What would have happened if John Lennon hadn’t met Paul McCartney at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete, Liverpool in 1957? Or if director Brian De Palma hadn’t introduced Martin Scorsese to his friend, Robert De Niro, in 1973? Or if Anni-Frid Lyngstad hadn’t, in 1969, sung at Sweden’s Melodifestival where she met Benny Andersson and started a collaboration that would lead to the formation of ABBA? No one can say, but there seemed a divine providence at play in all those rendezvous; as there was when Michael Jackson met Quincy Jones in 1978.

In honor of Jones’s passing on November 3, 2024 at the age of 91, I’d like to retell the story of this groundbreaking partnership.

Something in my head

Jones was on the film set of The Wiz, a film version of a Broadway musical based on the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, starring an all-black cast. Diana Ross played Dorothy, originally Judy Garland’s role. Jackson, part of the Jacksons, was also in the film. At the time, he was a known commodity, but far from being the world-renowned figure he became.

Director Sidney Lumet was a friend of Jones’s and wanted the composer/producer to provide orchestral gravitas for The Wiz’s soundtrack. Jones wasn’t impressed by the musical, but apparently felt he owed Lumet a favor or two. He and Jackson didn’t know each other before the film but struck up a serviceable working relationship. Jones later told The Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch that he remembered Jackson approached him with a task: “I need you to help me find a producer,” he said. “I’m getting ready to do my first solo album.” (Truthfully, he had made two previous solo albums.)

The two men discussed the possibility of renewing that relationship again on the projected solo album for which Jackson had already written three songs. Jones became curious about how Jackson was able to write songs without a musical instrument. According to Time’s Steve Knopper, the conversation went something like: “I hear something in my head. I make the sounds with my mouth.”

On hearing this, Jones grew interested. “There’s an instrument that can make the sounds you want. I can write anything down on paper,” Jones replied. “If you can hear it, I can write it down.” We’ll never know whether Jackson’s career would have soared and crackled like a rocket or merely hissed like a squib had Jones not been intrigued and agreed to work on the mooted album.

Transformation

All the same, inviting Jones to take the weighty role of producer carried some risk. Like any entertainer, Jackson must have been aware of audience expectations: they must have been sharpened to a point by the then-popular Philadelphia Sound and the Saturday Night Fever disco that captivated the public in the mid-1970s. The sweet-sounding Jacksons were perfect for the late 1960s and early 1970s. But against a background of Sylvester’s thumping synth on “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” or Chic’s twanging bass lines on “Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” the brothers sounded tame and, perhaps worse, quaint.

The last thing Jackson wanted at his pivotal stage in his professional life was to sound old-fashioned. So, Jones, for all his mastery, wasn’t an obvious choice. He was 45 in 1978. Five years earlier, he had produced Aretha Franklin’s “Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky),” which lacked Franklin’s gutsy blues quality and hadn’t overly impressed critics or consumers. His own double-album, I Heard That!, had been released to little impact in 1976.

Somehow, Jackson became convinced Jones could provide him with the kind of transformative makeover he wanted. Perhaps it was a compelling incongruity, like casting Charlize Theron as prostitute-cum-serial killer prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s 2003 film, Monster. It looked so odd, it might just work. Known for her glamor, Theron gained weight, wore false teeth and turned herself into a believable Wuornos. Jones seemed such an unusual producer for Jackson’s project, it too might yield something surprising.

George Benson, once a guitar prodigy who grew to prominence with his distinctive style of soul-infused jazz, once reflected on his own particular relationship with Jones. For years, Benson was discouraged from singing by his record company. Jones produced his breakthrough album Give Me the Night in 1980 and issued contradictory advice. “Quincy Jones looked at me and said: ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’ This made me feel angry, though I didn’t say anything. But he was pushing me to do things that didn’t come naturally to me,” Benson told the Financial Times’ David Cheal. “He was always pushing me to do things. He persuaded me to sing in a way that didn’t feel comfortable.”

Once outside his comfort zone, Benson sang in the unnatural way Jones suggested and the process yielded a record. “And it was a smash,” he said. The album won him three Grammys in 1981. Jackson never said Jones pushed him in the way Benson described, though the product of the collaboration suggests Jackson might also have been displaced from his comfort zone — with similarly agreeable results.

Life ain’t so bad at all

Those results were well-received, though not ecstatically. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden called their album, Off the Wall, “A slick, sophisticated R&B-pop showcase with a definite disco slant … A triumph for producer Quincy Jones as well as for Michael Jackson.”

There was disagreement over Jackson’s voice. New Republic’s Jim Miller discerned that, “Jackson’s voice has deepened without losing its boyish energy. He phrases with delicacy, sings ballads with a feather touch.” But the Los Angeles Times’s Dennis Hunt thought, “The adolescent frailties that linger in Jackson’s voice are nagging enough to, if uncontrolled, undermine good material and production.” In the end, though, he commented, “Thanks to producer Quincy Jones, that didn’t happen here. The result is one of the year’s best R&B albums.” Presciently, Hunt wondered, “Is it possible that he’s outgrown the Jacksons?”

Between them, Jackson and Jones captured the audacity of a notionally prosperous, upwardly mobile African-American population. They were willing to take risks, avoiding a disco saturation but absorbing enough of the euphoria that animated dancefloors around the world. They added lush arrangements that might, with another artist, have sounded too sickly, or worse, clichéd. Here, they sounded innovative and sophisticated.

Even the cover art radiated aplomb: 21-year-old Jackson was wearing black tie, tuxedo and loafers. He seemed to be searching for something. His right to be free from his brothers? Or family, perhaps? Or more likely, self-validation: with Jones, he seemed to discover a license to be a fully-fledged independent artist.

Sure, he had released four solo albums before. But none came close to Off the Wall in terms of artistry and imagination — and maybe irony. The expression “off the wall” meant unusual or strange, and the chorus of the title song was, “Life ain’t so bad at all if you live it off the wall.”

Reviews for The Wiz bore no resemblance to the warm approval Off the Wall had drawn. Time expressed the film critics’ consensus in its headline, “Nowhere Over the Rainbow.”

Off the Wall is regarded as a classic. It won a Grammy in 1980, multiple American Music Awards in the same year. It was inducted into the Grammy musical Hall of Fame in 2007. It reached number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 and spawned four Top 10 hits, including “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You” — both number ones.

Yet, as often happens when two artists collaborate and produce a creation for the ages, they had a falling out.

The sour aftermath

“Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson had worked together for years, forging one of the most productive and profitable relationships in pop music,” The New York Times’s Colin Moynihan reported. “The two worked together on albums … that sold tens of millions of copies and catapulted Jackson — already famous from his days in the Jackson 5 — into superstardom.” And yet, years after Jackson’s death, Jones found himself in court, head-to-head with the Jackson family.

They had continued to work together. Jones produced two more Jackson albums: 1982’s Thriller, which became the best-selling album of all time; and 1987’s Bad, which was the first album to have five consecutive singles reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Cumulatively, they have sold over 100 million copies.

The three albums were made and released at a time when music videos were hitting their stride and practically every record had a short companion movie. Jackson and Jones never fought or, as far as we know, even argued. But the release of Kenny Ortega’s 2009 film, This is It, a documentary feature based on rehearsal footage shot while Jackson was preparing for his proposed comeback in 2009, brought conflict. Jackson died on June 25 of that year and never made a comeback, of course.

Songs originally produced by Jones were included in the film’s soundtrack album. Jones filed suit against the Jackson estate, claiming, as Rolling Stone’s Miriam Coleman summarized, “under the contracts, he [Jones] should have been given the first opportunity to re-edit or re-mix any of the master recordings and that he was entitled to producer credit for the master recordings, as well as additional compensation if the masters were remixed.” Obviously, no one could have foreseen how such an opulently smooth album could lead to legal convulsions decades later.

In 2013, Jones claimed Sony Music Entertainment and Jackson’s estate owed him close to $30 million in royalties for edits and remixes of music he produced with Jackson during their collaboration. Four years later, in 2017, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court decided that Jones had not been sufficiently rewarded by the Jackson estate for the use of records Jones had produced and which were featured in This is It. The court awarded him $9.4 million in 2017.

Three years later, a California appellate court reduced this to $2.5 million, this being the amount due to Jones for the use of his master recording and other fees. It seemed a bitter conclusion to a relationship that, in many ways, remolded Jackson into a legitimate icon. While Jones maintained his dispute was not with Jackson himself, journalist Martín Macías, Jr. quoted the Jackson estate’s attorney as saying: “Quincy Jones was the last person we thought would try to take advantage of Michael Jackson by filing a lawsuit three years after he died asking for tens of millions of dollars he wasn’t entitled to.”

Jones too seemed to turn vindictive. While he’d enjoyed an amicable relationship with Jackson over many years in the 1970s and 1980s, he later reflected, “He [Jackson] was as Machiavellian as they come.” In a 2018 interview with Vulture’s David Marchese, he declared, “Michael stole a lot of stuff,” meaning his compositions incorporated passages from other artists’ music.

It was a sour end to an artistic collaboration that ranks with the greatest of modern times. Nothing will, in practice, diminish the significance of Off the Wall. It is established in pop music’s pantheon. For all his colossal contribution to music, Jones’ elemental role in the creation of Jackson’s album will be his defining achievement.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.