“I always felt he would never be an old man.”—Dan Beck, managing partner, Big Honcho MediaJackson was not only the first African-American music superstar, he was, Dan Beck points out, “the guy who met the beginning of the ultimate media explosion.” Beck, now managing partner of Big Honcho Media, worked with Michael from 1988 to 1996, as senior vice president of marketing and sales at Epic, “when he still had the big career, but there were starting to be cracks in it. The plastic surgery. The charges of child molesting. He was very smart, very competitive, but there were big blind spots.
“He was always about the Big Dream,” says Beck, who came up with the idea for Jackson’s 1995 ‘HIStory, “the Fantasy of it all. I remember Michael walking into a meeting for ‘HIStory’ and saying, ‘I see this album selling 100 million copies.’ The room stopped. It was like, ‘He’s out of his mind.’ But he just looked at us and said, ‘No one ever thought I could sell 44 million. Why can’t we imagine 100 million?”
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