He was especially mean to competitor Prince and dismissive of his older brother Jermaine, Reid writes in his new memoir, Sing To Me.
In
the early 1990s, Reid was co-producing an album for Jermaine when
Michael Jackson’s manager called asking if Reid and his partner, Kenny
“Babyface” Edmonds, would like to discuss writing songs with the star.
Reid told Jermaine only that they were slipping away to Los Angeles for a quick project. They didn’t mention what it was.
A
helicopter picked up the two at Burbank Airport and flew them to
Neverland Ranch, where they were met by an assistant with a
nondisclosure agreement (“Nobody got to see Michael without signing
one”) and were taken to Jackson’s library.
They discussed music, and Jackson took them on a tour of Neverland.
Finally,
he brought them to a screening room and showed them footage of a 1983
James Brown concert where Jackson, called on stage as a guest, “danced a
few steps,” then told Brown that Prince, Jackson’s longtime rival, was
in the crowd as well.
Brown called him up too, but to Jackson’s delight, his appearance didn’t go nearly as well.
“Prince
[couldn’t] make his guitar work, frantically stripping off his shirt
and trying tricks with the microphone stand and making all these poses.
After Michael’s dazzling star turn, Prince fell as flat as he could, and
Michael enjoyed laughing at the video.”
But Michael wasn’t done humiliating him.
“After that, he put on a scene from Prince’s movie Under The Cherry Moon, the artsy black-and-white bomb he made after Purple Rain, and he laughed some more at Prince.”
Following
a lunch where “Michael’s pasta was all cut in the shapes of Disney
characters,” it was arranged that the duo would fly to LA to write songs
with Jackson for three weeks.
When Jermaine found out, he went ballistic, demanding to be released from Reid and Edmonds’ label, LaFace Records.
When Reid told Michael what happened, the superstar replied, “He’ll get over it.”
“‘That’s not really the problem,’ I said. ‘The problem was that he wants off the label now.’
“‘Did he sign a contract?’ asked Michael.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Then he’ll have to live with it because those are the rules,’ Michael said and walked out.
“That
Michael Jackson was one shrewd man,” Reid writes. “He was not wrong,
but you didn’t expect that from Peter Pan. You expect a little
compassion or something. No. Cold as ice.”
Reid and Edmonds smoothed things over with Jermaine in Atlanta.
But when they went back to work on his record, Jermaine complicated matters further by dropping a bombshell.
“I
want to make a song about my brother,” he said. “I want to talk about
how he’s treated me through the years, like how every time I find
producers like you guys, he takes my producers. He doesn’t care about
his family or anybody but himself.”
As Jermaine’s producers, they had to serve their artist. Much as they
didn’t want to produce a song slamming Michael, they had no choice.
Radio
stations nationwide picked up Jermaine’s “Word to the Badd!” and Reid
was in his apartment in LA when he received a call from an angry Michael
Jackson.
“‘You have to stop this,’ he said. ‘You’re the head of the label. You have to kill this. This isn’t good.’”
The brothers convened at their mother’s house to discuss the issue,
after which Jermaine called Reid to say that the record would stay on
the air, followed by Michael calling to again tell Reid to put a stop to
it.
Two days later, Reid writes, “The record disappeared off the
air, as if it had never been there in the first place. I don’t know what
Michael did. I don’t know if Michael did anything, but it went away in a
flash.”
