It’s well-known that Mark Ronson grew up around a lot of famous musicians - his stepdad is Foreigner’s Mick Jones and one of his best childhood friends was Sean Lennon, for starters - but he’s now been telling the story of a slightly bizarre in encounter with one of the biggest pop stars of them all, Michael Jackson.
Speaking to Rolling Stone as he promotes his upcoming memoir, Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York, Ronson says that his meeting with Jackson happened when the King of Pop stayed with Sean Lennon and his mother Yoko at the Dakota building in New York during the Bad tour. Ronson was there too - he would have been around 13 at the time - and suggests that, initially, Jackson’s behaviour was as eccentric as you might expect.
“He just wanted to throw soggies out the window,” says Ronson. “Soggies are when you take a giant mound of wet toilet paper and then just chuck. Sean lived on the seventh floor. He wasn’t chucking [them] at people, but it was hitting the street and sounding like bombs were going off.”
What larks, Michael… but even at that stage of his ‘career’, Ronson’s musical brain was whirring.
“In my mind, I was like, ‘This is all really fun, but I just need to get a hit song out of Michael Jackson,’” he says. “That’s all I care about. I was already, I guess, at that age more producer-minded. I remember me and Sean being like, ‘Michael, Michael, sing us a bassline!’ I’ll never forget, he did the whole thing, like the hand out with the snap, and started to sing this bassline. That’s how he wrote music. He usually didn’t write stuff down. He would have somebody come and he’d sing them all the parts, at least that’s what I heard.”
Sensing that he had something - let’s not forget that Jackson had previously composed the iconic basslines for the likes of Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Wanna Be Startin’ Something, Billie Jean and The Way You Make Me Feel, among others - Ronson decided he was going to turn Michael’s low-end musings into a song.
“We went back to my studio the next day - my stepdad had his home studio - and we made this song,” he says. “It was pretty much just seven minutes of [Michael singing the bassline]. Thinking about it now and while I was writing the book, I was like, ‘Oh, he just kind of gave us some Smooth Criminal leftover.’ But whatever, it’s still a bassline from Michael Jackson. We put some horns on it, some sample ‘80s horns.”
Ronson doesn’t say whether or not the track still exists, but he does confirm that he played it to - you guessed it - another famous star on the evening of the day he created it.
“That night, we went to the Michael show,” he remembers. “And because Sean also lived in the same building with Roberta Flack, she took us to the show. I know these stories sound so fucking crazy. Sean was like, ‘Roberta, listen to this song that we made! Michael gave us this bassline!” After the third minute, she’s just like, ‘I mean, it’s the same thing for a while, but James Brown did that. So you never know!’ She was just trying to be friendly. And I think after like one more minute, she [hit] eject.”
Tough crowd, but as we now know, Ronson would go on to hone his skills and become one of the most sought-after producers in the industry. If you want to find out how he got his start, you can pre-order Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York now - it’ll be released on 16 September.
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