Jackson had high hopes, however, for Teddy Riley, whose street-inflected New Jack Swing style brilliantly fused jazz, gospel, R&B, and hip hop. Indeed, perhaps its greatest achievement was in bridging the divide between R&B and hip hop, a bridge, incidentally, that Jackson had been hoping to find since working on Bad.

Jackson listened carefully to the tapes Riley brought with him and instantly loved what he heard. The tracks used different chords than he was accustomed to. The rhythms were fresh and edgy. The beats swung with velocity and hit like sledgehammers.

Among several tracks Jackson listened to that day was the groove Riley worked on the night of the party. Jackson had no idea about the context. "He knew nothing about it," Riley says. "I never told him anything about it."

A couple of weeks later, however, Riley says he was shocked to learn Jackson's title for the track: "Blood on the Dance Floor." Riley got goose bumps. "It was like he prophesied that record. He felt its mood."

Over the subsequent months, Jackson and Riley began working feverishly on a variety of tracks, sometimes separately, sometimes together at Larabee Studios in Los Angeles. "I remember he came back with this melody, 'Blood on the dance floor, blood on the dance floor.' I was like, 'Wow!' He came up with these lyrics and harmonies. Then we just started building it up, layer by layer."

Riley used a vintage drum machine (the MPC 3000) for the beat. The snare was compressed to make it pop ("I want it dry and in your face," Jackson used to say). It was a sound they used throughout the Dangerous album. "Listen to 'Remember the Time,'" Riley says. "It's very similar."

Ultimately, however, "Blood on the Dance Floor" didn't end up making it onto Dangerous. "It wasn't quite finished," Riley says. "There were still some vocal parts missing. Michael loved the song, but he would listen to it and say, 'I like what you did here, but we still need this here.' He was a perfectionist."

As the Dangerous sessions continued, other tracks began to take priority, including "Remember the Time" and "In the Closet." Jackson wouldn't resume work on "Blood" until nearly seven years later. It was now January of 1997. Jackson was in the midst of his HIStory World Tour, and had decided to visit Montreux, Switzerland during a break between the first and second leg (according to news reports, while there he also tried to purchase the home of his longtime idol, Charlie Chaplin).

Here, at Mountain Studio, Jackson went to work on the old demo. "We took Teddy's DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and worked it over with a four-man crew," recalls musician, Brad Buxer. The completed multi-track, engineered, and mixed by Mick Guzauski, was modeled very closely on the last version Jackson and Riley recorded.

"When I heard it finished, I wished I could've been the one to [complete it]," Riley says. "But Michael knows what he wants, and he was happy with it."