The Brick Phone and the Upright Piano

Michael Jackson phoned Teddy Riley and asked him to start work on his next album right away. “I want to shock the world,” Jackson told him. Riley was in New York and asked for a week to get ready. Jackson agreed, and then mailed him a brick phone so they could stay in touch every step of the way.

It was the start of the partnership that produced Dangerous, Jackson's first album in twelve years without Quincy Jones. Jones had produced Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad. Riley was the producer behind Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat and his own group, Guy, and the man most associated with new jack swing.

The Producer Who Almost Made Bad

Riley was not a new name to Jackson. Jackson had wanted him for Bad years earlier. “When Michael called he basically said [that] he wanted me on the Bad album,” Riley told Revolt in 2017.

That deal never happened because of Riley's manager at the time, Gene Griffin. Jackson told Riley that Griffin had set conditions his team could not accept. One, as Riley recounted it, was that “nobody could be in the room at the same time as Teddy or me, I gotta be present at all times or we can't do the project.”

This time it was Quincy Jones who introduced Riley's music to Jackson. Jackson brought up the lost chance himself. “Man if we would've had you on that Bad album,” Riley remembered him saying, “it would've been amazing.”

Quincy Jones Still Had the Final Listen

Jones was gone from the credits but not from the process. In a 2008 interview with Future Music, Riley said Jackson brought Jones in because the album was taking so long. “Quincy Jones was like a quality controller for Michael,” Riley said. “If Michael had the chance he'd keep working on songs forever.”

Jones liked what he heard. “He heard it before it was released and he said this was a masterpiece, and that it's ready to come out,” Riley said. For Riley, that approval mattered because he knew who he was being compared with.

"It was really difficult for me having to follow in Quincy Jones' footsteps. He left big footsteps!"

“He Was the Beatbox”

Riley's records were known for dense drum programming, so the writing sessions surprised him. “The process of writing with Michael was being at an upright piano in his room,” he told Music Business Worldwide in 2023. “No beatbox, no drums – he was the beatbox! That's how we came up with In The Closet; we made it up right there at the piano.”

The production came afterward, at Record One and then Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles. “For Dangerous, I brought RnB back to Michael in its barest form; RnB and funk,” Riley said. “I was using a lot of vintage stuff to get the sound we needed.” He said Jackson welcomed the change: “When I came, Michael just opened up his heart to R&B and said, ‘I want to do that’.”

Jackson also gave Riley a rule to work by. “You are not a star until the music becomes a star,” Riley remembered him saying. In Riley's reading, the song had to break through first, and the singer came second.

A Deadline That Kept Moving

Riley felt the pressure throughout. “There was more pressure,” he said. “I didn't want to be the one to fail Michael.” Jackson's habits made finishing hard. “When the deadline came, he wanted to do more and more songs,” Riley told Rolling Stone in 1992, until Jackson's manager, Sandy Gallin, told them both to stop writing.

What stayed with Riley most was Jackson's singing. “One of the biggest things Michael really surprised me with on the Dangerous album was his vocal deliverance on Remember The Time,” he said. “That really blew me away.” Riley had brought that track to the project himself; he described it as the sound he wanted for the whole album.

How It Turned Out

Dangerous came out on November 26, 1991, and took over No. 1 on the Billboard 200 from U2's Achtung Baby. It stayed there until the chart dated January 11, 1992, when Nirvana's Nevermind replaced it. Four of its singles reached the US top ten, and it has shipped about 32 million copies worldwide.

Critics credited Riley by name. Robert Christgau, giving the album an A-minus in his Consumer Guide, wrote that Riley “acting alone has never manufactured such abrasively unpredictable beats.” Alan Light of Rolling Stone called hiring him “an inspired selection that is the key to the album's finest moments.” At the 1993 Grammys, Riley and Bruce Swedien won Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

Riley has never claimed the sound was his alone. New jack swing, he told Music Business Worldwide, “took a whole conglomerate of people and things to make,” including Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and Babyface. “And then Michael Jackson took it to the sky.”

The full album, including Bill Bottrell's work on “Black or White,” is covered in our review of Dangerous at 35.