* * *
Jackson and Jones assembled a bevy of talented musicians to help them in the studio, including Rod Temperton, the British master songwriter responsible for hits by Aretha Franklin and Donna Summer; bass guitarist Louis “Thunder-Thumbs” Johnson, of the Brothers Johnson; Greg Phillinganes, a keyboard prodigy who’d left school to start working for Jones five years earlier; and Tom Bähler, a vocal arranger known in part for his collaborations with Cher.
Another valuable addition was sound engineer Bruce Swedien. With his thick white mustache and burly physique, he was a pair of rosy cheeks short of winning a Santa Claus look-alike contest. An electrical engineering major at the University of Minnesota with a minor in music, he worked for the Minneapolis Symphony before leaping across genres to work with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Even against that backdrop, Jackson seemed remarkable.
“Michael was a joy to be with in the studio, absolutely the best,” says Swedien. “It doesn’t get any better. For instance, there’s two vocalists that I have worked with in my career—Michael Jackson is one, Siedah Garrett is the other—that I have never used pitch correction on. . . . He never wasted a take.”20
Swedien would go on to work on every one of Jackson’s solo studio albums (and Garrett would join forces with the singer on Bad for the duet “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”). Swedien and his wife, Bea, eventually became close friends with Jackson, and the singer would make frequent visits to the couple’s ranch in California. (“Michael used to love our chickens,” Swedien recalls.)
The first product of this extraordinary team was Off the Wall. Recording began in December 1978 at Hollywood’s Allen Zentz Studios, where Jones and his crew (collectively known as the A-Team) began experimenting with some unfamiliar recording techniques. These ranged from relatively mundane (using a wide range of microphones plucked from Swedien’s collection of more than a hundred) to bizarre (Jackson joined the engineer in the attic one day to record the sounds created by banging on assorted objects).
Jackson was a sound engineer’s dream. When Swedien suggested recording in the dark, the singer happily obliged. Sometimes he’d stay up all night memorizing his lyrics so that he could deliver them with the lights off in the studio the next day; it allowed him to feel uninhibited, particularly on romantic songs. He grew to love Swedien’s idea so much that he employed it on future albums as well.21
And though his Motown days were long behind him, Jackson never forgot the ethos that Berry Gordy had instilled in him at a young age. “He was a perfectionist,” says his cousin Keith Jackson. “No matter what he did, if it was business or music, or just being in the studio or just writing . . . he always believed if you were going to do it, do it right.”22
Off the Wall was no exception. From the album’s opening track (the swirling, emphatic disco-funky “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough”) to its other hits (the silky, mellow “Rock with You” and the tender, tremulous “She’s Out of My Life”), the songs of Jackson’s adult solo debut rocketed him to a musical place far beyond his Jackson 5 days.
“It was such a joy to work with Michael, so natural,” says Swedien. “Music just came out of every pore of his body.”23
* * *
The Wiz debuted in October of 1978, nearly a year before Off the Wall’s release. Roger Ebert was one of the critics who praised Jackson’s performance. “It’s good that the Scarecrow is the first traveling companion [Diana Ross’s Dorothy] meets,” he wrote. “Michael Jackson fills the role with humor and warmth.”24
When it came to the rest of the film, they weren’t so thrilled. “The Wiz had everything going for it—it could have been a musical Star Wars,” lamented the Globe and Mail. “Now, it’s suitable for children of all ages under twelve.”25 TimeOut would later name it one of the biggest flops in the history of cinema.26
The film bombed at the box office, too, grossing just $13 million—about $11 million less than its budget.27 Even some of the people involved in making the film thought it was terrible; Jackson stood out as one of the lone bright spots.
“What’s amazing is how he sparkles, and his dancing is just fabulous,” says Schumacher. “It’s a very saccharine film, because that’s what we were expected to make . . . but those quick turns and some of the things he went on to embroider upon and make even more brilliant, you can see the seeds of some of the great Michael Jackson moves in The Wiz.”28 Adds Berry Gordy: “I frankly liked his performance in The Wiz. . . . Michael just kind of wanted to do everything.”29
Jackson’s talent and ambitions couldn’t rescue The Wiz, but they powered the success of Off the Wall, which debuted the following summer. The album would sell 7 million copies in the US by 1982, and more than 30 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling effort by any black artist at the time; Rolling Stone labeled it “a slick, sophisticated R&B-Pop showcase.”30 Adds Yetnikoff: “[Off the Wall] was really, I think, his breakout record as Michael.”31
There was no doubt that Jackson had arrived as a legitimate solo act and was much more than just a member of the Jacksons—both the group and the family. Buoyed by a fresh sense of independence, Michael started to contemplate going his own way on a number of fronts, including business. Though his father had orchestrated the early success of the Jackson 5, he was a flawed manager in many respects. His aggressive approach came in handy during the chitlin circuit days when he bargained with small-time promoters to earn cash for modest gigs. But it wasn’t so helpful as his sons’ careers grew to superstar status.
“Joe wasn’t a businessman,” wrote Smokey Robinson. “In the end he was more of a hindrance than a help; business people didn’t want to deal with him. Sadly, when they were old enough, his kids found managers of their own, with Michael leading the way.”32
Jackson knew that taking the next step as a solo artist meant breaking off from his father. He turned twenty-one less than three weeks after Off the Wall’s debut and didn’t waste any time asserting himself as an adult. He informed his father he wouldn’t be retaining his services as manager.
“Trying to fire your dad isn’t easy,” he explained in his autobiography. “But I just didn’t like the way certain things were being handled.”33
Joe didn’t take the move as seriously as he might have, perhaps because Michael retained Freddy DeMann and Ron Weisner—who also handled some of the Jackson 5’s affairs—as his new managerial team. But Michael saw the move as a major step toward independence.
“All I wanted was control over my life,” he wrote. “And I took it.”
* * *
“We’re running overtime,” says Yetnikoff, after about an hour and a half at the diner. “I’ll start billing you.”34
“Okay, last one.”
“You keep saying last.”
Yetnikoff touches on one more topic before we wrap up: the multiple sides of Jackson’s personality, sometimes at odds with each other, that he witnessed as the singer’s career progressed.
“To me, it’s very simple,” says the former CBS chief. “They coexist. . . . He had the childlike, emotional kind of thing and he had the astute one . . . the astute businessman.”
He continues.
“I don’t see that as impossible, to have different sides to a personality. I may be the only one who says, ‘Sounds all right to me.’ Not sounds all right, but sounds almost normal.”
Chapter 4
* * *
EMPIRE BUILDING
The walls of John Branca’s Los Angeles office are covered with mementos from his clients—he has represented more than twenty-five members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—but the artist best represented by the keepsakes is Michael Jackson. Among the highlights is a photo of the singer at his wedding to Lisa Marie Presley, with the inscription: “To John Branca, the greatest lawyer of our times,” signed by Jackson.
The veteran attorney spent the 1980s helping build Jackson’s business, negotiating a record-setting album deal with CBS among other landmark agreements.
After an on-and-off working relationship in the following decades, he was asked to return to Jackson’s camp shortly before the singer’s death in 2009. Along with coexecutor John McClain, he has since guided the singer’s estate to more than $700 million in earnings, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, even on a Friday afternoon in August, his inbox is overflowing.
“Oh!” he exclaims. “We got the latest ticket report from Cirque du Soleil . . . we’re up to 103,000 tickets sold in Mexico City. They sold out nine shows, so they just added four more at the basketball arena.”
Another email rolls in—this time from Marty Bandier, the president of Sony/ATV music publishing, which the estate co-owns along with Sony. It’s a list of songs played at the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics.
“This will give you an example of some of the songs [Sony/ATV owns or administers],” says Branca, speeding up as he rattles off names. “ ‘Rolling in the Deep’ . . . ‘Rebel Rebel,’ all this Bowie . . . ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ ‘We Will Rock You’ . . . Spice Girls, Amy Winehouse, Depeche Mode, Robbie Williams . . . ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ . . .”
He smiles.
“Not bad, huh?”
* * *
Branca first met Michael Jackson in January of 1980 as a baby-faced twenty-nine-year-old attorney whose only professional experience was doing legal work for the Beach Boys with accountant Michael Mesnick—the one who’d arranged the meeting with Jackson.
The singer had just turned twenty-one and was looking for a lawyer. Sunglasses seemingly glued to his face, Jackson settled into a conference room seat and quietly listened as Branca and David Braun, an older partner at the firm where Branca was working, made their case. Then, in the middle of the meeting, the singer lowered his shades and stared directly at Branca.
“Do I know you?” Jackson asked.1
“Well, I don’t think we’ve met,” the young lawyer replied. “But I’m looking forward to us getting to know each other.”
“Are you sure we haven’t met before?”
“Michael, I think I would have remembered.”
“Oh,” said Jackson, replacing his eyewear. “Okay.”
The next day, Branca received a call from Mesnick. “Michael likes you,” said the accountant. “He’s hiring you.”
Jackson hadn’t interviewed any other attorneys, but going with his gut was a wise move in this case—he knew the firm was among the best for musicians, representing clients including Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and George Harrison. And Jackson’s eyewear was more than a fashion statement.
“He would sit in the meetings with his sunglasses on,” recalls Karen Langford, who started working with Jackson in the early 1980s. “And you really couldn’t tell how much attention he was paying . . . but afterwards, he would say something and you would know he actually really was paying attention because he just likes to sit there and take it all in. And that’s how he learns . . . the whole world was like his classroom and he just wanted to learn it all.”2
Shortly after Jackson hired Branca, the lawyer received his first task: negotiating a new deal with performing rights company BMI. He recalls asking the singer how much he was looking for as an advance against songwriting royalties. Though he was young, Jackson knew his worth, and said he would settle for nothing less than $200,000.3 So Branca went to BMI and made his case. It wasn’t long before he knew he’d passed his first test.
“I got three times that amount,” he remembers. “I’ll never forget the day we sat down and I said, ‘Well, Michael,’ and when I told him what I got him, there was a big smile on his face. So I knew for then, we were good to go, for a long time to come.”
Much as he’d done during his Motown days, Jackson continued to absorb lessons about the business of music. “While I think that he may have picked up a lot of that stuff from me,” says Berry Gordy, “I think it was John Branca [who] talked to him about what he could do.”4
The next move was to rework Jackson’s deal with CBS’s Epic Records. Renegotiation is a common reward for artists who release albums as successful as Off the Wall, but Branca was able to score a bonanza. He convinced Epic to draw up a new solo contract for the singer. Jackson had received 32 percent of wholesale on his previous record; Branca got that number bumped up to 37 percent escalating to 39 percent—about 20 percent of retail—the highest rate in the industry at the time. The deal called for Jackson to earn more than thirty times what he’d made at Motown (where each brother earned about 1 percent of wholesale) and guaranteed the label would retain the Jacksons even if Michael left the group.5
Branca added another handy stipulation to the deal: Jackson’s five-album deal, which began with Off the Wall, would be governed by California law, the only such agreement in the New York–based CBS Records family. That may sound like a triviality, which is likely why the label didn’t put up a fight. But it was actually quite a shrewd move—unlike New York, the Golden State’s regulations stipulated that an employee had the right to terminate any contract after seven years—and it gave Jackson’s team a great deal of leverage for future renegotiations.
Around the same time, Branca grew accustomed to receiving late-night phone calls from Jackson to discuss the status of his latest album or business deal. Some matters were of greater importance than others, as the lawyer learned on one particular night when he picked up the phone.
“John, we have something very serious to talk about,” Jackson said.
“What is it, Michael?” Branca replied, grabbing a pen and paper from his bedside table.
“My pinball machine isn’t working.”
* * *
Branca’s job would prove to encompass much more than law, business, and pinball machines (he outsourced the latter to an arcade technician). Jackson often leaned on him for help with family matters as well, and the two had quite a bit in common on that front.
Jackson grew up in the entertainment business and so did Branca, in a way: when he was four years old, his mother left him with his father in New York and moved to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. His uncle, Ralph Branca, was an all-star Major League pitcher and one of Jackie Robinson’s first friends on the Brooklyn Dodgers. Like the team, John eventually moved west; as a teenager, he played keyboard in a band that sometimes opened for the Doors, planting his flag in smoky Los Angeles clubs around the same time his future client was doing likewise halfway across the country in Gary.
While working for Jackson, Branca was often sent on reconnaissance missions to learn more about the intentions of the singer’s father. Though the elder Jackson had been relieved of his managerial duties, he still felt he could exert his influence over anybody in Michael’s sphere.
“I met with Joe, who basically said I needed to do what he told me to do,” he recalls. “Michael said, ‘Branca, tell me everything my father said.’ And I repeated it all back, and he said, ‘You don’t listen to a thing he says.’ And the fact that I would have repeated [Joe’s words] to Michael let him know that I was working for him and not his father.”6
Dealing with Michael’s family also meant unwinding a few sloppy deals that Joe and his associates had put together in the 1970s. One particular problem area: music publishing. Though Michael had realized the importance of songwriting as a revenue stream, he wasn’t familiar with the intricacies of copyright law—and neither was his father.
Shortly after the Jacksons left Motown, Joe had helped his son form a company in which to place copyrights to his own compositions, like “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” written with Randy. But he or one of his associates had signed away international publishing rights for next to nothing. Worse yet, this arrangement was scheduled to last for the life of the copyright.
As a result, Michael wouldn’t get paid for the airplay of his songs abroad, and it seemed that fixing the situation was impossible. It might have been, had Branca not noticed a loophole: when making the unfavorable deals, nobody on the Jacksons’ team had filled out the proper paperwork.
“I didn’t see any corporate documents that showed chain of title going from Michael to the corporations,” says Branca. “So I just blew off the corporations. I told the companies overseas these corporations don’t own these songs.”
Those songs formed the beginnings of a new publishing company called Mijac Music that would serve as home to Jackson’s future compositions. Now administered by Sony/ATV and owned by the estate, the catalogue is likely worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million (perhaps more, depending on what earnings multiple one uses to determine the value).
After Jackson’s experience with The Wiz, he’d been emboldened to flex his cinematographic muscles as well. He came up with the idea for the music video to the Jacksons’ 1980 hit “Can You Feel It,” a psychedelic romp through a futuristic landscape whose diverse inhabitants are sprinkled with golden dust by the brothers, who are portrayed as giant, shiny-suited superheroes. Critics would later praise the nine-minute segment for being ahead of its time; in 2001, MTV named it one of the top hundred videos ever made.7
Full recognition would be delayed for Jackson’s solo music as well. In February of 1980, Jackson won his first Grammy Award as a solo artist, taking home Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” But for the hyper-ambitious singer, who also earned a Best Disco Record nomination for the same song, the attention didn’t feel sufficient.
“My pride in the rhythms, the technical advances, and the success of Off the Wall was offset by the jolt I got when the Grammy nominations were announced,” he wrote in Moonwalk. “I remember where I was when I got the news. I felt ignored by my peers and it hurt.”8
Michael Jackson, Inc. Page 6
