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Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Thriller: (temporary) theft of the master records
Non-sports post.
John Landis relays a story where he participated in what can only be described as a huge theft, if he got caught. (I guess. Unless this is par for the course?)
I don’t know, but you know, I have to tell you that the music in the video is quite different than the record. I mean, that’s a story I’ll tell now because the statute of limitations is up, but the engineer, Bruce Swedien, and the brilliant Quincy Jones - they wouldn’t let me have the original tracks and I tried to explain. I’m going to do a movie mix, which is very different than needle drop, which is what videos were and still are.
And in order to do that, I needed the original tracks, so I told Michael and he said, oh, we’ll get them. So George Folsey and I and Michael went in Michael’s car. He had a big Rolls Royce. We went to the recording studio in Studio City about 3 o’clock in the morning, walked through the lobby and Mike waved to the night watchman. With a big suitcase, we went in the back. We took the reels off the racks, went out, drove across town to Todd-AO in Hollywood, duped all the tracks and then returned them. The whole thing took an hour.
And if you watch the video, people never noticed the song is 11 minutes long in the video and it’s the same original tracks, totally re-cut and remixed. In fact, Vincent Price rerecorded the narration for me because I couldn’t use the record narration because it was mixed with a synth track. And Mr. Price very graciously came in and redid it.
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