Steve Porcaro, the producer and synth player who played on Thriller, has been talking about his work on that album and two unreleased tracks he co-wrote with Michael Jackson.
This was in 1982, right at the end of the project. Appearing on the Think Like A Synth podcast, which is hosted by Anthony Marinelli – who played on Thriller himself – he described how those tracks came about.
Porcaro said: “He mentioned that he had to jump straight to another project, with his brothers – the Victory album – and he was hoping that I could help him write and produce some stuff off of that album. Literally two weeks after Thriller was done, he started showing up.”
“I’d give him a tape of just a synth jam I had done and one of them he really latched onto. About a week later, I was at the studio at David Paich’s house (the Toto man also contributed to Thriller) and I actually had a bunch of technical people over doing stuff and Michael just showed up at the door – unannounced – and said he wanted to throw a vocal.”
Porcaro continued: “He knew I’d be there. I asked the people to wait out in the back yard for a little while. And it was the most unbelievable thing I’d ever seen. He did nine vocal passes, beginning to end, on this song we were working on. He did lead vocals, doubles, backgrounds, harmonies.
"All the way through I never stopped the tape once. He would just go through the whole song and he’d say ‘give me another track’. We did that nine times and then he said ‘I’m outta here’ and he left.”
That track was Chicago 1945. The synth player recalls that every vocal was perfect, although he said he had to take out some of the tics that were becoming a Jackson habit.
Then just a few days later, Jackson turned up at Porcaro’s door – again, unannounced. “It’s 9am in the morning and someone knocks at the door and I open it and it’s Michael and he says ‘let’s do something’. I hated writing nose to nose with anybody because I’m afraid of drawing a blank but we wrote this second song, Dream Away, nose to nose.
"He grabbed a book that was lying around and wrote some lyrics and started playing this thing on a Roland electric piano. He sang a lead vocal and we put it together real quick.”
Those two tracks remain in the vaults. Chicago 1945 was a contender for both the Victory album and Jackson’s own Bad album, but missed the cut both times. Dream Away was considered for the posthumous album Xscape but again was overlooked.
“I always thought they’d be plenty of time to finish these with Michael," lamented Porcaro. "But unfortunately we lost him in 2009.'
