Following are excerpts from Michael Jackson (a Life in Music) (Geoff Brown).
This book is not so much a commentary on the life of Jackson, as much as it is a history and chronological account of his music, from his early years with “The Jackson 5” to his ending years of a solo career. The book doesn’t deal with his death and all the intrigue that went on with the doctor, etc. It finishes before all of that, focusing on the musical work he had done over the course of his career.
The book is organized into five sections: 1) The Jackson 5, 2) Solo at Motown, 3) The Jacksons at Epic, 4) Michael Jackson Solo: The Epic Years, 5) The Other Brothers and Sisters.
Michael Jackson was breaking records as a big-selling pop star before he was a teenager and went on to set standards for commercial success by selling upwards of 50 million copies of one piece of work, ‘Thriller’. His other solo albums recorded as an adult have sold in the region of another 50 million and he sold millions of singles as a child star fronting The Jackson 5. He became one of the richest individuals in the world. He could have anything he wanted and do anything he wanted. He could be anything he wanted except private, a child again, or immortal- and some of those things are probably what he most wanted. He was not a poor little rich boy who inherited wealth. His fortune was generated by his talent. As a child he had no choice or control over how this talent was directed but he learned his crafts- singing, dancing, recording, writing- with a speed and thoroughness that impressed his elders.
The price exacted for these riches was well documented in a series of biographies, his personal memoir (he was too young to have written a definitive autobiography) and the biographies and autobiographies from members of his family. You might know of large families, ruled by fear of the father who have evolved to be every bit as dysfunctional as the Jacksons without the professional pressures- or the opportunities for counselling money can buy. Of course, wealth could not forever shore up a collapsing family structure.
“He [his father] can be very hard…sometimes. You don’t wanna be getting him mad. He’s strict but we never object. That’s how he wants it so we go along. He shows us the value of work and hard effort.” (M. Jackson)
It is ludicrous to expect that Michael Jackson (born August 29, 1958) should have grown up “ordinary”. His was not an ordinary childhood. His three elder siblings formed a trio in 1961, and Michael joined a few years later, his singing and dancing thrusting him to the fore of the group.
He had been fronting the group for six years when the commercial ball started rolling in 1969. He was 11, something of a veteran and fast becoming the family’s meal ticket. He, not the father, was their breadwinner. And for a short while he was central to Motown’s financial stability. Remarkably, he was one of the few child stars who was a bigger star as an adult.
Although Motown had parlayed a “child genius” little Stevie Wonder into a mature star, the burn-out rate among pop music child stars is roughly equal to that of movie child stars. In 1956. ‘Frankie Lymon &The Teenagers’ had four R&B hits in the US, two of which were Top 20 pop hits there, and ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’, which Lymon had written at the age of 13, got to No. 1 in the UK, the first of three British hits.
Addicted to heroin for much of the Sixties, he died of an overdose in 1968, a year before The Jackson 5 burst onto the scene. By these tokens, Michael’s career should have ended in the Seventies. The 5’s success in targeting a new, young audience ended up spawning a rash of imitations, notably ‘The Osmonds’.
According to some books, his father, a manipulator by fear, told Jackson he was not as good as he thought. Motown told him he was fabulous but had much to learn. When he thought he’d learned much and wanted some control, they told him he wasn’t as good as he thought. The press wrote that he was great, then not as good as he thought. Then he was fantastic, then weird, mad and much worse. He formed few lasting relationships with people of his own age outside his family because of the cocoon woven around him by family and record company, by his own shyness (another result of a cloistered upbringing), and by his dissatisfaction with his appearance, which was not helped by virulent teenage acne, teasing brothers and a taunting father,
Once the deal with The Jackson 5 had been struck, Motown took over the grooming of the act from daddy Joe. The seasoned dance and deportment professionals who had taught the established breadwinners – The Supremes, The Temptations, The Miracles, The Four Tops – were now only fine-tuning, occasionally devising new steps but mostly trying to keep each act fresh and functioning. With The Jackson 5 they had a whole new pasture to cultivate and a younger Motown staffer, Suzanne de Passe, who was more in tune with the group’s potential audience, as well as the group itself, was charged with getting the young boys up to Motown speed.
Of course, age was not the only difference. Motown was essentially built on acts that sang and danced. The Jackson 5, like a growing number of popular African-American acts, played their own instruments too. There was a grand amount of practice to be done.
By 1972, if not before, it was obvious that although in young girls’ hearts Jermaine Jackson was the 5’s pin-up and received a larger share of fan mail, Michael had by far the better voice. It was rangier, he had better control over it, the pitch was certain and he had much the greater capacity for expression. Add to this his ability to learn quickly and willingly and an appetite for work bordering on gluttony and you have a piece of clay primed for molding.
In ‘Moonwalk’, Jackson said In 1972, when he was 14, around the time of the ‘Lookin’ Through The Windows’ album, he started to question producers’ insistence that he sing a song in a certain way. He thinks, he wrote, that Gordy told producers to give him more freedom. It was at this time, also, that he
had a growing spurt and ceased to be the cheeky-looking boychild Michael, and turned into a stick-limbed teenager with a bad case of acne. This is mortifying enough when you’re just a kid on the block but for a youth who’s up on stage, center of attention in the biggest teen sensation of the decade, it verged on the emotionally crippling.
The out-going 12-year-old became a shy and embarrassed 14-year-old. But by this time, he had a solo recording career as well as the group’s hits to sustain on and offstage.
One of the greatest motivating factors that drove The Jackson 5 to leave eventually Motown was their desire, Michael’s especially, to become more involved in writing and production. It is hard to believe that the label did not see this coming. In the studio, he had the reputation of being “a sponge” soaking up information all the time. His producers, the engineers, the musicians, must have seen that the long hours he’d put in at the studio, all of the techniques he’d learned, were creating a volcano of ambition, ready to blow unless it achieved an outlet.
In ‘Moonwalk’, Michael insisted that he’d been the only brother with the guts to go head-to-head with Berry Gordy and demand an increasing level of autonomy in their career. His brother Jermaine, who stayed at Motown, told a different story. While enjoying success with ‘Let’s Get Serious’ in 1979
(the year Michael was hitting with ‘Off The Wall’), for a millisecond it looked as though there would be genuine commercial and artistic rivalry here, but it was not Michael’s desire to split the group.
“It wasn’t my decision to be solo. This is not what I wanted to do. But I had no choice…usually when you hear of somebody going someplace else at least you would sit down and have a discussion about it. The first thing I saw was all the contracts with their names on it, so they had already left. They figured by signing ahead of time, I would go ahead and sign.”
Later in the interview, after launching a vigorous defense of his then father-in-law’s label, Jermaine said, ‘To this very day I can say that Michael never wanted to leave. Because he was too young to voice a strong opinion, to say “No father, I am not going, I am very happy where I am.”
Jermaine said he felt that the group simply panicked when the hits dried up after that phenomenal start. “So when, all of a sudden, that cools off one would probably get nervous and say, well, what’s wrong?’ And you say, well, the record company’s not doing something right so maybe we oughta leave and go elsewhere.’ But everybody, they’re hot for a while and then they cool off. As big as The Beetles were, they cooled off and split up and had individual success.”
Prior to the breakup, the third group album for ‘Epic’, ‘Destiny’, established the appeal and potential of Michael Jackson’s writing. While recording it, he’d begun to store away ideas he’d prefer to work on himself rather than with his brothers. Even though he’d been increasingly unhappy, his performances on the tour promoting ‘Destiny’ cemented his widening appeal. In spite of a lack of confidence about his future, the next logical step was to re-establish the solo career that had been dormant since 1975.
He took some serious business decisions notably not renewing his management contract with his father when it expired in 1979 but making him co-manager with Freddie DeMann and Ron Weisner of Weisner-DeMann Entertainment, a firm with mainstream clout – and cast around for a producer in order to make his records feel and sound sufficiently different from the group records.
According to Jackson in his ‘Moonwalk’ memoir, he called Quincy Jones (the producer with whom he’d built a good rapport during their brief but promising collaboration in cutting ‘Ease On Down The Road’ and ‘You Can’t Win’ for The Wiz soundtrack) to ask for advice in selecting a producer. Those conversations ended with Jones accepting the role. The result of this partnership is well known. With producer Bruce Swedien, a select band of studio musicians and writers such as Rod Temperton, the team broke all sales records and established Jackson as the recording phenomenon of his generation, whose vocal tone and mannerism would be copied as profusely as were Frank Sinatra’s, Elvis Presley’s or Aretha Franklin’s.
Marking the beginning of the end, tragically, in August 1993, the roof fell in on Jackson when the singer was accused of child abuse: object, 13-year-old Jordy Schwarz Chandler. Throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, Jackson had given freely and generously to sick and underprivileged children and built up an image of one who treated all children with largesse. So this was an utterly devastating charge. He cancelled concerts and later claimed to have become dependent on painkillers to get him through the world tour. A videotaped interview revealed a narcotized Jackson looking blurry and slurring words. Most business associates continued to support him but Pepsi-Cola severed its links.
Early in the investigation, the Los Angeles police suggested that Evan Chandler, Jordy’s father, had tried and failed to get Jacksons backing for a film project, and carried out his threat to “expose” the singer as a child molester. This story ran and ran, until January 1994, in fact, when the LA police admitted they had too little evidence to charge Chandler with extortion, that the evidence against Jackson was poor (descriptions by the boy of Jackson’s genitalia did not match the photographic evidence obtained by the police) and the Chandler vs Jackson case was settled for an undisclosed sum. Innocent until proven guilty, Jackson never had his day in court to refute the charges.
By October, 2001, after many delays Michael’s first solo album of new material for six years was finally released amid of barrage of publicity, not all of it welcome. In the years between ‘History’ and ‘Invincible’ his personal life and general well-being had come under considerable scrutiny, not least because his appearance had changed dramatically from the cute little African-American boy who
fronted the Jackson 5. Michael’s hair was now straight, his nose sharply pointed and, most remarkably, his skin appeared to be getting lighter.
He had married a second time, to Debbie Rowe, a nurse who produced his two children, a boy, Prince Michael, and a girl, Paris, before they separated. A third child, Prince Michael II, was born to a surrogate mother, identity unknown.
As if all this wasn’t enough Michael’s behavior became increasingly erratic as the nineties progressed. He was rarely seen in public without a face mask and was reputed to sleep in a specially built oxygen chamber designed to prolong his life. Minders who surrounded him invariably carried umbrellas to protect him from sunlight. He lived on a ranch near Los Angeles called Neverland, named after the mythical kingdom in J. M. Barrie’s fantasy Peter Pan, where children never grow up. He had his own private zoo and theme park, complete with fairground rides. His best friend was a chimpanzee named Bubbles.
Some further quotes from Jackson:
“There are times when I wish I wasn’t so recognizable and I could just go out and have a good time. Like being able to go to Disneyland and just go on the rides.”
“Certain people were created for certain things, and I think our job is to entertain the world. I don’t see no other thing that I could be doing.”
“In a crowd I’m afraid. On stage I’m safe. I’d sleep on stage if I could. See, my whole life has been on stage and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations and running after you.”