Q: How did it all start?
A: Motown was preparing to do this movie called The Wiz … and Quincy Jones happened to be the man who was doing the music. Now, I had heard of Quincy before. When I was in Indiana as a child, my father used to buy jazz albums, so I knew him as a jazz musician.
So after we had made this movie–we had gotten pretty close on the film, too; he helped me understand certain words, he was really father-like–I called him after the movie, out of complete sincerity–’cause I’m a shy person, ESPECIALLY then, I used to not even look at people when they were talking to me, I’m not joking–and I said, ‘I’m ready to do an album. Do you think … could you recommend anybody who would be interested in producing it with me or working with me?’ He paused and said, ‘Why don’t you let ME do it?’ I said to myself, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.’ Probably because I was thinking that he was more my father, kind of jazzy. So after he said that, I said, ‘WOW, that would be great.’ What’s great about working with Quincy, he let’s you do your thing. He doesn’t get in the way.
So the first thing I came to him with was from Off the Wall, our first album, and Rod Temperton came in the studio, and he came with this killer–he’s this little German guy from Wurms, Germany–he comes with this … ‘doop, dakka dakka doop, dakka dakka dakka doop’, this whole melody and chorus, Rock With You. I go, WOW! So when I heard that, I said, ‘OK, I really have to work now.’ So every time Rod would present something, I would present something, and we’d form a little friendly competition. I love working like that. I used to read how Walt Disney used to, if they were working on Bambi or an animated show, they’d put a deer in the middle of the floor and make the animators kind of compete with different styles of drawing. Whoever had the most stylized effect that Walt liked, he would pick that. They would kind of compete, it was like a friendly thing, but it was competition, ’cause it breeds higher effort. So whenever Rod would bring something, I would bring something, then he would bring something, then I would bring something else. We created this wonderful thing.
Q: So, after Off the Wall, in the spring of ’82, you went back in the studio to work on Thriller.
A: After Off the Wall, we had all these No. 1 hits from it–”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Rock With You,” “She’s Out of My Life,” “Workin’ Day and Night”–and we were nominated for a Grammy award, but I was just not happy with how the whole thing happened because I wanted to do much more, present much more, put more of my soul and heart in it.
Q: Was it a transition point for you?
A: A COMPLETE transition. Ever since I was a little boy, I would study composition. And it was Tchaikovsky that influenced me the most. If you take an album like Nutcracker Suite, every song is a killer, every one. So I said to myself, ‘Why can’t there be a pop album where every…’–people used to do an album where you’d get one good song, and the rest were like B-sides. They’d call them “album songs”–and I would say to myself, ‘Why can’t every one be like a hit song? Why can’t every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single?’ So I always tried to strive for that. That was my purpose for the next album. That was the whole idea. I wanted to just put any one out that we wanted. I worked hard for it.
Q: So, the creative process, were you deliberate about that, or did it just kind of happen?
A: No, I was pretty deliberate. Even though it all came together some kind of way, consciously, it was created in this universe, but once the right chemistry gets in the room, magic has to happen. It has to. It’s like putting certain elements in one hemisphere and it produces this magic in the other. It’s science. And getting in there with some of the great people, it’s just wonderful.
hat, too. Back then, especially back then–I say a few swear words now–but especially then, you couldn’t get me to swear. So I would say, ‘That’s a “smelly” song.’ That would mean, ‘It’s so great’ that you’re engrossed in it. So he would call me ‘Smelly.’
But yeah, working with Quincy was such a wonderful thing. He lets you experiment, do your thing, and he’s genius enough to stay out of the way of the music, and if there’s an element to be added, he’ll add it. And he hears these little things. Like, for instance, in “Billie Jean,” I had come up with this piece of the bass lick, and the melody, and the whole composition. But in listening, he’ll add a nice riff …
We would work on a track and then we’d meet at his house, play what we worked on, and he would say, ‘Smelly, let it talk to you.’ I’d go, ‘OK.’ He’d say, ‘If the song needs something, it’ll tell you. Let it talk to you.’ I’ve learned to do that. The key to being a wonderful writer is not to write. You just get out of the way. Leave room for God to walk in the room. And when I write something that I know is right, I get on my knees and say thank you. Thank you, Jehovah!
Q: When’s the last time you had that feeling?
A: Well, recently. I’m always writing. When you know it’s right, sometimes you feel like something’s coming, a gestation, almost like a pregnancy or something. You get emotional, and you start to feel something gestating and, magic, there it is! It’s an explosion of something that’s so beautiful, you go, WOW! There it is. That’s how it works through you. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a universe of where you can go, with those 12 notes …
(He’s now listening to an early, “writing” version of Billie Jean playing on an iPhone …)
… What I do when I write is that I’ll do a raggedy, rough version just to hear the chorus, just to see how much I like the chorus. If it works for me that way when it’s raggedy, then I know it’ll work … Listen to that, that’s at home. Janet, Randy, me … Janet and I are going “Whoo, Whoo … Whoo, Whoo …” I do that, the same process with every song. It’s the melody, the melody is most important. If the melody can sell me, if I like the rough, then I’ll go to the next step. If it sounds good in my head, it’s usually good when I do it. The idea is to transcribe from what’s in your mentality onto tape.
If you take a song like “Billie Jean,” where the bass line is the prominent, dominant piece, the protagonist of the song, the main driving rift that you hear, getting the character of that riff to be just the way you want it to be, that takes a lot of time. Listen, you’re hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, and that’s what gives it the character. But it takes a lot of work.
PART TWO COMING TOMORROW
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REMOVE THAT SCARF! YOUR HANDSOME!
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