Bad by Michael Jackson (1987) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Michael Jackson spent five years on the follow-up to the best-selling album ever made, wrote about 60 songs for it, and let Quincy Jones cut them down to 11.
Michael Jackson spent five years on the follow-up to the best-selling album ever made, wrote about 60 songs for it, and let Quincy Jones cut them down to 11. Bad arrived on 31 August 1987, shifted 2.25 million copies in America in a week, and became the first album in history to throw off five #1 singles. America called it a disappointment anyway — Rolling Stone readers voted it the worst album of the year — because the only yardstick anyone would use was Thriller. It is the record where the biggest star alive found out that outselling everybody had stopped being enough, and the last one he and Jones ever made together.
Michael Jackson's seventh studio album, released on 31 August 1987 — the record that had to follow Thriller, and the last he'd ever make with Quincy Jones. He wrote 9 of its 11 songs himself, chased a harder and more rock-leaning sound, and drove the sessions to a point where Jones said engineers were being carried out on stretchers. It sold 2.25 million copies in America in seven days and became the first album ever to produce five #1 singles. America called it a failure.
There was no sane way to follow Thriller. By the end of 1983 it had sold 32 million copies and made Jackson the most famous entertainer alive, and the reasonable response would have been to accept that the number was a freak of history and make a good record instead. Jackson didn't do that. He told people he wanted the next one to sell 100 million. Quincy Jones, who'd produced Off the Wall and Thriller and knew exactly what was being asked, pushed in a different direction: 'All the turmoil was starting to mount up, so I said I thought it was time for him to do a very honest album.'
The making took five years and ran on two parallel crews. Jackson had been cutting demos since 1983, and through 1985 and 1986 he worked at his home studio at Hayvenhurst in Encino with Bill Bottrell, Matt Forger, John Barnes and Christopher Currell — the 'B team'. Those demos went to Westlake in Los Angeles, where Jones and engineer Bruce Swedien, the 'A team', finished them. Jackson kept both rooms running at once, to Jones's open irritation, and the B team was dissolved early in 1987. Jones's memory of the pace is the line everyone quotes: 'They were carrying second engineers out on stretchers. I was smoking 180 cigarettes a day.' Jackson wrote around 60 songs and recorded 33 of them, and wanted the lot out as a three-disc set. Jones cut it to 11.
What survived is a harder record than either of the two before it. Steve Stevens, Billy Idol's guitarist, was hired for the 'Dirty Diana' solo after Jackson told him he'd been listening to rock bands; Jimmy Smith, who had spent the 1950s inventing what a Hammond organ was for, plays the organ on the title track. Underneath sits a wall of then-new machinery — Synclavier, Fairlight, FM synthesis — that Currell and Swedien layered until the individual sources stopped being identifiable. The album's real argument, though, is authorship. Jackson wrote 9 of the 11 songs. On Thriller he'd written 4 of 9. Bad is the record where he stopped being the greatest interpreter of other people's material and started being the writer.
It opened like nothing before it. Bad debuted at #1 in America and stayed 6 weeks, selling more than 2.25 million copies in its first week — the fastest-selling album in US history to that point. It went to #1 in 24 other countries. In Britain it entered at #1 on 350,000 copies, a record at the time, and by the end of the decade it had become the UK's second best-selling album of the 1980s, ahead of Thriller. Then the singles started. 'I Just Can't Stop Loving You', 'Bad', 'The Way You Make Me Feel', 'Man in the Mirror' and 'Dirty Diana' all went to #1 on the Hot 100 — five chart-toppers from one album, which nobody had ever managed.
And in America it was received as a flop. Thriller had done 12 million US copies inside 13 months and Bad hadn't, so the story wrote itself. The backlash went well past sales. In Washington neighbourhoods, Bad posters on utility poles were cut and spray-painted. The psychologist Na'im Akbar said Jackson 'engaged in a form of self-mutilation that was a rejection of his cultural self'. A 1988 Rolling Stone readers' poll of 23,000 people voted him worst male singer, worst-dressed and most unwelcome comeback, and gave Bad worst album, worst single, worst video and worst album cover. What sat under nearly all of it was his changed face and lightening skin — the vitiligo he'd been living with since the early 1980s and had never made public. At the 1988 Grammys he was tied as the most-nominated artist of the night and went home with nothing. Little Richard, in the room: 'I'm shocked. I'm stunned.'
The verdict didn't hold. Bad has sold more than 35 million copies, and the tour it launched — 123 shows in 15 countries, 4.4 million tickets, $125 million — was the biggest anyone had run. The reappraisal has been slow and near-total: the vocal tics, the 'shamone', the harder edge and the writing are now read as the start of Jackson's strongest three years rather than the end of his best two. Spike Lee's test is the fair one. Line up the albums that topped the Billboard 200 in 1987 — The Joshua Tree, Tunnel of Love, Whitney — put them on today, and see which one hasn't dated. The failure was never the record. It was the yardstick.
There is no rare Bad. It sold 35 million copies and the pressing plants ran for years, so nothing about the standard 1987 LP is scarce in either the US or the UK form. What that does is move the entire game onto condition, and specifically onto the gatefold. Both the US (Epic E 40600/OE 40600) and UK (Epic 450290 1) originals are gatefold sleeves with a printed lyric inner, and the gatefold spine is what fails — split hinges, ring wear and creasing are near-universal on played copies, so an unsplit sleeve with a clean inner is a genuinely uncommon object even though the record inside is not. Beyond condition, three things carry an actual premium: Japanese pressings with the obi strip and insert intact, the official picture discs (a US issue, plus French and Japanese promos), and factory-sealed US first pressings. The Carrollton-plant US copies can be identified from a 'G' etching in the runout, which is the sort of detail that separates a described copy from a guessed one.
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