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Making of Bad (short version)

OK: I’m one for making judgements based on evidence I have found.
But it’s getting complicated with you guys throwing in speculations about when APOM was actually recorded (the final version) and when the drum machine on that was available…

If you take what information is available: the Linn 9000, as it turns out, was released in mid-December as per Billboard magazine at that time. Regardless which artists or studios had access to one first.

Given that, I’m 90% sure that APOM was recorded in early 1985, as it features that very machine. Plus Matt Forger’s recollection and various books.

Sadly I can’t find evidence/recollections to suggest otherwise, that MJ used that specific drum machine pre-release. However possible that is.

Certainly for other projects that was a thing, but we don’t know for this specific song.

So early 1985 is the most likely date for me. Regardless of speculation.
 
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I love threads like this

I'm still amazed that Streetwalker was taken across to Westlake even with all the versions we've heard of the song. It's a good song that I really enjoy, but I think it's weaker than the other 9 MJ penned tracks on the record and I'd argue there were outtakes with more potential.

Surely there's an 87 Westlake version we haven't heard yet, with fully completed lyrics and vocals?
 
SmoothCriminal1995 said:
I love threads like this

I'm still amazed that Streetwalker was taken across to Westlake even with all the versions we've heard of the song. It's a good song that I really enjoy, but I think it's weaker than the other 9 MJ penned tracks on the record and I'd argue there were outtakes with more potential.

Surely there's an 87 Westlake version we haven't heard yet, with fully completed lyrics and vocals?
Click to expand...
Pretty sure there is one. Which may be on the August 1987 cassette that Brad Sundberg made. A picture of the cassette insert exists among the hard drive leaks…
 
SmoothCriminal1995 said:
I love threads like this

I'm still amazed that Streetwalker was taken across to Westlake even with all the versions we've heard of the song. It's a good song that I really enjoy, but I think it's weaker than the other 9 MJ penned tracks on the record and I'd argue there were outtakes with more potential.

Surely there's an 87 Westlake version we haven't heard yet, with fully completed lyrics and vocals?
Click to expand...
There’s a version that appeared on an early pressing of the album, but according to Brad, it was because Epic was trying out fonts using the song titles Michael provided for the album. No word on if it was further worked on or if it was discarded in favor of APOM
 
Bill's shared some backstory on SW:

Then sessions at Westlake w/Q. Kind of sleepy and boring, to me - and no chorus. Then, later, adding the chorus and getting Humberto.

This implies he was having issues with Q and Bruce not listening to him, like his strategy of the Hayvenhurst demos for much of the BAD album, to have something to point to. Only on this one he had no demo to point to, and it wasn't getting over the hump.

And when they chose the songs for BAD, its said that Q insisted on APOM while leaving out SW.

Cut to a year later and he calls and asks me to take it on alone, he's on the BAD tour.

So I set up at Smoketree in between other gigs. (I should look up what other albums I was up to at the time. This will be part of why it sounds different.)

I had minimal synths and my Hybrid Arts controller, E-mu sampler and my drum tracks that seemed to survive all the versions.. and I had guitars. I did horn arrangements that did not sound like Quincy horns. That was my taste, more like funk. It took a couple weeks to arrange it all, with spacey intros and a bridge/break and that chorus.

I had MJ's vocals for all the parts, but to this day those vocals sound like I recorded them but I don't know if I did. (Maybe at Hayvenhurst???)

So with those few tools, no Michael, plus calling my long time friend since grade school to play harmonica, what you hear is what I made in those 2 weeks.

Working with MJ, everyone knows to make sections longer than you need for purposes of future vids or whatever.. this is why the "Street Scene" intro goes so long! I was horrified when they released it without cutting anything?
I envisioned a video and the ambience was meant to imply a dark street scene. (But not just SIT THERE!)

Another year later, early in Dangerous sessions, probably at Ocean Way with MJ, I never spoke of SW. But he brought it up and said (as I've reported many times) "Billy that's country!"

I had heard MJ say "country" in various contexts, but this time I thought it was purely negative?

I was daring to put the blues harp in there. Not very MJ.
But it worked for the mysterious dark streets.

But it was Q's arrangement of BAD the song that inspired me. That "country" organ. Bluesy. And totally not very MJ. So, if Q could put a blues B-3 in BAD and have a huge hit, then blues harp was not such a stretch.

So I thought that was his negative opinion and so early in Dangerous neither of us spoke of it again, like I reported here, until I heard it on YouTube, a leak, sometime around 2010. Then later discovered it had been released!

So yeah, it doesn't sound like a normal MJ recording.
But neither did BAD, or other BB songs like Black or White, (very weird MJ song) or GITM, which is not very MJ. Also, if Monkey Business had ever been finished, it would totally fit with BAD (song)
Earth Song was so left field for MJ that he told me it was troubling him, and he left it off the album. I finished it anyway, and once again, he came around to it later.

I always thought there was a corner of MJ's recordings that was the MJ/BB corner. Hard to define but def. there..
 
Fuzball said:
Bill's shared some backstory on SW:

Then sessions at Westlake w/Q. Kind of sleepy and boring, to me - and no chorus. Then, later, adding the chorus and getting Humberto.

This implies he was having issues with Q and Bruce not listening to him, like his strategy of the Hayvenhurst demos for much of the BAD album, to have something to point to. Only on this one he had no demo to point to, and it wasn't getting over the hump.

And when they chose the songs for BAD, its said that Q insisted on APOM while leaving out SW.

Cut to a year later and he calls and asks me to take it on alone, he's on the BAD tour.

So I set up at Smoketree in between other gigs. (I should look up what other albums I was up to at the time. This will be part of why it sounds different.)

I had minimal synths and my Hybrid Arts controller, E-mu sampler and my drum tracks that seemed to survive all the versions.. and I had guitars. I did horn arrangements that did not sound like Quincy horns. That was my taste, more like funk. It took a couple weeks to arrange it all, with spacey intros and a bridge/break and that chorus.

I had MJ's vocals for all the parts, but to this day those vocals sound like I recorded them but I don't know if I did. (Maybe at Hayvenhurst???)

So with those few tools, no Michael, plus calling my long time friend since grade school to play harmonica, what you hear is what I made in those 2 weeks.

Working with MJ, everyone knows to make sections longer than you need for purposes of future vids or whatever.. this is why the "Street Scene" intro goes so long! I was horrified when they released it without cutting anything?
I envisioned a video and the ambience was meant to imply a dark street scene. (But not just SIT THERE!)

Another year later, early in Dangerous sessions, probably at Ocean Way with MJ, I never spoke of SW. But he brought it up and said (as I've reported many times) "Billy that's country!"

I had heard MJ say "country" in various contexts, but this time I thought it was purely negative?

I was daring to put the blues harp in there. Not very MJ.
But it worked for the mysterious dark streets.

But it was Q's arrangement of BAD the song that inspired me. That "country" organ. Bluesy. And totally not very MJ. So, if Q could put a blues B-3 in BAD and have a huge hit, then blues harp was not such a stretch.

So I thought that was his negative opinion and so early in Dangerous neither of us spoke of it again, like I reported here, until I heard it on YouTube, a leak, sometime around 2010. Then later discovered it had been released!

So yeah, it doesn't sound like a normal MJ recording.
But neither did BAD, or other BB songs like Black or White, (very weird MJ song) or GITM, which is not very MJ. Also, if Monkey Business had ever been finished, it would totally fit with BAD (song)
Earth Song was so left field for MJ that he told me it was troubling him, and he left it off the album. I finished it anyway, and once again, he came around to it later.

I always thought there was a corner of MJ's recordings that was the MJ/BB corner. Hard to define but def. there..
Click to expand...
SW is one of those songs you gotta be in the mood for. I’d probably turn it off if I didn’t purposely play it
 
Fuzball said:
Bill's shared some backstory on SW:

Then sessions at Westlake w/Q. Kind of sleepy and boring, to me - and no chorus. Then, later, adding the chorus and getting Humberto.

This implies he was having issues with Q and Bruce not listening to him, like his strategy of the Hayvenhurst demos for much of the BAD album, to have something to point to. Only on this one he had no demo to point to, and it wasn't getting over the hump.

And when they chose the songs for BAD, its said that Q insisted on APOM while leaving out SW.

Cut to a year later and he calls and asks me to take it on alone, he's on the BAD tour.

So I set up at Smoketree in between other gigs. (I should look up what other albums I was up to at the time. This will be part of why it sounds different.)

I had minimal synths and my Hybrid Arts controller, E-mu sampler and my drum tracks that seemed to survive all the versions.. and I had guitars. I did horn arrangements that did not sound like Quincy horns. That was my taste, more like funk. It took a couple weeks to arrange it all, with spacey intros and a bridge/break and that chorus.

I had MJ's vocals for all the parts, but to this day those vocals sound like I recorded them but I don't know if I did. (Maybe at Hayvenhurst???)

So with those few tools, no Michael, plus calling my long time friend since grade school to play harmonica, what you hear is what I made in those 2 weeks.

Working with MJ, everyone knows to make sections longer than you need for purposes of future vids or whatever.. this is why the "Street Scene" intro goes so long! I was horrified when they released it without cutting anything?
I envisioned a video and the ambience was meant to imply a dark street scene. (But not just SIT THERE!)

Another year later, early in Dangerous sessions, probably at Ocean Way with MJ, I never spoke of SW. But he brought it up and said (as I've reported many times) "Billy that's country!"

I had heard MJ say "country" in various contexts, but this time I thought it was purely negative?

I was daring to put the blues harp in there. Not very MJ.
But it worked for the mysterious dark streets.

But it was Q's arrangement of BAD the song that inspired me. That "country" organ. Bluesy. And totally not very MJ. So, if Q could put a blues B-3 in BAD and have a huge hit, then blues harp was not such a stretch.

So I thought that was his negative opinion and so early in Dangerous neither of us spoke of it again, like I reported here, until I heard it on YouTube, a leak, sometime around 2010. Then later discovered it had been released!

So yeah, it doesn't sound like a normal MJ recording.
But neither did BAD, or other BB songs like Black or White, (very weird MJ song) or GITM, which is not very MJ. Also, if Monkey Business had ever been finished, it would totally fit with BAD (song)
Earth Song was so left field for MJ that he told me it was troubling him, and he left it off the album. I finished it anyway, and once again, he came around to it later.

I always thought there was a corner of MJ's recordings that was the MJ/BB corner. Hard to define but def. there..
Click to expand...
Cool story there. On Bill’s calendars it said he recorded vocals for SW at Westlake in Jan ‘87 not long before he got fired…

It would be nice to hear those original demos made for Streetwalker from Hayvenhurst.

Did he say anything about Michael bringing Westlake tapes to Hayvenhurst behind Quincy’s back? Out of interest.

Cheers!
 
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Do you guys believe SW was started in Miami during the Victory tour stop, when MJ & Barnes were working on AC? It's initial work title "Florida groove" indicates so.
 
Interesting tidbit is Bill said years ago that Streetwalker was recorded after Bad was released but when you look at his session calendar, it shows they were working on it before the album was released. He was surely talking about the mix he did for the song in 1988 but the way he spoke of it made it seem like the entire concept of the song was recorded after the album

"'Streetwalker' was recorded after Bad was released. I don't understand the story told about it and 'Another Part of Me' it's impossible."

“I still can't work out if there was maybe a previous demo of 'Streetwalker'. It seems to me I can't remember MJ ever coming all the way out to Smoketree.(to do vocals)That would indicate maybe a demo from Encino. Maybe Matt Forger worked on it. What is heard on the Streetwalker release is my rough mix from Smoketree. I played the horns, (samples) drums, bass, and guitars, and Jasun Martz came in to do the blues harp.”

"There was also "Streetwalker" a true orphan, I made that track while MJ was on tour for Bad. Holed up at Smoketree for a couple weeks, played all the stuff, and my friend Jasun Martz came and played the blues harp solo, when I sent it in Michael said, "Billy that harmonica is ignorant!" (and not in a good way) I wrote the whole thing off until noticing a week ago that they released it! As is."
 
BlackAnon said:
Interesting tidbit is Bill said years ago that Streetwalker was recorded after Bad was released but when you look at his session calendar, it shows they were working on it before the album was released. He was surely talking about the mix he did for the song in 1988 but the way he spoke of it made it seem like the entire concept of the song was recorded after the album

"'Streetwalker' was recorded after Bad was released. I don't understand the story told about it and 'Another Part of Me' it's impossible."

“I still can't work out if there was maybe a previous demo of 'Streetwalker'. It seems to me I can't remember MJ ever coming all the way out to Smoketree.(to do vocals)That would indicate maybe a demo from Encino. Maybe Matt Forger worked on it. What is heard on the Streetwalker release is my rough mix from Smoketree. I played the horns, (samples) drums, bass, and guitars, and Jasun Martz came in to do the blues harp.”

"There was also "Streetwalker" a true orphan, I made that track while MJ was on tour for Bad. Holed up at Smoketree for a couple weeks, played all the stuff, and my friend Jasun Martz came and played the blues harp solo, when I sent it in Michael said, "Billy that harmonica is ignorant!" (and not in a good way) I wrote the whole thing off until noticing a week ago that they released it! As is."
Click to expand...
That would have been before he even checked his notes. Then he knew he did a prior version of it.
 
Fuzball said:
Do you guys believe SW was started in Miami during the Victory tour stop, when MJ & Barnes were working on AC? It's initial work title "Florida groove" indicates so.
Click to expand...
Michael was attending to some Captain EO post-production work in Florida as per Joe Vogel’s book so it could be that too.
 
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