Abena Malika, Peter Miller and Sacha Williamson

Where exactly does the best-selling album of all-time fit into the long-playing vinyl canon? Classic Albums Live, the Toronto-based operation dedicated to bringing old LPs to life through recitals focused exclusively on the music, provoked the question by staging a live run-through of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, last night at the Phoenix Concert Theatre. These recitals have taken the operation beyond its Toronto base — cities in Florida were concurrently visited by Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac roadshows — but this marked the first attempt to step completely out of the rock box. Craig Martin, founder and producer of the series, admits he was more likely to be listening to Judas Priest when Thriller was moving a million or two units a week worldwide throughout 1983. Now, at age 47, he’s absorbed it well enough to be able to pick out every imperfection still lingering amidst a third and final rehearsal, held on Tuesday night in an incense-scented space at Dupont and Dufferin.

Plans to tackle Thriller in this format were announced a couple months ago — a detour that continues with Prince’s Purple Rain in August, with Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye shows to follow — although actually finding a singer capable of mastering Michael Jackson without pretense was harder than first imagined.

Martin was visited by three contenders for the role, none of whom could quite separate the voice from the image, given how the frontman he required wasn’t going to be required to moonwalk.

“I can tell when an impression isn’t innate,” he says, while demonstrating the ragdoll gesticulations associated with a Jacko tribute act. “The audience can smell a rat, too. I was willing to call off the show. We’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

Things changed three weeks ago, after hearing from 30-year-old Peter Miller — who currently has a regular weekend gig singing at King Street bar Jo Mamas. “I could even tell over the phone he was the one,” says Martin. “The voice just falls out of the guy.”

Not unlike how Journey found their new lead singer via YouTube clips of a cover band from the Philippines, it turned out that the most qualified voice to reconstitute Thriller was as personally laid-back as a Jacko soundalike could probably be. Furthermore, he’d never listened to the album from start to finish before.

But it’s not as if many people familiar with it ever did, either. For a 42-minute platter with just nine tracks, the legacy of Thriller might be as confusing as a double or triple album. The lifespan of its initial success, from late fall 1982 through spring 1984, saw its zeitgeist status evolve from cunning Quincy Jones black pop production, to genre-breaking image-driven chartbuster, to populist party favour, to unavoidable mass-produced product, to contrived media event driven by the 13-minute John Landis video and its accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary.

Locally, when the title track from “Thriller,” the seventh single of the album, shattered tradition by debuting at the summit of 1050 CHUM chart edition No. 1414 in February 1984, it all but sounded the death knell for the concept of a Toronto monoculture.

The notion of taking Thriller seriously again was raised earlier this year with the release of its 25th anniversary edition, augmented by testimony to its influences from Akon, Kanye West, and sundry Black Eyed Peas. The six commissioned remixes were infused with the sonic cacophony Jackson increasingly mistook for music since 1991’s Dangerous — maybe, not unlike his distorted view of his physical self, that’s the kind of racket the pushing-50 King of Pop considers emblematic of his fiefdom. (More creatively successful was Man in the Mirror, a mixtape by Chicago rapper Rhymefest — ruminations on one man’s complex relationship with the source material.)

Thriller 25 sold respectably well for a 2008 compact-disc release — it would’ve near about topped the US album chart again if not for a Billboard technicality designating it as mere re-issue. But maybe the coast has finally cleared for a reverent tribute show.

“The album is really like hip-hop barbershop,” says Martin, “so, it was important to have the right backing vocalists. There’s more interplay than you might think.”

Which meant recruiting two women for the Thriller frontline: Sacha Williamson, 29, who played a similar role in productions of classic Bob Marley and Rolling Stones albums — a recital of “Gimmie Shelter” earlier this year also featured an appearance from the vocalist she was concurently imitating, Merry Clayton — and Abena Malika, 33, a singer and actress new to this turf. Both women attest to the influence of Thriller as the first musical phenomenon girls their age caught wind of first-hand — and, apparently, its closer led them to shed the occasional tear.

“Oh, I remember listening to ‘The Lady in My Life’ and just crying,” says Williamson. “That one really got into my soul.” Yet it was one of just two Thriller tracks not released in the 45 format.

Peter Miller, in fact, didn’t hear the song for the first time until getting this assignment three weeks ago — nor was he acquainted with the other non-single, “Baby Be Mine.” Mastering both would be key to making the case for Thriller as a classic album.

But staging Thriller requires more than a singing trio – it also requires people to impersonate Paul McCartney, Eddie Van Halen and Vincent Price. Nine of the other players are lined up for the last run-through prior to the pre-concert soundcheck.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the album opener, is one of the songs where layers of backing vocalists need to be emulated — rather than reproducing the effect of a multi-tracked Jackson. The reproduction flows seamlessly as promised, until the very brink of commotion on the infamous indictment, “You’re a vegetable.”

“You’ve got to get that bwabwabwauauaua,” Martin attempts to remind the troops. “I want that… it’s a gutter noise.” A second try gets the band closer. Frankly, one minute and 20 seconds of the refrain “Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa” seems more worthy of a show closer, except the record didn’t swing that way.

“This is the one we all missed growing up,” says Martin of track two, “Baby Be Mine.” “Now it’s the favourite one of the show.” His surrogate Michael remains seated at the front of the rehearsing band, but the backing vocals remind that Thriller didn’t lack for seduction, even if it was eclipsed by braggadocio.

Track three, however, is the all-time buzzkill. “The Girl Is Mine,” presumably conceived as a safe launch pad for the momentum to follow — while helping to mitigate Paul McCartney’s bloated contract with CBS Records — was never without middle-of-the-road goopy pop merit, even if the premise of a 24-year-old effeminate black man and a 40-year-old Beatle who already sired three children fighting over the same woman’s affection was preposterous in the first place. But the vast Classic Albums Live experience with the Beatles catalogue means a qualified McCartney soundalike is always close at hand, as percussionist Marty Morin interjects to challenge those claims of virility.

The title cut of Thriller could be trickiest to approach as pure music, let alone get the elements properly synchronized — foreshadowing the dissonance that would make a performance of any subsequent Jackson album too absurd to try. Getting elements lined up requires more ironing than anything else in the show. “It’s all about the mathematics,” Martin reassures his players.

Hearing it as the aforementioned “doo-wop hip-hop” provides a new context, though. A guitarist, Rob Phillips, applies his penchant for voice impressions by doing the Vincent Price rap — which is more subduded than history has made it remembered.

Side two kicks off with “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” two litmus tests for the vocalists — the former is left incomplete in the last rehearsal for lack of Van Halen guitar. Miller remains seated more often than not, reading lyrics from a hand-held device even if he looks like he might as well just be scrolling through email messages. The un-animated recital is sonically impeccable, yet also inspires wonder about what an impromptu nightclub performance from Michael Jackson would be like. (The closest example to date might’ve been in 1991, when he voiced escaped singing mental patient “Leon Kompowsky” on The Simpsons.)

What remains of Thriller, “Human Nature,” “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and “The Lady in My Life,” go down smoothly in rehearsal, formulaic as they ever were. “P.Y.T.” became something of a punch line in the ongoing Michael Jackson legal saga, of course — Thriller 25 remixed the original languid draft of the song before it was made into a rave-up by Quincy Jones and co-writer James Ingram, saluted last year on Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.” Retrospectively speaking, though, the second half of side two of Thriller belies the long-held notion that its 1979 pre-artifice predecessor, Off The Wall, sustains as the better-conceived distillation of Jackson’s old-school musical purity.  

Too many external distractions caused that to happen, of course. And, at the Phoenix last night, the closest such things was a large onstage backdrop painted with the “Thriller” video image of a zombified red-jacketed Jackson. The couple hundred in attendance didn’t look like groupies holding vigil at a courthouse — in fact, it could’ve passed for a crowd at a Rush convention.

With the whole band dressed in black, the reproduction was as impeccable as promised, even if it seems even the coolest R&B singers can’t help but feed off enthusiasm. The living room-style rehearsal, for an audience of one, was more appealingly restrained — or at least, more conducive to thinking thoughts about Thriller — although there’s obviously no money in that intimate approach.

For an encore, a half-dozen more Jackson classics were in the arsenal, crowd-pleasers all, even if a properly annotated Thriller would be augmented with morbid efforts to exploit its mania: Rebbie Jackson’s “Centipede,” Jermaine Jackson’s “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming,” Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” etc., collapsing in a heap with the Mick Jagger duet “State of Shock.”

Michael Jackson had a quarter-century to stick up for what he used to be. And, since he never did, it was refreshing to know someone had the audacity to do the trick. Which explains the song that earned the most enthusiastic reaction out of the nine revived for this auspicious occassion: “The Girl is Mine,” if only cheering out of sheer astonishment that anyone out there would actually bother.

 

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