Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones listened to 800 songs to find 9. Then Quincy threw out 4 of those 9 and went back into the studio. Beat It, Human Nature, P.Y.T., and The Lady in My Life were emergency replacements for songs that were not good enough.
They spent four months just listening. Quincy and Rod Temperton sat in a Los Angeles studio in 1982, going through song after song after song from every songwriter they could pull a favor from. Most got cut after a few seconds. Of the 800, they only ended up recording around 30 with Michael actually singing. Of those 30, only 9 made the final list. And then Quincy listened to the finished album, decided 4 of his own picks were not strong enough, and pulled them. The four songs he replaced them with became some of the most famous in pop music history. The four he cut went on to become hits for other artists.
Recording those replacements almost broke the team. During the Beat It sessions, Quincy had three studios running at the same time. Eddie Van Halen was in one of them laying down his guitar solo for free. He had thought the call from Quincy was a prank his friends were pulling on him. Michael was in the next room, singing a vocal part through a cardboard tube. Engineers were mixing in the third studio. They worked five days and five nights with no sleep. At one point the speakers overloaded and caught fire. Quincy later told the BBC they had to carry engineers out of the studio on stretchers. Musicians too. Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player on the album, said there was a moment where everyone thought it was finished, that they had nothing left to give, and Quincy was still standing there saying "It is not there yet" while Michael, almost falling apart, kept asking what they were supposed to do now.
They finally finished mixing in early November. Then they sat down to play the master back, and the album sounded weak. They had crammed too much music onto a normal vinyl record, and the grooves had to be cut so narrow that the punch was gone. So they cut a verse from "The Lady in My Life," shortened the famous 29-second intro of "Billie Jean" that Quincy had been trying to drop the entire time, and remixed almost the whole album from scratch. One song a day. Eight straight days. The only track they left alone was "The Girl Is Mine" because it was already on the radio. The final mix wrapped on November 8, 1982. The album came out 21 days later.
The wolves you hear at the start of the song "Thriller" are Michael. The engineer set up tape recorders in a barn overnight to catch his own dog howling, and the dog never made a sound. So Michael did the howls in the booth himself. Some of the background vocals on the same track were sung in the studio's shower stall. Vincent Price did his entire spoken-word horror section in three takes, and the verses he was reading had been written by Rod Temperton in a taxi on the way to the studio that same morning. Michael never wrote his songs on paper. He recorded them on a small handheld tape recorder and then sang them back from memory in the studio.
The album ended up selling around 70 million copies. It won 8 Grammys, sat at number one for 37 weeks, and produced 7 Top 10 hits out of 9 songs. At its peak it was moving a million copies a week. But all of that came after the work was done. The work itself was 800 demos, 30 recordings, 4 last-minute saves, three studios running until the speakers caught fire, and a producer who refused to put out something he did not believe in even when it meant pulling his own album apart twice. Nine tracks because they could not find more that were good enough.
