L.A. Reid and an all-star cast of producers re-imagine archival tracks by the King Of Pop. A little less than a year ago, L.A. Reid met John Branca for dinner at Cecconi's in West Hollywood. Reid had been the chairman and CEO of Epic Records ("the house that Thriller built," as Reid calls it) since July 2011, and he'd inherited a cold label that so far hadn't gotten much hotter. Branca had resumed his role as Michael Jackson's adviser and lawyer shortly before Jackson's death in 2009, and during his time as co-executor of the Jackson estate had erased the estate's $500 million debt, thanks to the This Is It concert film (which grossed $261 million worldwide), and lucrative Jackson performance properties with Cirque du Soleil.
One of the items on the table that night was Reid's idea for a Jackson biopic covering his life between the age of 19 — when he filmed The Wiz, and first worked with Quincy Jones — and 24, when he and Jones reshaped the world with Thriller. Branca had simple answer for Reid: No. "John said to me, 'That's wonderful. Why? Why should we allow you to do that?' " Reid, 57, remembers today. Branca complained that during his time at Epic, Reid had done nothing for Jackson. Reid's first two years at the label had coincided with his tenure as a judge on The X Factor on Fox (a decision he now calls "horrible"), and Branca seized on this too.
"He said, 'You don't talk about Michael when you're on TV,' " says Reid. "He starts to berate me. I walked right into it." But Reid saw a chance to prove himself, and so asked for something else, something bigger: to go into the vaults and hear the recordings that Jackson — who was known to work on as many as 70 songs for each album — had left behind. "Let me hear everything," he said to Branca. "And then let me go out and put my team together and make an album on Michael." "I was just being a lying-ass record man," says Reid. "Because I had no idea what was in the vaults." Thanks to thepestilence, check out more inside.
*billboard.com
