Last post on 1979-82 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=140016
Refer to my profile for all posts in the series
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The initial post-Thriller years were a mixed bag. A&M and Mercury Records used Quincy’s raised profile as an opportunity to put out several greatest hits compilation albums. Quincy and Qwest Records had James Ingram’s It’s Your Night go Gold and Patti Austin result in the hit dance single It’s Gonna Be Special, though neither record feels terribly essential today. Those two singers also joined Quincy and Ray Charles in 1983 at concerts in Seattle (the city he spent his formative musical years in after leaving Chicago) celebrating Quincy’s 50th birthday, the high point of those being Quincy bringing some of his old band buddies from the 1940s and 50s on stage for some gleeful singing.
Quincy and Patti Austin cracking jokes during the recording of It’s Gonna Be Special - https://youtu.be/CjNj61bBgl4
Quincy Jones: A Celebration in Seattle (1983) - https://youtu.be/ZbREHPDI6tc
While the mid-to-late 1970s hadn’t been great for Frank Sinatra, the 1980s were somewhat of a resurgence for him, and Quincy produced, arranged, and conducted one last album with him. Alas, L.A. Is My Lady ended up a noble but uneven attempt to blend old standards with contemporary tunes and occasionally contemporary production. The synths in the album opener got the lion’s share of negative attention at the time, though I’d argue that what Sinatra really didn’t need at the end of his illustrious career was to sing alongside Major Holley’s grumble-scatting, an asset on earlier albums like Gula Matari but a confusing companion to Frank’s voice here.
Recording session footage from L.A. Is My Lady - https://youtu.be/eIazK40JKbM
Quincy and Herbie Hancock messing around with synthesizers in 1984 - https://youtu.be/jzhbKqcm78o
And while a crass oversimplification of Quincy’s role has been that he just rings up a bunch of famous friends and lets them do their thing, that was arguably part of what went into the making of the hit charity single We Are The World, done in partnership with Michael Jackson, which won Grammy awards for Record and Song of the Year. Still, like it or not, Quincy and Michael were going to be judged mainly on their follow up album to Thriller - a follow up which could be the only album in history to be among the 20-30 best-selling records of all time and still be considered a colossal disappointment. No pressure.
But first there was Quincy’s first film score in seven years.
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Quincy joined Jon Peters and Peter Guber as a producer on The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the struggles of a young Black girl in early 1900s Georgia (Guber had originally approached him about a possible Olympic gymnastics theme). Quincy was the one who then approached Steven Spielberg to direct. “It took Steven eleven months to agree. He was doing E.T. and I was doing Thriller during that time.” In Quincy’s telling, everyone went on vacation after filming and he tried going straight into composing nearly two hours of music over eight weeks. Burned out after spending every day on the project since October 1983 and on the verge of a nervous breakdown (and possibly having the same kind of troubling emotional reaction to the subject matter that tripped him up on Roots), Quincy ended up treating the project like one of his albums by getting an army of contributors to work on the material. While only Quincy’s name ended up on the album cover, eleven guys were credited as co-composers - Argentinian arranger Jorge Calandrelli; gospel artist Andraé Crouch; jazz pianist and arranger Jeremy Lubbock, score composers/orchestrators Chris Boardman, Jack Hayes, Randy Kerber, Joel Rosenbaum, and Fred Steiner; South African composer Caiphus Semenya; Thriller songwriter Rod Temperton; and Jerry Hey who played and arranged on several of Quincy’s albums that decade.
Behind the scenes scoring footage as part of a 1986 60 Minutes profile - https://youtu.be/f8B0Gb4DOvY
Fred Steiner later noted that this kind of packed house under a tight deadline wasn’t too dissimilar from his time orchestrating Mackenna’s Gold, and he also laughed how absurd it would have been if they’d won the Best Score Oscar and all twelve of them had to go on stage. It arguably could’ve been thirteen guys as Lionel Ritchie helped with the lyrics for the song Miss Celie’s Blues. That nomination was one of eleven the 1985 film received (going 0-for-11), but while Quincy & co’s score has some delightful themes and expansive symphonic orchestrations that come close to the kind of sound John Williams might’ve provided for the project, the score also doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its parts. And while it likely wasn’t noticeable to American audiences at the time, the temp track almost assuredly contained a Georges Delerue composition as one of Quincy’s main themes was a copy of the Frenchman’s melody from the 1967 French film Our Mother’s House. Delerue was initially reported to have been amused, but it’s rumored that Purplegate got him a nice cash settlement and scoring assignments on multiple episodes of Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series.
As for Quincy, he didn’t score another film for 20 years.
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Two world-dominating, industry-redefining album events had made Michael and Quincy fast friends, with the two often described by others as having a father-son or big brother-little brother relationship, yet tensions had started to simmer during the making of Thriller. In addition to Michael hating the original mixes, there were intense disagreements on the sound of Billie Jean and Michael thought he was screwed out of a producer credit, and years later Quincy implied that Michael occasionally acted like Quincy’s contributions weren’t as significant as his (“sometimes in the studio Michael would say, ‘I don’t know what Quincy does’”). They went ahead and started work on what became Bad anyway, with Michael writing most of the songs at Quincy’s encouragement, pushing for more rock sounds and the then-innovative use of digital synthesizers, and securing a full co-producer credit. Quincy later said he felt his greatest contribution to the album was suggesting that Michael should make the album more raw and personal, largely in response to the mounting media coverage of the singer’s life (his changing skin color, plastic surgeries, rifts with his family, and odd pets among the topics, admittedly small potatoes compared to his many controversies and legal troubles later in life).
Released in August 1987, Bad didn’t match Thriller in sales - what could? - but was still enough of a massive success to not be considered anyone’s idea of a disappointment. Bad, Man in the Mirror, Smooth Criminal, and The Way You Make Me Feel become iconic songs for the artist who two years later would start being referred to by the nickname The King of Pop. The Grammy Awards didn’t give Bad the same amount of love that was bestowed upon Thriller, though it is hard to argue with Album of the Year going to U2’s The Joshua Tree instead. But even if it had won, it wouldn’t have stopped the dissolution of one of the most (if not the most) successful singer-producer partnerships in history. Michael supposedly told his manager that he felt Quincy was old and out of touch - though later in life Quincy never missed an opportunity to remind people that Michael thought rap was going to die out in 1987 and hadn’t wanted some of the most notable parts of his songs. Quincy went further than that long after Michael’s 2009 death, saying he missed his “little brother” but also calling him a greedy Machiavellian thief, pointing out similarities to other songs, publicly backing Greg Phillinganes’ assertion that Michael cheated him out of a producer credit on Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, and even suing Michael’s estate a few years ago for millions of dollars in unpaid royalties (millions he won, even with the amount reduced on appeal).
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Next time: A masterpiece, a flawed follow-up, and Quincy’s best concert album.
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1983-87: Film & TV scores
The Color Purple (1985) - ***½
https://open.spotify.com/album/4oKxvBrWpx0ff0iYespbpI
1983-87: The essential albums
Bad https://open.spotify.com/album/3Us57CjssWnHjTUIXBuIeH
1983-87: Other albums & songs
It’s Your Night https://open.spotify.com/album/28XSg8Y5N9pwKrSrMiwmbs
Patti Austin https://open.spotify.com/album/5Oka5otsbc2k8nFMhp84QQ
L.A. Is My Lady https://open.spotify.com/album/4zvku3SSgsUaVRsvcCZ1aU
We Are the World https://open.spotify.com/album/2O6gXGWFJcNrLYAqDINrDa
Decisions https://open.spotify.com/album/5Zg7MdGx8lMA1LzsrmpkDH
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