A new book has alleged that Michael Jackson was so frustrated at being forced to re-record a vocal for a track on his HIStory album that he ended up trashing a recording studio.
The book is You’ve Got Michael: Living Through HIStory by Dan Beck. Beck was an executive at Epic Records during the 1990s and worked with Jackson closely on his Dangerous and HIStory albums.
It was a turbulent time in the superstar’s life. The Jordy Chandler child abuse allegations had first surfaced in 1993 and early the following year - Jackson settled the case with the Chandler family to the tune of $23 million.
But reputational damage had been done and thus a lot was riding on Jackson’s next album. Epic left nothing to chance: HIStory was a double CD - one disc of greatest hits, another of new songs. The record company threw industrial amounts of money into promotion. The video for the lead single, Scream - a duet with his sister Janet - cost $7 million alone.
So when one of the tracks on the CD of new songs – They Don’t Care About Us – came out with an antisemitic slur as part of its lyrics, pressure was put on Jackson to do the decent thing and re-record the offensive lines. The media had caught hold of the story by this point and the last thing the new album needed was more controversy and bad publicity for Jackson.
In an extract from the book that Variety has run, Beck reveals that Jackson denied all intent, saying “It’s not antisemitic because I’m not a racist person. I could never be a racist. I love all races. My three best friends are Jewish - David Geffen, Jeffery Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg.”
Eventually, though, Jackson acquiesced and agreed to re-record the lines. But according to Beck, he wasn’t happy.
"Michael pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and placed it on the music stand," he writes. "The engineer asked through the talk-back system if Michael was ready. Michael told the engineer to play the song from beginning to end. When They Don’t Care About Us reached the controversial lyric, the engineer pushed “record” and Michael sang the new lyric.
"As the engineer let the song play on to another section that needed to be fixed, Michael picked up the music stand and threw it at the wall. He picked up a chair and threw it, too, then angrily pushed over a baffle. Michael Jackson was trashing the studio!"
Beck’s revelations certainly run counter to the public persona Jackson attempted to cultivate in the 1990s - that of a simple man who merely wanted world peace. But then it’s worth remembering that HIStory was launched by an act of (literally) monumental hubris, in the shape of ten 30ft statues of the singer that were placed at various locations around the world (you may recall one being floated down the Thames). What happened to them all, we wonder?
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