John Oates has reiterated a claim made by his former bandmate Daryl Hall that Michael Jackson took the groove from their 1981 hit I Can’t Go For That and used it as the template for his own Billie Jean, which was released a year later.
Speaking in a new episode of the Rock & Roll High School podcast, Oates says: “[Michael] came to one of our shows in LA and he said he liked to dance to it in front of his mirror in his bedroom. You can hear, he obviously wanted to do something like that for Billie Jean and he did his own version of that groove.”
This comes after Hall said something similar to Mix way back in 2006. “No question about it,” he noted of I Can’t Go For That’s influence on Billie Jean. “Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn’t mind that he copped that groove. That’s OK; it’s something we all do. [Eddie] Van Halen told me that he copied the synth part from Kiss On My List and used it in Jump. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”
Hall repeated the claim in 2018 in an interview with The Guardian, adding that the conversation took place during the We Are The World recording session.
“I got talking to Michael Jackson and he said: “I hope you don’t mind. I stole the groove from I Can’t Go for That for my song Billie Jean,’” Hall remembered. “I told him: ‘Oh Michael, what do I care? You did it very differently.’”
“I can’t say I’d ever noticed but he was quite insistent. Of course, I went away and listened to Billie Jean. And sure enough, it was our groove.
Discussing the origins of that groove in the Mix interview, Hall said: “Remember the old Roland CompuRhythm box? I turned to the Rock and Roll 1 preset, sat down at a Korg organ that happened to be lying there and started to play this bassline that was coming to me.”
This classic pop moment could easily have been lost, though, had it not been for a quick-thinking engineer who must have realised that Hall was onto something.
“It’s the old recording studio story: The engineer heard what I was doing and turned on the tape machine,” Hall confirmed. “Good thing, because I’m the kind of person who will come up with an idea and forget it. The chords came together in about 10 minutes, and then I heard a guitar riff, which I asked John, who was sitting in the booth, to play.”
Sadly, Hall and Oates’ relationship now appears to be broken beyond repair, with the two men trading barbs in the press after Hall took legal action against Oates in a bid to prevent him from selling his share of the duo’s publishing rights. This case has seemingly now been settled, but there’s no sense that it will lead to a reconciliation.
Discussing the situation in his Rock & Roll High School episode, though, Oates suggests that he’s trying to stay positive about it all.
“It’s always bittersweet when a relationship falls by the wayside, of course. But look at the legacy that Daryl and I leave behind. We left a musical legacy that very few people could match. You know what, that’s pretty good in a lifetime I would say.”
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