Some readers of Rule Forty-Two expressed astonishment at my post where I mentioned that Thriller sold a small but significant number of copies on eight-track, so I thought you might like to see the following, from a recent eBay auction:

(If you want this artifact to love and cherish, there are several more on sale at eBay right now; just search for “Thriller 8-track.”)

I am informed by a reliable source in my own house that when she was younger, she had a close friend who owned exactly three eight-track tapes: Thriller, Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan, and Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle.

posted 17 July 2009 in Photos. 2 comments

In the archives today: a 2005 profile of the mighty Paul Giamatti, recounting how we discussed his life over an extremely long Mexican lunch in Brooklyn.

Not discussed in the article: that Giamatti and I went to Yale at the same time. We didn’t know each other, but he was generally recognized as the best actor on campus and I saw pretty much every play he was in (which was a lot of plays). I also was briefly in the same Shakespeare production as him: he had a leading role and I was a supernumerary. I dropped out to be in a different show, but I did show up for one rehearsal where Giamatti manhandled and robbed me, so I can honestly say that I’ve acted with him. Also not included in the article: our long digression on which Yalies of our era had made it as professional actors (him, Ed Norton, Josh Malina, Jen Westfeldt, Melissa Errico, Phil LaMarr, probably some other people we didn’t think of).

posted 14 July 2009 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Shamefully, it’s been almost three months since my last flipwalk update. (If you’re not familiar with the flipwalk project: while living in New York City, I took walks of exactly one hour in duration, my route determined along the way by flipping a coin. Then I would take a photograph of whatever block I was on when the hour was up.)

The teaser image for this week’s flipwalk:

For the complete picture, plus the story of what happened on my way to getting there, click here.

posted 10 July 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

The second Warhol/Jackson meeting, as recounted in The Andy Warhol Diaries. The setting is a party in a hotel room before a performance of the Jacksons’ Victory tour at Madison Square Garden:

Saturday, August 4, 1984

Rosanna Arquette, the actress, came up and was so sweet, and I asked her if we’d ever done anything on her in Interview and she said, “No, and you’ve just got to!” But then I remembered that we had done something–but just a “First Impression.” Little Sean Lennon was there and that was exciting. And then this apparition appeared and it was Michael Jackson.

Susan Blond pushed me into his arms and he was shy, and then people pushed me away, and Keith [Haring] gave him T-shirts and everybody was meeting everybody and then I was pushed back at him and it was anticlimactic and then it was over. I shook his hand and it was like foam rubber. The sequined glove isn’t just a little sequined glove, it’s like a catcher’s mitt. Everything has to be bigger than life for the stage.

We went to the show and it was laser beams and a movie where a sword had to be pulled out of a stone and Michael pulled it out. Bianca [Jagger] arrived late and the Jackson father was in her seat and she didn’t know who he was and tried to kick him out, but Susan Blond got up and gave her her seat.

posted 8 July 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

Andy Warhol had two encounters with Michael Jackson; in between, he did a portrait of him for a 1984 cover of Time (working from photographic reference). This is his account of the first meeting:

Wednesday, February 2, 1977

Went home and did some work, then at 11:00 Catherine and I went over to Regine’s to interview Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5. He’s very tall now, but he has a really high voice. He had a big guy with him, maybe a bodyguard, and the girl from The Wiz. The whole situation was funny because Catherine and I didn’t know anything about Michael Jackson, really, and he didn’t know anything about me–he thought I was a poet or something like that. So he was asking questions that nobody who knew me would ask–like if I was married, if I had any kids, if my mother was alive…. (laughs) I told him, “She’s in a home.”

(Warhol’s mother died in the early ’70s, but he routinely deflected questions about her, saying “She’s fine.”)

posted 8 July 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

Today’s my last day of Michael Jackson posting for a while (i.e., until his next video comes around on the 1988 countdown). I’ll have some MJ excerpts from the Warhol diaries a little later in the day, but first I thought I’d share two historical updates from last week.

Another tidbit from the early 1980s at CBS Records: at the peak of Thriller, CBS had one record plant that did nothing but make copies of Thriller for over a year.

You might have missed Chris Molanphy’s interesting comment last week about my contention that by modern practices, Thriller seems absurdly backloaded:

Actually — not disagreeing but amplifying your point — in the early ’80s it was Standard Operating Procedure to put your first single, or your anticipated big single, at the start of Side B. Thriller, Synchronicity, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Colour by Numbers, Heartbeat City — the second side of each was led by the first single, or the biggest single (“Billie Jean” got Thriller’s pimp spot even though “The Girl Is Mine” was the leadoff, auguring its status as the legendary single of that album).

(“Beat It” got the pimp spot, actually.) Spot-checking the #1 albums of 1982-84, I would say that there are many more albums that put the big hits up front: Freeze-Frame, American Fool, Business as Usual, Metal Health, Can’t Slow Down. But Purple Rain is a perfect example of putting the smash in the pimp spot. (And Born in the USA perversely leaves the breakthrough single until close to the end.)

Side-two openers were also a good spot to put a quiet song that wouldn’t fit anywhere else on an album. I miss side-one closers just as much, though: they had to have enough drama to finish a side, but still make you want to flip the record over.

posted 8 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

There’s been a lot of fine writing about Michael Jackson’s life and death in the past twelve days, and some of the best of it has been by friends of Rule Forty-Two. I have a few more MJ-related posts to make, but before I cut off this skein, I wanted to steer you towards some other Michaelania:

Chris Molanphy on Michael’s chart achievements.
In the same month “Beat It” topped the Hot 100 and R&B lists, it peaked at No. 14 on the Rock chart, making Jackson the first African-American to score an honest-to-goodness AOR hit until guitarist Jon Butcher broke into the Top 10 with “Goodbye Saving Grace” four years later.

Tom Nawrocki on the Jackson 5.
The Jackson 5 were so good, and so popular, that MGM had a bunch of Mormons from Utah do a note-for-note imitation of the Jackson 5, and that went to Number One, too.

Robert Rossney on fashioning meaning out of the incomprehensible (plus a followup).
The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

Rob Sheffield on the brilliant music.
I went to a high school dance, drove home to watch the “Beat It” premiere, then drove back to the dance so I could tell everyone how awesome it was and make my first attempts to copy that dance at the end.

posted 6 July 2009 in Links. no comments yet

For your holiday-weekend contemplation, a few more photos from my April visit to the auction-house exhibition of the contents of Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

posted 3 July 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

Aside from its ultramegahugeness, there are some aspects of Thriller that wouldn’t be the same today.

A. If it was released now, it wouldn’t be sequenced the same way. Here’s your all-star lineup: (side one) 1. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” 2. “Baby Be Mine” 3. “The Girl Is Mine” 4. “Thriller” (side two) 5. “Beat It” 6. “Billie Jean” 7. “Human Nature” 8. “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” 9. “The Lady in My Life.” The conventional industry wisdom now is to front-load your strongest material as much as possible, because many listeners will never make it past the first three songs, but after the kickoff of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” side one seriously drags. Michael knew people would stick around for side two. (That same confidence is why he released a trifle like “The Girl Is Mine” as the album’s first single.)

B. Only a few years later, every song on the album would have had a video. Everyone remembers the Thriller videos; at the time, it didn’t seem odd that there were only three of them.

C. A year into its chart run, Michael started competing with himself! “Say Say Say,” his second duet with Paul McCartney, was on the charts at the same time as “P.Y.T.”–and did much better, lodging at #1 for six weeks, while “P.Y.T.” just made it to #10. At least it was the same record company in that case, so they could mark it all up to the bottom line. But a few months later, Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” with hugely prominent backing vocals by Jackson, was on the charts at the same time as “Thriller.” I think CBS Records just said “screw it, this thing’s unstoppable.”

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

My dad worked at CBS Records (as Sony Music was then known) in the 1980s and programmed the computer systems that handled a lot of their internal bookkeeping. I remember two details he told me about Thriller, which sold so many copies it routinely overwhelmed the computer:

1. One quarter, it accounted for one half of all CBS albums sold everywhere in the world. (Keep in mind that this was not a small label–they had Bruce Springsteen, Men at Work, and Journey, among many other hitmakers of the era.)

2. At a point where everyone assumed the format was dead, including people inside the company, there was a small but steady stream of Thriller eight-track tapes being sold; as near as anyone could figure out, they were being stocked at truck stops.

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment