With over 12 million sales worldwide, Michael Jackson‘s 1983 smash hit Beat It is one of the best-selling songs of all time – but it could have sounded completely different.

According to Toto’s Steve Lukather – who played guitar on the song, alongside Eddie Van Halen, who played the solo – Beat It nearly sounded a hell of a lot heavier. In a recent chat with The Guardian, the guitarist and producer reflects on his experience working with the late Quincy Jones to produce 1982’s Thriller, on which the song appears. And Jones wasn’t afraid to tell Lukather when he was wrong.

• READ MORE: 10 lessons everyone in music can learn from Quincy Jones

If it had been up to Lukather, Beat It would have been a more gritty, distorted affair. “I played a bunch of really wild guitar parts, because I knew Eddie [Van Halen]’s solo was on it,” he recalls. “I was doing real hard rock, a quadruple-track riff.”

“Quincy wasn’t even there, he was at Westlake doing overdubs on Billie Jean while we were fixing Beat It,” he goes on. “So we’d be on the phone and he goes: ‘It’s too metal, you gotta calm down. I gotta get it on pop radio! Use the small amp, not so much distortion.’”

“Quincy just creates a vibe in the studio,” Lukather explains. “He orders up great food, makes everybody feel comfortable and happy, and that makes for a great creative experience. He didn’t write out parts for us; he gave us free rein.”

“He’d give us a chord sheet and say: ’What have you guys got? Make me look good!’” he continues. “Then, once he started to get a feel for everything, he was a great director.”

Jones’ passing has come with a wave of loving tributes. Lukather’s words paint Jones as an irreplaceable creative force: “Quincy is the only guy that can do a solo album without playing or writing anything. Somehow, no matter what he did, there was a Quincy Jones sound – even if he didn’t play, sing, write or whatever. He was a director.”

The post “I gotta get it on pop radio!”: How Quincy Jones saved Beat It from becoming “too metal” appeared first on MusicTech.