Quincy Jones attended his own memorial service 50 years ago

Quincy Jones' “Beat It” – as well as his own chances of survival – long before he produced this classic “Thriller” for Michael Jackson.

Fifty years before his death on Sunday at age 91, the legendary producer was given a 1% chance of survival after suffering a brain aneurysm in 1974.

“It was scary,” Jones told GQ in 2018. “It's like someone blew my brains out. Your brain's main artery is exploding, you know.”

After a seven-and-a-half-hour brain operation, it was discovered that Jones had a second aneurysm, and with his prognosis grim, his showbiz colleagues began planning a memorial service for the jazz trumpeter turned producer and arranger, for all Count Basie to Frank Sinatra.

“I had an aneurysm that burst and it didn't look like I was going to make it, so my friends planned a memorial service,” Jones told The Hollywood Reporter in 2008. “Well, I made it, but they still had the concert.”

The originally scheduled memorial service was held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with the 28-time Grammy winner in attendance before he underwent his second brain surgery.

“The doctor said, 'The good news is you got through the first illness, but you have another one and we have to come back in two months,'” he told THR. “He said I could go to the concert, but I couldn’t get excited. How can I not get upset when I see Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye and Billy Eckstine and Cannonball Adderley?”

Nevertheless, having already escaped death from his first aneurysm, Jones braved the service under supervision, which was also attended by actor-comedian Richard Pryor and jazz great Sarah Vaughan.

“The neurologist sat with me to make sure I didn't get into trouble,” he told THR. “I still have a great picture of Sidney Poitier and I hugging from that night.”

Reflecting on the experience in 2018, Jones wrote on social media: “I was basically at my own funeral… It was special to see so many people there to celebrate what would be my 41st year would have been.”

While Jones reached historic heights in his career – from his blockbuster albums “Off the Wall”, “Thriller” and “Bad” with Jackson to his own Grammy-winning LPs “The Dude” and “Back on the Block” thanks to his Working on the all-star charity single “We Are the World” and the screen and stage versions of “The Color Purple,” he was never able to play the trumpet again.

“I couldn't get away with it, man,” he told GQ about feeling pain after continuing to try to play with a surgically implanted clamp on a blood vessel in his brain despite doctor's orders. “I missed the trumpet… I finger all the time. But I can’t touch it.”

And in the end, the music titan – who also cheated death when he decided to skip a party at Sharon Tate's house on the night she and four others were murdered by the Manson Family in 1969 – considered it all Blessings in his creative development.

“The operation was very liberating,” Jones told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1991. “I felt like I had nothing to lose…After the surgery, I had this vision of what I wanted to do with my life.”