Where exactly does the best-selling album of all-time fit into the long-playing vinyl canon? Classic Albums Live,
the Toronto-based operation dedicated to bringing old LPs to life
through recitals focused exclusively on the music, provoked the
question by staging a live run-through of Michael Jackson’s Thriller,
last night at the Phoenix Concert Theatre. These recitals have taken the
operation beyond its Toronto base — cities in Florida were concurrently
visited by Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac roadshows — but this marked the first attempt to step completely out of the rock box. Craig Martin, founder and producer of the series, admits he was more likely to be listening to Judas Priest when Thriller
was moving a million or two units a week worldwide throughout 1983.
Now, at age 47, he’s absorbed it well enough to be able to pick out
every imperfection still lingering amidst a third and final rehearsal,
held on Tuesday night in an incense-scented space at Dupont and
Dufferin.
Plans to tackle Thriller in this format were announced a couple months ago — a detour that continues with Prince’s Purple Rain in August, with Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye
shows to follow — although actually finding a singer capable of
mastering Michael Jackson without pretense was harder than first
imagined.
Martin was visited by three contenders for the role,
none of whom could quite separate the voice from the image, given how
the frontman he required wasn’t going to be required to moonwalk.
“I
can tell when an impression isn’t innate,” he says, while demonstrating
the ragdoll gesticulations associated with a Jacko tribute act. “The audience can
smell a rat, too. I was willing to call off the show. We’ve got a
reputation to uphold.”
Things changed three weeks ago, after hearing from 30-year-old Peter Miller — who currently has a regular weekend gig singing at King Street bar Jo Mamas. “I could even tell over the phone he was the one,” says Martin. “The voice just falls out of the guy.”
Not unlike how Journey found their new lead singer via YouTube clips of a cover band from the Philippines, it turned out that the most qualified voice to reconstitute Thriller
was as personally laid-back as a Jacko soundalike could probably be.
Furthermore, he’d never listened to the album from start to finish
before.
But it’s not as if many people familiar with it ever did, either. For a 42-minute platter with just nine tracks, the legacy of Thriller
might be as confusing as a double or triple album. The lifespan of its
initial success, from late fall 1982 through spring 1984, saw its
zeitgeist status evolve from cunning Quincy Jones black pop
production, to genre-breaking image-driven chartbuster, to populist
party favour, to unavoidable mass-produced product, to contrived media
event driven by the 13-minute John Landis video and its accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary.
Locally, when the title track from “Thriller,” the seventh single of the album, shattered tradition by debuting at the summit of 1050 CHUM chart edition No. 1414 in February 1984, it all but sounded the death knell for the concept of a Toronto monoculture.
The notion of taking Thriller seriously again was raised earlier this year with the release of its 25th anniversary edition, augmented by testimony to its influences from Akon, Kanye West, and sundry Black Eyed Peas. The six commissioned remixes were infused with the sonic cacophony Jackson increasingly mistook for music since 1991’s Dangerous
— maybe, not unlike his distorted view of his physical self, that’s the
kind of racket the pushing-50 King of Pop considers emblematic of his
fiefdom. (More creatively successful was Man in the Mirror, a mixtape by Chicago rapper Rhymefest — ruminations on one man’s complex relationship with the source material.)
Thriller 25 sold respectably well for a 2008 compact-disc release — it would’ve near about topped the US album chart again if not for a Billboard technicality designating it as mere re-issue. But maybe the coast has finally cleared for a reverent tribute show.
“The
album is really like hip-hop barbershop,” says Martin, “so, it was
important to have the right backing vocalists. There’s more interplay
than you might think.”
Which meant recruiting two women for the Thriller frontline: Sacha Williamson, 29, who played a similar role in productions of classic Bob Marley and Rolling Stones
albums — a recital of “Gimmie Shelter” earlier this year also featured
an appearance from the vocalist she was concurently imitating, Merry Clayton — and Abena Malika, 33, a singer and actress new to this turf. Both women attest to the influence of Thriller
as the first musical phenomenon girls their age caught wind of
first-hand — and, apparently, its closer led them to shed the
occasional tear.
“Oh, I remember listening to ‘The Lady in My Life’ and just crying,” says Williamson. “That one really got into my soul.” Yet it was one of just two Thriller tracks not released in the 45 format.
Peter
Miller, in fact, didn’t hear the song for the first time until getting
this assignment three weeks ago — nor was he acquainted with the other
non-single, “Baby Be Mine.” Mastering both would be key to making the
case for Thriller as a classic album.
But staging Thriller requires more than a singing trio – it also requires people to impersonate Paul McCartney, Eddie Van Halen and Vincent Price. Nine of the other players are lined up for the last run-through prior to the pre-concert soundcheck.
“Wanna
Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the album opener, is one of the songs where
layers of backing vocalists need to be emulated — rather than
reproducing the effect of a multi-tracked Jackson. The reproduction
flows seamlessly as promised, until the very brink of commotion on the
infamous indictment, “You’re a vegetable.”
“You’ve got to get that bwabwabwauauaua,”
Martin attempts to remind the troops. “I want that… it’s a gutter
noise.” A second try gets the band closer. Frankly, one minute and 20
seconds of the refrain “Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa” seems more
worthy of a show closer, except the record didn’t swing that
way.
“This is the one we all missed growing up,” says Martin of
track two, “Baby Be Mine.” “Now it’s the favourite one of the show.”
His surrogate Michael remains seated at the front of the rehearsing
band, but the backing vocals remind that Thriller didn’t lack for seduction, even if it was eclipsed by braggadocio.
Track
three, however, is the all-time buzzkill. “The Girl Is Mine,”
presumably conceived as a safe launch pad for the momentum to follow —
while helping to mitigate Paul McCartney’s bloated contract with CBS
Records — was never without middle-of-the-road goopy pop merit, even if the
premise of a 24-year-old effeminate black man and a 40-year-old Beatle
who already sired three children fighting over the same woman’s
affection was preposterous in the first place. But the vast Classic
Albums Live experience with the Beatles catalogue means a qualified
McCartney soundalike is always close at hand, as percussionist Marty Morin interjects to challenge those claims of virility.
The title cut of Thriller
could be trickiest to approach as pure music, let alone get the
elements properly synchronized — foreshadowing the dissonance that
would make a performance of any subsequent Jackson album too absurd to
try. Getting elements lined up requires more ironing than anything else
in the show. “It’s all about the mathematics,” Martin reassures his
players.
Hearing it as the aforementioned “doo-wop hip-hop” provides a new context, though. A guitarist, Rob Phillips,
applies his penchant for voice impressions by doing the Vincent Price
rap — which is more subduded than history has made it remembered.
Side
two kicks off with “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” two litmus tests for
the vocalists — the former is left incomplete in the last rehearsal for
lack of Van Halen guitar. Miller remains seated more often than not,
reading lyrics from a hand-held device even if he looks like he might
as well just be scrolling through email messages. The un-animated
recital is sonically impeccable, yet also inspires wonder about what an
impromptu nightclub performance from Michael Jackson would be like.
(The closest example to date might’ve been in 1991, when he voiced
escaped singing mental patient “Leon Kompowsky” on The Simpsons.)
What
remains of Thriller, “Human Nature,” “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and
“The Lady in My Life,” go down smoothly in rehearsal, formulaic as they
ever were. “P.Y.T.” became something of a punch line in the ongoing
Michael Jackson legal saga, of course — Thriller 25 remixed the original languid draft of the song before it was made into a rave-up by Quincy Jones and co-writer James Ingram, saluted last year on Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.” Retrospectively speaking, though, the second half of side two of Thriller belies the long-held notion that its 1979 pre-artifice predecessor, Off The Wall, sustains as the better-conceived distillation of Jackson’s old-school musical purity.
Too
many external distractions caused that to happen, of course. And, at
the Phoenix last night, the closest such things was a large onstage
backdrop painted with the “Thriller” video image of a zombified
red-jacketed Jackson. The couple hundred in attendance didn’t look like
groupies holding vigil at a courthouse — in fact, it could’ve passed
for a crowd at a Rush convention.
With
the whole band dressed in black, the reproduction was as impeccable as
promised, even if it seems even the coolest R&B singers can’t help
but feed off enthusiasm. The living room-style rehearsal, for an
audience of one, was more appealingly restrained — or at least, more
conducive to thinking thoughts about Thriller — although there’s obviously no money in that intimate approach.
For an encore, a half-dozen more Jackson classics were in the arsenal, crowd-pleasers all, even if a properly annotated Thriller would be augmented with morbid efforts to exploit its mania: Rebbie Jackson’s “Centipede,” Jermaine Jackson’s “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming,” Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” etc., collapsing in a heap with the Mick Jagger duet “State of Shock.”
Michael
Jackson had a quarter-century to stick up for what he used to be. And,
since he never did, it was refreshing to know someone had the audacity
to do the trick. Which explains the song that earned the most
enthusiastic reaction out of the nine revived for this auspicious
occassion: “The Girl is Mine,” if only cheering out of sheer astonishment that anyone out there would actually bother.
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