Jackson boys treated like royalty as they revisit Gary
A pre-teen Michael was in truth a fusion of a littlester and a mature adult. He could act either in the same set of circumstances or in altogether different settings. Wrote Berry Gordy in the introductory remarks to Moonwalk, Michael Jackson’s autobiography: “I must say, though, that he [Michael] did have two personalities. Offstage, he was shy, soft-spoken, and childlike. But when he took that stage in front of his screaming fans, he turned into another personality; a master, a ‘take no prisoners’ showman. For him it was kill or be killed.” In Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness. JR Taraborrelli also offers that, “Producers were always astonished at how Michael would, in between recording sessions, play games that pre-teen children enjoy such as cards and hide-and-seek, and then step behind a microphone and belt out a song with the emotional agility and presence of an old soul who’s seen his share of heartache.”
Needless to say, on the stage, the wunderkind was simply magical. “Not since Sammy Davis Jr. had the world seen a child performer with as innate a command of himself on stage as Michael Jackson,” writes JR Taraborrelli in Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness. “Both as a singer and dancer, young Michael exuded a presence that was simply uncanny. After this youngster was heard recording Smokey Robinson’s plaintive, bluesy Who’s Loving You?, the question among Motown’s staffers was, ‘Where did he learn that kind of emotion?’ The answer is that he didn’t have to learn it, it just seemed to be there for him.”
Even in the studio, Michael’s musical maturity and sophistication, which were way beyond his years, had everybody aghast. “Equally, even with tapes of the songs sang by a session singer to give him direction on the lead melody and Deke Richards’ [producer] constant prodding to clean up his diction, Michael was pretty much left to his own devices in the studio,” JR Taraborrelli unpacks more of Michael. “When he was told to sound like a rejected suitor, no one in the studio actually expected him to do it, to understand the emotion involved in heartbreak. How could they? After all, he was eleven.”
Nor could Michael himself explain his capacity to do the unseemly. “I’ll tell you the honest-to-God truth,” he told Taraborelli, “I never knew what I was doing in the early days. I just did it. I never knew how to sing, really. I didn’t control it. It just formed itself. I don’t know where it came from … It just came. Half the time, I didn’t even know what I was singing about, but I still felt the emotion behind it … I remember being so little that they had a special apple crate for me to stand on with my name on it so I could reach the microphone. Microphones didn’t go down far enough for kids my age. So many of my childhood years went by that way, with me standing on that apple box singing my heart out while other kids were outside playing.”
Taraborrelli furnishes further dope on this state of affairs thus: “Producer Deke Richards used to have to sit Michael on top of a trash can in order for him to sing into the boom mike above him. Jermaine and Jackie would stand on either side of Michael – Marlon and Tito rarely recorded backing vocals in the early days since neither had a knack for harmony – and sheet music would be positioned in front of Michael’s face on a music stand. From the control booth, all Richards could see in the studio were Jermaine and Jackie standing on either side of two sneakers dangling at the sides of a trash can.”
BORROWING FROM THE MASTERS OF THE MUSICAL CRAFT
According to entertainment pundits, a great deal of Michael’s uniqueness had to do with his execution more than simply talent. The superbness of this was, as we have long indicated, informed by his own musical idols, not least among whom were James Brown, Fred Astaire, Jackie Wilson, and Diana Ross. He had an eagle’s eye for what worked for sure.
From Jack Wilson he picked up practical tips on onstage drama. “He learned early on that dropping dramatically to one knee, an old Wilson tactic, usually made an audience whoop and holler,” says Taraborrelli. But his foremost inspiration was James Brown. “Michael appropriated everything he could from the self-proclaimed ‘hardest-working man in show business’,” writes Taraborrelli. “For the most part, watching young Michael at work was like observing an honour student of ‘James Brown 101’. Not only did he employ Brown’s splits and the one-foot slides, he worked a microphone bold-soul style just like Brown – passionately jerking the stand around like a drunk might handle his girlfriend at the corner pool hall on a Saturday night. Michael also pilfered James Brown’s famous spin. However, back then, the spin didn’t go over nearly as well with a crowd as Michael’s version of another dance of the day that Brown popularised, the Camel Walk. When Michael strode across the floor of American Bandstand during The Jackson 5‘s first appearance on that programme, even the audience of pretty white teenagers got caught up in the frenzy of excitement.”
With regard to Diana Ross, Michael gleaned from her the secret to hold the audience obsequiously in thrall all the while. Taraborrelli: “From Diana Ross, Michael got not only a sense of style, but an appreciation of power. Diana had a quiet authority, the power of presence. He’d observed how people reacted to her when she walked into a room. She was revered. She was given deferential treatment. She had a special power. He liked that. There was one other thing Michael got from Diana: his early ooohs. Michael’s early vocal ad-libs were almost always punctuated with an oooh here or there; not a long-drawn-out oooh, but rather a stab, an exclamation mark. Diana used this effect on many of The Supremes’ recordings. Michael delighted in it and put it in his grab bag of influences. Indeed, for little Michael Jackson, every little oooh helped.”
MICHAEL ASSERTS HIMSELF
Aware that he was so preternaturally talented, Michael was the first of the sibling group to remonstrate with Bery Gordy when something bothered him. He did not consider himself indispensable, but he felt he had the liberty to speak out, unlike his brothers who practically apotheosised Berry. He particularly resented the fact that the Motown team not only produced The Jackson 5 music but shaped it rather arbitrarily.
“I remember lots of times when I felt the song should be sang one way and the producers felt it should be sang another way,” he writes in Moonwalk. “But for a long time, I was very obedient and wouldn’t say anything about it. Finally, it reached a point where I got fed up with being told exactly how to sing. This was in 1972 when I was fourteen years old, around the time of the song Lookin’ Through the Windows. They wanted me to sing a certain way, and I knew they were wrong. No matter what age you are, if you have it and you know it, then people should listen to you. I was furious with our producers and very upset. So I called Berry Gordy and complained. I said that they had always told me how to sing, and I had agreed all this time, but now they were getting too … mechanical. So he came into the studio and told them to let me do what I wanted to do. I think he told them to let me be more free or something. And after that, I started adding a lot of vocal twists that they really ended up loving. I’d do a lot of ad-libbing, like twisting words or adding some edge to them.”
Meanwhile, in barely two years after signing with Motown, The Jackson 5 had become phenomenally famous. The year 1971 was particularly significant. They toured 90 cities of the US, garnering attendances of up to 80,000. That same year, they were presented with the symbol of “Pride of Black Youth” and voted the best vocal group of the year. They also graced
the cover of every pop magazine that was worth its salt, with hordes of journalists and talk show hosts tripping over each other to feature or interview them. Michael became the youngest person ever to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, with a headline that read, “Why does this eleven-year-old [he was actually four months shy of 13] stay up past his bedtime?” An article in the magazine gushed, “Here you have the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and The Temptations and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum”. The Jackson 5 also became the archetype after which many of America’s youth wanted to pattern themselves. “Fans began to copy the fashion style of my sons,” writes Joseph Jackson in The Jacksons. “Everywhere, the youth wore bell-bottom trousers, waistcoats with a fringe, and shirts with wide sleeves. The Afro hairstyle was the ultimate fashion craze. Most other groups copied the choreography and the sound of The Jackson 5, and new family groups appeared like mushrooms after the rain.” Sensing a damn good chance to cash in on her brothers’ rocketing renown, La Toya embarked on a column in a teen magazine which was dedicated to documenting what The Jackson 5 were doing both in the context of their work and off-stage.
HEROES WELCOME FOR “KEEPERS OF THE DREAM”
In that same year (1971), The Jackson 5 agreed, effectively, to make a pilgrimage to their hometown, Gary in Indiana. The Mayor of Gary, Richard Gordon Hatcher, had invited them to perform two concerts to help boost his re-election campaign. The concerts were to be performed at Westside High School, which Jackie and Tito had attended.
The band arrived at the school in grand style, in a helicopter, with up to 2000 students awaiting them in sub-zero temperatures. Both concerts were sellouts, with 15,000 attendees apiece. “Two years ago,” writes JR Taraborrelli, “many of these same neighbourhood kids had thrown stones at the Jackson house to taunt the group as they rehearsed; now they were sharing in their success, proud to know that they’d all come from the same streets. As the spotlights revealed the Jacksons in their rainbow-hued regalia, the group’s fans could not be contained. The gym was packed to the rafters with what was probably the noisiest audience the boys had so far encountered. There were so many flashbulbs popping at once, it looked as though flocks of fireflies had come to swarm.”
There were several more highlights of the homecoming. The street on which their old homestead, 2300 Jackson Street, stood was renamed Jackson 5 Boulevard, with Hatcher himself presiding over the ceremony. A sign was placed on the lawn in front of the house and it read, “WELCOME HOME JACKSON FIVE. KEEPERS OF THE DREAM.” A theatre previously called Palace Theatre became Jackson 5 Theatre. The group was presented with individual keys to the city. “As the limo pulled away,” writes Taraborrelli, “fans hurled themselves at its tightly closed windows. Inside, the boys smiled and waved, amazed at the frenzy … The boys had returned home as heroes, symbols of hope. In his speech that day, Mayor Hatcher said he was honoured 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’. Joseph could not have been more proud of his boys. He stood at the podium and said, ‘One thing I have always told my boys is that you’re either a winner in this life or a loser, and none of my kids were ever gonna be losers. I’m proud to say that they proved me right.’”
The group’s homecoming became the theme of a 1971 TV programme titled Going Back To Indiana.
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THE 70s ROYALTY OF THE BLACK RACE: The entirety of the Jackson family grace the cover of the December 1974 edition of Ebony magazine, America’s premier black-orientated monthly. Michael is second from right. The Jackson 5 were the poster boys of the country’s most popular publications.
NEXT WEEK: OF BUBBLES AND MUSCLES
