Quincy Jones on Michael Jackson: “Smelly” & Messy Habits

To Michael Jackson, he was like a big brother. Lionel Richie remembers with emotion the King of Pop, who died prematurely on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50. In his autobiography “Truly”, he affectionately nicknamed him “Smelly” [celui qui pue]…

«It was obviously a joke, but there’s a reason for it. Normally when you’re on tour, you give your clothes to the hotel dry cleaner. Michael sent his people to be washed, but they didn’t come back. They were stolen by the staff because everyone wanted to keep a memory of him…” he explains in the interview granted by Paris Match. “So, over the years, he got into this habit of always wearing the same clothes, until he threw them away. So Quincy Jones nicknamed him “Smelly” – I can say that now that he’s dead, but not because of the smell. Just because he left his clothes lying around everywhere.”

“The sums at stake were more important than his health”

And the one who co-wrote with Michael ­Jackson the famous song « We Are the World »in 1985, to remember: “no one can understand what Michael Jackson’s life was! One day, he arrives at my house, I see that he is wearing the same outfit as the week before. I sent him to my closet to get some clean jeans – we were the same size. But when he left, I discovered that he had left his dirty laundry on the floor to put in the trash. He didn’t care. »

For Lionel Richie, becoming famous at 12 is a curse: “In his later years, he became a commodity, someone everyone used to make money. He no longer knew who he could trust. The real question was not whether he would be able to give fifty concerts, as planned, but whether he was already capable of doing one. No one thought about whether he was strong enough to handle that. Because the sums at stake were more important than his health. »