Melbourne Writers Festival, Toff in Town, 27 August 2009
Side 1
Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' SEAN M WHELAN
Baby Be Mine ALICIA SOMETIMES
The Girl is Mine LINDA JAIVIN
Thriller NATHAN CURNOW
Side 2
Beat It NICK EARLS
Billie Jean YANA ALANA
Human Nature BEN POBJIE
P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) EMILIE ZOEY BAKER
The Lady in My Life JOSH EARL
It is midway through 1982 and one of the biggest rising stars of pop has returned to the recording studio with his esteemed producer and mentor Quincy Jones. Together, they’d produced the artist’s hugely successful break-out album Off the Wall, the first to generate four US top 10 hits and which netted the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough”. Afterwards, the pop sensation said, chillingly, that: “It was totally unfair that it didn’t get Record of the Year, and it can never happen again.”
And so, Quincy Delight Jones Jnr (his full name) reassembled many of the crack team of writers and musicians who’d worked on Off the Wall. The resulting album, released in November 1982, came too late for the ’83 Grammy Awards, but in 1984 the superstar was called to the stage to collect what he would later describe as the award of which he was most proud – the Grammy for Best Recording… for Children.
The album was, of course, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook, narrated by Michael Jackson and featuring an original song, “Someone in the Dark”.
Michael Jackson, Quincy and the team collected another eight Grammys that night, for the other record Michael had been working on, one you might consider even more influential – I speak, of course, of Thriller.
But it was the E.T. Storybook that came out first. It wasn’t meant to – Michael’s regular label Epic had only permitted him and Quincy to take up Steven Spielberg’s offer to work on it on condition that it not be released before Thriller, to avoid competition, and also that the song “Someone in the Dark” not be released as a single. But the label MCA broke the agreement on both counts, releasing E.T. a mere week before Thriller, and a subsequent court case forced them to remove it from sale.
It’s a fine boxed including the LP, a book to read along with it and a magnificent poster of E.T. and Michael. The pair got on famously, apparently. After the photo shoot, in which an animatronics robot of E.T. hugged Michael, he said, “He was so real that I was talking to him. I kissed him before I left. The next day, I missed him.” Don’t laugh, that’s just ignorant…
Referring to the little boy in the film, Spielberg says he told Michael, “If E.T. didn’t come to Elliott, he would have come to your house.” Michael might have preferred to have them both round.
In fact, so great was Michael’s emotional involvement in the narration of the story that Spielberg found him crying in the dark studio, when he’d got to the part where E.T. is dying. Quincy and Spielberg decided to go with it and keep the bit where Michael breaks down… Michael told Smash Hits magazine at the time: “I love E.T. ’cos it reminds me of me. Someone from another world coming down and you becoming friends with them and this person is, like, 800 years old and he’s filling you with all kinds of wisdom and he can teach you to fly.” Yes, Michael, and you taught us to fly.
And it was in that headspace that Michael was also recording Thriller, the best-selling album of all time; though sales figures vary, it is believed to have sold as many as 110 million copies worldwide. By comparison, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has sold 43 million, U2’s Joshua Tree has sold 25 million, Madonna’s Like a Virgin has sold 20 million... and Cos Life Hurts by the Uncanny X-Men has sold over half a million copies. Thriller was the first album to spawn seven top ten singles and was #1 in the US for 37 weeks, selling a million copies a week at its peak. On Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time it ranked #20, just below Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. It’s ignorant, just ignorant…
In truth, you can scarcely overstate Michael Jackson’s influence… in our music, in our fashion, in bringing black music to white audiences. “Billie Jean” was the first
video by a black artist to get high rotation on MTV, in 1983, and only aired after CBS manager Walter Yetnikoff threatened to deny MTV all videos by CBS artists if they didn’t play it. The whole singer-backed-by-a-bank-of-synchronised-dancers thing is another Michael legacy. And if the gloves and finger band-aids never took off, no self-respecting US R&B singer takes the stage without a fedora.
He is entrenched in modern music history (just below Van Morrison), but his every move seemed destined to ensure that this was so. He recorded with a Beatle, he married a Presley. If he could somehow have had Sinatra adopt him, no doubt he would have. Through the ’80s and ’90s, he was King.
Tonight we come not to bury Michael Jackson, but to praise him. He’ll actually be buried next week. His father, Joe Jackson, announced that as a sign of respect, Michael’s coffin will draped in a banner for Joe’s new record label, Ranch Records.
But, for us, just like Jeff Goldblum, Michael Jackson didn’t die in 2009 – Pepsi already killed him in 1984, by setting fire to his head. You remember that every time you head for the drinks machine.
So let’s rewind the clock to 1982, having got through the introduction without mentioning plastic surgery, painkiller addiction, baby-dangling, homicidal physicians or child molestation (by and large).
