Music
Quincy Jones said recording ‘Thriller’ was a drama-filled process. A speaker even burst into flames as Michael Jackson sang.
Producer Quincy Jones said that he and Michael Jackson faced seemingly endless challenges while recording Thriller. They found themselves behind schedule, they had to work on other projects, and they even dealt with a fire in the studio. Jones said that the fire felt like a sign as they recorded.
A speaker burst into flames while Michael Jackson recorded ‘Thriller’
As Jones wrote for the LA Times after Jackson’s death, “the drama surrounding Thriller seemed to never end.” They had to work on a companion album for the film E.T., and continually found themselves behind schedule.
“With two months to get Thriller done, we dug in and really hit it,” Jones wrote. “Michael, Rod, the great engineer Bruce Swedien and I had all spent so much time together by now that we had a shorthand, so moving quickly wasn’t a problem.”
They also dealt with a studio fire, but Jones saw it as a sign for how the song would eventually sound.
“Rod also brought in ‘Thriller’ and Michael sang his heart out on it,” he wrote. “At one point during the session the right speaker burst into flames. How’s that for a sign?”
Michael Jackson dealt with another fire while he worked on ‘Thriller’
Jackson dealt with another, more dangerous fire while recording the album. He was thinking about the song “Billie Jean” so intently while driving that he didn’t notice his car was on fire.
“One day during a break during a recording session I was riding down the Ventura Freeway with Nelson Hayes, who was working with me at the time,” Jackson wrote in his autobiography Moonwalk. “‘Billie Jean’ was going around in my head and that’s all I was thinking about. We were getting off the freeway when a kid on a motorcycle pulls up to us and says, ‘Your car’s on fire.’”
They pulled over in time, and Jackson continued to think about the song.
“Suddenly we noticed the smoke and pulled over and the whole bottom of the Rolls-Royce was on fire. That kid probably saved our lives,” he said. “If the car had exploded, we would have been killed. But I was so absorbed by this tune floating in my head that I didn’t even focus on the awful possibilities until later. Even while we were getting help and finding an alternate way to get where we were going, I was silently composing additional material, that’s how involved I was with ‘Billie Jean.’”
He wasn’t happy with the album at first
After all the work Jones and Jackson put into the album, they were both devastated upon the first listen. It sounded terrible.
“We all gathered in Studio A to listen to the test pressing with this enormous anticipation,” Jones explained. “This was it, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to Off the Wall. And it sounded . . . terrible. After all of that great work we were doing, it wasn’t there. There was total silence in the studio. We’d put too much material on the record. Michael was in tears.”
They quickly got to work fixing it. The resulting album was a massive success.
