When Quincy Jones Worked With Michael Jackson, ‘We Had No Limitations’
Their work on “Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” and “Bad” set records for commercial success and defined the sound of the 1980s.
Quincy Jones first met Michael Jackson in the early 1970s at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house in Los Angeles, when the 12-year-old was still a bubble-gum soul singer leading his brothers in the Jackson 5.
Jones and Jackson’s second meeting, at the end of that decade, proved the more pivotal, both for them and for the future of pop music. Jackson landed a role as Scarecrow in “The Wiz”; Jones had been hired as the music supervisor for the film.
What came next cemented one of the most celebrated musical relationships of all time. The pairing of Jones, a noted composer, arranger and producer for jazz and R&B acts, and Jackson, the child star looking for a breakout sound, over three albums remains a career-defining arc that transformed pop music in the 1980s.
Jones, who died Sunday at 91, spoke extensively about his working relationship with Jackson, telling The New York Times in a 2012 interview, “You’re looking at one of the most talented kids in the history of show business. Michael was very observant and detail-oriented. You put that together with my background of big-band arranging and composing, we had no limitations.”
With “Off the Wall,” Jackson’s solo debut released in 1979, Jones called on his wide-ranging network of studio musicians and collaborators, notably recruiting Rod Temperton from the band Heatwave to write songs for the album, including “Rock With You,” and “Burn This Disco Out.” “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” the single that established the album’s polished disco grooves, won Jackson his first solo Grammy for best male R&B vocal performance.
The LP went platinum that year (it has since gone nine-times platinum), but the dearth of more awards for the LP and a backlash against disco at the dawn of the ’80s sent Jones and Jackson back to the studio with a renewed mission to better their previous effort.
“Why can’t every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single?,” Jackson said in a 2007 interview with Ebony magazine. “That was my purpose for the next album. That was the whole idea.”
The intense recording process for “Thriller” (1982) would strain the relationship between the pair. A first listen of the rock-infused album was so terrible that it brought Jackson to tears, Jones wrote in a 2009 essay for The Los Angeles Times, so the crew worked to reshape it, mixing one song a day. For that album, Jones enlisted members of the band Toto and convinced the reluctant guitarist Eddie Van Halen to performed a solo on “Beat It.”
“Thriller” went on to become the best-selling record of all time and earned a record eight Grammy Awards. With his televised performances of “Billie Jean” and pioneering music videos for the album’s singles, Jackson made the album an inescapable pop staple.
“‘Thriller’ is now played on rock radio stations that cater largely to young white listeners as well as on urban dance-music stations that appeal largely to Blacks,” the critic Jon Pareles wrote in The Times in 1984. “Before ‘Thriller,’ few entertainers were able to cross that subtle color line. A similar crossover has taken place on cable television, where Mr. Jackson’s video clips are shown on programs that rarely offer Black performers.”
The album redefined “how big and culturally binding a commercial entertainment product could be,” Nelson George wrote in “Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson.” He added: “A success this massive can be seen retrospectively not only as the beginning of something but also the end of an era. ‘Thriller’ was both.”
Its success ultimately alienated Jackson, who distanced himself from past mentors, including Jones, in its wake. By the mid 1980s, when Jones and Jackson reunited to create “Bad,” Jackson had taken more control over his career and his creative process. He wrote nine of the 11 songs on the LP and co-produced it with Jones.
“There was a lot of tension because we felt we were competing with ourselves,” Jackson said about the making of “Bad.” “It’s very hard to create something when you feel like you’re in competition with yourself because no matter how you look at it, people are always going to compare ‘Bad’ to ‘Thriller.’”
Still, “Bad” was another chart-topping success. Five of the album’s singles — “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Dirty Diana” — went No. 1. The pair split soon after its release, and according to Jones, Jackson felt the producer was out of touch with newer music.
“He told his manager that I was losing it,” Jones said in the Times interview, “that I didn’t understand the business because I didn’t understand in 1987 that rap was dead. Rap wasn’t dead. Rap hadn’t even started yet.”
Both men went on to make more music, but never again achieved the commercial success of those three albums. After Jackson’s death at 50 in 2009, interest in his music surged, complicating the business impact for the other artists involved in its creation. In 2013, Jones sued Jackson’s estate over royalties for the music used in two Cirque du Soleil shows and in “This Is It,” a 2009 documentary about Jackson that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Jones was initially awarded $9.4 million in damages, but a California appellate court later rejected his claim to most of that money.
In 2018, Jones criticized several musicians, including Jackson, in a meandering interview with New York magazine, calling his former collaborator “as Machiavellian as they come.”
Jones later apologized for that interview. Previously in the Los Angeles Times essay, he had described the legacy of their work together, writing that Jackson and he “shared the ’80s, achieving heights that I can humbly say may never be reached again.”
“There will be a lot written about what came next in Michael’s life, but for me all of that is just noise,” he added. “I promise you in 50, 75, 100 years, what will be remembered is the music.”
