So we know a lot about Michael Jackson and you were just talking about him.
What on those albums, Thriller, for example, is you?
You know, you have his music, some of his writings.
Some of my music.
We take his stuff and take it to another level.
Michael came over to my house.
I met him when he was twelve at Sammy's house.
He was about twelve years old.
And I remember at the Academy Awards
seeing Michael, when he was little, seeing Ben, a love story about the Rat.
When Michael was 19, when we first worked together,
he was costarring in and I was the musical director.
I was resisting it for the score of the movie version of The Wiz.
We worked on The Wiz first.
And he said, I'm going to go and be
on Epic and I'd like you to help me find a producer.
I said, Michael, I don't want to talk about that.
You don't even have a song in the picture yet.
You got 'Ease On Down The Road' with Diana, but you don't have a solo song.
So I'm going to get you a song first, then we talk about the rest. So we got 'You Can't Win',
and then for the scarecrow Song. It was terrific.
It's something I always wanted to do.
And it was a lot of fun.
Working with all the greats, Sidney Lumet, Quincy Jones.
And then I started to watch him how intuitive he was.
He knew everybody's dialogue.
He did make up for 5 hours and all of the songs and all of the dance steps.
Michael was one very special talent.
I mean, really special. In every way,
in observation, influences and dancing and singing everything.
He didn't miss a thing you know. Because he was so smart and intuitive,
he just hooked on me everything.
And he watched everybody,
Jamie Brown Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis.
And I started to see a maturity in him that I respected in a lot in the Motown
records, all of this stuff, ABC, Dancing Machine, all those great things
they did, great producers.
I think I'd like to take a shot
of producing a new record because I felt something else in him.
We finished the movie.
Michael came back all teary eyed one day
and said, the people at Epic don't want to use you.
They said, you're too jazzy.
I said, Michael, we will be fine.
Just fine.
And thank God,
he went back and they fought and they said, he's doing it.
Everybody at Epic,
black and white, said, no way, it's not going to work.
And I love that.
Yes, I know you do.
All you got to do is get me going is to underestimate me.
When I first started working with him,
his father and everybody else says, you can't make him any bigger.
I said, we'll see.
One thing led to another.
I felt a lot of things inside that nobody had heard before.
Untapped folk equipment that could take him even much further. One gift that you
hope you have is be able to see something before it happens and then work backwards
into details and see how to figure out how to get there.
You can tell if they got it,
if you know exactly who they are in the first 20 seconds of their record.
If you have to call up and say, who was that singing, you have a rough time.
So we hit the first one and the first album
michael was on the road most of the time
with the brothers, so he did two songs in there and I got one
track with the Brother Johnson, Get On The Floor.
Michael does not use any profanity ever.
So when it got good, we'd say that's funky. He'd say, don't say that.
It's smelly jelly.
And up to that point, Michael's most emotional moment was Ben,
you just singing about a love affair with a rat.
So I steered him into a lot of songs like 'She's
Out Of My Life', which I was saving for Sinatra.
And he cried at the end of it every time.
And so I just left it on the record him crying because it was a very real emotion.
And the result was 'Off The Wall'.
An album, that featured 'Rock With You'
and 'She's Out of My Life' and 'Don't Stop Till You Get Enough'.
And it was the biggest black album in history at that time.
All the guys who were bad mouth me and dissing me, it saved their jobs.
So that's God's way of evening things out.
You set your vision high enough and you only get 50%.
You're doing pretty good.
So you keep it real high, like no boundaries at all.
Because everybody kept saying, Michael can't be any bigger. I
said, you want to bet? We're not going down to make a bomb.
We also had to take we have to take disco out.
Disco is staring us right in the face and all.
Everybody goes into a studio to make the biggest record in the world.
Sure.
And everybody's always surprised when it isn't the biggest record in the world.
Surprised when it's not.
It's a lot of hard work.
We spend a lot of time laying down on the ground at midnight.
Yeah.
Sleeping. 18 hours a day like you're doing today. It was more than 18.
We were sleeping out on the couch, wake up, mix it, go back to sleep.
They were carrying the second engineers out on stretchers, and musicians, too.
They were tired, but we were just all wired up and stoked up into it.
He just has a great quality for excellence, for perfection.
And anybody who's worked with him notices
this, the way he'll make you do a thing until it's perfect.
He'll say, it's beautiful.
We have a take.
Then you say, well, can you give us one more?
It's a question of doing something over
and over and over again until you get it right and you figure out what it's about.
One thing that I think work for us is we
didn't have time for paralysis from analysis.
We made Thriller in eight weeks.
And everything was just right.
Again, if you just get out of your own way
and let that force go to work, that's what happens.
What we do is once I get those nine songs on their feet.
In the nine songs, relatively, what are the four weakest?
You take those four out, which we substituted with 'Human Nature'.
And we added 'Lady In My Life' wrote 'PYT' and added 'Beat It' and Human Nature.
And that together with 'Billie Jean',
and 'Wanna Be Startin Somethin' and 'Thriller'.
It's over because you got that magic in all that.
And then on top of that, MTV and Michael rode each other to glory.
Because this was the beginning of that.
This was when MTV wasn't playing black artists.
Remember Rick James?
They were screaming at Motown about super freak and all that.
And so we were down in Acapulco with Steve Ross.
So what's coming out with Michael next?
'Billie Jean', it goes on.
At first, they didn't know what 'Thriller' was about.
The tune. They didn't have a clue.
And the song didn't make sense to anybody until the video was made.
That's a lot of weird stuff on it.
Vincent Price, the King of Terror.
Doing the Edgar Island bow type rap in the middle of a pop record like that.
And people say, what? The 14 minutes video.
And it was received like a future film
almost, all around the world.
Michael, I think this is going to be the 'Citizen Kane' of the videos.
I really do.
It's going to be the most revolutionary thing in the history of the videos.
Well the videos are getting to be-
I mean, it's a new art form now, but I think this is leading the way.
'Beat It' and this one is leading the way.
MTV changed the music business.
And Michael and MTV would not have been
able to do what they did without each other.
They rode each other to glory.
The videos standard has not changed since then.
Britney Spears does the same thing.
Madonna does the same thing.
The foundation, the template was laid back then.
The album, after being out 13 or 14 months, went up to a million and a half
copies a week in sales for four months, which was number one for 37 weeks.
How many record albums does this thing end up selling?
38. 38 million, 38 million.
45 million.
56 million
110 albums, million albums.
And became the biggest selling album in the history of music.
Selling anywhere between
we still don't know, 67 to 104 million albums.
We still can't find out
this was pre RIAA.
So when you did the playback
for 'Billie Jean' or for any of the songs on there, was there a moment where you
said to yourself, We've done something different?
No, but that was the whole plan in the beginning, man.
You go through 800 songs to get nine.
That's not casual.
Anyone who says they figured out how to make records,
to sell more than 50 million records is lying and smoking koolaid
that work like that.
You just find a group of songs to touch you and give you goosebumps.
That's why I go by my goosebumps.
I don't need survey groups and let the rest take care of itself.
Quincy Jones Is a wonderful person.
I know he's an incredible producer.
He is a wonderful man.
He's such a family person, and I love him.
We have made history together, and I'm thankful.
And it freaked me out because I was worried about Michael because in June, 84,
People magazine did a cover on him with no interviews.
He didn't do interviews.
The next week they did another cover on him with no interviews.
And the third week interviewing, the whole issue about him and no interviews.
And I think Mike
kind of snapped in there a little bit, and it can because if you're not
spiritually grounded. You've got to be ready for success.
Because its a lot.
You think you deserve it?
All that adulation, all that money,
or you think you don't deserve it and you're fooling everybody.
I don't think he's weird.
I look at him and I think he's eccentric,
and that's truly what intrigues me about him.
Right. And that's just what Michael is.
If you look at his background,
it may not even be considered eccentric, because I remember we went to home one day
of many days and as you know, from 13 to 30 people outside of the gate every day.
So, Michael doesn't that seem strange to you?
Does it- how do you feel about it?
It's normal. It's been like that since I was 5 years old.
So he's come up in a whole world like this since he was a child.
All he can really relate to is a kind of a world
he creates with his imagination.
And I don't think it's weird at all.
Their relationship was very close.
I think there was that father son thing.
I think that was the natural thing to happen.
The relationship with a producer
and an artist is really special, and there's no room for BS at all.
It's got to be pure.
It's got to be love and respect.
Well, you can't be an effective producer unless it's love.
You have to love them enough to give them a thorough examination
silently. Very grounded.
He's very spiritual. He's focused.
He's very courteous for us people.
And he's kind, he never throws his weight around.
And he's fun to be with.
Twelve months in the studio, 14 months
in the studio with someone is difficult, even if it's the woman you love.
Yeah.
That's a lot of time to spend with somebody. You can see him just
growing as an artist and understanding production and all that stuff.
There's stories about him.
You've talked about it before that it wasn't easy.
Your relationship together,
working on these records, it was challenging at times.
Was that a hindrance or did that actually help create?
Listen, what am I going to learn from Michael, man?
I don't want to be a singer or dancer, but everything else he doesn't have, we had.
So I didn't ask him about anything.
We told him what songs he was going to sing.
The producer has to do that.
You don't ask him what songs are going to sing.
Weren't the two of you kind
of disappointed creatively and sales wise on the Bad LP?
Disappointed with 22 million albums?
No, not at all.
I mean, if you look at it in relationship
to Thriller, which is 40 million, but that's insanity.
Seem to think you're going to do that again.
22 million albums is a lot of records.
I wasn't disappointed.
I've been in the business too long to be disappointed with 22 million.
And it was an amazing adventure for all of us.
We had three albums. I don't know.
We did almost 100 million albums.
Well, I think at one point he probably felt that I wasn't in touch
with the market anymore because I remember when we were doing Bad,
I had DMC in the studio because could see what was coming with hip hop.
He was telling Frank Dileo that I think
Quincy is losing it and doesn't understand the market anymore.
He doesn't know rap is dead.
This is 1987, rap hadn't even started.
And by the time we did Back on the Block in 1992, it was all rap.
And at that time, Michael's plan was going after all of the big rappers,
Teddy Riley, whatever, all the rap producers to spend five times
what they were paying me to produce his records and so forth.
I'm kind of curious,
why didn't Michael Jackson sing on the album? He said the President of his
company didn't want him to sing on my record.
Michael Jackson's Neverland.
It was amazing.
There I was meeting the King of pop.
Thank you so much.
Also there taking in this magical
experience where actress Nastasia Kinsky, Michael's longtime friend and producer,
Quincy Jones, and Quincy's daughter Kadata.
We weren't there just to hang out.
The reason for the gathering was a photo session for Quincy's, Vibe magazine.
A shoot so important it had to be supervised by the boss.
This whole thing,
this is a big coup for Vibe, getting this Michael Jackson cover.
Oh, it's beautiful. I think it's one of the best covers we've
had because it shows a world figure, really,
in a totally different light.
How is he today? He's fine.
I think he's a family man now.
I don't see much of him, but my daughter does.
He's got two babies. He brought the babies over with me.
Say hello to Michael Jackson.
Michael.
What's it like the experience of working with Mr. Jones?
Working with Quincy? Yeah.
He's very professional, very talented, and he's a musical visionary.
He's been around, as, you know, a very long time.
I learned a lot.
You want to said something?
You don't write the music.
You let the music write itself.
Let it create itself.
It's like we're just a source, which it comes.
Well, thank you, Michael, for joining us.
Thanks for taking the time to call up and say hey Q.
I love you smelly. I love you more Quincy.
When was the last time you saw Michael? In London,
he was trying to get us back to do another
album, and he wanted to bring the kids over.
Something else was going on.
He said, let's do it in LA.
And I was coming back from China, my God,
in Luxembourg, and Duke and Duchess had a band there.
And welcome to and everything else in the car on the way home, they said,
by the way, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson just died.
I freaked out.
I couldn't believe it.
Now that there are several days have
passed by, have you had a chance to really process this?
Absolutely not.
It's almost surrealistic,
and I have no way of processing it in my wildest dreams or nightmares.
I never thought that he'd leave before me.
It's very hard to accept.
I know I'm in a big state of denial because I can't believe it.
I'm 76 years old and he's 50 and he's not with me anymore.
And because our souls had to be connected
to do what we did in the 80s, a divinity involved there.
I miss my little brother, really do.
And I just still cannot process the fact that he's no longer with us.
I love him.
They have these amazing collaborations
on these three albums, these kind of culture changing albums,
and then to subsequently see what happened to Michael. Did that break your heart?
Well, yes, it does.
But, you know, I've been in this business
60 years, and success is an amazing animal.
It's a very complex animal and nobody can live.
I'm not a psychiatrist or shrink.
I'm not going to try to get philosophical about it.
It's a lot to eat.
There were a lot of things that were
bothering Michael because I felt the tension.
It was subliminal, but I could feel it a lot.
You can't say he was a happy go lucky person all through his career.
Was he comfortable in his own skin?
I'm not sure.
At times I didn't think so.
I don't think he would have gone through the surgical things he went through.
Well, something was wrong,
because somehow I think with just what was happening in his face.
And I used to give him a hard time about the chemical peels and everything else.
And he always would tell me things like,
I have a blister on my lungs and all those kinds of things.
And I swear I've got this disease and so
forth to getting chemical peels and everything.
In a way, he was in denial,
he wanted to look different. And that this
whole fallacy about me not liking 'Billie Jean' is a lie.
It is some lie that started somewhere,
because anybody could hear that record is smash and also I know where it came from.
He claims Michael Jackson was a thief
claiming he stole songs from all kinds of artists.
He talks about Donna Summer's 'State Of Independence' and 'Billie Jean'.
The notes don't lie. He was as Machavellian as they come.
I think when he's saying stole, he's not saying he actually stole songs from them.
He got a lot of inspiration
from it and he said it was because Michael Jackson was greedy.
He said Michael should have given 10%
of the song 'Don't Stop Till You Get Enough' but he wouldn't do it.
Wow, this really tarnishes Michael Jackson's reputation.
I mean, that's just about the worst rumor I've ever heard about him.
There's all this stuff after Bad.
What do you think of that?
What do you think of the Michael stuff
after. They're trying to make money and I understand it, but it's just the money.
The estate, the lawyers. About money.
Do you like it? Does it bother you? They're still putting up music?
Yeah,
but it's not my business anymore.
Quincy Jones is taking Sony music and the estate of Michael Jackson to court.
The music producer says he is owed
millions in royalties generated from some of the King of Pop's biggest hits
after his death. Quincy Jones has been
awarded $9.4 million in the Michael Jackson royalty trial.
Now Michael Jackson's estate is saying
that judgment is too much and it's unfair to Michael Jackson's heirs.
So they are trying to say that is not proper, not correct.
You wouldn't have all of that if it wasn't for Quincy Jones.
Quincy Jones laid that foundation with Off
The Wall and Thriller. Following the court's decision
Jones said in an official statement, this lawsuit was never about Michael.
It was about protecting the integrity
of the work we all did in the recording studio and the legacy of what we created.