We need certain missing elements.’ Michael was pretty disappointed, but then that’s how we got (‘The Lady in My Life’) and ‘Beat It.’”At the time, disco still dominated the charts, and Jones and Jackson wanted to transcend it. “We thought at one point we were done,” recalls Greg Phillinganes, a keyboardist on the “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” albums “And Quincy was like, ‘No, not so fast. You make something that touches you and will hopefully touch someone else.”One priority was to balance “Thriller” between R&B and pop, disco and rock, funk and ballads. “You don’t make records to say how many you’re going to sell,” he says “You can’t control that. Jackson wrote several of the songs: “The Girl Is Mine,” “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Among the other writers was former Heatwave keyboardist Rod Temperton, who wrote “Rock With You” on “Off the Wall.” He brought them an “amazing” song he had, titled “Starlight Love,” Jones says, which eventually became the song “Thriller.”Despite the success of “Off the Wall,” Jones says, their working relationship was very much about creativity for creativity’s sake. At the time, Jones was struck by Jackson’s “profound discipline and focus”; he knew that “he could still be bigger than everyone else was saying.”Jones began laying the foundation for “Thriller” in December 1981, when he took Jackson to Tucson, Ariz., to spend three days recording the Paul McCartney duet “The Girl Is Mine.” “Michael and I just wanted to work with Paul, who I’d known for years,” Jones remembers.Work began in earnest in August 1982. But Jackson, who had met Jones when he played the Scarecrow in the movie version of “The Wiz” and Jones produced the soundtrack, persisted.

“The wall was down by the time we got to ‘Thriller.’”‘THRILLER’ TIMEWhen Jackson first suggested working with Quincy Jones on “Off the Wall,” Epic executives worried that the producer was too jazzy. “We knew right off: We’re all going to work the records at the same time.”"Don’t Stop” debuted July 28, 1979, and became Jackson’s first No. 1 R&B and pop single as a solo artist since his 1972 hit “Ben.” That was followed in November by a second No. 1 R&B and pop single, “Rock With You,” then the album’s title track and “She’s Out of My Life.”"‘Off the Wall’ opened up something at radio that was never closed again,” Weisner says. So they took the unprecedented step of promoting singles to R&B and pop radio at the same time.”It wasn’t the usual ‘Build up the artist at urban radio first and then go to pop,’” Warfield says. Our attitude was, ‘Let the public decide — don’t just present it to a black market only.’”From the moment Epic’s pop and R&B promotion teams heard “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the album’s opening track and lead single, they knew they had a major hit on their hands, recalls former West Coast regional urban promotion manager Maurice Warfield.

“If you were a black artist, you were put in a black music division, and that meant the marketing campaign was an ad in Jet and Ebony. But Jackson became a bona fide superstar with his first solo album for Epic, “Off the Wall.”As Jackson recorded that album, which came out in 1979, his team decided to bring it to the broadest audience possible.”Our whole mind-set was that we were making music for the masses, and part of the big picture was to get the record company to turn around and market and promote to a mass market,” says Ron Weisner, who was co-managing Jackson with Freddy DeMann at the time. The “Flashdance” soundtrack and the Police’s “Synchronicity” also helped lure fans back into stores.WRITING ON THE ‘WALL’Jackson made a name for himself in the early ’70s as the young frontman of Motown’s Jackson 5 and as a solo artist. The Jacksons had left Motown in 1975 and released three albums on Epic, the most recent of which, “Destiny,” peaked at No 11 on the Billboard 200 in 1978. “There is no question that ‘Thriller’ was the driving force behind what became the hottest span in Epic’s history,” Beck says.

After that, the label had major hits with Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club and REO Speedwagon. It was very upsetting because nothing like that had ever happened before.”Then Jackson changed everything. At the time, Billboard reported that record shipments had declined by 50 million units between 1980 and 1982.It was a bleak time, and CBS staffers referred to August 13, 1982, as “Black Friday.” “We had a major layoff that day,” remembers Epic/Portrait/CBS Associated Labels vice president of merchandising Dan Beck “Half of the marketing department was let go at Epic. Starting in 1984, Columbia released seven singles from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” all of which landed in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 Around the same time, Warner Bros. sent to radio five singles from Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Mercury found seven singles on Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” all of which went to the pop chart. All three albums eventually sold more than 10 million copies each in the United States alone.Before all that, “Thriller” gave a much-needed boost to the music business, then suffering from its second slump in three years. The label made “Thriller” the first major release to debut worldwide simultaneously, the first album to be promoted for close to two years instead of the usual six or eight months and the first album to spin off seven singles to radio — more than double the normal number.Along the way, “Thriller” redefined the expectations for blockbuster releases.