In today's selection -- in 1982, Michael Jackson triumphed with the release of his album Thrillerunder the auspices of CBS Records and its president Walter Yetnikoff. Here Yetnikoff relates stories of his conversations with Michael during that period:

Author: Walter Yetnikoff with David Ritz
Title: Howling at the Moon
Publisher: Broadway Books
Date: Copyright 2004 by Walter Yetnikoff
Pages: 157-159

Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess

by Walter Yetnikoff by Broadway

Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2004-03-02

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

um, lmfao?

Michael was such a big baby at times, but knew what he wanted and it's true Quincy had no credit on Billie Jean at all if you read the credits and Michael had more of a say than he gets credit for. Reading this kind of made me laugh though I know people are going to say he's arrogant and fake and shit up in this thread.

[Edited 12/10/12 3:36am]

DakutiusMaximus said:

"But everyone says Quincy is going to win some, too. And I don't want him to. Quincy didn't really produce the record, I did. Quincy has enough Grammys. He doesn't need any more. Tell them not to give him any Grammys for Thriller.

Damn.

If Quincy ever heard that, he should have said something like, "and Michael has enough sales. He doesn't need any more. So change the name and photo on the cover to mine." Teasing, I mean... not as a serious suggestion.

Meh. Thriller has Quincy's sound all over it... I fail to see how he didn't deserve proportionate credit. By all means, Bad was a different story. It's much harder to see Q's touches on that one.

Yeah I have this book too, its an interesting read. Its not new tho.

Seems interesting, where can I purchase this book?

These comments are very sad.

Funny and sad read at the same time.

mjscarousal said:

Seems interesting, where can I purchase this book?

Amazon is selling it

http://www.amazon.com/Howling-Moon-Odyssey-Monstrous-Excess/dp/0767915364%3FSubscriptionId%3D0DK6RX2SNSBPXDSWSNR2%26tag%3Ddelaplac-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0767915364

It's pretty obvious that Michael didn't want to participate in the Victory tour and album.He should have stood up to his brothers and said NO,even if Katherine was disappointed.

the comments he made about Quincy Jones are funny

NaughtyKitty said:

mjscarousal said:

Seems interesting, where can I purchase this book?

Amazon is selling it

http://www.amazon.com/Howling-Moon-Odyssey-Monstrous-Excess/dp/0767915364%3FSubscriptionId%3D0DK6RX2SNSBPXDSWSNR2%26tag%3Ddelaplac-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0767915364

Thanks love

SoulAlive said:

It's pretty obvious that Michael didn't want to participate in the Victory tour and album.He should have stood up to his brothers and said NO,even if Katherine was disappointed.

the comments he made about Quincy Jones are funny

I really wish Michael had stood up to his family more.... even his mom who clearly was apart of that whole scheme lying family

The Quincy Comments are funny BUT true.

I can see Michael having more to do with "Billie Jean", "Beat It" and maybe "Wanna Be Startin' Something" than Quincy, but the rest of the album sure sounds an awful lot like the other stuff Quincy Jones did at the time (that applies also to the title track).

One of the things that I don't really like about Michael is that he seemed oblivious to how hard it is to come up with good arrangements. He himself wrote songs just by singing the melodies and bits and pieces of the parts intended for some of the instruments. He could always get the best guys out there to flesh out his ideas into full songs just because of money, so he never had to struggle with trying to make those things work himself like most other people do.

A producer has to really listen to the music and have a working knowledge on how to approach the pieces so that the different parts played by different instruments will really complement each other. It's not just about getting Vincent Price to do a cameo at the end of the track because the kids will think that's cool.

Michael had produced songs BY HIS SELF

Lets not have this discussion again

I heard this about Bad that Michael wanted Quincy was not recorded as a producer in the credits ... and I really believe that MJ did most of the work for this album ....

but Thriller was obviously under the influence and guidance of Quincy.
Quincy did some dishonest statements after MJ's death, so I'm not a high opinion of his morality.
and Michael ... uh ... it's Michael .... he was very self-centered and very strange ... probably in his mind he really did it himself

mjscarousal said:

Michael had produced songs BY HIS SELF

Yes, he produced songs that were very different stylistically from the Quincy Jones productions on Off The Wall and Thriller. His own productions were typically either computerized uptempo numbers or mawkish power ballads. Not really soul or R&B music, if we're honest about it.

Not that it was always such a bad thing. I find it hard to believe Quincy Jones could have added anything to a song like "They Don't Care About Us". At least under his own direction the records started to have more experimentation with the sounds, song structure, length and so on.

I was just saying that people that can afford to have others realize their "visions" seem to think the different parts played on different instruments just fit each other automatically just because they think they will stylistically fit each other (which is not the case). I'm pretty sure one additional person that was involved in the more technical side of what a "producer" often does was Bruce Swedien.

novabrkr said:

mjscarousal said:

Michael had produced songs BY HIS SELF

Yes, he produced songs that were very different stylistically from the Quincy Jones productions on Off The Wall and Thriller. His own productions were typically either computerized uptempo numbers or mawkish power ballads. Not really soul or R&B music, if we're honest about it.

Not that it was always such a bad thing. I find it hard to believe Quincy Jones could have added anything to a song like "They Don't Care About Us". At least under his own direction the records started to have more experimentation with the sounds, song structure, length and so on.

I was just saying that people that can afford to have others realize their "visions" seem to think the different parts played on different instruments just fit each other automatically just because they think they will stylistically fit each other (which is not the case). I'm pretty sure one additional person that was involved in the more technical side of what a "producer" often does was Bruce Swedien.

Well if that is your opinion, I can dig it I just wanted to clarify that Michael has produced songs by himself which were exactly NUMBER ONE hits and also songs for other people.

Why would Quincy need to add anything to a flawless song such as They Dont Really Care About Us?

Michael wanted to break away from Quincy to prove he could do it on his own.... and he did and he could. He also wanted to experiment with other things.

The fact is Michael showed he could produced hit songs on his own.... period. And anybody who wants to foolishlessly argue otherwise is just indenial.

Your right being a producer is not as simple as people make it but alot of those productions had demos that Michael created himself and when you listen to the demo versions of Dont Stop till you get enough and Workin Day and Night Quincys final touches is not that much different. I think on some songs on Off The Wall and Thriller Michael deserved a Co credit. So I can understand where he is coming from in these transcripts. With those three albums, they implied Q innovated all those productions and that is not true 100 percent

Not directed toward novabr

Someone doesnt have to like songs like They Dont Care About Us but to deny Michael produced it himself is absurd especially when its evidence he did. Not saying you are but alot of other members here do.

I didn't mean to imply at all that Quincy Jones would have been "needed" on "They Don't Care About Us". On the contrary.

People have gotten production credits on albums for all kinds of tasks. I think one of the reasons why the title itself has been used in various different senses is that the "producer" usually gets a certain percentage of the royalties. For example, a person that is simply credited for doing the "keyboard arrangements" or the "rhythm arrangements" usually doesn't get any. However, that's actually what many of the "producers" in R&B and hiphop are doing these days. Quincy Jones seemed to be allowed by the record company to make the final decisions on the albums, so he was mostly a "producer" in the same sense as film producers are.

I think what Quincy Jones did was that he kept the music at a very high standard in overall, which at least from the viewpoint of musicianship suffered quite a bit on the successive albums. Michael and his later associates didn't have much of an ear for things like chord changes and so on (excluding a few songs, of course).

novabrkr said:

I didn't mean to imply at all that Quincy Jones would have been "needed" on "They Don't Care About Us". On the contrary.

People have gotten production credits on albums for all kinds of tasks. I think one of the reasons why the title itself has been used in various different senses is that the "producer" usually gets a certain percentage of the royalties. For example, a person that is simply credited for doing the "keyboard arrangements" or the "rhythm arrangements" usually doesn't get any. However, that's actually what many of the "producers" in R&B and hiphop are doing these days. Quincy Jones seemed to be allowed by the record company to make the final decisions on the albums, so he was mostly a "producer" in the same sense as film producers are.

I think what Quincy Jones did was that he kept the music at a very high standard in overall, which at least from the viewpoint of musicianship suffered quite a bit on the successive albums. Michael and his later associates didn't have much of an ear for things like chord changes and so on (excluding a few songs, of course).

That's interesting about the chords, cause there were not many chord variations later on post-quincy in the songs, but that doesn't make them any less better, and though I love all of mj's eras, I really really love the 90's stuff too and think it's underrated, and I think the reason michael was doing that was to deviate from what he did with quincy, and everything his musical peers were doing for the past decade to emulate him to some extent and trying to be one step ahead of the game.

Since when did Thriller win a dozen grammy's? poor old Walter, i thought his memory may be going, but respect to him for remembering a 26 year old conversation word for word. That's some recall.

B.S.

Marrk said:

Since when did Thriller win a dozen grammy's? poor old Walter, i thought his memory may be going, but respect to him for remembering a 26 year old conversation word for word. That's some recall.

B.S.

Probably blurred Thriller and the time before Bad all together. 8 Grammys=1984, Making of Thriller=1985 (9), We Are the World=1986 (12)

Dozen Grammys "for Thriller"

Jealousy isn't a nice trait.

It really isn't a good trait, but everyone has it to some degree and some learn it later on in life than others.

"all he did was help out"

LOL all those other artists did was help out Quincy in making his own albums! That's what working together means.

There's no denying that Michael Jackson was also a producer, he produced Destiny and Triumph with The Jacksons and a few of their songs earlier on, and I suspect that he was the main producer of the brothers considering how much worse their albums without his input are. But there's also no denying that Quincy Jones produced Off The Wall and Thriller, Michael Jackson produced some of the songs on those albums and can be considered the co-producer of those albums. The main reason I think Quincy Jones can definitely be considered the main producer is that outside of Michael Jackson's self-written songs for Thriller I don't see any of MJ's influence on the production at all. And he only wrote 4 songs on the album so if we can assume that he did fully produce on his own those 4 records (which he didn't) then it's still less than 50% of the album.

On Bad is when things get different, I personally think that MJ produced that basically on his own, I really think that he just kept Quincy around because he may not have been confident enough to produce a full album on his own so he just had Quincy look over his work (or really just cut it down). That said, I think Bad would have been a much more interesting album if MJ really made it his way with as many of the songs as he wanted and producing all of them, because although it's the perfect Pop album, MJ could've made an even greater masterpiece had he included songs that didn't all seem to be made as perfect singles and music videos.

MiniJamesW said:

There's no denying that Michael Jackson was also a producer, he produced Destiny and Triumph with The Jacksons and a few of their songs earlier on, and I suspect that he was the main producer of the brothers considering how much worse their albums without his input are. But there's also no denying that Quincy Jones produced Off The Wall and Thriller, Michael Jackson produced some of the songs on those albums and can be considered the co-producer of those albums. The main reason I think Quincy Jones can definitely be considered the main producer is that outside of Michael Jackson's self-written songs for Thriller I don't see any of MJ's influence on the production at all. And he only wrote 4 songs on the album so if we can assume that he did fully produce on his own those 4 records (which he didn't) then it's still less than 50% of the album.

On Bad is when things get different, I personally think that MJ produced that basically on his own, I really think that he just kept Quincy around because he may not have been confident enough to produce a full album on his own so he just had Quincy look over his work (or really just cut it down). That said, I think Bad would have been a much more interesting album if MJ really made it his way with as many of the songs as he wanted and producing all of them, because although it's the perfect Pop album, MJ could've made an even greater masterpiece had he included songs that didn't all seem to be made as perfect singles and music videos.

Michael didn't become a main producer of his own stuff until Bad. Quincy actually had little input in that one to be honest. I think only Just Good Friends was the one song where Michael didn't have complete control of. I almost wanna say Man in the Mirror too but he provided input on that even without writing it himself.

MiniJamesW said:

There's no denying that Michael Jackson was also a producer, he produced Destiny and Triumph with The Jacksons and a few of their songs earlier on, and I suspect that he was the main producer of the brothers considering how much worse their albums without his input are. But there's also no denying that Quincy Jones produced Off The Wall and Thriller, Michael Jackson produced some of the songs on those albums and can be considered the co-producer of those albums. The main reason I think Quincy Jones can definitely be considered the main producer is that outside of Michael Jackson's self-written songs for Thriller I don't see any of MJ's influence on the production at all. And he only wrote 4 songs on the album so if we can assume that he did fully produce on his own those 4 records (which he didn't) then it's still less than 50% of the album.

On Bad is when things get different, I personally think that MJ produced that basically on his own, I really think that he just kept Quincy around because he may not have been confident enough to produce a full album on his own so he just had Quincy look over his work (or really just cut it down). That said, I think Bad would have been a much more interesting album if MJ really made it his way with as many of the songs as he wanted and producing all of them, because although it's the perfect Pop album, MJ could've made an even greater masterpiece had he included songs that didn't all seem to be made as perfect singles and music videos.

One thing that was a bit disappointing about Bad 25 documentary was that they didn't discuss how hands-on MJ was as a producer or go in to detail about what kind of roll Quincy actually played for that album. One thing I remember them saying was that it was Quincy's decision to include Another Part of Me instead of Street Walker, mainly because that was the track that got Michael dancing. I mean lol, seriously I would really love to know how the whole process of picking songs took place and what was Quincy's favorite tracks and what was Michael's, etc. But if Michael was the main producer for the Bad album I think maybe that's one of the reasons Quincy wasn't interviewed for the documentary....maybe he just didn't have much to say anymore.

^ Are you talking about the TV version of the documentary or the full length DVD one?

By the way I thought this info was from Walter Yetnikoff's autobiography? I remember reading about how paranoid and high out of his mind on coke Marvin was from Walter's words. I think Walter said he and Marvin did some lines together or something...

Emancipation89 said:

MiniJamesW said:

There's no denying that Michael Jackson was also a producer, he produced Destiny and Triumph with The Jacksons and a few of their songs earlier on, and I suspect that he was the main producer of the brothers considering how much worse their albums without his input are. But there's also no denying that Quincy Jones produced Off The Wall and Thriller, Michael Jackson produced some of the songs on those albums and can be considered the co-producer of those albums. The main reason I think Quincy Jones can definitely be considered the main producer is that outside of Michael Jackson's self-written songs for Thriller I don't see any of MJ's influence on the production at all. And he only wrote 4 songs on the album so if we can assume that he did fully produce on his own those 4 records (which he didn't) then it's still less than 50% of the album.

On Bad is when things get different, I personally think that MJ produced that basically on his own, I really think that he just kept Quincy around because he may not have been confident enough to produce a full album on his own so he just had Quincy look over his work (or really just cut it down). That said, I think Bad would have been a much more interesting album if MJ really made it his way with as many of the songs as he wanted and producing all of them, because although it's the perfect Pop album, MJ could've made an even greater masterpiece had he included songs that didn't all seem to be made as perfect singles and music videos.

One thing that was a bit disappointing about Bad 25 documentary was that they didn't discuss how hands-on MJ was as a producer or go in to detail about what kind of roll Quincy actually played for that album. One thing I remember them saying was that it was Quincy's decision to include Another Part of Me instead of Street Walker, mainly because that was the track that got Michael dancing. I mean lol, seriously I would really love to know how the whole process of picking songs took place and what was Quincy's favorite tracks and what was Michael's, etc. But if Michael was the main producer for the Bad album I think maybe that's one of the reasons Quincy wasn't interviewed for the documentary....maybe he just didn't have much to say anymore.

I agree, it's unfortunate that with most films and books about Michael Jackson don't get into detail about the production or the music itself but rather the dance moves, music videos, fashion, concerts, and crazy stories about MJ during the time. Hopefully the longer version of this documentary has a lot more about the production and songwriting on the album, which I think is one of the most important things about Bad because it was the album where he wrote and produced almost all of the songs. MJ wrote aboust sixty songs for Bad and recorded about 30, he wanted it to be a triple-album and we don't really get to know about any of this during the doc, I'd love to more about the whole project, what went on the album and what didn't.