Just finished Brice Najar’s new book!
This one is very firmly rooted in the
Thriller era, though there are plenty of detours into
Victory and
Bad. The creative design is beautiful, and there are some lovely photos included. As usual, this is essentially a book of uncut, unfiltered interviews with collaborators, and Brice gives them room to speak candidly—there are times when a response will take up two full pages. If you’re a purist, this is the book for you. There isn’t much in the way of new information per se, but getting the unfiltered commentary from first-hand sources is awesome.
Some of the interesting tidbits that I didn’t know:
- The descending glassy synth in the intro of “The Girl is Mine” was a demo of some sort programmed by Amin Bhatia. Steve Porcaro was unable to recreate it and Quincy wound up directly sampling Amin’s track without giving him credit.
- MJ and David Williams supposedly had a brief falling out, and Dean Parks was hired to re-record the guitar lines on “Billie Jean.” The final mix only used David’s recordings, which Dean encouraged, but CBS had already begun pressing album packages with the incorrect credits. Dean placed an ad in Billboard acknowledging the error, but to this day, some pressings of Thriller (including Thriller 40) list him as the sole guitarist.
- When John Bettis submitted the new lyrics to “Human Nature,” he had retitled it “I Like Living This Way,” but Quincy restored the original title.
- During the Victory tour, David Williams briefly flew home to visit his family but overslept and missed his return flight. The travel agent arranged for him to board the next flight to a neighboring city, but he hadn’t yet touched down by showtime. MJ refused to go on without David and spent $10,000 to have a sheriff’s helicopter pick him up at the tarmac and drop him off at the venue. The show started about an hour and a half late.
- John Barnes started working on musical ideas for Captain EO once Centipede by Rebbie was finished, i.e., in/around late 1984. He and Matt Forger sketched out about six demos, of which MJ liked two (including what ultimately became “We Are Here to Change the World”).
- Since Hayvenhurst was undergoing renovations at the time, the first month or so of work on the Bad demos took place at Westlake. The first song, according to Matt Forger, was “Dirty Diana.”
- MJ, Matt Forger, and John Barnes worked on Bad for 13 months before the proper recording sessions with Quincy began. (If these sessions started in August 1986 as reported by Rolling Stone, the demo sessions would have begun in/around July 1985.)
- Steve Porcaro submitted a couple rough demos for Bad, including one song called “Game of Passion” cowritten with David Paich and Glen Ballard.
- Quincy liked “Chicago 1945” and, according to David Williams, worked on it briefly during the Bad sessions (though Steve Porcaro hasn’t been able to find anyone to corroborate that claim).
- MJ and his team worked on a total of 67 songs for HIStory, including pre-existing demos (e.g., “Little Susie,” “Earth Song”).
- While recording the choir on “Speechless,” MJ was dissatisfied with the sound but couldn’t quite pinpoint why. When MJ asked Tom Bahler to join them against Bruce Swedien’s initial orders, he went, “Yeah, that’s it, man! That’s it!”
- MJ and Tom Bahler spent five-and-a-half hours straight recording every part of “I Have This Dream” together without a break.
www.discogs.com
