----------
Carl Wiser (Songfacts): You've had a very interesting career. You were working on the Michael Jackson HIStory album at a time when he was clearly coming unhinged, and you were in charge of the marketing. How did you handle that?
Dan Beck: It was unbelievable, really Carl. Everything changed all the way along. You think you're in charge but you're really not. More and more things would happen and it was just a really, really challenging experience and I was very concerned that the album would come out and it would just be the absolute biggest disaster in the history of the music industry... and it had my name on it.
When I started working with him on the Dangerous album [released in 1991], we were still thinking about how we could rehabilitate his career. He did the Super Bowl halftime and he did the Oprah interview at the ranch, and there were all kinds of really good things going on, but it just started to slide downward. And it's frightening to work with such a magnificent career and see it crumbling. It was just a sad situation and a very intense time.
Carl: In that very last documentary that Jackson did, it becomes clear he's very strong-willed. So, if he would make a decision, he was going to push that through pretty much no matter what. Is that what happened when you were doing the work on these albums?
Dan: It was a culmination of things. If Michael got things in his head, they became very fixed and he was very focused to move forward. A lot of what we tried to do was to establish a perspective and reasons to do things before he would get positioned on it. He was very open-minded to those kinds of ideas when he didn't have something fixed in his head, and I thought he was a wonderful collaborator in the sense that he always appreciated ideas and was very thoughtful. That's why so many really talented people liked to work with him - from Quincy to the choreographers to the video directors, the big names that were involved through his career - because in that collaborative effort he was just a pleasure to work with.
Carl: The other thing that really surprises me about the guy is that he was such a wonderful songwriter, and it seems like you need to have some kind of grounded life experience to write these really relatable songs. Jackson was born in a bubble, yet he was still able to write songs that moved ordinary people.
Dan: Very much so. I was around him when he was in the studio, and he was never particularly a musician in the technical sense - he was a guy with ideas in his head and he would interpret them through musicians. But I think so much of songwriting comes from isolation. Even as a child performer he had a lot of isolated time where he wasn't like everybody else, and I think that's why he became such a good writer. He was also a student of the whole business and I think that is part of it too.
There are people who overwhelm you with what they have contributed creatively, whether it's John Lennon or Kris Kristofferson, and I think Michael was inspired that way.
Carl: Did you have any musical training?
Dan: I played piano but I was not technically very good. I started trying to write songs - simple chords and that sort of thing - early on, and then I had a passion for writing lyrics and decided to collaborate and write with other people. I wrote a lot of lyrics initially with my own melodies in my head, and if I ever used those with people I generally didn't tell them what my melody was, because my hope was that they would come up with something that exceeded my own idea, and that's usually what happened. But I had a sense of meter that really helped when I collaborated.
But I was not a very good musician and I thought I was going to hold myself back as a writer if I tried to do the music as well.
+
Dan: You're not looking for the ultimate tag. Maybe you're coming up with something for an advertising campaign for the record or something to give some definition.
People say, "Oh, that's a combination of such-and-such a band and..." Why? Because it just seems that people need some direction - they need something to hang their hat on: "What kind of band is that?" So, we get into these descriptions. I think it's rare that it just really works. Michael Jackson manufactured "King of Pop," and believe me, we were trying to talk him out of it.
Carl: Why did you try to talk him out of it?
Dan: Well, our feeling was that radio was going to just roll their eyes and say, "Screw you!"
This was around the time of Dangerous, the late '80s and beginning of the '90s, and here was a guy that the tabloids were starting to talk about his skin color, they were starting to talk about the plastic surgery and the Elephant Man and the hyperbaric chamber – I guess those were probably the first four aspects of Michael starting to take hits in the media.
A lot of people in the media were unhappy with Michael because he didn't talk to them and Frank DiLeo [Jackson's manager] essentially kept him away from the press, I think with good reason because Michael only had so much to say and he also was a very vulnerable guy. He wasn't media savvy in the way of sitting down with a journalist and really having that engaging conversation. He was just too much in a bubble.
Frank kept him away, so with all the success that he had there were some media people who were very frustrated that they couldn't talk to him. So, when things started to crack and there were more odd entities in his life, it started to turn negative.
Well, now, Michael starts to evolve the idea of "King of Pop" and he passes that along to his new manager, Sandy Gallin, who starts presenting this idea that we're going to call Michael "King of Pop." At Epic, we were saying, "Sandy, stop, please. This is going to hurt him and we could have people turn against us."
Were we over-concerned? Probably. We were all trying to make our own lives simpler. In the meantime, if you look back on the whole thing, he did become "King of Pop." I guess in immortality he established it and maybe he was working on that while he was alive.
Carl: Yeah, and Michael Jackson's an artist that you don't need to have out there promoting his new album because it's a news event in and of itself, but most artists aren't like that. And some artists will promote themselves relentlessly, which in the '80s and '90s was this dog and pony show where you'd have to go to all the radio stations and play their silly events and do the meet-and-greets. The Barenaked Ladies would suck it up and do it, hit every town, whereas other acts would just have complete disdain for this [remember the Primitive Radio Gods?]. Did you encounter any acts that were one way or the other and see how it affected their careers?
Dan: Well, we encouraged artists to get involved, to do the stuff they needed to do to ingratiate themselves with the market. You didn't want an act to be out there begging, since that was a bad image. But a hardworking act that knew how to say thank you and was interesting to speak with was a huge plus. We would sit down and evaluate the pros and cons of an artist. We certainly worked with acts who weren't good interviews or weren't good live: "Let's make a great video and keep them off the road!"
We think of Living Colour breaking from the "Cult of Personality" video on MTV. We actually shot a video before that [for "Middle Man"] which floundered, and the band went on the road and built enough momentum going that I was able to go back in and ask my boss if we could try doing another video. So, it was their live thing that actually saved us in terms of marketing, and the video exploded but the fact was it was the band playing New Haven and Albany and Poughkeepsie - that's why the band succeeded.
So, it was really looking for that "thing." Some acts in the meet-and-greets would just overwhelm people with how good they were at it, so we'd do that in every city we could.
-----------------
MORE OF THIS INTERVIEW HERE - http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2016...ml#comment-6a00d83451b36c69e201bb08af7ff2970d
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE
This is a reply of Dan Beck to my comment on the hypebot article/interview through Facebook accounts :
https://www.facebook.com/dan.beck1
+
The second reply from Dan Beck on FB
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