A treasure trove of unreleased Michael Jackson tapes has been discovered in a storage unit in the San Fernando valley.
Among the tracks is a song that reportedly appears to reference the rumours circulating about the King of Pop in the media, while another features Jackson rapping with LL Cool J.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke to former California Highway Patrol officer Gregg Musgrove, who discovered the tapes when an associate contacted him about a storage unit he’d recently bought, which once belonged to producer and musician Bryan Loren.
Loren – whose whereabouts are currently unknown, according to Musgrove – worked with Jackson on his eighth studio album Dangerous (1991) and has also collaborated and written for artists such as Whitney Houston, Sting and Barry White.
The tapes include 12 unreleased tracks that Jackson was working on before the release of Dangerous, around 1989 to 1991.
“I’ve gone to all the fan sites. Some of them [the songs] are rumoured to exist, some of them have been leaked a little bit,” Musgrove told the publication. “A couple aren’t even out there in the world.”
He added: “I’m listening to this stuff, and I would get goosebumps because nobody’s ever heard this stuff before,” Musgrove says. “To hear Michael Jackson actually talk and kind of joke back and forth, it was really, really cool.”
The Hollywood Reporter said that, for unknown reasons, Jackson’s estate declined to purchase the tapes but provided Musgrove with a letter stating that it does not claim ownership.
However, it was apparently made clear by the estate that anyone who might purchase the tapes from Musgrove does not own the copyright on the recordings or the compositions, meaning they cannot be released publicly.
This does not mean the tapes have no value – far from it. Musgrove said he plans to take the tapes to auction houses, where it is likely that they could be snapped up by a diehard Jackson fan or private collector.
In November, Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones – who helped him create the albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad – died aged 91.
With Jackson, he was responsible for the fusion of disco, funk, rock, R&B and jazz that launched the singer as a music icon and influenced generations of artists to come, with Thriller selling more than 20 million copies in 1983 alone.
Jackson died from cardiac arrest in 2009, aged 50, just weeks before his sold-out concert residency was due to begin in London.
