Quincy Jones: True or False? His Wild Life and the Stories Behind His Wildest Claims

DISGRACELAND

This episode of Disgraceland investigates the validity of legendary music producer Quincy Jones's explosive late-life claims. The host explo

Key takeaways

Quincy Jones claimed Michael Jackson used 'subterfuge' to use melodies like Manu Dibango's 'Soul Makossa'.
The host examines the claim that The Beatles were 'no-playing motherfuckers' through the lens of jazz technical standards.
Evidence is presented regarding Bernard Purdy potentially playing drum tracks on early Beatles recordings.
The episode connects Frank Sinatra's relationship with mob boss Sam Giancana to Jones's claims about the JFK assassination.
Jones's career is credited with revolutionizing film scoring by integrating R&B into orchestral arrangements.

Main topics

Quincy Jones's controversial claims
Musical plagiarism and theft
The Beatles' musical legitimacy

Notable quotes

All I've ever done is tell the truth.

Conclusion

While some of Jones's claims may be hyperbolic or rooted in jazz-centr

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:01) This is exactly Speaker 2 (0:02) right. Double Elvis. Speaker 5 (0:13) Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Speaker 3 (0:25) DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now Speaker 5 (0:33) in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Speaker 3 (0:38) Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (0:44) Hey there, everybody. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes here from the Amy and TJ podcast. A Speaker 1 (0:50) lot of times the story of the day is what we're all talking about and buzzing about. And yes, sometimes it's Love Island and sometimes it's Serena Robes. Speaker 8 (1:00) Coming back to the U.S. Open, sometimes it's Obsession and Spider-Man making box office history. Speaker 1 (1:06) Hopefully, Robes, people get our point. Speaker 8 (1:09) Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 6 (1:15) I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 3 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It's a scorched earth war that shows just how far someone will go to get what they want. Speaker 1 (1:31) Cindy said I had to choose between the truth and my family, and I had to choose the truth. Speaker 6 (1:36) Listen to Season 3 of Burden of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:45) This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Speaker 2 (2:07) This is a story about arguably the greatest music producer ever. A man who said, all I ever did was tell the truth. But a man who clearly said some outrageous things. Things about the Beatles, about Michael Jackson, about Frank Sinatra. Claims that amount to musical crimes, fraud, theft, and murder. A man who, despite his statements about these musicians, made some of the greatest music ever put on tape. I'm talking about Quincy Jones. Yes, a man who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called After P and Before R M K 1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to God's plan by Drake. And why would I play you that specific slice of... I'm sorry, I find Drake to be so damn boring that I can't even find an interesting way to insult him. Cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on January 29th, 2018. And that was the day Quincy Jones started talking to reporters at his advanced age and making outrageous claims nobody asked for, but that nearly everybody wanted to hear. On this episode, the Beatles as fraudsters, Michael Jackson as a thief, Frank Sinatra's front seat at the assassination, and the loose lips and unbelievable life of Quincy Jones. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Speaker 4 (4:20) During the last years of his life, Speaker 2 (4:22) Quincy Jones, arguably the greatest music producer of all time, made some truly outrageous claims, some involving crimes, musical and otherwise. He said that Michael Jackson stole a lot of songs and that the Beatles didn't Speaker 4 (4:37) play their instruments and that Frank Sinatra was the reason that he knew who Speaker 2 (4:42) killed Kennedy. Quincy Jones, age 84, when he gave these interviews to GQ and New York Magazine, was clearly out of fucks to give. He also told interviewers that he once Speaker 4 (4:55) dated Ivanka Trump, a woman 48 years younger than him and, more Speaker 2 (4:59) outrageously, the president's daughter. He also spilled the tea about Marlon Brando's sexual appetite that he slept with Richard Pryor and Marvin Gaye and that Brando would, quote-unquote, fuck a mailbox. Speaker 2 (5:13) These claims, regardless of whether they're true or not, are hysterical, especially when you hear Quincy, or Q as the world universally knows him, tell these stories in his unmistakable Speaker 4 (5:27) voice. These stories, though, they're not directly related to figures from music Speaker 2 (5:32) history, aside from Q's involvement, so I'm less interested in them than I am the claims about Sinatra, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson. It should be noted that after Quincy Jones made this claim about Michael Jackson that he was a musical thief, that the Jackson family pushed back hard. Joe Jackson said that Quincy was jealous of Michael's talent, and Speaker 4 (5:55) an anonymous member of the Jackson clan claimed that Quincy Jones had been in the first stages of dementia when he said these things. Quincy Jones was a lot of things. He lifted himself up from a childhood of poverty through an oftentimes violent Speaker 2 (6:10) and racist music industry to create music that not only sounded like what America really sounded like, but that also changed the way America sounded. Speaker 4 (6:19) More on that later. And Quincy Jones became, as I said before, arguably the Speaker 2 (6:24) greatest music producer of all time. A music producer who said, all I ever did was tell the truth. Was he lying about Michael, about the Beatles, about Sinatra? Well, before we answer that, we must first look at who Quincy Jones was. Quincy Speaker 7 (6:47) Belight Jones Jr. was born on the south side of Chicago, and he grew up in a neighborhood so violent that it was known as the Bucket of Blood. His family moved to Seattle, where Quincy began his music career at the age of 12, playing trumpet and learning to write arrangements for jazz orchestras. This is where he later met and became friends with 16-year-old Ray Charles, backed Billie Holiday while he was still only 14, and talked his way into a future gig with band leader Lionel Hampton. Quincy then headed to Boston to attend what would become Berklee College of Music. But at school, there was no action. So Quincy Jones then hit the road with Lionel Hampton, and the road was a grind. Eventually, Quincy relocated to the Bebop Center of the Universe in New York City to try his hand as an arranger professionally. And in the Big Apple, his talent took off, but the money was slow to come. Quincy split for Hollywood and his career erupted. It is not a stretch to say that Quincy Jones worked with damn near everybody in the business during these years. In New York City, Quincy Jones got down to writing arrangements for Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. He performed live on television as part of the Dorsey Brothers Band when they backed Elvis Presley in his first television performance. In 1958, he flew to Monaco with Frank Sinatra to conduct Frank's orchestra for Princess Grace. In 1961, Quincy Jones was hired by Mercury Records as the first black vice president of a record label. For Mercury, he wrote and produced a smash number one hit, Leslie Gore's It's My Party. Sidney Lumet hired Quincy to score a major motion picture, The Pawnbroker. This led to director Richard Brooks asking Quincy Jones to score the film adaptation of Truman Capote's smash hit true crime story, In Cold Blood. Truman told Richard Brooks, Richard, I don't understand why you've got a Negro doing the music for a film with no people of color in it. Richard Brooks told Truman Capote to fuck off. Q was scoring his film. Q did just that, and Quincy Jones received his first Academy Award nomination. He was later nominated for either Best Score or Best Song for several films, including The Wiz, The Color Purple, and would eventually take home honorary Oscars for his humanitarian efforts and his lifetime contribution to cinema. On top of those two Oscars, Quincy Jones earned 28 Grammys, one Emmy, and one Tony. He's on a short list of EGOT winners that include Steven Spielberg, Elton John, and Rita Moreno. Quincy Jones worked twice as hard as other composers. Most composers, most white composers, scored one film a year. Quincy Jones was black. Quincy Jones had something to prove. He didn't score one film a year. He at least scored two, sometimes three. He once scored eight films in one year. Throughout the 60s and 70s, he worked again with Sinatra, composed TV series themes for his buddies Redd Foxx and Bill Cosby, wrote and produced a song called Soul Bossa Nova that you recognize from Austin Powers. But it wasn't just glitzy Hollywood fun and games, not by a long shot. Quincy Jones collaborated with creative giants, Poitier, Peckinpah, and most notably from 1979 to 1987, his production work helped crown the king of pop, Michael Jackson. In the 60s, he was active in the civil rights movement in support of Martin Luther King Jr. and then alongside Jesse Jackson. Later, he teamed with Bono to launch the Just Listen Up Foundation to build houses in South Africa and tirelessly advocated in support of the arts to President Barack Obama. Oh, and he also married Norma from Twin Peaks, actress Peggy Lipton. And Quincy was Rashida Jones's dad. You know her as Karen from The Office. And he was Tupac's ex, Kadeda Jones's father, too. But what does any of this have to do with Quincy Jones and his claims that Michael Jackson was a thief, that the Beatles were frauds, that Sinatra was the key to understanding who murdered Kennedy? Speaker 4 (10:48) Well, with that incredible career, Quincy Jones was rewarded special access. And perhaps because of that special access, Quincy gained special insight, special insight to claim, as he did confidently, that he knew who killed Kennedy and to insinuate that this knowledge came from his relationship with Frank Sinatra. So let's look further Speaker 2 (11:10) into whether or not Quincy Jones was telling the truth. Let's first look into the crime of murder. Speaker 2 (11:22) Long before Quincy Jones wanted to be a musician, he wanted to be a gangster. The Bucket of Blood neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, where he grew up in the 1930s, was controlled by criminals and crooked cops. It was unsafe, uninspiring, and no place for a young boy to grow up. Black gangsters, the Jones boys, no relation, ran this black neighborhood. They robbed, stole, fought, Speaker 4 (11:49) and killed brazenly. Young Quincy Jones and his friends watched it all from the urine-stained sidewalks. And they saw black men in pinstripe suits stalking the streets with Tommy Speaker 2 (12:00) guns, and the men who crossed them meet their makers. One morning, while on the way to elementary school, Quincy saw a man's body impaled on the iron rung of a telephone pole with an ice pick jammed into his neck. Speaker 2 (12:16) Aside from the racist cops who patrolled his neighborhood, like the notorious two-gun Pete officer who made his living shooting little black kids in the back with his twin revolvers, the Speaker 4 (12:27) gangsters were the only role models that Quincy Jones had at that young age. And as he recalls it, back in the 30s, with what limited exposure he had beyond the violent corner of the world where he grew up, Aside from his hardworking handyman father, there literally were no black men for him to look up to. That all changed when Quincy Jones and his family moved to Seattle Speaker 2 (12:52) when he was 10, Speaker 4 (12:53) and Speaker 2 (12:54) shortly afterward, found music. Speaker 2 (13:02) In 1943, Quincy Jones' family relocated to Seattle, and it was there that he took up trumpet. As a young teenager, Quincy immersed himself in Seattle's jazz nightlife and taught himself how to arrange music. After high school, he headed east to Speaker 4 (13:17) Boston and then to Manhattan. But even while learning from bebop giants, Quincy wanted more, so... He headed to Paris to study with arguably the most important musical educator of the 20th century, Nathalie Boulanger, the woman who taught Igor Stravinsky. He then booked work as a performer, which took him to the Middle East and South America, and eventually all over Europe as a bandleader. All of this experience turned Quincy Jones into a genius arranger and opened doors for him in Hollywood to score films. Those doors wouldn't stay open on Speaker 2 (13:52) their own, however. Quincy Jones would have to use every ounce of his creative genius to keep them that