Michael Jackson’s bizarre obsession with E.T. spoiled his Thriller album

His idol in the seventh art was, as one would expect, Steven Spielberg. He had already signed masterpieces like “Jaws,” “Encounters in the III,” or “Indiana Jones in search of the Lost Ark” and had just released “ET, the extra-terrestrial” in the summer of 1982, halfway through. from the registry ‘excitement’.

The movie, as everyone knows, was a massive hit and Michael was so taken with it that he suffered from a kind of temporary personality disorder that nearly killed his most anticipated track record. What’s more: He did.

That September, the team responsible for recording “Thriller” with the producer Quincy Jones On the intro, he was starting to get nervous because the due date was approaching and the album was very far from finished. The pressure after the blasting of the “new” adult Michael’s first solo work, “Off the wall” was enormous, any delay would mean millions of dollars in losses and the standard CBS-Epic alliance would not tolerate the unexpected, so they doubled down on the sessions. Stakhanovite to arrive on time. At that time, the bulging-eyed little Martian upset all his plans.

With his highest-grossing film in history, Spielberg had the idea to diversify the business by shooting a movie audiobook It was narrated by the biggest pop star of the moment, and when he pitched the project to Jackson, the singer celebrated as if the gates of heaven had opened for him. He was well aware that taking the job would jeopardize his new album, but he wasn’t about to turn it down.

Mission: Impossible

His manager couldn’t believe it. There were only a few weeks left before the deadline and everyone involved in the recording knew that it was impossible to juggle two projects at the same time, let alone at such a critical moment. So he confronted Michael and begged him to tell Spielberg he was unavailable. The artist replied: “You don’t understand.” “I’m ET, I gotta do it”. Faced with such a response, she had no choice but to let Michael record the audiobook and pray that it wouldn’t take him too long. But that was not the case.

When the sessions for the ET album ended, there were only two weeks left to deliver “Thriller”. The entire recording crew worked overtime, He hardly sleeps, to complete the most anticipated album of the moment, and the night before the meeting with the record label executives, where they would finally show them the finished product, they were still desperately completing the details. And this catastrophically affected the result.

In the room where “Thriller” was to be played for the first time, there were bottles of champagne to celebrate the birth of what they hoped would be a record-breaking bestseller. But when listening to the album, there was no cork or toast. It was A fiasco. Michael, completely devastated by the failure, leaned into a corner and began crying in a fetal position in front of the eyes of his entire team, who saw it as an impossible task to sort out this huge mess.

CBS-Epic refused to carry the album, and Michael’s career seemed destined for sheer drama. But then someone stepped forward: the audio engineer Bruce Swedenone of the most unfairly forgotten names in pop history and the protagonist of “Sonic Fantasy”, a recent Majorcan Marcos Cabota documentary released on Movistar that tells the whole story.

nine days. This was all the Swedes needed to turn it all into Pop’s greatest masterpiece. With a gift of synesthesia, the engineer literally locked himself in the mixing room—he slept there with a mattress and a blanket—conceiving every sound and every detail, to rearrange and re-equate everything into a new master delivered as soon as it was delivered. , changed music history forever and became the best-selling album of all time.

Despite the fact that he was a genius in the purest sense of the word and played a superlative role in contemporary music, hardly anyone knows the name of Bruce Swedyan. When he died two years ago, Quincy Jones He wrote: “It was without a doubt The best engineer in this work. For over 70 years, I wouldn’t even consider going to a recording session unless I knew Bruce was behind the controls.”