Out October 15th
“You’ve Got Michael” Living through HIStory
By Dan Beck
In 1991, Dan Beck was a senior product manager at Epic Records when he was made Michael Jackson’s main marketing contact at the label. For five rollercoaster years, he was immersed in a world of unequalled stardom, dealing with the outsized ambition, whims and idiosyncrasies of the world’s most famous entertainer.
It was a pivotal point in Jackson’s career. His previous album had failed to repeat the record-shattering success of Thriller. Would the upcoming Dangerous help rebuild the King of Pop’s global audience? Rumors about his personal life and his eccentricities had made him the subject of gossip and accusations in the press, which had taken to calling him “Wacko Jacko.”
“You’ve Got Michael” is the story of the high-stakes battle to save Michael Jackson's career and market his 1995 greatest hits album, as told by the record company executive who was the closest to him. Rather than rehashing a controversial career, “You’ve Got Michael” goes behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the music business at its multi-platinum height.
From the frequent 2:00 a.m. phone calls to the runaway budgets of video shoots, the desperate efforts to get Michael to complete the new songs for the HIStory greatest hits collection to corporate damage control on a monumental career on the precipice of collapse, “You’ve Got Michael” offers a unique look into the workings of the record industry before the digital age and the details of working so closely with one of its biggest figures, a supreme talent hampered by naïveté and blind spots when it came to his behavior and image.
Dan Beck writes, “I wish I could put Michael Jackson in some neat compartment of my brain. Some gray matter that could integrate the intrigue, the sense of responsibility, the exhaustion, the utter helplessness, the power, the joy, the dread, the embarrassment, the pride, the awe, the pity and, yes, the thrill of working with Michael Jackson.”
“If you thought there was nothing more to learn about Michael Jackson, Dan Beck has news for you. Beck worked as a product manager for Jackson's HIStory project and has gripping tales to tell. Not the sordid revelations you already know, but the day-to-day agonies and occasional ecstasies of being on the front lines as the career of the biggest pop star in the world goes up in flames. His torn professional and personal loyalties are so easy to relate to — uncomfortably so. Beck writes with honesty, clarity and force; the only sensationalism comes from your own memories of Jackson's highly public self-incineration.”
—Anthony DeCurtis, author of Lou Reed: A Life
“Celebrated by fans but dismissed by critics, HIStory was Jackson's answer to a world waiting, watching and demanding more from him. Beck cuts through the frenzy to reveal the careful orchestration required to balance artistic ambition, media scrutiny, business pressures and the hopes of fans. "You've Got Michael" deepens our understanding of Jackson's legacy and belongs on every fan's shelf.” —Pez Jax, MJVibe.com
“The goal of Dan Beck’s nuanced memoir is threefold. First, he makes clear how profoundly digital technologies have changed the ways pop music stars are made and marketed. Then he stresses how impossible replicating the peaks of Michael Jackson's solo career would be under today's streamlined business model(s). Third, he underscores how he still respects Jackson's creative achievements even as he reveals how the increasing pressures of fame, market competition, hostile publicity and Jackson’s unrestrained ambition, inevitably destabilized the artist's health, reputation and finances. (Beck even reminds us that record labels seldom try to protect their superstars from such predictable hazards.)
No family member or label president could have told this story so well, because only a veteran interdepartmental product manager like Dan Beck really knows how the pop song sausage gets made — and has the moral strength to tell the hard truths about it.”
—journalist Carol Cooper, Ph.D
From Michael Jackson’s acknowledgments on the HIStory album:
“Dan Beck…Thank you for your input and HIStorical thinking.”
$22.50 (paper) $8.95 (eBook)
290 pages. Indexed, with eight pages of photographs
ISBN Paper 979-8-9990487-0-7
ISBN eBook 979-8-9990487-1-4