10 Things We Learned From L.A. Reid’s Juicy Tell-All
He protected Paula Abdul as Pebbles trashed his apartment.
“We asked if [Paula] would choreograph a music video for Kenny — we were putting the finishing touches on his second Babyface solo album—and she said would trade us for a song. We wrote ‘Knocked Out’ for her and we took [her] into Studio Masters, where it took a long time to cut her vocal. … We didn’t work on the album — Pebbles saw to that. Paula and I started to be friendly. We didn’t have a relationship, but one night Paula came to my house and it was after midnight. We stood on the balcony listening to ‘Man in the Mirror.’ … The phone rang. It was Pebbles wanting to know what I was doing. … Suddenly someone was knocking on my door, hard. I opened the door and there was Pebbles. Never taking her eyes off me, she walked past me into the kitchen, grabbed a broom, and shattered all my glass furniture. It was like slow motion, tearing shit up. I smiled and loved it. She never looked at Paula, who was trembling in fear.”
He had to convince Pebbles to stop being jealous of Whitney Houston.
“Whitney was the undoubtedly the most popular female vocalist of the day and the biggest-selling act on the label. She had a string of number one hits, but Clive felt she needed to strengthen her grounding in contemporary black music and ease up on the pop songs. So he called L.A. Reid and Babyface. … We had written ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’ for her, and Clive found this song, ‘My Name Is Not Susan,’ that he wanted us to produce with her. … Whitney called from her hotel to tell me her room had been broken into and she felt uncomfortable. Could she use the guesthouse? It was late. [Pebbles called and] quickly became upset when she learned Whitney was there. ‘Whitney’s in my house?’ she said. ‘We’re not having that. My husband is not going to sit in my house late at night watching a movie with another girl.’ The next day, Pebbles came home and had attitude with me. She tried having attitude with Whitney, too, but Whitney put out that fire … [and invited us all] to her place in New Jersey.”
He provided the spot for Whitney and Bobby to fall in love.
“She was no longer just a shining superstar. Bobby made her a person. … She had fallen in love with Bobby Brown under my roof. As I watched them ride off into the sunset, the realization sunk in. I became fascinated by this. It seemed so unlikely, but, at the same time, so right. Bobby was a street smart bad boy and Whitney was an R&B angel. You never would have thought it, but when you saw them together, they fit like puzzle parts. They were R&B royalty.”
He wrote a song for Michael Jackson that didn’t get released for 25 years.
“Michael wanted to arrange a meeting to talk about working together. This was Michael Jackson in his moment. His latest album was Bad. … We managed to put together a song called ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ that Michael liked enough to lay down a finished vocal, and he never sang a song he didn’t believe in — he didn’t even bother to try if he didn’t. I sat across the other side of the glass and watched in what was an almost out-of-body experience as Michael sang our song. … God was in the room and He looked like Michael Jackson. … We finished only the one song, ‘Slave to the Rhythm,’ during those sessions where Michael laid down lead vocals, and it wasn’t released for another 25 years. We had another track nearly done, but he never finished it.”
He helped Jermaine Jackson record an MJ diss track.
“During another one of these sessions with Michael, I was called to the phone. I went down the hall and took the call in an office. It was Jermaine. He went crazy on me. … We went back to Atlanta and needed to patch up things with Jermaine [and] … went back to work and what was the first thing Jermaine tells us? ‘I want to make a song about my brother,’ he said. ‘I want to talk about how he’s treated me through the years, like how every time I find producers like you guys, he takes my producers. He doesn’t care about his family or anybody but himself.’ … We ended up with a clever song, ‘Word to the Badd!!,’ but he we kind of lost our nerve and redid the song to make it more about Jermaine and some girl, not his brother. Clive heard the original version and wanted to put it out. … The song was getting requested on radio … [but then] two days later, the record disappeared off the air… I don’t know what Michael did, I don’t know if Michael did anything, but it went away in a flash.”