TOP 40 DEBUT: February 23, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #10 (April 12, 1980)
The biggest-selling artist of the decade doesn’t become a superstar solely on his own. In his prime, Michael Jackson was pure entertainment made flesh, a magnetic presence on stage and in the recording booth, blessed with the potent combination of immense charisma and an obsessive work ethic. He’d been wowing audiences since he could walk; he sang on five #1 singles before reaching puberty. Jackson had the tools, the talent, and the drive. But he still needed help.
The team Quincy Jones assembled to create Off The Wall might be the most stacked in the history of studio recording, perhaps bested only by the cast assembled three years later to create Thriller. The musicians and songwriters involved came from the worlds of pop, soul, jazz, and film; their numbers included multiple Grammy winners, past-and-future #1 artists, and an ex-Beatle. Yet one of the album’s most essential ingredients wasn’t a big-name musician with a resume full of illustrious credits. He was a white keyboardist in a British disco band.
Rod Temperton only had two Top 10 writing credits to his name—both with that aforementioned disco band, Heatwave—when Jones recruited him in early ’79 to pitch songs for Off The Wall. Temperton turned out to be the album’s songwriting MVP, authoring three of the LP’s ten tracks and two of its four eventual singles; on a record also featuring compositions from Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, his were the ones people remembered. (That neither Paul nor Stevie’s contributions rank in the top half tells you exactly how stacked Off The Wall really is.) Temperton went on to write three more songs for Jackson’s next project, AKA The Biggest Album of All Time. Over the rest of the decade, he would work similar magic for the likes of George Benson, Michael McDonald, Patti Austin, and many others. By 1986, his composition credits included ten Top 20 hits—including two #1’s—scattered across eight different artists.
An unassuming musician from a small town in England, Temperton shunned publicity as actively as Jackson embraced it. He rarely granted interviews or performed on-stage after 1978; within the industry, his nickname was “The Invisible Man.” In the pre-Internet era, only obsessives who scanned the liner notes even knew he existed. Yet without Temperton, there’s no “Rock With You,” and no “Thriller.” Without Temperton, we don’t get “Off The Wall,” the deceptively weird title cut that became the album’s third straight Top 10 single—and also predicted the path Jackson’s artistry would take moving forward. Off The Wall is a masterpiece because of the man on the front cover, but also because of the smaller names written on the inside: unsung heroes like Temperton, working alongside Jackson and Jones to turn their vision into reality.
Nothing in Rod Temperton’s upbringing suggested that he’d eventually go on to author more than two dozen American R&B hits. He was born in Cleethorpes, a seaside resort in Lincolnshire, England; upon graduation, he worked at a frozen-fish factory in nearby Grimsby. His first musical break came in Worms, Germany, where he played keyboards in a dance cover band. But in 1974, some cosmic stroke of good fortune—or, more accurately, an ad in Melody Maker—put Temperton in contact with Johnnie Wilder Jr., an American serviceman from Dayton, Ohio, stationed overseas following the Vietnam War. Wilder already had the musicians: a multi-national collective encompassing a Brit, a Swede, a Czech, a Jamaican, and another American (his younger brother Keith). The musicians just needed songs. And that’s how Heatwave—and Temperton’s songwriting career—came into existence.
Rod Temperton singlehandedly composed every track on Heatwave’s 1976 debut album, Too Hot To Handle, including the #2 smash “Boogie Nights” (an 8) and its #18 follow-up, the richly harmonic ballad “Always And Forever” (another 8). He also authored the bulk of their follow-up, Central Heating, which yielded another Top 10 single in “The Groove Line” (a 7). By the time Temperton left the group in mid-1978 to focus solely on songwriting, he’d developed a reputation for crafting precise, perfectly arranged R&B. And that reputation soon attracted attention from some big names across the pond, including Quincy Jones.
“I had loved his work for a long time,” explains Jones in the Spike Lee documentary Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off The Wall. “And I could never figure out how he could be from Grimsby, England… and understand ‘ain’t no half steppin’ and all those different terms he was using.” The contrast between Temperton’s distinctly “American” writing style and his modest English roots would cause plenty of confusion in the years to come, with Jones’ longtime engineer Bruce Swedien offering his own amusing anecdote in 2009:
“There were some young guys writing songs for Michael and they had never met Rod. They [just] heard his music and thought he was cool. But when they met him, they said, ‘Rod, I thought you were young and black! But you're old! And white! …And British!’”
Jones recruited Temperton in early ’79, asking him to contribute tracks for possible inclusion on Jackson’s first solo album in over four years. Supposedly, the 31-year-old songwriter only needed a few days to deliver “Rock With You,” “Off The Wall,” and “Burn This Disco Out.” All three eventually appeared on Off The Wall. That’s absolutely astounding—and a little too good to be true.
It’s since been confirmed that “Rock With You” had originally been penned for Karen Carpenter’s cancelled 1980 solo effort—under the title “Eat You Up,” no less—before being rejected by Karen herself. (A different Temperton song, “Lovelines,” opens that solo record, which finally got a posthumous release in 1996.) Some sources claim that “Off The Wall” was another discarded Carpenter track, meaning Temperton already had both songs in his back pocket when Quincy called. However, a rare Rod interview from 2001 sure made it sound like the song was written specifically with Michael in mind:
“I could tell… that the melodies he would sing on in-tempo songs [were] very rhythmically driven. And so, I tried to write melodies with short notes… to give him some staccato, rhythmic things he could do… The other thing I knew from his previous records [was] that he loved harmony work. And that’s really the side of me that I would’ve brought from Heatwave… So, I kind of mixed the harmony segments of my music with this new idea of the shorter-note melodies… And that’s how I came up with ‘Off The Wall.’”
If you’re any kind of Off The Wall fan, it’s worth checking out Temperton’s complete conversation, if only for some fascinating behind-the-scenes details. (I especially love how Michael cut the vocals on all three songs in the span of two days: backing parts on Saturday, leads on Sunday.) But to the point, that delineation he mentions—between the song’s lush, harmonic moments and its more propulsive elements—is exactly what makes “Off The Wall” unique, on an album where every other track comes down on either one side or the other. The title cut, alone, gets to have it both ways.
In the verses, “Off The Wall” is stripped and sparse (by Quincy standards, anyway): just a single vocal, one basic beat, and a driving, heavy chorused bassline. If this low-end riff sounds familiar, that’s because Temperton lifted it, wholesale, from his earlier hit, “Boogie Nights.” (Legal note: It’s not copyright infringement if you steal from yourself.) If the performance of said riff feels infinitely funkier than Heatwave’s version, that’s because of Louis Johnson, the gobsmackingly great bassist who’s another one of the album’s many unsung heroes. (Wanna know the impetus for the decade’s surge in slap-bass playing? Check out “Get On The Floor,” the only track on the record co-written by Johnson. He doesn’t just dominate the song; he serves up an absolute clinic. Like Temperton, Louis turned Off The Wall into a career springboard, meaning he and his bass will eventually appear many, many more times on this site.)
A lesser song, perhaps, would’ve been content to simply ride that groove for the duration, letting a hooky lyric like we’re the party people, night and day function as an ersatz chorus. “Off The Wall” is better than that. Those lines barely escape Jackson’s lips before the whole track takes a hard right turn, from anxious, pressure-cooker funk to gorgeous, billowing post-disco. The change is so dramatic that the actual sound of the production flips in that same instant, with Michael announcing the shift like an emcee: “So… tonight!!”
It’s a credit to Temperton’s synchronous blend of lyrics and melody—and Jackson’s delivery, of course—that I can perfectly picture this scene unfolding: the working stiff coming home after a long week, eager to blow off steam and “boogie down.” He takes off his tie, hops in a car, walks up to the club, and… BOOM. The transition from when the world is on your shoulder to gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf is swift, sudden, and transportive—like stepping onto the dance floor, or entering Oz. It’s a remarkable pivot, maybe the best one on any Jackson single. It’s also the one time Off The Wall actively anticipates the future.
I’m not about to wade into the thirty-plus-year debate over whether Off The Wall or Thriller is the Greatest Michael Jackson Album Ever. (Those of you yelling for Bad: Go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done.) They’re two very different records, with very different personalities. The former radiates pure light, from its euphoric, up-tempo first half to the lighter-than-air pop songs on the back end; the latter bristles with paranoia and tension in even its catchiest moments, only faltering when that edge disappears completely. No track from either album splits that difference straight down the middle—save one.
“Off The Wall” contains—at least in its chorus—just as much exuberance as “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” or “Rock With You,” or the great, underrated “Working Day And Night.” But there’s a darkness lurking around its edges as well. That’s most obvious in the opening, which kicks off with an entrance on the “and,” rather than the downbeat: common in prog-rock or fusion, almost unheard of in mainstream pop, and designed solely to throw the listener off-balance. The ghoulish sounds that follow—all apparently performed by Michael, a notorious horror buff—simply serve to unsettle even further. Temperton, obviously, would revisit this idea again on Jackson’s next album, but whereas that later single goes all-in on the Halloween vibe, “Off The Wall” pulls a bait-and-switch. The haunted house setup turns out to be a feint, less a mood-setter and more a welcome (if isolated) bit of weirdness.
On one incarnation of Off The Wall, even that little smidge of weirdness disappeared completely. A leaked, alternate mix of the title cut—possibly planned for the album, possibly not—reimagines the record’s moodiest club cut as a joyous banger, bursting with horn blasts, swooping strings, and gang vocals. It’s a pretty fantastic listen, arguably better than the original. But I still think Jones and Jackson made the right decision; there’s something admirable about leaving one song purposely off-kilter, even on an album as blissfully uncomplicated as Off The Wall. Plus, it’s just straight up ballsy: MJ and Q took a surefire hit, removed the most crowd-pleasing elements, amped up the strangeness—and had a hit anyway.
The official “Off The Wall” isn’t even that strange, or sinister; if anything, the darker bits function as contrast, throwing the ecstatic moments into sharper relief. And make no mistake, this song is packed with ecstatic moments. The thick, chewy clusters of overdubbed Jackson harmonies; the sneaky guitar squiggles dancing through the verses; that amazing middle-eight lifting the entire track skyward: “DO… what you want to do/ There ain’t no rules, it’s up to you!” Only on Off The Wall could such a rapturous, head-spinning passage—a damn-near-perfect bridge, even by Temperton standards—be matched, ten seconds later, by something equally rapturous: one of the earliest utterances of Michael’s trademark He-HEE! By the end of the decade, that particular vocal hiccup would be exhausted beyond cliché. Here, at the dawn of his adult solo career, it simply sounds like unfettered joy.
“Off The Wall” didn’t achieve the heights of its two #1 predecessors, but it still hit #10 on Billboard’s pop charts, while also reaching the Top 5 on the R&B side. These days, though, the song feels strangely overlooked—or at least as overlooked as a Top 10 single from one of Jackson’s most beloved albums can be, anyway. Maybe that’s why it still contains surprises. Like everything on Off The Wall that isn’t “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” or “Rock With You,” the title cut actually benefits from its lack of ubiquity, sounding fresh and ageless in a way that Michael’s later overplayed hits often don’t.
Jackson, of course, would take the success of Off The Wall and build on it in exponential ways. But he wouldn’t be the only one. In the interim leading up to Thriller, Jones’ own “solo” album, 1981’s The Dude, would garner three Grammies and three Top 40 singles; as a producer, he’d also beat Michael back to #1—with a song written by Rod Temperton. Recording as one half of the Brothers Johnson, Louis Johnson would land an R&B #1 of his own, aided by nearly all the same players from Off The Wall. (Three guesses who the composer and producer were.) By the time Jackson reentered the studio on April 14, 1982, ready to begin work on the album that would transform pop music forever, his team—of equally talented, and equally crucial, supporting musicians—would be ready.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BITS: Here’s the 1996 remix of “Off The Wall” from famed house producer Junior Vasquez, which appeared as a bonus cut on Jackson’s “Stranger In Moscow” single. Reportedly Vasquez made eight separate remixes; this was the only one officially released.
BONUS BONUS BITS: None of the tracks that legally sample “Off The Wall” are particularly fun or inventive, so here’s a nicely bizarre one instead: “Enjoy Yourself,” a 2013 reimagining from vaporwave artist Saint Pepsi (AKA Skylar Spence) that breaks a whole bunch of copyright laws and has a blast doing so.