Ask most people who played that big guitar riff on Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” and they’ll say Slash. The wild-haired guitarist from Guns N’ Roses, trading licks with the King of Pop. It’s a great picture. It’s also not what happened on the record.
The real story starts in a Los Angeles studio, and the man who can tell it best is the guitarist who actually played the heavy part. Tim Pierce is a session musician, one of those players whose hands are on hundreds of hit songs even if his name never made a cover. In this video he walks through exactly how “Black or White” came together.
Guitarist Tim Pierce explains who really played the parts on the song.
The session guitarist who played the metal riff tells the real story
Here’s how it went. Michael was working at Westlake Studios with Bill Bottrell, the producer who helped shape a lot of the “Dangerous” album. Michael didn’t read music or play guitar. What he did was hum.
Bottrell remembered it years later. “As soon as we got to Westlake, the first thing that Michael hummed to me was ‘Black Or White’. He sang me the main riff without specifying what instrument it would be played on.” So Bottrell picked up a guitar and played the riff Michael was singing.
Then Michael wanted something heavier for one section. “Michael came up with the idea of putting heavy metal guitars in the second eight,” Bottrell said. “He sang me that riff and I hired my friend Tim Pierce, because I couldn’t play that kind of guitar.”
So the famous riff is Bottrell playing what Michael hummed. The crunchy metal chords are Tim Pierce. Slash isn’t on the record at all, except for one spot a lot of folks have never noticed.
The album version opens with a little skit. A dad yells at his son to turn the music down, the kid cranks it anyway, and there’s a burst of guitar in there. That burst is Slash. You hear him. You don’t see him in the video.
So why does half the world swear Slash played the whole thing? Because he did play it live with Michael, right in front of a huge TV audience. At MTV’s 10th Anniversary show in November 1991, the two of them tore through “Black or White” together, and that image stuck.
Here’s that live performance that started all the confusion.
Michael and Slash perform it live on MTV in 1991
Slash never claimed the studio version. He said it plain. “The recorded song ‘Black or White,’ I did not play on.”
The song itself went to No. 1 and sat there for seven weeks across 1991 and 1992, one of the biggest hits of Michael’s whole career. Give the official video a watch and listen for that opening riff Michael hummed into being.
The video that made the song a worldwide smash.
The official “Black or White” video
Funny thing is, the loudest, most rock-and-roll moment on the track came from a pop singer humming a tune and a producer who admitted he couldn’t play that style at all. He just phoned a friend who could, and that’s Tim Pierce you’re hearing.