Michael Jackson Was ‘in Tears’ Because of How ‘Terrible’ 1 Iconic Album Sounded at First
Michael Jackson’s Thriller became the biggest-selling album of all time. According to producer Quincy Jones, however, it initially seemed like the record would be a resounding failure. They struggled to stick to their schedule and, when they finally listened to the finished album, it sounded terrible. Jones said Jackson was so shocked and disappointed that he began to cry.
Michael Jackson was shocked at how bad one album sounded on the first listen
As Jackson and Jones worked on Thriller, they constantly found themselves behind schedule.
“With two months to get Thriller done, we dug in and really hit it,” Jones wrote for the LA Times after Jackson’s death. “Michael, Rod [Temperton], the great engineer Bruce Swedien and I had all spent so much time together by now that we had a shorthand, so moving quickly wasn’t a problem.”
They managed to get it done on time, though.
“We finished the album the morning we needed to deliver the reference copy,” he wrote. “We had three studios going all night long. Michael in one putting final touches on ‘Billie Jean,’ Bruce in another, and Eddie Van Halen, who I brought in, in yet another recording his parts for ‘Beat It.’”
When they finally sat down and listened to the finished product, Jones said they were all stunned. It sounded so awful that Jackson began to cry.
“We all gathered in Studio A to listen to the test pressing with this enormous anticipation,” Jones explained. “This was it, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to Off the Wall. And it sounded … terrible. After all of that great work we were doing, it wasn’t there. There was total silence in the studio. We’d put too much material on the record. Michael was in tears.”
Quincy Jones shared how they fixed the Michael Jackson album
They didn’t give up on the album, though. They spent the next several days trying to fix things, one song at a time.
“We took two days off, and in the next eight days, we set about reshaping the album, mixing just one song a day,” Jones explained. “Rod cut a verse from ‘The Lady in My Life,’ and we shortened the long, long intro to ‘Billie Jean,’ something Michael hated to do because he said the intro ‘made him want to dance.’”
Quincy Jones believed MTV helped with the dominance of ‘Thriller’
Jones believed that the rise of MTV augmented of Thriller’s success.
“We delivered the album and watched ‘Billie Jean’ — thanks to Michael’s debut performance of the moonwalk on the 25th anniversary of Motown special — ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ just explode, fueled in part by heavy video rotation on MTV,” Jones wrote. “Prior to ‘Billie Jean,’ MTV wasn’t playing videos with Black artists. After those three videos, virtually every video on MTV was trying to emulate their style.”
The album made him the biggest artist of the decade.
“Michael, the music, and MTV all went to the mountaintop,” Jones wrote. “It was the perfect convergence of forces. In the music business, every decade you have a phenomenon … We owned the ‘80s and our souls would be connected forever.”
