MICHAEL JACKSON ARCHIVED - ROLLING STONE: 1971 -1983 - 2009

1971 The Jackson 5

1983 Michael Jackson: Life in the Magical Kingdom

2009 Michael Jackson’s Last Days:

The Comeback That Never Was

Cover Story
The Jackson 5:
The Men Don't Know But The Little Girls Understand By Ben Fong-Torres Posted Apr 29, 1971

The taxi driver kept the cab moving in straight lines, despite 50 MPH winds. Street lamps and signs, strung across intersections, danced like diapers on a stormy clothesline. Welcome to Columbus, Ohio. The cabbie was in an obliging good mood, even stopping the meter at $2.80 — the usual fare for a ride from Port Columbus airport to the Sheraton — to do a little sightseeing, driving through the rich part of town, the high-rise senior citizens' apartment towers, and a block away, the "colored section." "Here's where you can get a piece of tail for ten bucks," he explained, "anything you want." He slowed down dramatically as we passed the bars and grills — clean, actually, with the grime either covered by snow or blown away. "Here's where they had that riot a few years back," he said grimly. "I just thought you'd like to see this, since you're a writer and all." Silence. I brought up football, to get the talk going again, and his mind must've registered Kent State, or its aftermath, the disruptions at nearby Ohio State. He grunted and dismissed Ohio's high football ranking last season. We'd arrived at the hotel already anyway. He looked over his seat and explained how Ohio is regulated by the State Liquor Control. Stores are closed after 9, and it was past midnight. "If there's anything you want, I can get it for you. Or just ask any of the cab drivers. We'll be right here." Thanks, I said.

"Oh," and he took out a billfold and flashed a color photo of a "colored" woman. "I can get this for you, too. She's a nice one."

* * *

Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher takes his place before a lectern in the Council chambers of Gary, Indiana. The mayor is waiting for the film crew to get their lights placed, and for the buzz to die down a little. It is Jackson 5 Day this January 31st in Elbert Gary's little old city; in Music Man town, soul music rules. They were going to helicopter the Jackson 5 in and parade them to their old house at 23rd and Jackson Streets, and the mayor was going to re-name the street "Jackson 5 Street" for the week, and even lay a cornerstone in front of the house where Joe and Kathy Jackson raised their family of nine.

And then there'd be the ceremonies at City Hall. But snow, 40 MPH winds, and zero-degree weather made it so that, all of a sudden, we're at City Hall. It had taken about ten minutes to fill the room, some two hundred Christmas-dressed kids towing parents and guardians up from the libraryish lobby into this high-ceilinged chamber. And now a dozen teenagers enter through a special door, to the tables the councilmen usually use for meetings. They sit in a neat row behind the mayor, in front of the Gary banner: CITY ON THE MOVE. City of steel — US Steel — and waterway transportation, and trucking, and rail; of a past of graft and corruption, and of plentiful black labor. And, now, a black mayor. The city emblem, on the flag and on the podium, is a bucket of hot metal being poured onto the globe, like gravy onto a mashed potato.

Hatcher is running for re-election in this 55 percent black city; he is generally popular, but running hard, anyway, and the J-5 are here to help, with two benefit shows today and tonight. They were in Columbus for two shows the day before. They and the mayor are all old buddies, according to all the stories in Soul Magazine. The Jackson kids all played youth-league baseball, and Hatcher, as a city official who loved kids, supported various ball teams. It was at a campaign benefit concert for candidate Hatcher ? where the Jackson 5 performed — where Hatcher introduced the boys to Diana Ross; Diana rushed the word to Berry Gordy, and that's how Motown landed them and moved them into an immense home in the Hollywood hills — and into the top hierarchy of soul, pop, and — if you must — bubblegum music.
Dear MICHAEL:

I have a problem. I've been in LOVE with you ever since I set my eyes on you. I would like to see you in person. My birthday is March 3rd and I will be 11. I hope I am not too old for you.

Carla Hall, Los Angeles

There're these letters to Soul, the primary music publication for young blacks. The letters section is the most popular part of the paper, Soul discovered by survey. Here is where people voice their choices; this is where Aretha was defended and where Motown is so often denounced — Where is David Ruffin? Why is Flo Ballard, one of the original Supremes, slaving away as a domestic maid; why doesn't Motown take care of her? Why no publicity for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas?

Now, there is a full page each issue for a "Jackson 5 Mailbag." Now, while the grown-ups — the teenagers and young adults — debate and carry on about Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis and interracial marriages, the J-5 fans have their own big korner.

Dear SOUL:

I want to say how proud all us kids are to have a group like the J-5 today. It wasn't too long ago when kids got on the stage and were laughed at.

The J-5 can communicate with young and old, Black and white. It takes a great recording company like Motown to have guys like these.

C. E., New York

Mayor Hatcher takes just a minute to say why we're all here today, and the kids, straining away from mothers, brothers, and sisters, are cheering with each mention of the J-5. A three-second, high-pitched, fast-dipping Y AAAyyy, just like at the concerts.

"Behind me here are the winners of the Jackson 5 poster contest and essay contest," the Mayor says. "Each winning student will receive a prize that I am sure millions of young Americans would love to have. They will be able to have their pictures taken with the Jackson 5." Mayor Hatcher's even sounding like a Boss Soul DJ. A heartfelt OOOooohhh swells up and wafts up to the Mayor. There's real envy in these 200 little faces.

Just before the Jackson 5 walked in, the kids were angling for the best view from their pew-seats in the spectator section of the council room, sitting on patient parents' laps, standing, leaning against the back of the row in front, some of them with Instamatics poised. A couple of girls in the second row figure out I'm press, languorously taking up a couple of front-row spaces in the press pew, and there is a deluge of hellos to deliver to the J-5: Rebecca for Jermaine, Rochelle Williams and Sheryl for Michael, Sheryl also for Tito, and Margo for Marlon.

The ones they love enter, dressed in suits and sports jackets, mod but moderately so, looking pretty much straight ahead to the Mayor.

"Lookit them in their suits ... Oooh ..."

First, as promised, they take pictures of the brothers with the contest winners, and, just like in a high school assembly, the winners take turns introducing themselves and their schools. Partisan cheers go up as each one passes by. "... and I'm from Roosevelt High." "Right on!" They shake hands with each of the J-5. Tito and Michael exchange power shakes with some of the winners?the ones who offer their hands for that grip. They're at home. Their father, Joe Jackson, mistyeyed at the heroes' reception, says a short thank-you. Another cheer; the kids consider him a hero, too. "Lay it on, Jackson, lay it on!"

The Jackson 5 go through it all with consummate grace. They accept a flag that has flown atop the state capitol, a gift from a Congressman. They get a plaque from Indiana University, for inspiring "hope for the young." Mayor Hatcher himself presents plaqued keys to his city, so proud, today, "that the Jackson 5 has carried the name of Gary throughout the country and the world, and made it a name to be proud of."

Each of the Jackson 5 steps up for a few words. Tito sums it up: "We're glad to be home. There's no place like home."

* * *

Backstage at Veteran Memorial Auditorium in Columbus, Ohio, maybe 15 seconds before the call to go on stage, and Michael Jackson is making a request to Tito, who's diddling away on his electric guitar, still plugged into the portable amp. "Play Brenda and the Tabulations' song," he pleads. Tito, his serious face defiant beyond its 17 years, continue on the 'blues riff he's found, 'way down at the bottom of the neck. Jermaine, on bass, is playing along, singing in his new falsetto:

It's a sha-a-ame...the way you hurt me,

Sha-a-ame...ooh-ooh-ooh...
Michael seems restless. He's posed with his brothers for the local black paper — that's become a dressing room ritual now — and he's done his vocal exercise, hitting the high notes in little burps while Jermaine is matching him on base guitar. Now he's hungry again as 9:30 PM approaches, and he asks Jack Nance, the road manager, for some food — especially a hot dog. Too late by a second; a man steps into the room and calls, "Let's go." Out in the corridor, you can hear cousins Ronnie Rancifer and Johnny Jackson on electric piano and drums driving into the first of a dozen repeating bars to intorduce "Stand," Time to face 4000 shrieks, and there is this remarkable lack of tension. The Jackson 5 could be paperboys going off to do their routes. Before the first show, Michael poked around the dull, well-lit room in his stage outfit — part Afro sharp, part nursery school, orange top with little green turtles the desgin, and a toga-style shoulder cape. He drummed sticks onto a copy of Rolling Stone on the table facing the mirror, pouring a steady rain of wood onto James Taylor's glaring face, until Marlon grabbed the magazine. He poked around some more; reminded cousin Ronnie to remember his cue list of songs; watched people come and go. He is not a center of attention.

"Let's go," and by the time the cousins hit the "Stand" riff for the twelfth time, the Jackson 5 are up the ramp, past the columns of curtains and the first wave of screams, and lined up — tall Jackie in the center, Tito and Jermaine, behind their guitars, alongside, and Marlon and Michael on the wingtips. On a count, each puts one hand on the left hip, the other hand lightly cupping the right ear, and gets the right leg stomping, highstep style — all, of course, in unison, until Michael breaks away to take the mike and put his own voice above the screams.

One talk with Joe Jackson and you're sprung back two musical generations, back past the beginnings of rhythm and blues, to Chicago in 1951, when bebop and blues were the music staples of the black man. In the Forties, white musicians had turned jazz into a tepid "swing"; the answer, in the black urban areas, was "hard" bebop, mixing the hard-edged city blues style, reflecting the migration of Negroes to the north and midwest, with the big band sound popular in the Southwest — in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Oklahoma.

Joe Jackson was one of the migrant blacks, settling into steel town to work and raise a family. He worked as a crane operator, "but I always wanted to be in entertainment." On weekends, he sang and played guitar with one of the many groups that called themselves the Falcons. "It was a local group out of Chicago, around 1951," he said. "We played mostly colleges and things — bars. It was a blues thing, which is what everybody was getting into."

But he had to keep working to support his fast-growing family. "The boys would listen to the things we were trying to do, at rehearsals, and there were always instruments laying around. If you're around something a lot, you're gonna take part in it." Soon, Mr. Jackson faded away from the Falcons scene and turned the house over to his sons' music. "We went overboard. My wife and I would fight, because I invested in new instruments that cost so much. When a woman's a good mother and finds all the money going into instruments, she doesn't like it."

Things worked out, obviously. As Bob Jones, a publicist at Motown, explained, "The average black family living off a menial job can be as well off as a middle class white family. You eat collard greens and chitlings, and you can take a penny and stretch it out."

Papa Joe went out and scouted other groups, bringing back ideas on how to choreograph his sons. "It always looked good; the little ones on the side and the tall one in the center. And their voices blend well because of the family thing. There's a basic tone quality that's common to all of them."

First, it was the three oldest sons, with Jermaine singing lead. Two sisters, Maureen (the oldest of the Jackson children) and Latoya, played violin and clarinet (the instrument Mrs. Jackson played) outside the group.

Shortly after Marlon and Michael joined, the group won a talent show at Roosevelt High and, the next two years, won regional talent competitions. And the rest is in Soul Magazine.

(Oh, yes. There's Randy, 8, who plays congas and is just about ready to make it the Jackson 6. And Janet, 4, in the wings, still learning words.)

What happens at Motown, in the studios? Motown acts usually won't talk about record production, as if some conspiracy transpires in secret rooms in Detroit and Hollywood. Few people know who actually decides what songs, what producers, what musicians make up "The Sound of Young America."

I mean, when I heard the first several Jackson 5 singles on the radio — "I Want You Back," "ABC," and "One More Chance" — I had thought, crazy; Diana Ross and the Family Stone. All the albums are gems. On the first, Michael turns Smokey's "Who's Loving You" into a noodly little blues number; on the second, he leaves his band and orchestra behind on the Stevie Wonder tune, "Don't Know Why I Love You." Michael is causing heartbreaks while the Osmonds are still learning the ABC's of white-skinned soul. And all the albums are planned, Motown's publicist says, with the black market in mind. "We try and have at least two hits on every album." The third album includes "I'll Be There" and "Mama's Pearl," which was re-mixed for its release as a single. Now, Michael's in the studios with his producer, working on his tracks for the next album.
From what Joe Jackson says, the deal with the Jackson 5 apparently works like this: He has raised, trained, and furnished them; Motown will now do the rest. For example: "What is your role in the studio?" "My role is getting the boys out to the studios. I'm the legal guardian. They listen to me 100 percent." There is, however, a road manager from Dick Clark Productions and a young Motown employee, Suzanne DePasse, handling choreography and selection of stage numbers.

"Who writes the songs?" "I've written some songs, the boys have written some." But none of them have yet been recorded, and many of the tunes on the three albums (not counting the Christmas record) are by "The Corporation," who are credited as arrangers and producers, along with Hal Davis. Who're they? "The Corporation," Jackson says, "is the company itself — people, producers within Motown. They're called 'the clan' back in Detroit."

Here in the suite the Jackson 5 are using for a parlor at their hotel in Columbus, the most noise is being made by several men, white men; the Jackson 5 are scattered among a couple of suites on the floor (where, by the elevator, two security guards keep watch for persistent fans). A couple of them are playing cards; nearby sit partially-drunk glasses of milk and a bucket of the remains of fried chicken. There is hard liquor, but it's being guzzled by the various promoters hanging around. Joe Jackson, watching the card game, remains quiet, except to help herd his sons over to talk.

They do interviews like most boys get their hair cut, worried if they move their mouth the wrong way they'll get nicked. But they are as uniformly amiable as they are bashful.

Jackie, 19, talks about going into business school with an eye to "maybe take care of the financial part of the group someday." For now, "all I do is enjoy what I do on stage. It's something like a hobby."

Tito, 17, is more into music (Jackie dropped out of a high school music course and is learning to read charts now from Jermaine, Tito, and cousin Ronnie). "In the studios, I sing bass and play some lead guitar, and I'm going into music theory." In school, he learned to play the violin, bass fiddle, and saxophone. And — pointing to himself, to credit himself as teacher — he can play some piano, too. Tito is perhaps the most serious musician of the Jackson 5. He listens to Hendrix and BB King records. "Ever since I started playing guitar, about three years ago. And I have one BB King record about as old as me. It's my father's."

What about studio work? "Sometimes we like to go, sometimes not... Repeating songs over and over — that's a drag, man. It's hard." Tito shook his head slowly, like an old bluesman reminiscing, when I asked about the old days, seven years ago, when Michael first joined: "It was hard. Money was short. It was a drag."

Jermaine Jackson, 16, laughs easily, with an open face and smile. Right after the initial introductions, while everybody else was watching TV or playing the card game Tonk, he walked over, looked at my cassette recorder, and asked, "Wanna talk right now?" And he sat against the headboard of a bed and told about school — how he and his brothers go to a private school in Encino, five classrooms and 29 students; how a tutor, assigned by the state board of education, follows them on their short tours to keep them doing schoolwork.

Jermaine played bass on a guitar before getting a bass guitar. "I started guitar at 11, before we became professional. That's when I was 14." Next, Jermaine wants to learn piano. And he's writing songs — "all kinds; a lot of short songs. I've got some saved up...for when we go bankrupt."

I asked Jermaine to name me some of his favorite artists, people I wouldn't guess (like the Motown acts). He smiled. "Barbra Streisand ... and Bread .. .Three Dog Night. I met them at the Forum when we were there."

Marlon, 13, is considered the quietest of the Jackson 5. On stage, Michael has the spotlight, but Marlon is as visible as any corner of a polished diamond. Those smooth moves he and his brothers execute while Michael works the front lines — left hand up, right arm and hand joining left, both arms slashed diagonally past the hip; a spin and a grab of the mike stand with one hand, taking it down to knee level and singing into it — Marlon looks the best at it. Vocally, his singing goes into the harmonic mix — he sings no leads — but once in a while, you hear him. After a rousing "Goin' Back to Indiana," while the electric piano and drums and Michael swirl to a finish, Marlon stays at his mike and lets out three happy whoops.

At home, Marlon shares a room with Michael and Randy, and they play basketball and pool and swim. Marlon likes to watch cartoons Saturday mornings with Michael, and, like Mike, he's thinking of an acting career.

At home they take turns cleaning rooms and washing dishes; backstage and in hotel rooms they sing and play cards and fight and generally ignore the adults; in public they are clean-cut, cordial and unassuming. There really are no secrets.

Tito looks the toughest, so, over a sandwich at the coffee shop in Chicago's airport, I asked him about what the Jackson 5 were saying to kids — especially to black kids. Peace and freedom and unity, right? Or are you singing these songs just to entertain? Tito thought it over, worked an overload of lettuce into his mouth, and swallowed. "Just to entertain," he said.

("Just two things you gotta promise me," Bob Jones had said when we first approached Motown about a J-5 piece. "No questions about drugs or politics. They aren't into that and we'd just rather lay off it.")

* * *

Michael Jackson is 11 years old, 75 pounds. And he's sung lead on almost all the Jackson 5's songs — six hit singles in 1970 (counting black and white surveys); three gold albums (plus a Christmas LP that is sure to play forever, like Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" or Harry Simeone's "Little Drummer Boy"). And two hit singles so far this three-month-old year.

It is not all that amazing. The Five Stairsteps, who had "Ooh Child" last year, are a family act who were about the same age as the Jackson 5 when they began some five years ago; the Osmonds, even if now they're onlv duplicating the J-5 sound, were around and on TV back in 1963 on the Andy Williams show, when Donny first pitched his pipes into the Brothers' barbershop sound. And, from Oakland, little Dion is a drummer, singer, and dancer who's been knocking around at clubs and lounges for several years now. He's nine years old today.

Still, here you have the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and the Tempts and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum; of all the spirit that is meant when Brown does his all-out dance-sweat-and-relate act, when the Miracles or the Tops line up, all dressed alike, and do their black-is-beautiful drill team maneuvers, tall, proud, and smiling, sounding like rivulets of soul. Or when Sly and the Family Stone, five blacks and two whites, all outfitted different but funkadelic, come on stomping, raising you up, by flashes, to a feeling of exhilaration and to some syn-ergistic sense, all of you there in your $5.50 seat section, of potential power and present glory. Color, flash, and a mayfield of messengers, drumming, pounding, screeching, blowing out the word.

The Jackson 5 are this and more: They are peers. Stars, untouchable in their sleek black Fleetwood Cadillacs that roar off behind police escorts after all their shows. Yet peers, backstage in Gary, Indiana, looking for old friends to drop by. One of them sheepishly walks in, and Marlon and Michael brighten. The friend is dressed OK, but he's not in pink top and Indian rainbow-print slacks with puffballs down to the bottom of the bell, like Marlon. He's checking Marlon out, stands back a little, you know, but Marlon just wants to find out about all the old friends from grammar school, and they talk a little, hands reach out, slap, slap, and the friend leaves with a power salute.
Eight, ten-year-old kids in Columbus, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, where we visited; in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where I work — they love and emulate the Jackson 5. There's a bit of fantasy — the kind of gush white teenies direct at Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy (of the TV Partridge Family). But there isn't that real distance. It is a style of clothing, for one thing. Pre-teen blacks are blossoming out in Afros and fringed bells and Apple hats. And it is different from that Hollywood notion of fashion for fad's sake; hot pants for a hot minute. This is an approach to brothers and to others; in a way, a statement. It is a feeling of camaraderie, of the kind of spirit that bought Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young so close to so many last year; it is a feeling that, in white circles, might best be counterparted by Grand Funk and its "brotherhood" kind of magnetism.

It is in the posters that the kids in Gary drew and cut out and painted for the J-5 contest. "You can make it if you try." "On Top with our Jackson 5." And it is in the songs — in the first album. "Stand" (There's a midget standing tall, and the giant beside him about to fall Stand/ stand/ stand); in the second, "Make Way for the Young Folks." In the third, "I'm on your side, when things get rough and friends just can't be found, like a bridge over troubled water." On the Christmas album, along with the rousing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," and the most soulful "Little Drummer Boy" ever, Michael sang an anti-war song. "Someday at Christmas" came on sounding like it might be another "White Christmas," until the high, earnest voice sang out:

Someday at Christmas there won't be boys


Playing with bombs like kids play with toys


Like one December, our hearts will see


A world where men are free


Someday at Christmas there'll be no wars


When we have learned what Christmas is for

When we have found what life's really worth

There'll be peace on earth*

*© Stein & Van Stock, Inc.

James Brown says the same thing — sitting on a stool looking very gentlemanly on a TV talk show; Little Richard says the same thing, his upstretched arms and fingers forming three V-signs all together. So does Diana Ross. But it is different when Michael Jackson says it. He's not even a grownup yet, and he knows.

Michael Jackson, round eyes, round dimples on a round face, under a round Afro, has placed himself on a couch in the hotel suite and looks up, to indicate he's ready to be interviewed. He's done his two shows, and he's been relaxing — playing cards, doing card tricks, and waiting for the inevitable pillow fight. So his brown eyes dart around now and then, watching for the first move.

Backstage in Columbus that day — and he must've heard this line a dozen times — when a columnist for the local black paper patted him paternally and tried: "I heard you were really a midget, man, that you're actually 30 years old" — Mike gave him this side-swipe smile, like ha-ha, very original.

Michael began singing with his brothers when he turned four. The first show "was a hospital we did. They had a big Santa Claus." Another early show was at the Big Top; it was a shopping center. "We were doing it free so the people could hear the music." Now, seven years later, Michael is playing drums and learning the piano. And, in the Motown studios in Hollywood, backed vocally by his brothers and instrumentally by the usual full crew of Motown session men, he sings lead. "It takes me about two hours to do one whole song," he says. "I do my part first, then they do theirs."

The first songs Michael remembers singing were the Drifters' "Under the Boardwalk" and the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout," both from 1961. Today, on stage, Michael does a talk bit about how he feels the blues. It is not convincing; the Jackson 5 are not great actors just yet. But, with their median age still 15, they have paid dues. "Before Motown," Mike recalled, "we used to do five shows a night for theaters" and clubs around Chicago and Gary where their youth was no barrier, doing the circuit with groups like the Emotions and the Chi-Lites. The Jacksons also worked in Missouri and Wisconsin, and even in Arizona once. They got there by bus.

Michael joined his brothers when he turned four; soon he perfected a James Brown imitation and made it his routine. "It was amazing," says Suzanne DePasse, who plans and coordinates the J-5's stage show. "He had it down to a T" — every twist, turn, jerk, and thrust. "And I had to work to get him away from a lot of it."

Mike is a skilled mimic. He watches TV cartoons and can sketch profiles; now he wants to take art in college. "Also I'd like to be an actor, like the kinds of things Sidney Poitier does." And when I told Michael he was a good blues singer, he laughed. "I learned by ear."

By the time Diana Ross introduced the Jackson 5 to her world — at the Daisy discotheque in Beverly Hills in September, 1969 — the group was reported to have "a repertoire that ranges from Ray Charles to Liberace." Soul magazine didn't elaborate, but Michael, talking about his favorite kind of music, made it sound almost plausible. "I like classical music," he said, "and soft listening music. Sometimes I sit and listen to soft stuff like Johnny Mathis. I like Ray Charles. And most of the time, I listen to Three Dog Night."

Page 6 of 7

And what about the screaming audiences? Jackson 5 did their first major tour last fall, hitting the big arenas — the Gardens in Boston, Cincinnati, and New York. They set an attendance record by drawing 12,275 to a show in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had a majestic triumph in home territory — at the Chicago Amphi Theatre before 19,570. Kids fainted in Cincinnati and Boston, rushing through fences and human barriers to reach the stage. Michael Jackson, the understanding diplomat: "If it weren't for the screaming, it wouldn't be exciting. The kids help us by being the way they are."

The black audience. At the Greek Theatre, summer 1970, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles are in mid-show, and they whip off their gold-sequined toreador jackets, all in one sweeping motion, and the kids are screaming, and Smokey moves from the monkey into a medley of the hits — "Mirage," and "Tracks of My Tears," and "Emotion" — and when it all ends, and they've gone through all those movements — fluttering hands pointing to those tear-tracks, synchronized spins ending with arms stretched out in a "safe" sign, all that shit — the crowd goes: YAAAAyyy. Three seconds, and it dies.

I couldn't figure it out. Now, here are the Commodores, opening act on the J-5 show. They're a run-of-the-mill seven-man soul ensemble from Tuskegee, Alabama, where they all go to a, ahem, Negro college. Still, they can get down to it, working hard, doing all that Sly stuff. The drummer stretches out "I'm gonna add a little organ" with rhetoric & blues questions: "Would you like to hear my organ?" "YAAAyyy." He jumps up and down on his wooden altar. "YAAyy." "You like that?" "YAAAy." And at the end of it, when they've sung the Edwin Starr song. "War" (Temptations style, of course), and gone through their Hollywood-transplant nightclub things like "Wichita Lineman," and sung Sly's "Higher," and flashed the perfunctory peace signs, when the MC from the soul station has loped onto the stage to yell their names over and over again:

YAAAyyy. Three seconds.

"Well," a black promoter explains after two Jackson 5 shows, "the black audience participates so much more during the song. They're screaming and dancing and answering — it's like in church — so when the song ends, there ain't no more."

Church. Here comes the next warm-up, Yvonne Fair, charging out like a raging bull, short, stout, with large breasts snug against each other under a thin white outfit that goes down to her belly, where long white fringes take over and skitter all over her hot panties. Women's libido.

She earns ten, maybe 12 seconds of yays with "25 Miles" by Edwin Starr (Motown tunes get a lot of mileage out here on the road), "Band of Gold," and, to give her a real chance to dance, "Deeper and Deeper."

Then, "Now, we get to the part of the show about the low-down, no-good me-en." A grandmother, teeny-sitting for the day, smiles. Younger sisters laugh and cheer, and, suddenly, it's Women's Lib, young/black/Columbus Ohio style, and you see the participation.

Yvonne: "This song is for like young ladies with men who have a habit of taking everything — we mean from clothes to money to... whatever." She goes into "Piece of My Heart." Then a break. She moves back and points to her stage-prop man, the Commodores' lean young bass player. This is her property, she tells her audience. "He's mine."

Teenage girl: You can have it!

Yvonne: He ain't much, but he's mine. [To bass man, heatedly:] You don't got to go show off!

Girl: He ain't got much to show!

Yvonne: Pose more, honey, pose more.

Girl: He's gonna have to pose a whole lot!

Yvonne: What you see is what you get!

Girl (and friends): Right on!

And Yvonne builds the song back up. "Take another little piece of my heart, baby.... Take another piece of this good thing, baby ..." You can tell she'd be a good match for James Brown in any battle of the lungs.

By way of introduction, Yvonne Fair used to be a featured singer with James Brown's show, after her first days with the Chantels in the early Fifties, a break-up, a reunion, and a hit, "Look in My Eyes," in 1961. She was with Brown from 1962 to 1965, when "It got kind of wearing on my nerves." James Brown, she said — and she kept it short — is not the man he has made a lot of people think he is.
She went off to join Chuck Jackson's revue, and, two years ago, signed with Motown. Now she's going through the ropes again, traveling with Motown stars like the J-5, waiting patiently for some of that Motown Attention. She's just moved out to Hollywood, and she's hopeful. "There are so many artists in Detroit that it was kinda hard to concentrate on me. What it is is the producers and writers over there; they automatically go to the big acts. They're the guaranteed sales. The smaller acts have to wait around for their turn."

So what is this with the multiple entendres and the whirlpool-ass act? Isn't it ... beyond the 6-, 8-, 10-year-olds who make up such a large part of the Jackson 5 audiences? "Not the kids of today. Their minds are more developed. You don't have to tell them garbage and be filthy about it.... I just suggest certain things; their minds are open to whatever. Kids know what it's all about, and they should be able to get pleasure out of their own imagination. If they didn't dig it, I could feel it. I'm not advertising sex; the dances of today are sex."

As for the Jackson 5: "They captivate you because Michael works the stage like an old professional. His riffs take an average singer a lifetime to learn. It's a group that lacks nothing."

* * *

"I'd like to talk to you all tonight about the blues. Yeah, the blues." Mike's brothers are standing around pretending like this is the first time they've heard this, and do a mocking-the-kid-brother routine. "Don't nobody have the blues like I do," says Michael. "I may be young, but I know what it's all about." He tells about this girl he met at school — in the sandbox. "We toasted our love during milk break." (The brothers snicker; Marlon walks off from the group disbelieving, shaking his head) ... "And then I said to her ..."

A slam of the drums, and Michael oomphs up a crotch-thrust, the head goes down, and when it comes up again, he's crooning: "When I ..." broken up into about ten syllables altogether, the first words of Smokey Robinson's Fifties song, "Who's Loving You." And the brothers are an A-framed unit behind him, hands behind their buttocks like the Miracles, doing steps in place and weaving a perfect vocal backing.

Marlon, two years older and two inches taller, is a superb dancer; confident and workmanlike in his younger brother's shadow. He'll flash a smile once in a while to say he's thoroughly enjoying being a part of this precision — a look you see on the face of an Ikette. Marlon will grow to be handsome, where Mike will forever be, as almost all the girls say, "so cute."

Jackie has grown to a bit over 5'10", and looks not unlike Sly on stage, an Indian-costumed stone among pebbles. Sometimes he looks out of place, his high cheekbones drawing his soft features into a just-about-adult face. Sometimes his role appears to be that of puppeteer, letting Marlon and Michael go only so far.

Tito is sturdy, serious, an Ali in demeanor, with a developing bass voice and a developing skill at lead guitar. He'll keep one leg out and planted while his fingers pick out simple lines. With tinted shades and brown suede apple hat on, Toriano (the given name means "bull") rarely looks up and out to the audience to acknowledge all the Tito fans.

Jermaine is the innocent, lamby figure. He plays strong bass on his Fender jazz model, often playing a harmony line to support Tito's vocal effort. Jermaine has sung lead on several tunes, including the single, "I Found That Girl," but now he's worried a little 'cause his voice is changing. At 16, he's the perfect idol-figure for those who can't seriously get into 11-year-old Mike.

Now Michael's to the end of his woes, and he stretches it out, microphone tippled over his mouth: "Who-o-o-o-o ...'s loving you," the "you" broken down and up into six parts. Then a James Brown spin and another pump of the still-forming pelvis while Marlon, Jermaine, and Jackie are just completing their spins, and they're ready to sing "Darling Dear." The show moves fast, from "Stand" right into the hits — "One More Chance" and "ABC," then a Traffic song they credit to Three Dog Night — "Feelin' All Right," which gives Tito a chance to move out on lead guitar; then the blues; then, usually, another nine or ten numbers.

If the J-5 show lacks anything, it's surprises. Whatever happens, you can tell it's been worked out in long rehearsal sessions at home in the Hollywood hills or at Motown: Cousin Ronnie Rancifer stepping out to show off his funky chicken; Jermaine being directed by Jackie to sing a song to a particular girl in the audience: "That one there, in the red dress," and Jermaine does a job on her, serenading, "Won't you take me with you," his head shaking with the words, looking for a "yes." Or the singularly excellent dance routine for "Walk On By." And the song salute to Gary, "Goin' Back to Indiana," met by power salutes by the pre-teens in Gary, at the West Side High gym. Fans stand up, here and there, to their full four or five foot heights and scream; girls soul-slap with each other to celebrate eye-contact with one of the Five; everywhere, kids are holding hands tightly in their excitement. But there is no mass movement, no jumping atop chairs and flooding of aisles, articulations of defiance, like at Sly concerts. The kids are like the Jackson 5; there is a lot of unself-conscious fun, but, also, a remarkable lack of tension.

* * *

Bob Jones is talking about the cancellation of several Jackson 5 dates in Texas last year after protests over Dick Clark Productions, promoters of the tour. "It was mainly because Clark went into areas and didn't do anything with the local [read "Black"] promoters. And they screamed about it.

"He's eventually gonna give it up, I'm sure, because he's lost Chicago, he's lost New York, and he's lost L.A." Jones is talking about disc jockeys who control markets — heavily. "You don't go into Chicago if you're a black act unless you're an E. Rodney Jones [WVON] promotion. Otherwise, forget it. And there's a key DJ in Atlanta ... There are cities we cannot give him anymore, and all the major cities will be taken by some force — DJ, Operation Breadbasket, or whatever. And Clark will have only the Daytons and the Columbuses ..."

* * *

We are almost out of Columbus. At the airport, TWA gives the J-5 entourage a special waiting room, and that saves them from a couple dozen autographs each — which is not to say they mind giving them. It's become part of the routine. A thank-you here, a power-shake there, an autograph or two on these glossies, and hold it for just one picture, if you will. TWA brings in a trayful of hamburgers and Cokes, and the J-5 get down to chomping and arguing — mostly about the water and pillow fight the night before. "Suzanne, I saw you tripping someone last night," Michael says. "It was everybody against everybody."

And the ride from Chicago to Lansing, Michigan — where we'll stay after the day in Gary — is fast. Yvonne Fair talks about getting married to a singer with one of Little Anthony's Imperials. "The men coming along now are no good. Just shit. I'm just getting married and I'll wait for him to change..."

We go from Lansing, from our ice boxes at the motel, to City Hall for the ceremonies, to West Side High School for the first concert at 3 PM, then to the Mayor's home for a fairly private party — the Jackson 5 watch the Disney hour on TV; they pose with the Mayor, with their father, with their traveling teacher, for the local papers; they have some of the soul food; they play cards; they play ping-pong with Hatcher. When the second show is finished they run out the back doors, pile into the puffing limousines and motor over to another section of Gary — for a Jackson family reunion at Joe Jackson's cousin's. She has worked a day and a half with friends and relatives to turn out two dozen sweet potato pies, mountains of cold cuts and fried chicken, tubs of salad and black-eyed peas, and now she stands at the door, almost crying, so happy that her basement den is stuffed with people, and Joe and the boys are all here, along with some Commodores and just platoons of Jackson relations. They arrive, as if planned, in shifts, so that the aunts and cousins and sisters, beaming behind the food tables, stay busy serving all night. The joy of family.

Joe's matronly cousin, damp-eyed, keeps asking if anybody wants more food. She steals a look or two at the various brothers of the Jackson 5, who eat lightly (The Mayor, a few hours before, hadn't exactly been skimpy with his food) and settle down around folding tables for a few rounds of Tonk. Relatives and friends keep calling them away for a picture; little boys and girls ask for autographs, and the Jackson 5 does it all, graciously, saying "Thank you" afterwards. They're glad to be here. There's no place like home.

From Issue 81 — April 29, 1971

******

Cover Story:
Michael Jackson: Life in the Magical Kingdom

GERRI HIRSHEY
Posted Feb 17, 1983

It's noon, and somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, the front shades of a row of condos are lowered against a hazy glare. Through the metal gate, the courtyard is silent, except for the distant splat of a fountain against its plastic basin. Then comes the chilling whine of a real-life Valley girl. "Grandmuther. I am not gonna walk a whole block. It's bumid. My hair will be brillo."

And the soothing counterpoint of maternal encouragement: "Be good pup, Jolie. Make for mama."

All along the courtyard's trimmed inner paths, poodles waddle about trailing poodle-cut ladies on pink leashes.

"Not what you expected, huh?" From behind a mask of bony fingers, Michael Jackson giggles. Having settled his visitor on the middle floor of his own three-level condo, Michael explains that the residence is temporary, while his Encino, California, home is razed and rebuilt. He concedes that this is an unlikely spot for a young prince of pop.

It is also surprising to see that Michael has decided to face this interview alone. He says he has not done anything like this for over two years. And even when he did, it was always with a cordon of managers, other Jackson brothers and, in one case, his younger sister Janet parroting a reporter's questions before Michael would answer them. The small body of existing literature paints him as excruciatingly shy. He ducks, he hides, he talks to his shoe tops. Or he just doesn't show up. He is known to conduct his private life with almost obsessive caution, "just like a hemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way." The analogy is his.

Run this down next to the stats, the successes, and it doesn't add up. He has been the featured player with the Jackson Five since grade school. In 1980, he stepped out of the Jacksons to record his own LP, Off the Wall, and it became the best-selling album of the year. Thriller, his new album, is Number Five on the charts. And the list of performers now working with him — or wanting to — includes Paul McCartney, Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Queen and Jane Fonda. On record, onstage, on TV and screen, Michael Jackson has no trouble stepping out. Nothing scares him, he says. But this....

"Do you like doing this?" Michael asks. There is a note of incredulity in his voice, as though he were asking the question of a coroner. He is slumped in a dining-room chair, looking down into the lower level of the living room. It is filled with statuary. There are some graceful, Greco-Roman type bronzes, as well as a few pieces from the suburban birdbath school. The figures are frozen around the sofa like some ghostly tea party.

Michael himself is having little success sitting still. He is so nervous that he is eating — plowing through — a bag of potato chips. This is truly odd behavior. None of his brothers can recall seeing anything snacky pass his lips since he became a strict vegetarian and health-food disciple six years ago. In fact, Katherine Jackson, his mother, worries that Michael seems to exist on little more than air. As far as she can tell, her son just has no interest in food. He says that if he didn't have to eat to stay alive, he wouldn't.

"I really do hate this," he says. Having polished off the chips, he has begun to fold and refold a newspaper clipping. "I am much more relaxed onstage than I am right now. But hey, let's go." He smiles. Later, he will explain that "let's go" is what his bodyguard always says when they are about to wade into some public fray. It's also a phrase Michael has been listening for since he was old enough to tie his own shoes.


Let's go, boys. With that, Joe Jackson would round up his sons Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael. "Let's go" has rumbled from the brothers' preshow huddle for more than three-quarters of Michael's life, first as the Jackson Five on Motown and now as the Jacksons on Epic. Michael and the Jacksons have sold over a 100 million records. Six of their two dozen Motown singles went platinum; ten others went gold. He was just eleven in 1970 when their first hit, "I Want You Back," nudged out B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," for Number One.

Michael says he knew at age five, when he sang "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" in school and laid out the house, that something special was going on. Back then, such precocity frightened his mother. But years later it soothed hearts and coffers at Epic when Off the Wall sold over 5 million in the U.S., another 2 million worldwide and one of its hit singles, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," won him a Grammy. The LP yielded four Top Ten hit singles, a record for a solo artist and a feat attained only by Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and by the combined efforts on the Grease and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks.

If a jittery record industry dared wager, the smart money would be on Michael Jackson. Recent months have found him at work on no fewer than three projects: his own recently released Thriller; Paul McCartney's work-in-progress, which will contain two Jackson-McCartney collaborations, "Say, Say, Say" and "The Man"; and the narration and one song for the storybook E.T. album on MCA for director Steven Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones. In his spare time, he wrote and produced Diana Ross' single "Muscles." This is indeed a young man in a hurry. Already he is looking past the album he is scheduled to make with the Jacksons this winter. There is a chance of a spring tour. And then there are the movies. Since his role as the scarecrow in The Wiz his bedroom has been hip-deep in scripts.
At twenty-four, Michael Jackson has one foot planted firmly on either side of the Eighties. His childhood hits are golden oldies, and his boyhood idols have become his peers. Michael was just ten when he moved into Diana Ross' Hollywood home. Now he produces her. He was five when the Beatles crossed over; now he and McCartney wrangle over the same girl on Michael's single "The Girl Is Mine." His showbiz friends span generations as well. He hangs out with the likes of such other kid stars as Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol, and ex-kid star Stevie Wonder. He gossips long distance with-Adam Ant and Liza Minnelli, and has heart-to-hearts with octogenarian Fred Astaire. When he visited the set of On Golden Pond. Henry Fonda baited fishhooks for him. Jane Fonda is helping him learn acting. Pen pal Katharine Hepburn broke a lifelong habit of avoiding rock by attending a 1981 Jacksons concert at Madison Square Garden.

Even E.T would be attracted to such a gentle spirit, according to Steven Spielberg, who says he told Michael, "If E.T. didn't come to Elliott, he would have come to your house." Spielberg also says he thought of no one else to narrate the saga of his timorous alien. "Michael is one of the last living innocents who is in complete control of his life. I've never seen anybody like Michael. He's an emotional star child."


Cartoons are flashing silently across the giant screen that glows in the darkened den. Michael mentions that he loves cartoons. In fact, he loves all things "magic." This definition is wide enough to include everything from Bambi to James Brown.

"He's so magic," Michael says of Brown, admitting that he patterned his own quicksilver choreography on the Godfather's classic bag of stage moves. "I'd be in the wings when I was like six or seven. I'd sit there and watch him."

Michael's kindergarten was the basement of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was too shy to actually approach the performers the Jackson Five opened for — everyone from Jackie Wilson to Gladys Knight, the Temptations and Etta James. But he says he had to know everything they did — how James Brown could do a slide, a spin and a split and still make it back before the mike hit the floor. How the mike itself disappeared through the Apollo stage floor. He crept downstairs, along passageways and walls and hid there, peering from behind the dusty flanks of old vaudeville sets while musicians tuned, smoked, played cards and divvied barbecue. Climbing back to the wings, he stood in the protective folds of the musty maroon curtain, watching his favorite acts, committing every double dip and every bump, snap, whip-it-back mike toss to his inventory of night moves. Recently, for a refresher course, Michael went to see James Brown perform at an L.A. club. "He's the most electrifying. He can take an audience anywhere he wants to. The audience just went bananas. He went wild?and at his age. He gets so out of himself."

Getting out of oneself is a recurrent theme in Michael's life, whether the subject is dancing, singing or acting. As a Jehovah's Witness, Michael believes in an impending holocaust, which will be followed by the second coming of Christ. Religion is a large part of his life, requiring intense Bible study and thrice-weekly meetings at a nearby Kingdom Hall. He has never touched drugs and rarely goes near alcohol. Still, despite the prophesied Armageddon, the spirit is not so dour as to rule out frequent hops on the fantasy shuttle.

"I'm a collector of cartoons," he says. "All the Disney stuff, Bugs Bunny, the old MGM ones. I've only met one person who has a bigger collection than I do, and I was surprised — Paul McCartney. He's a cartoon fanatic. Whenever I go to his house, we watch cartoons. When we came here to work on my album, we rented all these cartoons from the studio, Dumbo and some other stuff. It's real escapism. It's like everything's all right. It's like the world is happening now in a faraway city. Everything's fine.

"The first time I saw E.T., I melted through the whole thing," he says. "The second time, I cried like crazy. And then, in doing the narration, I felt like I was there with them, like behind a tree or something, watching everything that happened."

So great was Michael's emotional involvement that Steven Spielberg found his narrator crying in the darkened studio when he got to the part where E.T. is dying. Finally, Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones decided to run with it and let Michael's voice break. Fighting those feelings would be counterproductive — something Jones had already learned while producing Off the Wall.

"I had a song I'd been saving for Michael called "She's Out of My Life," he remembers. "Michael heard it, and it clicked. But when he sang it, he would cry. Every time we did it, I'd look up at the end and Michael would be crying. I said, 'We'll come back in two weeks and do it again, and maybe it won't tear you up so much. 'Came back and he started to get teary. So we left it in."

This tug of war between the controlled professional and the vulnerable, private Michael surfaces in the lyrics he has written for himself. In "Bless His Soul," a song on the Jacksons' Destiny LP that Michael says is definitely about him, he sings:


Sometimes I cry cause I'm confused

Is this a fact of being used?

There is no life for me at all

Cause I give myself at beck and call.

Two of the Jackson-written cuts on Thriller strengthen that defensive stance. "They eat off you, you're a vegetable," he shouts on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." "Beat It," a tense, tough dance cut, flirts with paranoia: "You have to show them that you're really not scared/You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare/They'll kick you, then they beat you/Then they'll tell you it's fair."

Yes, he says, he feels used, declining specifics, saying only that in his profession, "They demand that, and they want you to do this. They think that they own you, they think they made you. If you don't have faith, you go crazy. Like not doing interviews. If I talk, I say what's on my mind, and it can seem strange to other peoples' ears. I'm the kind of person who will tell it all, even though it's a secret. And I know that things should be kept private."

For his own protection, Michael has rigged himself a set of emotional floodgates, created situations where it's okay to let it all out. "Some circumstances require me to be real quiet," he says. "But I dance every Sunday." On that day, he also fasts.

This, his mother confirms, is a weekly ritual that leaves her son laid out, sweating, laughing and crying. It is also a ritual very similar to Michael's performances. Indeed, the weight of the Jacksons' stage show rests heavily on his narrow, sequined shoulders. There is nothing tentative about his solo turns. He can tuck his long, thin frame into a figure skater's spin without benefit of ice or skates. Aided by the burn and flash of silvery body suits, he seems to change molecular structure at will, all robot angles one second and rippling curves the next. So sure is the body that his eyes are often closed, his face turned upward to some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps and squeals. He has been known to leap offstage and climb up into the rigging.

At home, in his room, he dances until he falls down. Michael says the Sunday dance sessions are also an effective way to quiet his stage addiction when he is not touring. Sometimes in these off periods, another performer will call him up from the audience. And in the long, long trip from his seat to the stage, the two Michaels duke it out.

"I sit there and say, 'Please don't call me up, I am too shy,'" Jackson says. "But once I get up there, I take control of myself. Being onstage is magic. There's nothing like it. You feel the energy of everybody who's out there. You feel it all over your body. When the lights hit you, it's all over, I swear it is."

He is smiling now, sitting upright, trying to explain weightlessness to the earth-bound.

"When it's time to go off, I don't want to. I could stay up there forever. It's the same thing with making a movie. What's wonderful about a film is that you can become another person. I love to forget. And lots of times, you totally forget. It's like automatic pilot. I mean — whew."

During shooting for The Wiz, he became so attached to his Scarecrow character, the crew literally had to wrench him from the set and out of his costume. He was in Oz, and wasn't keen on leaving it for another hotel room.

"That's what I loved about doing E.T. I was actually there. The next day, I missed him a lot. I wanted to go back to that spot I was at yesterday in the forest. I wanted to be there."

Alas, he is still at the dining-room table in his condo. But despite the visible strain, he's holding steady. And he brightens at a question about his animals. He says he talks to his menagerie every day."I have two fawns. Mr. Tibbs looks like a ram; he's got the horns. I've got a beautiful llama. His name is Louie." He's also into exotic birds like macaws, cockatoos and a giant rhea.

"Stay right there," he says, "and I'll show you something." He takes the stairs to his bedroom two at a time. Though I know we are the only people in the apartment, I hear him talking.

"Aw, were you asleep? I'm sorry...."

Seconds later, an eight-foot boa constrictor is deposited on the dining-room table. He is moving in my direction at an alarming rate.

"This is Muscles. And I have trained him to eat interviewers."

Muscles, having made it to the tape recorder and flicked his tongue disdainfully, continues on toward the nearest source of warm blood. Michael thoughtfully picks up the reptile as its snub nose butts my wrist. Really, he insists, Muscles is quite sweet. It's all nonsense, this stuff about snakes eating people. Besides, Muscles isn't even hungry; he enjoyed his weekly live rat a couple of days ago. If anything, the stranger's presence has probably made Muscles a trifle nervous himself. Coiled around his owner's torso, his tensile strength has made Michael's forearm a vivid bas-relief of straining blood vessels. To demonstrate the snake's sense of balance, Michael sets him down on a three-inch wide banister, where he will remain, motionless, for the next hour or so.

"Snakes are very misunderstood," he says. Snakes, I suggest, may be the oldest victims of bad press. Michael whacks the table and laughs.

"Bad press. Ain't it so, Muscles?

The snake lifts its head momentarily, then settles back on the banister. All three of us are a bit more relaxed.

"Know what I also love?" Michael volunteers. "Manikins."

Yes, he means the kind you see wearing mink bikinis in Beverly Hills store windows. When his new house is finished, he says he'll have a room with no furniture, just a desk and a bunch of store dummies.

"I guess I want to bring them to life. I like to imagine talking to them. You know what I think it is? Yeah, I think I'll say it. I think I'm accompanying myself with friends I never had. I probably have two friends. And I just got them. Being an entertainer, you just can't tell who is your friend. And they see you so differently. A star instead of a next-door neighbor."

He pauses, staring down at the living-room statues.
"That's what it is. I surround myself with people I want to be my friends. And I can do that with manikins. I'll talk to them."

All of this is not to say that Michael is friendless. On the contrary, people are clamoring to be his friend.That's just the trouble: with such staggering numbers knocking at the gate, it becomes necessary to sort and categorize. Michael never had a school chum. Or a playmate. Or a steady girlfriend. The two mystery friends he mentioned are his first civilians. As for the rest....

"I know people in show business."

Foremost is Diana Ross, with whom he shares his "deepest, darkest secrets" and problems. But even when they are alone together, their world is circumscribed. And there's Quincy Jones, "who I think is wonderful. But to get out of the realm of show business, to become like everybody else...."

To forget. To get out of the performing self.

"Me and Liza, say. Now, I would consider her a great friend, but a show-business friend. And we're sitting there talking about this movie, and she'll tell me all about Judy Garland. And then she'll go, 'Show me that stuff you did at rehearsal.'" He feints a dance move. "And I'll go, 'Show me yours.' We're totally into each other's performance."

This Michael does not find odd, or unacceptable. It's when celebrity makes every gesture a performance that he runs for cover. Some stars simply make up their minds to get on with things, no matter what. Diana Ross marched bravely into a Manhattan shoe store with her three daughters and had them fitted for running shoes, despite the crowd of 200 that convened on the sidewalk. Michael, who's been a boy in a bubble since the age of reason, would find that intolerable. He will go to only one L.A. restaurant, a health-food place where the owners know him. As for shopping, Michael avoids it by having a secretary or aide pick out clothes for him. "You don't get peace in a shop. If they don't know your name, they know your voice. And you can't hide."

He won't say love stinks. But sometimes it smarts.

"Being mobbed hurts. You feel like you're spaghetti among thousands of hands. They're just ripping you and pulling your hair. And you feel that any moment you're gonna just break."

Thus, Michael must travel with the veiled secrecy of a pasha's prized daughter. Any tourism is attempted from behind shades, tinted limo glass and a bodyguard's somber serge. Even in a hotel room, he hears females squeal and scurry like so many mice in the walls.

"Girls in the lobby, coming up the stairway. You hear guards getting them out of elevators. But you stay in your room and write a song. And when you get tired of that, you talk to yourself. Then let it all out onstage. That's what it's like."

No argument — it ain't natural. But about those store dummies? Won't it be just as eerie to wake up in the middle of the night to all those polystyrene grins?

"Oh, I'll give them names. Like the statues you see down there." He motions to the living-room crowd. "They've got names. I feel as if I know them. I'll go down there and talk to them."

A restless rhythm is jiggling his foot, and the newspaper clipping has long been destroyed. Michael is apologetic, explaining that he can sit still for just so long. On an impulse, he decides to drive us to the house under construction. Though his parents forced him to learn two years ago, Michael rarely drives. When he does, he refuses to travel freeways, taking hour-long detours to avoid them. He has learned the way to only a few "safe" zones — his brothers' homes, the health-food restaurant and the Kingdom Hall.

First, Muscles must be put away. "He's real sweet," Michael says as he unwinds the serpent from the banister. "I'd like you to wrap him around you before you go."

This is not meant as a prank, and Michael will not force the issue. But fear of interviews can be just as deep-rooted as fear of snakes, and in consenting to talk, Michael was told the same thing he's telling me now: Trust me. It won't hurt you.

We compromise. Muscles cakewalks across an ankle. His tongue is dry. It just tickles. Block out the primal dread, and it could be a kitten whisker. "You truly believe," says Michael, "with the power of reason, that this animal won't harm you now, right? But there's this fear, built in by the world, by what people say, that makes you shy away like that."

Having politely made their point, Michael and Muscles disappear upstairs.


"Hi, Michael."

A few such girlish messages are scratched into the paint of a somber security sign on the steel driveway gate at his house. There is a fence, dogs and guards, but girls still will loiter outside, in cars and in bushes.

As Michael conducts the tour of the two-story Tudor-style house, it's clear that the room he will sleep in is almost monkish compared to those he has had designed for his pleasures and the ones reserved for his sisters Janet and LaToya, who pored over every detail of their wallpapered suites. "Girls are fussy," he explains, stepping over a power saw in his bedroom. "I just don't care. I wanted room to dance and have my books."

The rooms Michael inspects most carefully are those marked for recreation. "I'm putting all this stuff in," he says, "so I will never have to leave and go out there." The "stuff" includes a screening room with two professional projectors and a giant speaker. And then an exercise room, one for videogames and another with a giant-screen video system. In addition, there is a huge chamber off the backyard patio, which has been designated the Pirate Room. It will be not so much decorated as populated. More dummies. But this set will talk back. Michael has been consulting with a Disney technician, the very man who designed the Audio-Animatronics figures for the Disneyland ride Pirates of the Caribbean. If all goes well, he will install several scowling, scabbard-waving buccaneers, wenches and sea dogs right here. "There won't be any rides," Michael says. "But there will be a pirate shootout, cannons and guns. They'll just scream at one another and I'll have the lights, sounds, everything."
Pirates is one of his favorite rides in the Magic Kingdom. And Disneyland is one of the few public spots even he cannot stay away from. Sometimes Michael stops at a magic booth and buys one of those Groucho Masks — fake glasses with nose attached. But it's better when the staff leads him through back doors and tunnels. It's murder to cross the Court of Sleeping Beauty's Castle in daylight. "I tried to go just last night, but it was closed," he says with some disbelief. "So was Knott's Berry Farm."

If you live in the funhouse, you usually don't have to worry about such things. Michael has sung it himself:

Life ain't so bad at all, if you live it off the wall.


When we arrive back at the condo, Michael finds that a test pressing of "The Girl Is Mine" has been delivered. This is business. He must check it before release, he explains, as he heads for a listen on the stereo in the den. Before the record is finished, he is punching at phone buttons. In between calls to accountants and managers, he says that he makes all his own decisions, right down to the last sequin on his stage suits — the only clothes he cares about. He says he can be a merciless interviewer when it comes to choosing management, musicians and concert promoters. He assesses their performances with the rigor of an investigative reporter, questioning his brothers, fellow artists and even reporters for observations. Though he truly believes his talent comes from God, he is acutely aware of its value on the open market. He is never pushy or overbearing, but he does appreciate respect. Do not ask him, for instance, how long he has been with a particular show-business firm. "Ask me," he corrects, "how long they've been with me."

Those who have worked with him do not doubt his capability. Even those to whom he is a star child. "He's in full control," says Spielberg. "Sometimes he appears to other people to be sort of wavering on the fringes of twilight, but there is great conscious forethought behind everything he does. He's very smart about his career and the choices he makes. I think he is definitely a man of two personalities."

When Michael was looking for a producer for his solo album, Quincy Jones was happy to hear from him. Jones knew Michael was in a special class. A few things tipped him off, he says. First there was the Academy Awards ceremony at which Jones watched twelve-year-old Michael deliver a trash-flick love song to a fascist rodent ("Ben") with astounding poise. Years later, while working with him on The Wiz soundtrack, Jones says, "I saw another side. Watching him in the context of being an actor, I saw a lot of things about him as a singer that rang a lot of bells. I saw a depth that was never apparent, and a commitment. I saw that Michael was growing up."

In the studio, Jones found that his professionalism had matured. In fact, Michael's nose for things is so by-your-leave funky that Jones started calling him Smelly. Fortunately, when corporate rumblings feared the partnership too unlikely to work, Smelly hung tough and cocked an ear inward to his own special rhythms. Indeed, Off the Wall's most memorable cuts are the Jackson-penned dance tunes. "Working Day and Night" with all its breathy asides and deft punctuation, could only have been written by a dancer. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," the album's biggest-selling single, bops along with that same appealing give-and-go between restraint and abandon. The song begins with Michael talking in a low mumble over a taut, single-string bass bomp:

"You know, I was wonderin'... you know the force, it's got a lot of power, make me feel like a... make me feel like...."

Ooooooh. Fraidy cat breaks into disco monster, with onrushing strings and a sexy, cathartic squeal. The introduction is ten seconds of perfect pop tension. Dance boogie is the welcome release. The arrangement — high, gusting strings and vocals over a thudding, in-the-pocket rhythm — is Michael's signature. Smelly, the funky sprite.

It works. Such a creature as Michael is the perfect pop hybrid for the Eighties. The fanzine set is not scared off by raunchy lyrics and chest hair. But the R-rated uptown dance crowd can bump and slide right along the greasy tracks. Thriller is eclectic enough to include African chants and some ripping macho-rock guitar work by Eddie Van Halen. It is now being called pop-soul by those into marketing categories. Michael says he doesn't care what anybody wants to call it. Just how it all came about is still a mystery to him? as is the creative process itself.

"I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper,'" he says. "The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face. And you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry, I just didn't write this. It's there already.' That's why I hate to take credit for the songs I've written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it's been done and I'm just a courier bringing it into the world. I really believe that. I love what I do. I'm happy at what I do. It's escapism."

Again, that word. But Michael is right. There is no better definition for good, well-meaning, American pop. Few understand this better than Diana Ross, that Tamla teen turned latter-day pop diva. Her closeness to Michael began when she met the Jacksons.

"No, I didn't discover them," she says, countering the myth. Motown head Berry Gordy had already found them; she simply introduced them on her 1971 television special. "There was an identification between Michael and I," she says. "I was older, he kind of idolized me, and he wanted to sing like me."
She has been pleased to watch Michael become his own person. Still, she wishes he would step out even more. She says she had to be firm and force him to stay in his role as producer on "Muscles."He wanted them to do it jointly. She insisted he go it alone.

"He spends a lot of time, too much time, by himself. I try to get him out. I rented a boat and took my children and Michael on a cruise. Michael has a lot of people around him, but he's very afraid. I don't know why. I think it came from the early days."

Michael's show-business friends, many of them women not thought of as especially motherly, do go to great lengths to push and prod him into the world, and to keep him comfortable. When he's in Manhattan, Ross urges him to go to the theater and the clubs, and counteroffers with quiet weekends at her Connecticut home. In notes and phone calls, Katharine Hepburn has been encouraging about his acting.

Michael has recorded much of this counsel in notebooks and on tape. Visiting Jane Fonda — whom he's known since they met at a Hollywood party a few years ago — on the New Hampshire set of On Golden Pond proved to be an intensive crash course. In a mirror version of his scenes with the stepgrandson in the movie, Henry Fonda took his daughter's rock-star friend out on the lake and showed him how to fish. They sat on a jetty for hours, talking trout and theater. The night Fonda died, Michael spent the evening with Fonda's widow, Shirlee, and his children, Jane and Peter. He says they sat around, laughing and crying and watching the news reports. The ease with which Michael was welcomed into her family did not surprise Jane Fonda. Michael and her father got on naturally, she says, because they were so much alike.

"Dad was also painfully self-conscious and shy in life," she says, "and he really only felt comfortable when he was behind the mask of a character. He could liberate himself when he was being someone else. That's a lot like Michael.

"In some ways," she continues, "Michael reminds me of the walking wounded. He's an extremely fragile person. I think that just getting on with life, making contact with people, is hard enough, much less to be worried about whither goest the world.

"I remember driving with him one day, and I said,'God, Michael, I wish I could find a movie I could produce for you.' And suddenly I knew. I said, 'I know what you've got to do. It's Peter Pan.' Tears welled up in his eyes and he said, 'Why did you say that?' with this ferocity. I said, 'I realize you're Peter Pan.' And he started to cry and said, 'You know, all over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I've read everything that [author J.M.] Barrie wrote. I totally identify with Peter Pan, the lost boy of never-never land.'"

Hearing that Francis Coppola may be doing a film version, Fonda sent word to him that he must talk to Michael Jackson. "Oh, I can see him," she says, "leading lost children into a world of fantasy and magic."

In the book, that fantasy world lies "second to the right star, then straight on til morning" — no less strange a route, Fonda notes, than Michael's own journey from Indiana.

"From Gary," she says,"straight on to Barrie."


All Children, Except one, grow up.

This is the first line of Michael's favorite book, and if you ask Katherine Jackson if she finds this similar to what happened in her own brood of nine, she will laugh and say, oh yes, her fifth son is the one.

Five children — Maureen, Tito, Jackie, Jermaine and Marlon — are married and have families. LaToya is a very independent young woman. At thirteen, Janet was starring as a self-possessed ghetto twerp on the sitcom Good Times. Now she has a hit single of her own, "Young Love," and appears in the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. Youngest brother Randy is already living on his own at twenty. Michael is sure he'd just die if he tried that.

"LaToya once told me she thinks that I overprotected them all," Mrs. Jackson says. "But under the circumstances, I truly don't think so."

Marriage had brought her from east Indiana, just outside Chicago, to the chilly industrial town of Gary. A growing family had forced Joe Jackson to disband the Falcons, and R&B group he had formed with his two brothers. Playing Chuck Berry and Fats Domino covers in local clubs was as far as they got. The guitar went into the closet, and Jackson went to the steel mills as a crane operator. The family budget didn't have a lot of slack for toys, but there was an old saxophone, a tambourine, some bongos and a homey patchwork of songs from Katherine's childhood. What she could remember, she taught her children. "It was just plain stuff," she says, "like 'Cotton Fields' and 'You Are My Sunshine.'"

The breadth of the harmony grew with the family. Jackie, Jermaine and Tito started singing together, with Tito on guitar and Jermaine on bass. Then Marlon climbed aboard. Baby Michael, who liked to flail on the bongos, surprised his mother one day when she heard him imitating Jermaine's lead vocals in his clear toddler's falsetto. "I think we have another lead singer," she told her husband. The brothers agreed.

"He was so energetic that at five years old, he was like a leader," says Jackie, at thirty-one the oldest brother. "We saw that. So we said, 'Hey, Michael, you be the lead guy.' The audience ate it up. He was into those James Brown things at the time, you know. The speed was the thing. He would see somebody do something, and he could do it right away."

"It was sort of frightening," his mother says. "He was so young. He didn't go out and play much. So if you want me to tell you the truth, I don't know where he got it. He just knew."
By the age of seven, Michael was a dance monster, working out the choreography for the whole group. Local gigs were giving way to opening slots at larger halls in distant cities. Joe Jackson spent weekends and evenings as chauffeur, road manager, agent and coach. He taught Michael how to work a stage and handle a mike. Michael does not remember his father making it fun; the boys always knew it was work. Rules were strict. Grades had to be kept up, even with five shows a night, or the offender would be yanked off the road. When Motown called, Joe took the boys to Detroit, and Katherine stayed in Gary with the rest of the children. She says she never really worried about her children until she went to a show and heard the screams from the audience. "Every time I'd go to a concert I'd worry, because sometimes the girls would get onstage and I'd have to watch them tearing at Michael. He was so small, and they were so big."

There have been some serious incidents, too, one so chilling and bizarre it landed a young woman in a mental institution. So Katherine Jackson has made it her business to talk to some of these wild, persistent girls. What is so very crazy, she says, is that they do it in the name of love. "There are so many," she says. "You have no idea what's really on their minds. That's why it's going to be so hard for my son to get a wife."

Michael is aware of, if not resigned to, the impossibility of that task. He might like to have children in the future, but says he would probably adopt them. For now, he has only to walk into one of his brothers' homes and he's instantly covered with nephews. He says he gets along with children better than adults, anyhow: "They don't wear masks."

Kids and animals can nose their way into Michael's most private reserves. It's the showbiz spook show that makes his own growing up so public and hard. He has borne, with patience and good humor, the standard rumors of sexchange operations and paternity accusations from women he has never seen. But clearly they have affected him. "Billie Jean," on Thriller, is a vehement denial of paternity ("the kid is not my son"). In reality there has been no special one. Michael says that he is not in a hurry to jump into any romantic liaison.

"It's like what I told you about finding friends," he says. "With that, it's even harder. With so many girls around, how am I ever gonna know?"


"Just here to see a friend."

Michael is politely trying to sidestep an inquiring young woman decked out with the latest video equipment. She blocks the corridor leading to the warren of dressing rooms beneath the L.A. Forum.

"Can I tell my viewers that Michael Jackson is a Queen fan?"

"I'm a Freddie Mercury fan," he says, slipping past her into a long room crowded with Queen band members, wives, roadies and friends. A burly man with the look of a linebacker is putting lead singer Freddie Mercury through a set of stretching exercises that will propel his road-weary muscles through the final show of the group's recent U.S. tour. The band is merry. Michael is shy, standing quietly at the door until Freddie spots him and leaps up to gather him in a hug.

Freddie invited Michael. He has been calling all week, mainly about the possibility of their working together. They've decided to try it on the Jacksons' upcoming album. Though they are hardly alike — Freddie celebrated a recent birthday by hanging naked from a chandelier — the two have been friendly since Michael listened to the material Queen had recorded for The Game and insisted that the single had to be "Another One-Cites the Dust."

"Now, he listens to me, right Freddie?"

"Righto, little brother."

The linebacker beckons. Freddie waves his cigarette at the platters of fruit, fowl and candy. "You and your friends make yourselves comfortable."

Our escort, a sweet-faced, hamfisted bodyguard, is consulting with security about seat locations. There had been girls lurking outside the condo when Michael sprinted to the limousine, girls peering through the tinted glass as the door locks clicked shut. This was all very puzzling to Michael's guest, who was waiting in the car.

He is a real friend, one of the civilians, so normal as to pass unseen by the jaded eyes of celebrity watchers. He has never been to a rock concert, nor has he ever seen Michael perform. He says he hopes to, but mainly, they just hang out together. Sometimes his younger brother even tags along. Most of the time they just talk "just regular old stuff," says the friend. For Michael, it is another kind of magic.

At the moment, though, it's show business as usual. Gossip, to be specific. Michael is questioning a dancer he knows about the recent crises of a fallen superstar. Michael wants to know what the problem is. The dancer mimes his answer, laying a finger alongside his nose. Michael nods, and translates for his friend: "Drugs. Cocaine."

Michael admits that he seeks out such gossip, and listens again and again as the famous blurt out their need for escape. "Escapism," he says. "I totally understand."

But addictions are another thing. "I always want to know what makes good performers fall to pieces," he says. "I always try to find out. Because I just can't believe it's the same things that get them time and time again." So far, his own addictions?the stage, dancing, cartoons — have been free of toxins.
Something's working on Michael now, but it is nothing chemical. He's buzzing like a bumblebee trapped in a jelly jar. It's the room we're in, he explains. So many times, he's stretched and bounced and whipped up on his vocal chords right here, got crazy in here, pumping up, shivering like some flighty race horse as he wriggled into his sequined suit.

"I can't stand this," lie fairly yells. "I cannot sit still."

Just before he must be held down for his own good. Randy Jackson rockets into the room, containing his brother in a bear hug, helping him dissipate some of the energy with a short bout of wrestling. This is not the same creature who tried to hide behind a potato chip.

Now Michael is boxing with the bodyguard, asking every minute for the time until the man mercifully claps a big hand on the shoulder of his charge and says it: "Let's go."

Mercury and company have already begun moving down the narrow hall, and before anyone can catch him. Michael is drawn into their wake, riding on the low roar of the crowd outside, leaping up to catch a glimpse of Freddie, who is raising a fist and about to take the stairs to the stage.

"Ooooh, Freddie is pumped," says Michael. "I envy him now. You don't know how much."

The last of the band makes the stairs, and the black stage curtain closes. Michael turns and lets himself be led into the darkness of the arena.

[From Issue 389 — February 17, 1983]

Michael Jackson’s Last Days:
The Comeback That Never Was

7/22/09

In the days just before his death, Michael Jackson was working harder than he ever had in hopes of staging “the greatest show on Earth” according to our latest cover story.

Claire Hoffman retraced the pop icon’s final moments for “The Last Days of Michael Jackson” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and found that Jackson was well aware of how the public came to perceive him in recent years and that he had fully dedicated himself to a comeback tour that he hoped would erase that perception.

“He wanted people to see his work and not just talk about his lifestyle,” AEG CEO Randy Phillips tells Hoffman in her cover story.

He was also eager to finally clean up his finances and settle down in Las Vegas. “He was ready to stop living like a vagabond and settle down and earn money again,” Phillips tells Rolling Stone.

And those who were inside his final rehearsals say that the show he was prepared to mount may have actually succeeded on all fronts.

“He was so brilliant on stage,” tour director Kenny Ortega tells Hoffman. “I had goose bumps.”

“I turned to somebody and said, ‘This is amazing,’” adds Ken Ehrlich, the longtime Grammy Awards producer who sat in on rehearsals. “For so many years I have watched Chris Brown and Justin Timberlake and Usher and the Backstreet Boys and En Vogue all imitate Michael Jackson — and now here we were this many years later, and he was going to do it again. I got chills, literally. The hairs on the back of my neck were raised. Those are the moments you hope for.”

Claire Hoffman’s “The Last Days of Michael Jackson” can be found in Issue 1084, on newsstands now, and you can get the story behind her cover story in our exclusive video.
Rolling Stone