Quincy Jones first met Michael Jackson years before they started working together. At the time, Jackson was in the Jackson Five and Jones was an established music producer. He admitted that on this first meeting, he told Jackson that he was being too weird.
Quincy Jones told a young Michael Jackson he was weird
Jones first met Jackson in the early days of his career. He said Jackson was one of many performers he met when they were young.
“For some reason I have had the honor of meeting young performers when they reach the age of 12,” Jones wrote for the LA Times after Jackson’s death. “There was Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Tevin Campbell, and, of course, Michael Jackson.”
While he said he found Jackson’s talent impressive, he never predicted that they would go on to work together.
“I was fully aware of Michael and impressed by the achievements that he’d reached with the Jackson Five, but it never crossed my mind that we would eventually work together,” he wrote. “But as is always the case, divinity interceded into the process.”
Still, he admitted that he offered the young singer some advice. According to Jones, he only told Jackson he was being “too weird” once.
“Only when we first met, when he was 12,” Jones told The Guardian in 2014.
Quincy Jones shared why he wanted to work with Michael Jackson
Years later, Jones and Jackson crossed paths again on the set of The Wiz. Jackson continually flubbed a line reading, and Jones eventually pulled him aside. He said that this interaction made him want to work with Jackson.
“At rehearsals, during the part where the scarecrow is pulling proverbs from his stuffing, Michael kept saying ‘So-Crates’ instead of ‘Socrates,’” Jones recalled. “After about the third time, I pulled him aside and told him the correct pronunciation. He looked at me with these big wide eyes and said, ‘Really?’ and it was at that moment that I said, ‘Michael, I’d like to produce your album.’”
He said Jackson’s reaction to the correction was what convinced him.
“It was that wonderment that I saw in his eyes that locked me in,” Jones wrote. “I knew that we could go into completely unexplored territory, a place that as a jazz musician gave me goosebumps.”
The singer was still eccentric in the studio as an adult
Jones grew accustomed to Jackson’s eccentricities when they worked together. The singer brought his pet snake and chimpanzee around and was surprisingly shy for someone of his level of fame.
“I simply loved working with Michael,” Jones wrote. “He was so shy he’d sit down and sing behind the couch with his back to me while I sat there with my hands over my eyes with the lights off. We tried all kinds of tricks that I’d learned over the years to help him with his artistic growth, like dropping keys just a minor third to give him flexibility and a more mature range in the upper and lower registers, and more than a few tempo changes.”
Ultimately, Jones said he believes that Jackson’s music will have a longer legacy than any details of his personality.
