"Thriller" by Michael Jackson: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two night creatures of the
nitty gritty, your hounds of Hellish history, your foul stenches
of facts parentheses, the funk of forty thousand years.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Alex Heider. That's what he says, foul stenches. Not
only the lyrics to that rap are ridiculous. Wow, the
funk of forty thousand years is pretty great.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
I got considering Michael Jackson was afraid of the word funky.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hence smelly jelly if I believe. Yeah, Okay, that's correct,
and I'm Jordan Rontg. There we go and Jordan. Today
we're talking about the biggest Halloween song of all time
with an earth shattering visual impact to match. That's right,
we're talking about Michael Jackson's just the song in the video,
though not the record because that would take days. Yes,

(01:05):
Halloween season came around, you were like we should do another,
Like what are the other music ones that we could do?

Speaker 2 (01:12):
And since we already did Monster Mash. I thought back
to all the Halloween music compilations I've heard in my youth,
and it's it's it's monster mash, thriller and then a
bunch of horror movie soundtracks.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
That's all of them. The Purple People Eater, I guess
if you scre sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
An edge case though, But yeah, what do you say
about thriller?

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Dude? I mean, it's no monster mash, but that's true.
That is true.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
But it's pretty, pretty, pretty deep, pretty good. Uh yeah,
sold a bajillion copies, revolutionized the art form of the
music video. Uh party standard from now Party standard, Yeah,
viral dance success.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Vincent Price got like, I don't know, a couple grand
for it. List goes on, it's nice to see black
people ripping off old white men for a change. Ah
ah is that staying in I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I mean yeah again, do you say, dude, It's like
the national anthem of October. It's in the firmament of
American culture. There's like nothing it's thriller. You shut up?
It's what do you have to say about it? This
is gonna get me into trouble.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
But it's not my favorite song on thriller by a
long shot fair it's in like my lower half. I think, yeah, okay,
so in descending orders for me, it's all about Billy Jean.
Did they come up with that baseline while driving over
a bridge like the Beg's did when they came up
with jive talking going over a bridge in Florida. It's

(02:52):
just like the tires would hit the grooves in the
road at a weird, weird rhythm. It makes makes sense.
I think that's maybe I might be making so but
that's number one. Yeah, I want to be starting something.
I think number two it's got that great soul Makosa
sample which rips. That song's incredible, let's see pyt. Number
three also rips what.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Is wrong with you that you have beat it so low?
It's it's too rocky for me. I like more of
the R and B stuff. It hurts my ears.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
It's telling the girl's mind is number four because Paul
McCartney's got to be in the top half of whatever
I'm ranking. Although that song, I hate that song. I know.
It sounds like an eighties sitcom theme. It sounds like
the family that does like no, no, no, no, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I just think of the the there's like a clip
or there's like an interview clip of Paul McCartney doing
like a withering Michael Jackson impression that's been like burned
into my brain.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Oh yeah, I think it's from you know what I
think it's from.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
I think it's from the it's VH Well, the one
that I'm thinking of is I was I remember it
because VH one's one hundred Most Shocking Moments in Rock
and Roll came out when I was watching a lot
of VH one lists, And yeah, it's when Michael Jackson
bought the Beatles rights and and Paul tells that story
about how on that video said he.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Was like, you know the real you know, the real
money is and music publishing and uh and and Michael
says to him, I'm gonna about your songs. We have
we have to have like a like a trip like
moment where how Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon do like
dueling Michael Caine impressions. We gotta go do dueling Paul
McCartney doing Michael Jackson's I'm gonna bouyt your songs. I'm

(04:38):
gonna about your songs.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Paul Yeah, so uh yeah, girls, my god, that song sucks.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
I know, human Nature a good mid tempo cut, and
then I think I'm up to Thriller and that's so
that's my My sixth favorite song on Thriller is the
title track. But I we talked about this during our
spooky season last year, which I know is a lot
more robust than this year's. I'm sorry. I take full

(05:08):
responsibility for that, but I'm not really into Halloween. I know,
I know, but I love how much you love it.
It's so good.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
I mean, it's great, man, I what what other like?
It's the biggest artists of all time doing a Halloween song, right, Yeah,
that's like where I'm trying to think of what else?

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, man, I carry all over for Christmases you in
terms of like that's a huge artists, huge holiday.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
But I think ad but I think around the same
time it would be it would like, oh god, we
should just pitch other versions of this. What if the
Eagles because that's the only the only band that's sold
higher than Michael What Eagles did Thanksgiving Thanksgiving song?

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, that's what they would do. That's exactly what they
did or fourth of July. I was going to say,
I feel like they would maybe do Fourth of July.
No Beach Boys would Fourth of July. God, that would
can you imagine how much that would suck. I'm sure
they did do a Fourth of July song at some
point in their in their wilderness years that I've just
not acknowledged. Old please not Eagles Thanksgiving. Maybe it's a
bird Turkey eagle thing. Nope, they sure do Fourth of July.

(06:14):
But it actually seems to be dramatically anti war.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I think it's because it was written by Dennis that's why. Okay, yeah,
there is a an excellent Bollywood version of Thriller. Okay,
it was like it made the rounds on YouTube. Like
back when YouTube was was was brand new, it was
more pure. Have you ever heard it? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Now maybe I just remember all the viral I remember
all the viral dance challenges.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Well, no, that I mean this is like actually good.
Like I actually think like the baseline in it, because
it's such a wild rip like it's so clearly thriller,
but it's like just different enough to not get sued.
But the baseline of it I kind of prefer I
want you to I want you to hear it and
see what you have to say. You might remember this

(07:01):
because I feel like it was big only E Bomb's
world or something when we were freshman in college.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
Live reacts, No, this sucks, It's awful.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
That is the worst synth tone I've heard. Dancing's great though, Yeah, yeah, no,
that sucks. What else you got?

Speaker 1 (07:42):
That's all I got? All right?

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Well, from the silent songwriter behind the monster hit to
the truly mind blowing sales records notched to the landmark
music video, here's everything you didn't know about Michael Jackson's thriller.
Necessarily quick thumbnail sketch before we dive in. Michael Jackson

(08:10):
obviously first rose to fame in the early nineteen seventies.
This is the adorable, pint sized front man of Motown's
Jackson five. We get a quick super Sounds of the
seventies style montage of him in the platform shoes, dancing
and then with Joe Jackson hitting him with a chair.
The Jackson's left Motown in nineteen seventy five and released
three albums on Epic, the most contemporaneous of the time,

(08:34):
of which Destiny had peaked at number eleven on the
Billboard two hundred and nineteen seventy eight. But then Jackson
became a bonafide global solo superstar with his first album
for Epic under his own name, Off the Wall.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
When it came out in nineteen seventy nine, Epic made
the then unusual move of promoting the album simultaneously to
pop and RnB markets, which helped it become this just
enormous crossover success. And then after that or Jackson and
Quincy Jones producer Quincy Jones, who's what his producer?

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Quincy Jones producer quizy Yeah. If you don't know Quincy Jones,
I can't help you. You're listening to the Rod podcast.
Jones came back to help Jackson realize his vision of
an album where every single song was a hit. That
was what everyone who has been interviewed about Thriller said
that they were going in and trying to do. Larry Williams,
who played saxophone, flute and since on the album, said

(09:29):
that to The New York Post in twenty twenty two.
He said, that was the mandate.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
I have a question for you just and this may
be something that requires my research offhand, what are some
other albums that you can think of that almost follow
that same edict. I mean, the only one I can
think of that comes close is Katy Perry. Katy Perry, Yeah,
because she t tied or broke the record of the
most number ones on one album. Yeah, I mean that

(09:54):
they set out to do ahead of time either way.
Either way, I don't know. That's an interesting question because
I feel like it would kind of either ahead of
time or just in retrospect, like why every single one
of these either it was a hit or could have
been a hit.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
I mean even just going to the top list of
all time California.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
As much as I hate to admit it, I.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Mean, Dark Side of the Moon is pretty up there
when you think of like every single song on that
album is actually like a banger. Like the weakest song
on there is like.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Eclipse, Yeah, maybe on the run, on the Runs, the
one I can't deal with.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Well, it's an instrument I mean I'm talking about the instrumentals.
But like when you think about like Breathe Time, great
gig and It's got money Us and them, like those
are all like those. I mean it was FM radio
rocks and maybe that's a bit of a dark horse.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
We gotta do dark Side we got somebody requested that
and oh yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
I mean the thing about Back in Black is that
it is not it's not all bangers. But when you've
got yeah, I guess it really was only three on that, man,
it's kind.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Of Hell's bells. The title one, You Shook Me. The
rest of them are all kind of you know, yeah,
come on over. Oh yeah, Rumors has filler on it,
like oh daddy, Yeah, that song sucks, yeah it does.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Secondhand News sucks. Oh Daddy also sucks. But the rest
of these are all strong.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Uh yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Zeppelin four, oh yeah, good, but but there's not that
many songs on that. It's only an eight song record
the cars day, but they all oh man, Zeppelin fours
for sure up there. The weakest one on Zeppelin four
is like Battle of Evermore and four Sticks, and then
every one of those other songs Smack, Black Dog, Rock

(11:57):
and Roll, Stairway to Heaven, ste Mountain Hop, going to
California when the Lemon breaks. Like that's that's a high
batting average for a record. Car's debut, Sure, car a
Dell twenty one. I feel like twenty one was really
just like powered by Rolling Deep, Rolling the Deep, set

(12:19):
Fire to the Rain, and someone like You. I'm gonna
say nineteen eighty nine might have been the most recent
Santana's Supernatural Oh oh well, okay, Yeah, Which doesn't that
share a story with Thriller where they both basically had
engineers engineers on four Yeah, Gurney's when they were done?

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (12:41):
Interesting thought experiment. Maybe Born in the USA? Oh, Born Run?

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Maybe too?

Speaker 2 (12:49):
I don't think so. Yeah, I want to elaborate on
that run Born and Run has Born to Run?

Speaker 5 (12:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (12:57):
No, David Lynn choice, No, any what's the David Cross
in the rest of the development? Do you want to
try that a little bit simpler?

Speaker 3 (13:09):
No.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Asked in two thousand and nine by Rolling Stone about Thriller,
Quincy Jones was admirably a forthright about the fact that
it was a team effort.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
He said, Michael didn't create Thriller. It takes a team, right,
It takes a team to make an album. He wrote
four songs and he sang his ass off, but he
didn't conceive it. That's not how an album works. Real
talk facts aside from engineer Bruce Swedeen Sweden Swedeen Sweden

(13:40):
with Sweden Swedeen Bruce Sweeden who will get to but
English songwriter Rod Temperton is the guy who comes up
most in the discussion of Thriller.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
For good reason.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Temperton is such a relentlessly low key dude though, that
his nickname and the title of a documentary about his
career by the DBC was the Invisible Man. He grew
up a musical kid. I think both his parents were
classically trained musicians. I grew up in Lincolnshire and he
eventually joined a multi racial disco funk band called Heat

(14:15):
Wave heat Wave Whips. Yeah, I imagine you pulled that
out in your DJ knights.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
I pull that out at home.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
Well.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
His biggest hits for the band, Boogie Nights and the
Ballot Always and Forever, were both million sellers, and they
helped break the band in America, which is how Quincy
Jones heard about him. Producer Barry Blue were called to
the BBC that despite this, Temperton was hardly living large
at the time. He had a very small flat, so
everything had to be done within one room, and he
had piles of washing and he had the TV on

(14:43):
top of the organ. It was a nightmare. He had
trams running outside, but he made it, just absorbed himself
in the music, and Rod seemed to come up with
these amazing songs. So Rod left Heatwave in nineteen seventy
eight after writing another hit for them, the Groove Line,
with the intention of focus on his writing. It was
not a career decision in the sense of I knew

(15:03):
what I was going to do, he told the BBC.
I had no idea where I was going. If I
was any good, somebody will call me, I guess. Obviously
that person ended up being Quincy Jones, who, based on
the heat Wave hits, called Temperton in nineteen seventy eight
and liked his demos enough to fly him to la
on weekends to work on Off the Wall. Jones said
in twenty seventeen that Temperton had asked Jones to manage

(15:27):
heat Wave, but he wasn't interested in doing that, but
they hit it off, and Temperton contributed rock with You,
Off the Wall and Burn this disco out to the
Jackson record Off the Wall. Intention was for that was
to actually have Jackson and Jones select just one song
for the record, but they liked all of his demos
so much that they went with three.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
So Michael Jackson was only twenty four at the time,
and he wrote four of the nine songs on Thriller himself.
Want to be starting something, which borrows heavily on Solmakosa,
which I feel like I should splice in now to
the tune of getting sued, Right, did they get sued? Who?
I mean taking a shot at Michael Jackson? You better
not miss wow? Uh that's who is that? Hugh Massaa?

Speaker 6 (16:13):
Yeah, mam, I.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
Mean it's the same song. I mean I maybe he
was arguing that it was sampling before sampling was heavily.
You know, I had a precedent of, oh, you got
to pay these people for this. Oh no, it was
man It was man U Dubongo, not huge massee Kela.
Oh I thought funny. I thought it was he Mesagia too. Yeah, whoops,
we're racist.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, because he sued Jackson and won in nineteen eighty six,
and then he also sued Rihanno when she sampled right for.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Place of Stuff the music. Yeah, but yeah, I don't
think I realized until right this moment that Jackson wrote
my favorite songs on Thriller. I want to be starting something.
The Girl is Mine Paul McCartney, Beat It and Billy Jean,
and the other songs for Thriller were selected by Quincy
Jones and Rod Temperton in two thousand and one autobiography
Q The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. I love him so much,

(17:42):
he said Rod Temperton, and I listened to nearly six
hundred songs before picking out a dozen we liked, And
in another interview he cited this figure as eight hundred,
but he's consistently seemed to say that thirty or so
of these songs were written by Temperton. That's a hell
of a batting average for that songwriter. Good lord. He said.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
They would all come with like alternate titles and lyrics too,
Like he submitted a bunch of different versions of He's
like well in case you don't like it with this
title in these lyrics, like he was like a three
other alternates.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
So he essentially would write all of these songs like
three times. That is wild, and that is what he
did with Thriller. Temperaman explained to m magazine that as
you got to know Jackson better, he honed in on
Michael's love of movies, and that was the prompt that
generated thriller. He said, I came up with the idea
that I should write something really theatrical. This is him
talking in twenty twelve. I've been really impressed with Michael's

(18:35):
participation in the rhythm section when recording don't stop till
you get enough, so I wanted to write something with
the same power, but a really dramatic melody structure. Michael's
love of movies did not extend to horror, however. Michael
described himself as being too scared, and this probably came
from when it comes to talking about Michael's trauma where

(18:57):
else his father Joe in that what you've described as
our second Arrested Development reference on this episode a hilariously
tragic prefiguring of the That's why you Don't Lie bit
from Arrested Development. Joe Jackson tried to teach his kids
a lesson about leaving their bedroom windows open by climbing
through their window one night in a mask and shouting

(19:19):
at Michael, which gave him recurring nightmares about being kidnapped.
I mean, you have to need a mask, Joe. Climbing
through your window period in the middle of the night
is scary enough.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
You have to laugh because otherwise you cry. But like,
what an insane person thing to do to your child
and largest breadwinner of your.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Family, to take it much kidnaps. He was so mad
about the window being open.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
He was like, I will risk, and not risk, but
I will permanently damage my son and the man who
makes enough money for all of us to live because
leaving the.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Damn window open. It's kind of it's like sort of
the ultimate dad thing to do. Oh yeah, it'd be
like if you wanted to teach your kid a lesson
about leaving the thermostad on by like faking a house.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Fire or something like kind of shocked. He never did that,
to be honest. Uh, Temperton continued. I remembered messing around
with bass patterns and drums until I came up with
the core baseline that runs through the piece. Then I
started building chords on top to grow the tune into
its climax. I wanted it to build and build a
bit like stretching an elastic band throughout the tune to

(20:38):
heighten suspense. Actually I should have put this in from
the top.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
Uh. I guess you can kind of hear that. You're right,
It's like, m.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Well, I just want you to sing it, but you
got to listen to this. This is a bass player
named Ian Martin Allison who does a lot of stuff
with a sight that I and social bass channel Scott's
Bass Lessons, and he does a great bit on this bassline.

Speaker 5 (21:02):
So but really, what I'm trying to do is think
about this tune in the way that a keys bass
player would think about it.

Speaker 1 (21:14):
But doo dooo do don't.

Speaker 5 (21:15):
Go short notes right, short notes, cut off, muted notes.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
It's a great part, so you can actually hear how
everyone thinks that bassline is doom doom, doom doom, butting
doom doom, doom doom.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
But it's got that extra little punch, that low one
in it.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
That does make a difference. Yeah, great, great bassline. The
demo was done in Temperton's usually humble circumstances. He said
he lived in Germany at the time and he was
recording with a two track revox, so he'd put drums
on one track, then play the bass live, bounce back
the drums record that in the other track. Uh, just

(21:54):
a lot of self recording and bouncing over to a
new channel. And he did that with guitars keys and vogels.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
That is insane.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
It really is nuts when you hear that, which we
will plug in in a second. That the scrapped version
of this before it was thriller, but like how fully
formed it was.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Was he like some kind of songwriting virtuoso? I want
to know, did he start writing when he was a
kid and sell like a panale that?

Speaker 2 (22:20):
I don't know, man, I don't really. There's he did
like three interviews in his life, and then there's that documentary,
so we don't really know a ton about him. He's
no Quincy Jones, right, yes, I.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Mean, just you think about I was watching something about
a documentary about ten CC recently, and I didn't realize
that one of the guys in a Glenn Goldman as
like a fourteen fifteen, sixteen year old would write these
incredible sixties pop hits, things like a lot of Holly
songs like Bust Stop Now.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
He started out as a drummer, then moved to keyboards,
and I guess just discovered that he could write really well.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, that the guy from ten CEC wrote for Your
Love and Heartful of Soul for the Yardbirds. I didn't, Yeah,
I had a bunch of Holly songs too, look through
any Window, Bustop no Milk Today for Herman's Hermons. That's
why they were so good at aping that pop sounds,
but with like a weird art school twist, because he
got to start as like a fifteen sixteen year old

(23:20):
writting these pop songs for British pop groups, and I just, yeah,
that's weird. I would have thought Temperton had a similar
background because he's churning them out single handedly. Wow. But
getting back to Thriller, the song's lyrics and title did
not arrive fully formed, and in fact they went through
a few iterations, Temperton told The Telegraph in two thousand

(23:42):
and seven. Originally, when I did my Thriller demo, I
called it Starlight. That scans really well. I can totally
hear that. Yeah, Quincy said to me, you managed to
come up with the title for the last album. See
what you can do for this album. I said, oh great,
So I went back to the hotel, wrote two or
three hundred titles and came up with the title Midnight Man,

(24:02):
which a kind of rules. I like that.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
I don't care what you say, like it does be
Getting back to Arrested development. It just makes me think
of like the Man and me right, yes, you know, like, yeah,
Michael Jackson, of all people should not be singing a
song called the Midnight.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Midnight mat Yeah. Yeah. The next morning, this is temperament continuing.
I woke up and I just said this word thriller.
Something in my head just said, this is the title.
You could visualize it on the top of the Billboard charts.
You could see the merchandising for this one word. How
it jumped off the page as thriller. So wait, I
have a question. You did was Quincy assigning him to

(24:39):
basically just write a title for the album, and then
once he had thriller, he realized.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
That it fit the Starlight song I don't know. And
to distract you, we're now going to listen to the
Starlight demo. Oh I've never heard this. I'm excepting because
I don't know. This is including on one of the
massive Thriller box sets that came out, so it is
up on all the streamers.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
Wow, that's that's there.

Speaker 7 (25:20):
The rubber bands pulling it back, that's in the case shot.

Speaker 8 (25:39):
Stunning name shut. It's always trying to pat it down.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Now I'm leaving until until the chorus drops in.

Speaker 7 (25:56):
I want to hear him.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Sorry, I can forget soon. I kind of like it better.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Oh I don't like spooky things, so yeah, well it
doesn't you know, it doesn't have uh, it doesn't have room.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
I'm not hearing Vincent Price monologue in there. That's still okay, fair.
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more. Too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
I can't believe they put Thriller together in two months.
He's the craziest thing, not the song, the whole album.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
How am was mixing? Was mixing well? Or get to
mixing okay? Recorded by Bruce Swede Swedeen swydey Ian. His
name is spelled s w e d i e n
so tweet elis.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
If you were a loved one, know how to pronounce
Bruce Swedian's name.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
Westlake Recording Studios in LA. Seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars was the budget, which in today dollars is nearly
two point four million. The entire production team worked around
the clock. On an interview with the BBC, Quincy Jones
said they would carry the second engineers out on stretchers
and the musicians too. Bruce and I would stay up
for five days, five nights.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
The passion drives you and the cocaine yeah yeah, but
the supernatural thing is real too. That was another thing
for because Clive was so obsessed with making making Supernatural
a hit. So they I think they were literally working
in like twenty four hour shifts on this when Union
rules said, like that guy has to stop mixing your
duet with the guy from Everlast, And then another guy

(28:08):
would come in the Union steward tapping his watch, Yeah,
no more, ever Last, stop comping Everlast Vocals.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
The guy with the gurney comes in, haulsome out and
puts him an ivy drip. He's like, I don't want
to go back, Clive, please get back there and mix
the guy from Everlast vocals.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Cut me, Clive, cut me, cut me. I can't see Clive,
I can't see you. Gotta cut me, guy. I hate
Santana so much.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
This is a question, I mean, because you know a
lot more about this stuff than I do. I have
no concept of what a budget for a big name,
a list musician album is, like like two point four
million dollars today? Is that normal? For what would like,
I don't know, Maroon five, Adele. I mean, it's definitely interesting.

(29:00):
It's it's an interesting thing that's evolved at the cost
of it has evolved. Like back in the day when
you were doing this with musicians, a lot of those
fees would be eaten up by just having people cycle
in and play oh okay, everything right, because like Steely
Dan the class example for Asia, when they were just
like calling in every top session guitarist in LA and

(29:23):
giving him a crack at one song solo and being like, Nope,
that wasn't it.

Speaker 6 (29:27):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
You know, those guys were all making scale union fee.
And then you have engineers at least two probably more percession,
a head engineer, a head you know producer. Nowadays that
is all probably getting eaten up by like producers and programmers,
like because everything is done so piecemeal. You would you know,

(29:49):
have a guy who's doing sequencing and programming, and then
you have like a lot of top people have their
preferred vocal engineer. So you see the engineer lists nowadays
are so long because it'll be like someone engineered the
basic tracking and then someone came in and did Taylor
Beyonce's vocal or whoever. As far as an average cost,
I don't know. I feel like I've been interviewing you

(30:12):
on this episode. Sorry, I just you know a lot
more about this than I do. I mean, even just
going back like the top Google results, Invincible supposedly is
the most expensive record ever made, the last Michael or
the sort of basically last Michael Jackson one. Yeah, yeah,
at thirty and forty million.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean how much that was hush money?

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Well exactly, I mean, you know, the first out so
this is again just going by Wikipedia. The first album
to cost over a million was actually believed to be Tusk,
and then it was Guns N' Roses Chinese Democracy, but
that album took you know, fourteen years, fifteen years to make. Yeah,
and one of the more recent ones is actually My beautiful, dark,

(30:58):
twisted Fantasy by Kanye and that is I'm gonna go
ahead and say due to just hourly studio costs getting
all these different producers in there and having them hit
their hourly. Because he's also on there for Jesus Watch
the Throne is also on there. You know, it's a
really surprised one.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Ricky Martin that doesn't surprise me that era in music,
and like the late nineties, I'm sure there were the
producer on that. I'm sure there was some big name
producer that I'm forgetting. Great question.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Oh Desmond Child, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Emilio Estefon Yeah, and
our boy Walter Fantasy, writer of All I Want for Christmas. Yes,
that's funny. They put a lot of money behind that record.
The Darkness is one way ticket to Helen Back is
on here.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
That's so weird. I just reference The Darkness today, which
I do maybe bi annually.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
It's interesting because it becomes a thing about like Hollywood
accounting too, because it gets into promotional costs too, like
when you budget. You know, again, Michael Jackson's History in
nineteen ninety five is the most expensive marketing campaign ever supposedly,
but you know, something like a Virgin is the other

(32:12):
thing that's sponsored or cited in here had a two
million campaign from Warner Brothers. But like recently ten years ago,
Born This Way by Lady Gaga cost three million, but
apparently that was sponsored by Amazon. So it does come
become a really interesting case of accounting where it's like
when do you consider the line cut off? Is like
what the label paid. Is it the money that was

(32:32):
paid for the studio musicians? Is it money that was
paid for mixing and everything?

Speaker 1 (32:36):
So? Where were we talking about how much I hate Santana?

Speaker 3 (32:40):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, I wanted to know what your favorite song is?
Supernatural is uh it's like a quick look here, deep.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Cut, no hits you don't get I mean smooth? Is
that someone Marie Marie on it? Yeah, and might have
to go with that, Yeah, probably, but nothing nothing well.
Compare with Game of Love written by Greg what's his name?
The guy who wrote You Get What You Give by
the New Radicals. Oh, Game of Love is incredible. I

(33:13):
was thinking of damp.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
There's this songar on here with Dave Matthews, Love of
My Life. Oh God, I hate Santana.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
All right, there's swid.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Swedeen's parents gave him recording gear for his tenth birthday.
By the age of fourteen, he wasn't only recording everyone
anyone who wanted to swing by, he was also broadcasting
his projects on the neighborhood radio station he set up himself.
At nineteen, he was establishing his own commercial studio in Minneapolis,
and by twenty one he was recording the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra professionally for RCA Victor before moving on to Universal

(33:49):
the following year. Quite a wunderkin.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
See, this is what I thought Ted Templeton would have
had his background like that, kind of like started young
and was just a virtuo so at writing pop.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
It's interesting because Swedeens has Swedeens has kind of a
he's got a real mix of high and low culture.
Like Michael's vocals on this album are recorded on the
same model mic that you and I are both using.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
That's insane wo wow.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
In a full disclosure for podcasts set up, this is
like a three hundred and fifty dollars mic as opposed
to use like the probably staple for a lot of
recordings around this time would have been Annoyman, which are
like three thousand dollars two mics. So yeah, that's that's interesting.
Do you think it was because he would just belt?

(34:39):
Thank you, James Burrown. That's an interesting question.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
Some of what he did well, I mean some of
the engineering that he did was actually uh to get
the sound of Michael's dancing involved, because Michael would dance
while he was moving, and so they talked about recording. Uh, well,
he was recording me this is Yeah, it didn't start

(35:03):
on this album, but it actually started on Bad, which
I think Swedeen also engineered.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
But yeah, they would set him up on a drum
riser and use a bunch of baffles around it so
that his dancing and vocals wouldn't echo. But they would
actually use a bunch of like different mics pointed around
to get that sound as well as just one on
his voice. But I mean they also had him do
like on Billy Jean, the like I think it's the
you think twice, like one of the backing vocals is

(35:31):
him like singing through like a cardboard, like a gift
tilepper tube. Yeah, gift wrapping tube because it was like long.
There's another weird thing that people have always parsed in
the liner notes. It has recorded and mixed by Bruce
Swedeen using the ACU Sonic recording process, and everyone thought
it was this like weird piece of outboard gear or
like rack mounta gear that And believe me, there are

(35:52):
extensive documentations of the rap gear that he used on this.
If you want to know the exact compressors and e
U used on this, you can find it, but no,
this is actually like basically just like an overdub and
sinking process without getting too much in the weeds. It's
like a two step process. Basically, he would record the
rhythm tracks and then lock the master tape away for

(36:17):
those and never touch it again until it was time
to do a final mix. So every subsequent overdub was
done on like a scratch track, a temp track, a
temp comp of all the rhythm tracks, so that when
they went to do the final mixes, all the rhythm
tracks wouldn't have been degraded by constant overdubs, which, as
you remember from the Bohemian Rhapsody episode, you know, they

(36:39):
literally overdubbed the tape into transparency, and so Bruce's whole
thing was like, well, if you don't want that to happen,
you need to keep the original tape as pristine as possible.
The other part of it that he would that this
ACU sonic thing entails is basically just the other part
of the Bohemian Rhapsity thing that we talked about, where
you just record a bunch of overdubs, mix them down
into a sub mix, bounce that onto a smaller part

(36:59):
of the tape and then you can just you he
was recording on twenty four track, but there's way more
than twenty four tracks on these because of that process.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
And then there's stuff about he.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
The way that he would like sync it up to
keep track of all this stuff, but it's really not
it's not like a single piece of gear or anything.
Oh and yeah, if you see the drum set that
he made for this to get like the isolation of
the drum sounds is really funny because he basically like
he took the kick drum apart and put like a
cinderblock in it and like a furniture blanket, so it's

(37:32):
this really diy kind of jury ragged looking thing. And
then he would I think he enclosed or separated the
snare and high hat with pieces of wood.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Like.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
So he just made all this like custom carpenter style,
like really literally built stuff to isolate all the drum
sounds and get them as crisp as sounding as possible.
And this went as far as building a ten inch
drum riser because he knew that the low end vibrations
from the kick drum and the low tom's could bleed

(38:06):
into the walls and floor and affect the resonant frequencies
of the room. So yeah, that guy's a nerd.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
But I'm sure that there wasn't It wasn't all electronic drums.
I think I just sort of assumed they were drummer shans.
I think it's a little early. I mean, there is
Michael's credited with using the lin drum on this, which
is like one of the first ones Roger Lyn's drum,
and that's in particular for a lot of Prince stuff.
But I think at this point in the eighties they

(38:38):
would have been using it for like hits more than
actual full tracks. Do you know that the lin drum
is samples of the Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker's drummer?
No really? Yeah, oh no, so i'vecked it up.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Actually, the L one is mostly samples from Ronnie Wood's
brother Art Wood, and then the clap sounds come from
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So when you hear that
early LM one, let's.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
See if I can find it actually that was.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Is that that supposedly supposedly the Tom Petty.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
From the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sessions. Is that
the sound that opens uptown Funk? Probably that little weasels. Oh,
I like Mark Ronson, Yeah you would, Oh, I meant
Bruno Mars. I have no quarrel with Mark Ronson. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
So you know we've talked about this, this wild Prince
Michael Jackson rivalry and multicaseted long, decades long thing. But
one of the funniest influences on Thriller is specifically from
Prince's nineteen ninety nine and let me backtrack a little bit.
Filling out the ranks of the people who played on
Thriller is a group of known Quincy Jones collaborators Greg

(39:59):
Filling on synths, Rhoades, David Williams on guitar, guys Jerry Hay,
Gary Grant, so close to Carry Grant, Larry Williams and
Bill Reichenbach on various horns. Brian Banks, who also played since,
told the Telegraph it was late in the evening one night,
which is so.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Close to Monster Mash. I don't know if he knew
that he was doing that. It would have been.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Amazing if in this interview Brian Banks was like, we
were working in the lab late one night. So he said,
it was late in the evening one night and we
were working Quincy came to us. He wanted this huge
chord sequence. He said, there's this sound I've got in
my head. There's this underground this new artist that nobody's
ever really heard of. But he's great, he's hot, he's
got this great song. And he pulled out the album
and it was nineteen ninety nine by Prince and so

(40:45):
he says, you know that opening sound on nineteen ninety nine,
that was the sound that he wanted, but bigger that
Quincy Jones wanted for thriller. So let's take a listen
to that. And there's a bit of non musical stuff

(41:32):
that goes into the thriller as well, which we will
now let's get into that before we get to uh,
get into the rest of the song.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Jordan take it away. Talking to music radar Bruce Swedeen,
the engineer explained that the wolf howls were Rod Temperton's idea.
He said, at the time, there was a Sherlock Holmes movie,
The Hound of the Baskervilles, and they had this huge dog,
a great Dane, and that did some howling, and of
course I had that in my mind's ear, my mind's
ear like that, I automatically thought of my great Dan,

(42:00):
who I figured ought to be in show business. So
I tried to get him to do those howls, and
you know what, he never did it. We put him
up in the barn at night to listen to the coyotes,
and I had my tape machine ready to record him.
He was a fantastic dog, two hundred pounds. His name
was Max. But you know who it is doing those
wolf howls. That's Michael Jackson. We had to get Michael

(42:20):
to do it instead, but he did so great. There's
some library stuff in there, but Michael did those lone
wolf howls. I had no idea. That's that's very good.
I'm also obliged to mention at this point that Brian
Wilson of my beloved Beach Boys got his dogs Louis
and Banana to bark in the studio for the end
of Caroline No. On one of my favorite albums of

(42:40):
all time, Pet Sounds. They were champs on like we
was the guy's this putts yes, Get me the Dog
from Pet Sounds.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
I don't care how much it costs Michael's underwritingness, Bring
me the Dog.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
What are their names? Louis and Banana, bring me Louis
and Banana put it on Quincy's bill. That was the
most organic use of the cigar shopping executive that we've
had in a long time. He's got to come for
a while, but that was a good one. Bruce whote

(43:21):
and continued. For the creaking doors, I went to Universal
Studios in Hollywood, the movie lot and rented two or
three sound effects doors and brought them to Westlake and
spent a whole day auditioning these doors and Miking ma
Hinge is real close. Got the eighties record industry, had
more money than he knew what to do with. They
spent the day checking out these doors. That was a

(43:43):
real door. I recorded and I added it onto the track.
Come to think of it, that might have been Michael
doing those footsteps too. Actually, God, I love it. What
a town. Sorry, anything he couldn't do.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Lastly, we've got to talk about Vincent Price baby bisexual
icon once taught Johnny Carson had a cook fish and
a dishwasher.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
You could have made all of that up for all
I know. They think they think he might have been bisexual. Well,
I met more of the I was more referring to
the cooking fish and a dishwasher. What's that about? Oh well,
great question.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Vincent Price was a big fan of a big cooking guy,
and among his many culinary endeavors was simple, easy ways
to cook. And when he was on Carson and he uh,
pulling the clip up. Now, this might be the most
clip rich episode we've ever done. Yeah, well, you know
you gotta pull out Vincent doing the dishwasher.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
You put this in the oven.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
You don't put it in the oven?

Speaker 9 (44:42):
No you don't.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
Well, I'll tell you what you do.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
Put such distinctive voice. It is true the dishwasher.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Absolutely, absolutely true. Now I give you my word that
an hour before the show's we cooked exactly that meal
in this dishwasher on the full cycle, mind you, on
the boat cycle. The water and everything. Yeah, no rints,
no rent, no, and no soap, but the drying and everything,
the whole bit. Now here it all is. There are

(45:10):
dishes and they're hot. Now they're hot, and we hope
they're done. And I'm sure they are done because they've
tried it and it was successful. And you'll take a
look first at the why why do you use the
dishwasher just to because it steams and it heats, and
fish is one of the few things you couldn't do,
you know, meat or anything, wipe that it. But fish
cooks and only a very short time, and it really

(45:33):
is kind of beautiful.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Because it steams and it heats. That's incredible. That's a
great household tip. That did not make it to TikTok yet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Right, wait, do they get a load of Vincent Price's dishwashers?

Speaker 1 (45:47):
Salmon?

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Temperton said an interview included on the CD reissue of Thriller.
I had always envisioned a talking section at the end,
but I didn't really know what to do with it.
It turns out that Quincy Jones' wife then wife.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Wasn't he like seven wives?

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, Quincy John's wife of the moment, Peggy Lipton, at
the time best known as Julie from The Mod Squad
but now beloved as Norma from Twin Peaks, knew the
legendary horror actor Vincent Price. Funnily enough, the twenty seventeen
biography of Temperton, The Invisible Man by Jed Pittman, contended
that Temperton's original choice for the voiceover was Elvira, Mistress

(46:21):
of the dark, but her image was probably a little
too sexy for a.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Prudish little Mikey.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Temperton later said the idea was that Price would just
talk some horror talk like he would deliver in his
famous roles. The night before our session, Quincy called and said,
I'm a bit scared. Perhaps you better write something for him.
So Temperton wrote one verse of that talking part while
waiting for a taxi to the studio, and then two
more verses during the ride. Vincent apparently recorded this in

(46:50):
two takes. And hear a bit of studio banter from
that recording session. And if you ever wanted to hear
two men who sound like old women, here it is.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Listen to this show, Okay, anytime you want. Hi, This
is Michael Jackson.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
This is Vincent, so you can hear how his voice
drives and doing the Vincent Price voice the thriller.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Do we both say it? Say it together? It's in
my ears.

Speaker 8 (47:27):
Anti.

Speaker 9 (47:33):
Hi, this is Michael Jackson and this is Vincent Price,
inviting you to the Thriller. Darkness falls across the land,
the midnight hour is close at hand.

Speaker 8 (47:49):
Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize yours neighborhood
and whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting
down incredible?

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Did he ryan blood with the hood?

Speaker 2 (48:06):
He sure did. He also said yawls, which is very funny. Yeah,
tatter raise Yoel's neighborhood. Was there visuals with that or
was it just the audio?

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Nah?

Speaker 2 (48:16):
He does A photoshopped image of Vincent Price holding Michael
Jackson's head severed.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
Temperton elaborated to m Magazine. I told the driver to
drive round back to the studio, and I raced in
and told the secretary to photocopy what I've written, and
was able to walk into the studio and calmly hand
the copy to Vincent, who recorded it in two takes.
He was just fantastic. Wow. So he didn't have that
the night before and like prepped it. Man's prize. That's nuts.

(48:44):
That's what you get making seventeen movies a year with
Roger Corman. True. According to Sonic Fantasy, a documentary about
engineer Bruce Swedeen, Vincent Price had never used headphones before
and was star OpEd when he put him on to
record and thriller blared out. Now I find that hard

(49:05):
to believe. I mean, I don't know, man, I don't
know what he did.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
He record a Calypso album like everybody else was doing
in the sixties.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
I mean, maybe during his radio days or whatever.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
But like, well, I guess you're right, I guess I
guess that doesn't seem to track because he was nominated
for a Grammy No why for what his voice work
in the nineteen fifty nine album Great American Speeches.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Huh huh.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
He read on the War of eighteen twelve by Henry
Clay the Crime against Kansas by Charles Sumner, for which
he was nominated for a Grammy Award. Anyway, that's just
what That's just what the documentary said, so sue me.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
But as you alluded to earlier, Vincent Price recorded more
than what's heard on the final track of Thriller, and
he only performed the monologue live on TV once, during
an episode of The Tonight Show hosted by Joan Rivers.
I guess she was the guest host back in nineteen
eighty seven.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Yeah, And he was offered a flat fee for his
work on the track or a cut of the profits,
and he chose poorly. The figure that I keep seeing
is twenty grand, which not bad for a couple hours work.
But you know when you later find out that this
is the most the highest selling record of all time.
It did indeed rankle Price after the song became a hit.

(50:28):
John Landis, who directed the Thriller video, told the Telegraph
Vincent called me about a year later and said, look,
the kid made the most successful record of all time,
and I made less than one thousand dollars. Michael won't
take my calls. I'm very upset about it. Let me
see if can do that in his voice.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Vincent called me about a year later and he said, look,
the kid made the most successful record of all time,
and I made less than one thousand dollars. Michael won't
take my calls. Very upset about it. It's very Stewie.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, I didn't. Yeah, strike that in crisis. Price's daughter
Victoria wrote a biography of her dad, and in it
she wrote word eventually trickled back to Michael Jackson that
my father was upset about the money. One day, I
answered the door at my father's house to find three
members of Jackson's entourage. They came bearing the gift, a

(51:17):
letter of thanks from Jackson and a large frame containing
a poster of the pop star and one gold and
two platinum albums, all dedicated to Vincent.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
Post is not even autographed.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Needless to say, this framed wal art, coming from one
of the richest art people in the world, did not
mollify Price. He attempted to get paid for the usage
of his voice in the music video, but there was
a clause in his contract about video rights that was
buried in it, so he didn't get any further money
from that either. And at that point, Victoria wrote, Vincent
agitated to have the gold disc auctioned, with the proceeds

(51:51):
to go to his gallery at East Los Angeles College.
She continued in a truly stunning PostScript that when news
of Jackson's multi million dollar settlement to one of his
alleged victims was made public, Vincent Price quipped, all I
can say is Michael Jackson, me and I didn't get
paid for it.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Stunning line reading there too. That's good.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages, we will spare
you from the torturous details of post production on thriller.
But one illustrative antidote is that Bruce Swedeen did ninety

(52:40):
one mixes of Billy Jean, ninety one separate mixes.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Guess which one they used Number two. Also complicating matters
was that they had actually too much music, which is
an interesting archival or no, what's the word I want
to use, old timey, antiquated, antiquated, an antiquated concern from God,

(53:10):
I'm getting old, an antiquated.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Concern from the vinyl pressing days. The more music that
you have on a disc, the thinner the grooves have
to be. And thinner grooves do not transmit lower frequencies
as well. You need wide, deep grooves for that. And
Quincy Jones, obviously thinking with the mind that this was
going to be a hit pop dance record, wanted thinner,
deeper grooves, so they actually had to cut stuff out

(53:33):
of this. They cut down the intro to Billie Jean,
and they cut a verse from the Lady in My Life.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
I didn't realize that. Wow, Yeah, a lot of there
are problems on I think mixing some early Beatles singles
where the bass when it went too low would cause
the record to the needle to jump out of the grooves.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
I thought it was the distortion I thought it was
when they made they pushed the distortion on those too much.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
I think it was both. Sometimes it was the lower
base stuff things like Paperback Rider. But that's interested.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
That also plays into the sequencing that they would do
on records from this era, where they would have your
side one track one is your banger because that's going
to have the deepest base response and everything, and then
the crews get thinner as it goes towards the center.
So that's why traditionally in these big classic rock albums,
the end of both sides is like a smaller acoustic

(54:24):
number or like something that doesn't have to be as
hard I did.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
I just thought that was a show busy thing. Although
I guess you're going to have an intermission like on
the ending of a side or ending of an album.
I guess that sounds like you want to end with
something huge anyway. So that's interesting. Well, speaking of interesting things.
Despite the heavy marketing push behind Thriller, the brain trust
behind that push, which is Michael Jackson, his lawyer and

(54:48):
very close advisor John Branca, and CBS Records chief Walter
Yetnikoff and epic heead of promotion for Frank de Leo
did not include plans for a third video, and certainly
not a video of the title track, which wasn't even
going to be released as a single. No Thriller was
not going to be released as a single, to which
I say, good, my sixth favorite track on the album.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
They should have made another video for the Girl as Mine.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Yes, I focus more on Paul Walter. Yetnikoff, the head
of CBS Records, told Vanity Fair, who wants a single
about monsters? The prevailing thought seventeen billion Americans can't be wrong.
Bobby Boris Pickett also this despite the fact that Jackson

(55:36):
was batting a thousand at this point after the videos
for Billy Jean and Beat It. Part of the success
of those videos was yet Nakoff threatening to pull CBS
and Columbia's acts from MTV's rotation unless they played Michael's videos.
At the time, MTV had a no black Axe policy,
which I'm sure was not written in such stark. I mean,

(55:59):
I was an unreal in the rule. I would imagine.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
Yeah, you remember there's that clip of David Bowie pushing
someone on air.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Mark Goodman. He's a friend of mine. Now I like
Mark Goodman. Wow, sucks to be him. I know I
felt bad for him when I saw that clip resurface.
Recently realized it was him. But yeah, MTV had this
unspoken but strictly enforced no black acts policy at this time.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Buzz Brindle, MTV's former director of music Programming, told Jet
magazine in two thousand and six MTV was originally designed
to be a rock music channel. It was difficult for
MTV to find African American artist whose music fit the
channel's format that leaned towards rock. Out the outset sounds
like a weak excuse, although you know Les Garland, who

(56:45):
isn't the Networked co founder also talked to Jet. He said,
we just had nothing to pick from. Fifty percent of
my time was spent in the early days of MTV
convincing artists to make music videos and then convincing record
labels to put up money to make those videos. That's interesting,
I buy that. I'm sure like convincing people to spend
money on music videos was an uphill battle.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
I could have sworn there was another famous example of
somebody of a very famous artist. Maybe it was maybe
it was Michael oh Rick James, not who I was
thinking of. But yeah, Rick had.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
To battle Motown for money to make videos Forgive It
to Me Baby and Super Freak. Actually funny enough, the
director of those, Nick Saxton, did Can't Stop Till You
Get Enough.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Oh wow, that's a really groundbreaking video. But put the
bubbles and stuff in the background. I guess it was
green screens, but I'm sure at the time it was. Wow.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
This is actually really fascinating. This is on lit Hub
by Raymond Hervey the Second. He basically along and short
of this is that there was a Billboard Music Video
conference held in New York and Gail Sparrow, who's a
vice president of MTV, who you may remember from our
Osborne's episode I Want to Say or cribs how that

(57:55):
name rings a bell?

Speaker 1 (57:57):
Nuppy Baby got back. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
So this guy, Raymond Hervey the Second, proposed that Rick
James philed the artist slot on this panel, and he
said the panel discussion was well attended. When it came
time for Rick to speak, he started out on point,
but within a few minutes went off script and pointedly
attacked MTV's programming format for being discriminatory and racially biased.

(58:20):
He took the exact stance we had told him to avoid,
and his comments created a media firestorm contrary.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
To my vision.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Ah yeah, this is an interesting side tangent that I
did not know anything about. This made it as far
as the La Times. Rick did an interview with The
La Times. He accused MTV of being racist, Oh Rob
Tannebaum and cred marks in I Want My MTV. The
Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution said that MTV's
lone black executive, Carolyn Baker, took credit for rejecting Rick's

(58:52):
Super Freak video. She said, it was an MTV that
turned down Super Freak.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
It was me.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
I turned it down, you know why, because there were
half naked women in it, and it was a piece
of crap. As a black woman, I did not want
that representing my people as the first black video on
MTV far out.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Oh where were we? I think we were about to
tell us about another factor in the thriller videos conception?

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Oh sure, well, another factor in the thriller videos conception
was that in June nineteen eighty three, the album, after
four months at number one on the Billboard two hundred chart,
was bumped from the top slot by the Flash Dance soundtrack.
It briefly crawled back atop the chart in July before
him being bumped again by the Police's synchronicity. So the
three remaining singles from the record want to be starting
something released in May, Human Nature scheduled for July, and

(59:41):
PYT Pretty Young Thing for September. We're not a pretty
own thing. We're not expected to drive album sales as
much as Billy Jean or beat It had, and were
not pegged as good material for videos. But for the
extremely competitive MJ, who was obsessed with beating his peers
like Prince and Madonna and his constant yardstick by w
she measured his own success the Beatles, this was cause

(01:00:02):
for alarm. Walter Yetnikoff and Larry Stescil, Epic's West Coast
marketing executive, told Vanity Fair that they started getting calls
in the middle of the night from Michael Jackson.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Walter the record, isn't it number one anymore? What are
we going to do about it? Walter Yetnikoff recalled. He said,
We're going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow.
And it was Epic head of promotion Frank Delo who
first mentioned the idea of making a third video and
pressed Jackson to consider the album's title track, I work
with people like that. That sucks.

Speaker 7 (01:00:36):
Somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:00:36):
Despite not really being a horror ficionado, Michael had seen
an American Werewolf in London, John Landis's groundbreaking horror comedy
that featured Oscar winning makeup SFX icon Rick Baker. I
shouldn't take this. He's a hero. As you take this.
I do love Rick Baker. What else do we talk
about him? We talked about him in one episode The Thing? Yes,

(01:00:58):
so John Landis. I also, did you know Blues Brothers
killed some kids? Has a really fail son? Did he
kill the kids?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
There was just a stunt man who died. I think
it was both. Yeah, so that's the Twilight Zone movie.
But you know he also did Blues Brothers, so got
to break a few eggs.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Landis told The Telegraph.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Michael contacted me and asked me if I would make
a video with him, and I said no actually because
they were basically commercials, right, But he persisted and he
said no, no, no, I really want to make it.
So when I returned to La I called Rick Baker,
who had done the makeup effects for American Werewolf, and said,
Rick Michael Jackson wants to become a monster. It's funny
because when Landis and Jackson met for the first time,
Landis was talking to Vanity Fair. They did a great

(01:01:45):
oral history of the video. John land has apparently teased
Michael Jackson when he asked him about seeing American Werewolf
in London.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
He said, Michael, what about the sex? And Jackson said,
I closed my eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
Another funny anecdote, according to Quincy Jones's autobiography, when they
were recording thriller re Beat at one of them. In
Quincy Jones's word, a healthy California girl walked by the
front window of the studio there's one way mirror facing
a street, and pulled her dress up over her head.
She was wearing absolutely nothing underneath, and Michael Jackson ducked

(01:02:18):
behind the mixing console so that he wouldn't look, while
Quincy Jones and all the studio musicians augled. This this
woman who for whatever reason just decided to flash a mirror.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
I guess, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:02:29):
LA is weird.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
The funniest thing that my father has ever seen. And
I hope it's this thing right now so that he
can he can have a good laugh at this. It
was I think it was out of Ripley's Believe it
or Not Museum, and they had a mirror and they
had like a plaque in front of it that was
talking about like, you know, only one in ten people
can like do the cloverly thing with their with their tongue,

(01:02:53):
and like only one in four can like roll your
tongue into like a tube that goes straight up and down,
and only one in eight can do it to face
into the left and right. And you're in front of
this mirror and you're making all these like you're testing
this out with your tongue and doing all these goofy
things with your lips and everything. And then you go
through the entire museum. It's like all one track and

(01:03:14):
it takes like an hour to get through. At the
very end, you just go there's a big window the
sign over that says monkey House, and you realize that
that mirror with the tongue stuff was a one way mirror,
and you're just watching people just like making stupid faces
in the in the window. And my dad thought that
was the funniest thing you ever seen. A friend of

(01:03:34):
the pod Big dig Tun, Yes, John Landis told Michael
Jackson that he didn't want to direct a music video
and instead wanted to think of the production as an
actual short film shot on thirty five millimeter with multiple locations,
a show stopping dance number as you wrote, and Ted
Baker's makeup not Ted Baker, Rick Baker, Ted Baker does Baker,

(01:03:58):
it's a clothing brand, It's a that's more my speed.
And Landis's budget for the short film nine hundred thousand
dollars or nearly two point nine million dollars today. Landis
recalled that when Michael called CBS had Walter Yetnikoff with
that figure after CBS had already dropped a quarter million

(01:04:20):
dollars for Beat It Yetnikoff screamed so loudly that the
director had to literally hold the phone away from his ear,
a move I've only seen in cartoons. Really, steam coming off.
I was gonna say this like air coming out of
the phone, blowing Landis's hair to the side. When Landis

(01:04:40):
hung up the phone, Jackson said, calmly, it's okay, I'll
pay for It's okay, I'll pay for.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
My MJ's getting there. I'm gonna start calling you in
the middle of the night. I need practice doing weird
MJ monologues.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
Jordan, do you ever think do you believe in an afterlife? Okay,
we'll talk in the moment, just thinking about you, or
just do it like what else?

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
I just do Werner Herzog monologues. Hang on, let me
see where I can find my favorite one. This is
Verner her monologue from A Burden of Dreams Less Blank documentary.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Oh that's blank.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
Yah. About the making of fitzcrado Kinski always says it's
full of erotic elements, I don't see it so much erotic.
I see it more full of obscenity. Nature here is
vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I
see phonication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting. Of course,

(01:05:43):
there's a lot of misery, but it is the same
misery that is all around us. The trees here are
in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't
think they sing, They just screech and pain. That goes on.
Do the end of seven and he's having way once
rote the world's a fine place and worth fine. I

(01:06:05):
agree with the second part. I don't know why that
was the one that came up with Oh what the
hell are.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Oh so?

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
Land has hung up the phone. After being yelled at
by the head of CBS for asking for a nine
hundred thousand dollars budget, Michael Jackson said, calmly, I can't
do it in his vace. It's okay, I'll pay for it.
CBS ultimately spent another one hundred thousand dollars towards the video,
which still left a huge shortfall, so they came up
with a unique solution. They decided to film the behind

(01:06:39):
the scenes on sixteen millimeter for a nearly forty five
minute documentary called Making Michael Jackson's Thriller, which bundled with
the Thriller video could be sold to cable for eight
hour special What the video itself is thirteen fourteen minutes
forty five minutes special He got four hour ray MTV
agreed to pay two hundred and fifty thousand, and Showtime

(01:07:00):
agreed to pay at three hundred thousand for the one
hour package. Jackson would cover the assorted costs up front
and be reimbursed by them. And then also Vestren came in,
I don't know what Vestrin is and offered a distribute,
making Michael Jackson's thriller as a twenty nine to ninety
five sell through video on VHS and Beta Max, which
was a pioneering deal of its kind. What is Vestan,

(01:07:22):
Imagine it's just a distribution company. Yeah, something like that. Uh,
you have another story from landis I do?

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
I don't know how much he's full of shit, but
he told the Telegraph that a part of the costs
where that he insisted that this would be a union shoot,
which most music videos at the time weren't, and that
the team of dancers that he assembled be given two
weeks to rehearse. So make of that what you will.
The plot of the film is and Michael's sort of
look is loosely based on I Was a teenage Werewolf,

(01:07:51):
which is Michael Landin?

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
Is it Michael Lane?

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
I think there's a nod to a boatload of other
horror movies in there. And they needed a love interest
for Jackson, and they landed on Ola Ray, a former
Playboy playmate, which obviously caused some consternation from Jackson and
has told Vanity Fair, I auditioned a lot of girls,
and this girl, Ola Ray. First of all, she was
crazy for Michael. She had such a great smile. I

(01:08:16):
didn't know she was a playmate. I said, Michael, she's
a playmate, but so what She's not a playmate in
this Ola Ray and Michael Jackson got on well. She
told Vanity Fair that she had a hilarious exchange with
Jackson's makeup artist. Michael Jackson would watch her do her
makeup and wanted to get tips from her for his
makeup artist. He said, I have this shine on my

(01:08:38):
nose that I can't get off. And then when Ray
tried talking to Michael Jackson's makeup artist, that person responded
to her, don't you know that how much powder I
put on his nose, it's gonna shine? Do you know
how many nose jobs he's had? And this is news
to me.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
The pair even had something of a real life romance,
or at least as close as you could get to it.
With a heavily ammatized Michael Jackson on the set of
the video. Ray described this to Vanity Fair thusly, I
won't say that I have seen him in his birthday suit,
but close enough kissing and puppy love makeout sessions and

(01:09:13):
a little bit more than that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Gross she actually sounds really like down bad for Michael
Jackson out a after years for this, Like she just
talks about how head over heels she was for him.
Everyone remarks on their chemistry, and there's a really heartbreaking
quote in Vanity Fair where she's like, she says something
to the effect of, like, I just wish I had

(01:09:36):
been allowed in Michael's life more because I feel like
I could have helped him.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Oh wow, which is just so crushing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
She also appeared on Cheers and in Beverly Hills cop Too,
but her only other notable music video was give Me
the Night by George Benson, a single also written by
Rod Temperton and produced by Quincy Jones. Isn't that funny?
I love that connection. She and Jackson did not have
a happy ending. She sued him in two thousand and
nine for non payment of royalties, saying I got the

(01:10:06):
fame from Thriller, but I didn't get the fortune.

Speaker 1 (01:10:08):
This was surely the worst thing to happen to Michael Jackson.
In two thousand and nine, heyo, I want to say, hey.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
Oh boy, Jordan, let me just take this next juck Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
Makeup artist Rick Baker told the Telegraph. I got a
call from John Landis and he was like, you know
who Michael Jackson is And I was like, yeah, kinda.
He's the guy from the Jackson five, right, And he said, well,
he's got the song called Thriller and he wants to
do a short film. And I said, I didn't want
to do it. It's not the most popular job being
a makeup artist. It's like being a dentist in a way.

(01:10:43):
They have to sit in a chair for hours while
you work on them. It's uncomfortable. It's not something actors
look forward to. Baker continued, You start with the casting
of the actor's face than the latex the contact lenses.
Michael's makeup started more as a werewolf and then became
more like we made he elaborated on this, Rick Baker

(01:11:04):
did to Vulture in twenty ten. We made him into
more of a wear cat, which I didn't I wasn't
aware it was a thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
I've always thought that was the weirdest thing where I'm like,
you what, we.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
Made him into more of a wear cat just because
I didn't want to do another were wolf. I guess
because he'd just done on an American werewolf in London
with John Landis. At first I was thinking it would
be almost like a black panther thing, but I ended
up putting a longer made of hair on Michael and
bigger ears. You've also read that the wear cat approach
was also because of Jack Wells, so they said, they

(01:11:42):
said because of Michael's delicate features.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
And I didn't parse it any more than that. But
there's obviously two ways that that phrasing could be interpreted,
and I think one of them is that his nose
was simply structurally too delicate to support the larger muzzle
aesthetic that our fine features just I literally delicate nos. Okay,
that's what I that's what. There's just a tinfoil hatchet

(01:12:07):
on my end. But you know, I have my theories
because it's a really dumb looking wear cat.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Sorry, it's no bad looking. The zombie dancers were also
subjected to a makeup routine. Michelle Simmons, one of the dancers,
told the Telegraph, they took most of our teeth for
the dancers that they put in our mouths. You put
those in your mouth and now you can't close your mouth.
And when you can't close your mouth, the saliva falls
out too, and they just said, this is great. Let's

(01:12:33):
just put some food color and die in there and
make it really nasty looking. That was part of the deal.
That's so cross it is. Another dancer, Lorraine Fields recalled,
I remember at one point they got some dirt on
the floor and stuck it on my face and said
this looks good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
Baker said he was frustrated because ordinarily they would have
done individual casts of every every dancer's face for it,
and instead they weren't given that much time, and so
they instance had just kind of made three like rough
prosthetics that were kind of like a like small medium
in large size, and then just slapped him on everyone.
So Jackson's iconic wardrobe in the video was the work

(01:13:12):
of Deborah Landis, John Lance's wife, who you will perhaps
recall from Raiders of the Lost Arc Yeah long d
Hollywood wardrobe designer. Since the video would be shot at
night with a relatively subdued palette, she told Vanity Fair,
I felt that red would really pop in front of
the ghouls. Find that word so inherently comedic, you know,

(01:13:35):
in front of the ghouls, And so she elected to
make both his jacket and jeans red to make Jackson
appear taller.

Speaker 1 (01:13:43):
The shoulders of that jacket gave him some virility, she
told the Telegraph, praising the socked. The socks and shoes
were his own. He took that directly from Fred Astaire,
who always wore soft leather loafers.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
To dance in and socks. One of those jackets the
Jackson wore four. The video was sold to a Texan
gold trader named Milton Varren Thomas Pinchin ass name and
character in twenty eleven for one point eight million.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
You gotta ask, I mean, do these people just like
put that on? I mean, I can't imagine Texas gold
trader with fitting the Michael Jackson's fill of jacket, but
like you know, he puts it on and does the dance,
I mean, like risky business style, just like sliding around
the slipping room in the thriller jacket. Yes, I think
I saw one of the like b thriller jackets in

(01:14:32):
the in the hard Rock vault in Orlando that I
tore it a bunch of years ago, which is one
of the most real things I've ever done. It's like
a BJ's Sam's Club sized warehouse in the Orlando ever
Glades and you walk in and it's just you know,
first of all, one of the entire walls is just

(01:14:52):
completely filled with guitars. They go all the way up
to the ceiling. It's gargantuan, and they just have rosebund rose,
bun rose. It looks like prop warehouse. But it's just
everything is like, oh, this is from the YouTube Pop Tour,
This is from Lady Gago's Monster Ball. This is anything
anything good. Though a lot of the good stuff I

(01:15:14):
think was in more climate controlled stuff. I'm trying to
give me a second. I don't care, no, no, I
gotta eat dinner, keep going.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
I truly don't give a about the hard rock of
old I think you need to understand that, my friend.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
The iconic choreography in the video came about in conjunction
with beat It choreographer Michael Peters. Jackson said it was
a delicate thing to work on. I remember my original
approach was, how do you make zombies and monsters dance
without it being comical? This is Michael talking to MTV
News in nineteen ninety nine. So I said, we have
to do just the right kind of movement so it

(01:15:51):
doesn't become something that you laugh at, but it just
has to take it to another level. I got in
a room with choreographer Michael Peters, and he and I
together kind of imagine how these zombies move by making
faces in the mirror. Second reference to making faces and
mirrors in this episode. I used to come to rehearsal
sometimes with monster makeup on and I loved and I
love doing that. So he and I collaborated and we

(01:16:14):
both choreographed the piece, and I thought it should go
into this jazzy kind of step, you know, kind of
grewsome things like that. Michelle Simmons, one of the dancers,
told The Telegraph that the rehearsals were held in Debbie
Reynolds Dance studio in North Hollywood. That's amazing, speaking of
buying stuff, one of the largest Hollywood memorabilia collections in history.

(01:16:34):
That's true. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
In the Making of Thriller, the making of video that
accompanied this, Peters, the choreographer, Michael Peters, choreographer, talks about
Jackson's physical facility with these steps. He said, Michael danced
in front of eighteen professionals who spent their lives training
to achieve what Jackson picked up in minutes, he said,
purely on rhythm.

Speaker 1 (01:16:54):
He works.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
I give him the rhythm of a step and he
does it. You say, this is the beat you know,
don and he does. It's really wonderful to watch because
it's an innate gift. He's a dancer in his soul.
The thriller dance has become so beloved that you remember
that when they were going around in the early web
two point zero days, you know, I remember everyone's the
remembers the guy the prison version of the Prison Thriller.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Oh my god, I forgot about that. I haven't thought
about that in years and then.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
But did you know that the world record for the
most people doing the thriller dance at once was achieved
by thirteen thousand, five hundred and ninety seven participants in
Mexico City in August of two thousand and nine.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
I did not. I assume this was in tribute to
the then recently departed King of pop. It was I'm
just trying to set up The thriller.

Speaker 2 (01:17:50):
Shoots took place at the Palace Theater in downtown Los Angeles.
The Zombie sequence at the junction of Union Pacific Avenue
in South Calzona Street. And East Los Angeles and the
final house scene at thirteen forty five Carrol Avenue in
the Angelino Heights neighborhood of Echo Park. Marty Thomas, the
video's props assistant, recalled the atmosphere around the shoot to
the Telegraph. I remember we had to sign a non
disclosure agreement not to tell anyone what we were filming,

(01:18:12):
not to tell family or anything. What they would do
is print up maps to the location and leave them around,
but they were false locations. Some of it from the
press would sneak on set and steal these maps, and
they were just sort of locations of the shopping mall
that's closed way way out in the valley.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
He continued. We couldn't believe this was sure just one
music video. It was a small city.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
Everywhere we went there was a lot of police, a
lot of security, and John Landis he would let people
who made it there get pretty close, but behind a barrier.
They had third and fourth and fifth assistant directors handling
the crowd, which would be in numbers of two, three
to four hundred who had figured out where to go
or had heard from one of the film crew wherever
there watching on the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
Set filming, unfortunately, was occasionally marred by Jackson's eccentricities we'll
call them. One telling detail in Vanity Fair's profile of
the shoot had him showing up forty five minutes late
to a makeup session, infuriating John Landis, the director, and
returning from a bathroom break carrying his Boa constrictor called

(01:19:08):
muscles in a pilow case, which he then proceeded to
drape around the neck of a reporter. The shoot was
also marked by a series of high profile visitors. We
got Rock Hudson, Fred Astaire, which must have really made
Michael happy. Jackie Kennedy O NASA's who would later edit
Michael Jackson's Moonwalk autobiography. I didn't realize that although our

(01:19:29):
Hollywood heavy in your parentheticals, pun intended visiting was Marlon Brando,
who was giving Jackson acting advice. One day, when Landis
chastised Jackson for flubbing his lines, Jackson said, Marlon told MA,
can't do it. Marlon told me to always go for
the truth, not the words. Other less fun visitors included

(01:19:51):
Michael's parents, Joseph and Catherine Jackson, which caused a minor stir.
Landis told Vanity Fair. Michael asked me to have Joe removed.
He said, will you please ask my father to leave?
So I go over to mister Jackson. Mister Jackson, I'm sorry,
but can you please?

Speaker 7 (01:20:08):
Who are you?

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
I'm John Landis, I'm directing this well, I'm Joe Jackson.
I do what I please, I said, I'll have to
ask security. It's a movie. If you don't leave now.
John this told the magazine that he had a policeman
escort at Joe Jackson off the set, which Jackson, through
his lawyer, denied in the Peace Damn Oi.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
As the project moved out of shooting and began into
the editing stage with a slated premier date at the
Crest Theater in Westwood of November fourteenth, nineteen eighty three,
Jackson's religious beliefs nearly derailed the entire thing when he
called his lawyer, John Bronca and ordered him to destroy
the negative of Thriller two weeks before the premiere.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
This is just for the making of video. This is funny.

Speaker 2 (01:20:54):
Landis added up all the footage that they shot and
realized that they were at twenty six minutes rather than
the half hour they were aiming for so he dug
through Jackson's closet for the old eight millimeters home videos
that you see in there to pad out the running time. Anyway,
Michael Jackson had eventually divulged on the phone to Bronco
that the Jehovah's Witnesses, and at this time Jackson was
a devout practitioner. He would go door to door proselytizing

(01:21:17):
as the religion demands, wearing a fake mustache. I'm not
making that up anyway, that Jehovah's witness had gotten wind
of Thriller in the Thriller video and told him that
it promoted demonology and that they were going to excommunicate him.
Bronco smartly got John Landis to remove the film canisters
from the processing lab and lock them up in his office.
Landis said that he heard from Jackson's security chief, Bill Bray,

(01:21:40):
that the star had been in his room with the
door locked for three days, refusing to come out. So
he drove to Michael's Encino estate and with Bray kicked
the door down. Michael said he hadn't eaten in three days,
so after getting into the doctor, Landis said that Jackson
apologized the following day for wanting to destroy the film,
at which point Landis then had to explain to him

(01:22:00):
that they had ignored those orders from the jump. Bronca
eventually resorted to just lying to his client to preserve
the work. He told Vanity Fair, I said, Mike, did
you ever watch Bella Legosi in Dracula?

Speaker 1 (01:22:12):
He goes why?

Speaker 2 (01:22:13):
I said, do you know that he was a devout Christian?
I was just making it up, And I said, did
you ever notice there were like disclaimers on those movies?
He goes, no, So, Michael, before we destroy this film,
let's put a disclaimer on it, saying this does not
reflect the personal convictions of Michael Jackson.

Speaker 1 (01:22:30):
Is that I'm there. I don't remember that. Oh yeah,
narrator voice, they did. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
The whole thing opens with due to my strong personal convictions,
I state that this film does not endor let me
find it? Why am I trying to paraphrase it? Due
to my strong personal convictions. I wish to stress that
this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
That's just like the title card.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
Well that's settled. Thriller premiered at the five hundred seat
Historic Crest theater, which I believe is the movie theater
used in the video itself. Attended by the likes of
Diana Ross, Warren Batty Prince and Eddie Murphy, John Landis
warmed up the audience with a new print of a
Mickey Mouse cartoon called the Band's Concert. For some reason,

(01:23:12):
to need something to do with it, or just I
can imagine Michael just being really pumped to see a
Mickey Mouse cartoon. Yeah, and fourteen minutes later, after Thriller
had been received with a rapturous standing ovation, Landis found
himself stuck with what to do next until Eddie Murphy
yelled out, show the damn thing again. Show the damn
thing again. You could probably cut that. That's verging on

(01:23:37):
the racist. That's pretty good. That was accurate, though. Thanks.
The video premiered on MTV on December second, nineteen eighty three,
and former MTV executive Les Garland told Vanity Fair the
network settled on a saturation strategy, which he describes as
every time we played Thriller, let's tell them when we're
going to play it again. We played it three to

(01:23:58):
five times a day. We were getting audience ratings ten
times the usual when we popped Thriller. Showtime meanwhile aired,
making Michael Jackson's Thriller six times that February. Within months,
the Vestern release had sold a million copies, making at
the time the biggest selling home video release ever. Sadly,
like so many other things in Michael's life, Thriller was

(01:24:20):
subsumed by the financial chaos of his fame. In January
two thousand and nine, six months before his death, John
Landis and co producer George Folsey, filed suit against Michael
Jackson and his company, Optimum Productions for breach of contract,
alleging that they had not been paid their fifty percent
of royalties in many years and accusing Jackson of quote fraudulent, malicious,

(01:24:42):
and oppressive conduct end quote.

Speaker 2 (01:24:46):
So this is good as time as any to get
into the insane numbers that Thriller, the song, and the
album put up. For context, it is important to understand
that the American record industry was literally in the toilet before.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
This album came out. It was in its second slump
in three years.

Speaker 2 (01:25:01):
Well, the United States was still in the middle of
a deep recession. Unemployment was at a four decade high.
I am just spitballing here. But I have to assume
that the oil shortage played into this, well just for
like making yeah, the actual vinyl. Yeah maybe you think
maybe thanks for me? All right, I won't.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
Tell if you don't.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Billboard reported that record shipments had declined by fifty million
units between nineteen eighty nineteen eighty two. CBS staffers referred
to August thirteenth, nineteen eighty two as Black Friday. Their
vice president of merchandising told Reuters, we had a major
layoff that day. Half the marketing department was let go
at epic. Good come anyone that looks like them. It's

(01:25:50):
a training day quote for you. Yeah, oh man, I
should do what training day monologues are there?

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):
Ys? Michael Jacks, King Kran you gotta do the King
Kong one?

Speaker 2 (01:26:04):
Yeah, yeah, I would like to hear this.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
I think I think our fans would also. I think
IDDS would also like to Oh you motherers, Okay, all right,
I'm putting cases on all you bitches. You think you
can do this, Jake, you think you can do this
to me? You motherickers will be playing basketball on Pelican

(01:26:30):
Bay when I get finished with you. Shoe Program twenty
three hour lockdown. I'm the man up in this piece.
Do you think you're sicking with I'm the police. I
run around here. You just live here. Yeah, that's right.
You better walk away. Go on and walk away because
I'm gonna burn this mother for down. King Kong ain't

(01:26:52):
got you on me, That's right, I don't. I'm winning anyway.
I'm winning an motherfucking way. I can't lose. Yeah, you
can shoot me, but you can't kill me. Thank you,
probably Instentiam Bernard hung Well. Originally, the label Epic planned

(01:27:22):
for a Christmas nineteen eighty two release for Thriller, but
then they were going to push it to January nineteen
eighty three as Jones and Jackson continued to fiddle with it.
But the album leaked to radio and stations began playing
multiple cuts, forcing the label to release Thriller on November thirtieth,
nineteen eighty two. The first single, the Girl Was Mine.
Of course, they went with the Girl as Mine. It's

(01:27:43):
got Paul McCartney on. It went to number two, and
then the label made the decision to go for broke
and release Beat It. While Billy Gan was also still
climbing the charts. Real Flex Yeah, When the Thriller video
came out, sales reduced again. Epic was shipping one million
copies a week, with thirty two million copies sold worldwide.

(01:28:04):
By the end of nineteen eighty three, Thriller became the
best selling album of all time and was ratified by
the Guinness Book of World Records on February seventh, nineteen
eighty four. I wonder how much that pissed off Paul McCartney,
because that is the twentieth anniversary of the Beatles' arrival
in the United States. It was the best selling album
of nineteen eighty three worldwide, and in nineteen eighty four

(01:28:25):
it became the first album to become the best selling
in the United States for two years in a row.
As of May twenty twenty two, Billboard put its global
sales at over one hundred million copies, though you've seen
figures closer to seventy million.

Speaker 2 (01:28:41):
Yeah, I'm always interested in sales figures for this kind
of stuff. I don't know how people exactly certify it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
And then especially when you get into nowadays, when it's
like how many streams count towards a sale or whatever, So,
but you know, it's still in the top.

Speaker 2 (01:28:54):
It's kept from the top slot by their greatest hits,
by the fucking Eagles.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
It also pulled in eight Grammys, with seven for Jackson
and one for Bruce I forgot how to say it already,
Sweideen Sweet Sweets.

Speaker 3 (01:29:09):
And.

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
Michael Jackson's incredibly high royalty rate two dollars per album
helped him become ludicrously wealthy. So let's think about that.
Thirty two million copies sold worldwide at the end of
nineteen eighty three, two dollars an album. So that's sixty
four million on record sales alone. Good god, let's see me.
Let's just go for the inflation calculator. I'm gonna say

(01:29:32):
six sixty four million turns into one hundred and ten million,
as my guess, all right, was this eighty four you said?

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
Yeah, one hundred and eighty nine almost one hundred and
eighty nine point six million dollars christ.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
Not counting tours, not counting singles sales, YEP, radio play man,
that's just know it's I mean, that's it. That's the
top of the mountain. That's that's exactly it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
And it's it's so funny because this album, I mean,
obviously what do you do? But it did become something
of the albatross around Jackson's neck, and he fully expected it,
perhaps in the depths of his delusion, that this would
just be a stepping stone onto bigger and better things.
I think there's a quote it's from one of his
team at some point where they're like, well, you know, Michael,

(01:30:18):
how do you how do you feel? And he's like, well,
the next one's going to be bigger. Like I think
he expected Bad to sell like or no, you know
what it was.

Speaker 1 (01:30:25):
It was he was disappointed when Bad came out and
sold twenty million because he thought it was going to
sell better than Thriller. But yeah, man, I mean it's
just like, yeah, where do you go from the top
of the world. You go on a post nine to
eleven road trip with Elizabeth Taylor and maybe hang out
in your private zoo.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
Was that Elizabeth Taylor nine to eleven thing disproved that
actually happened?

Speaker 1 (01:30:49):
I think it was disproved. Yeah, bummers, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor,
and Mylon Branda. That was someone weirder. For those of
you who have no idea what we're talking about, there's
a a I'll call on been legend that on nine
to eleven, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and somebody else. I
thought it was Marlon Brando. Was Marlon Brando? You okay,
fled New York City in a rental car. I don't

(01:31:12):
think they even had a driver. I think they in
the story they all took turns driving.

Speaker 2 (01:31:16):
And this disproved disproved by Tim Mendelson, trustee of Elizabeth
Taylor's estate.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
I think Liz Leonard wrote that. Liz McNeil wrote that, yeah,
you know what people call it, bomber. Well, I have
a question for you about Thriller before we end did
it end up? Did it end up in the Library
of Congress? It sure did, Thank god, thank god. It
truly is the top of the mountain. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:45):
I mean again, it's like we were saying at the
top of the episode, like Thriller Man. Nancy Griffin writes
in Vanity Fair, it just feels like not just a
high water mark for music, but culture period. She wrote,
Thriller seems like the last time everyone on the planet
got excited at the same time by the same thing.

(01:32:07):
No matter where you went in the world, they were
playing those songs. You could dance to them. Since then,
the fragmentation of pop culture has destroyed our sense of
collective exhilaration and I miss that. Well, folks, this has
been too much information. Thank you for listening, Thank you
for hanging tough with us.

Speaker 1 (01:32:26):
I'm Halloween on Halloween, I'm out Tigel, and I'm Jordan
run Tug. We'll catch you next time. Well, folks, after
we stopped recording, Heigel delivered us a little treat. Thankfully
I had a backup recorder going, so please enjoy. You
know what you look like to me, with your good

(01:32:46):
bag and your cheap shoes. You look like a rube,
a well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good
nutrition's given you some length of bone. But you're no
more than one generation from poor white trash. Are you
agent starling accent? You've tried so desperately to shed pure
West Virginia? What is your father, dear? Is he a

(01:33:06):
coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know
how quickly the boys found you, all those tds, sticky
fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could
only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the
way to the FB I Too Much Information was a

(01:33:28):
production of iHeart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel
Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael
Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by
Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth
Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what
you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For
more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(01:33:51):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Expect Mom
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"Thriller" by Michael Jackson: Everything You Didn't Know