You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

  IF AMERICA’S BRAINS WENT TO HARVARD, America’s talent went to Motown – and artists graduated with a lifetime’s knowledge. ‘You’re entering the finest finishing school in the business,’ Mr Gordy told us. Our education was fast-track: every song should be a three-minute story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Music is story-telling and that linear thread makes it universal, we learned.

  The chorus must summarise the story arc – you should be able to sing it and know what the song is about (‘Billie Jean is not my lover/She’s just a girl that says that I am the one/But the kid is not my son’); the lyrical content should be catchy and commercial with a message; each song’s dynamics should keep building and, at the vamp, go through the roof.

  And then there were Mr Gordy’s tell-tale signatures. Go out with the hook so that the last thing people remember is the title. Like the final fade of ‘I Want You Back’ or ‘I’ll Be There’.

  The packaging and trappings of being an artist were an education, too. We went from a VW camper van to limousines; from carrying our own stuff to having roadies; from Joseph juggling everything to a management team and A&Rs; from shopping for second-hand clothes to a professional wardrobe. We even had lessons in etiquette, PR and how to hold ourselves in public.

  We learned ‘going on the record’: how not to put a foot wrong with the media, how to be courteous, how to answer questions in an interview, what to say, what not to say. There were a few marketing myths we rolled with because we were told to: ‘Michael, you lived with Diana Ross’; ‘Boys, remember – you were discovered by Diana Ross’; ‘Michael, we’re saying you’re eight, not 10 – makes you cuter.’

  We adopted ‘the look’: elaborate pencil sketches were presented to us on designer boards, depicting us in formation wearing different costumes, complete with big Afros; a wardrobe of Argyle tank-tops, flowery shirts, elaborately embroidered bell-bottomed pants and psychedelic waistcoats with tasselled fringes. Our look was very Sly and the Family Stone meets Mod Squad. Motown then handed us our separate marketable identities so that the pre-teen market could decide who was their favourite: Jackie was now officially the ‘athletic’ one, Tito ‘the mechanic’, Marlon ‘the dancer’, Michael ‘the super-talented baby’ and I was ‘the heart-throb’. Motown packaged me as one of music’s first teen idols, and the PR revolved around ‘Love Gift Ideas for Jermaine’ and ‘Jermaine’s Love Wishes’. Michael couldn’t stop giggling – he said it made us sound like the Seven Dwarfs. We performed under a new logo, too: ‘J5’ – lipstick red set in a yellow heart, with the bottom curls of the letter and number licking up into two bubble hearts. It would cover our stages and backdrops, and also adorn the canvas on Johnny’s drum-kit.

  The Motown machine was like something out of the Willie Wonka factory that we would see at the theatres two years later: five boys from Gary squeezed through some magic machine and coming out the other end all shiny, new and repackaged. Nothing was our choice and everything was dictated; that was just the way it was. Our sound was ‘bubble-gum soul’ – not too much soul, not too much pop – and it was plain, but catchy family entertainment, straddling decades. We didn’t really have to be marketed as anything more than we actually were: innocents, wholesome and well-behaved. Yet we found ourselves in this wonderland of Hollywood and music where we were given the best in life.

  But within everything, we were always brothers. Brotherhood stopped us feeling disoriented throughout the whole metamorphosis. Whenever we looked at each other – in motels, new homes, recording studios and on the stage – we always felt ‘home’. In our minds, we never left the confines of our bedroom in Gary.

  Within that inseparableness, Michael always knew which brother he could turn to for different things and that was how he viewed each one of us back then: Jackie – the pair of sensible shoulders, armed with the facts of life; Tito – with the technical know-how and the ability to answer Michael’s endless whys; Marlon – the playful competitor and fellow jester, always pulling Michael’s arm to show him a dance step one more time; and me – the brother who always talked songs, creativity, ‘mushy stuff’ and girls. It would be some years before I understood the extent of my positive influence on Michael. He always told me, of course, how he loved and admired me, but he said it most succinctly to someone else, the writer and family friend David Ritz. It was during a conversation they shared in the 1970s that Michael said, ‘Growing up, it was Jermaine I focused on. He’d walk me to school. I’d get his hand-me-down clothes. It was his voice that I first imitated. I loved his sound. He showed me the way.’

  Every older brother likes to hear something like that, I think.

  OUR DAY-TO-DAY MANAGER WAS Suzanne de Passe. She over-saw everything we did and played a pivotal role in keeping what Joseph had cultivated, but framing it within Motown’s vision. She, with Tony Jones and Shelly Berger, worked all hours to make our operation run like clockwork under Mr Gordy’s command. Suzanne was a tall, beautiful New Yorker with blonde hair and she had amazing skin. After Diana Ross, she was the most beautiful woman we had ever seen.

  Beauty is a whip that makes you fall into line, we discovered. Whatever Suzanne wanted us to do, we would do. She nicknamed Michael ‘Caspar Milquetoast’ (a cartoon character known for being timid) and me ‘Maine’ – two terms of endearment that stuck throughout the Jackson 5 years. Suzanne had the patience of a saint and must have felt like our babysitter as well as manager. Onstage, we were wild and energetic and knew our professional job but offstage, we were just kids, messy, wild, crazy and clowning around. There’d be tantrums and fights and silliness; we were a handful. Or, as she said, ‘You were two handfuls!’ In many ways, she was as green as we were – but that was what made the adventure so much fun. She had lots of energy and ideas, and made us feel comfortable in a world unknown to us.

  But within the whirlwind, Mr Gordy didn’t want us getting carried away. ‘As much as you have the ability to become enormous stars and make a lot of money, the most important thing is to be a good, decent human being,’ he said. He was a businessman, and signed us to make a mint, but his personal interest and emotional investment were such that he looked out for us throughout the whole process. His philosophy echoed our upbringing: stick together, work hard, be loyal.

  I suspect most of Hollywood will laugh as it reads that line today. But it was a different age and it shaped Michael’s expectations. I think he honestly expected everyone to be as kind, affable, fun and accommodating as Berry Gordy and Diana Ross. Because it wasn’t only Motown University, it was the Motown Family.

  EVERY WEEKDAY WAS A STUDIO DAY, but before the serious business of recording could begin, we had to get school out of the way. Our first focus was music, then education and we had to go through the motions of normal school days but when most kids went home to play, we set to work as recording artists. We ran out of the school gates around 3.30pm, grabbed something to eat at home and then went off to the studio for around 5.30pm, and sometimes stayed there till 10.30pm. Some people say this sounds exhausting but we were too excited to notice because we loved being ‘at work’.

  The West-Coast Motown studio, the Sound Factory, was in Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. Inside were the masterminds behind our creation: a songwriter-producer team named ‘The Corporation’, which comprised Mr Gordy, Freddie Perren, Deke Richards and ‘Fonce’ Mizell. We also worked with independents such as Hal Davis, Willie Hutch, Bob West and the Marsilino Brothers – we had a new bunch of musicians because the Funk Brothers had stayed in Detroit. This set-up meant that Tito, Johnny, Ronny and I were instrumentally redundant during studio sessions, but it was like Joseph said: we had to pay even closer attention to what the in-house musicians were doing because we’d need to repeat everything on tour.

  Usually, the first time we’d hear a song was when we walked into the studio. We’d sometimes record two new songs, which had been instrumentally fine-tuned for us to lay down our vocals. We worked hard on improving our song presentation,
but there was nothing we couldn’t do because Michael had an incredible range in his voice. It was part Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson, with the heights of Diana Ross and the accents of James Brown, all mixed into one to become the beginnings of his own unmistakable sound. As ever, Michael emulated his idols and then created his own style. The only thing out of reach for him was the non-adjustable microphone hanging from the ceiling. He had to stand on an apple box before we could be cheek-to-cheek, Afro-to-Afro around the mic, doing the backgrounds.

  Hal Davis was the one producer who always wanted us to huddle closer and he’d sit in his chair, behind the glass, raising his arms into an arch above his head, like a ballerina, mouthing, ‘Get closer, get closer.’ Seeing this thick-set producer with big arms strike what we saw as a ballerina pose always made us laugh and Hal had the least patience. He’d push record, we’d start singing, Hal would arc his arms … and Michael would be chuckling. ‘Come on, guys! Concentrate! We’ve got a lot of work to do,’ said Hal. But the more serious he got, the more Michael laughed. And once he got the giggles, he couldn’t stop, and once he couldn’t stop, it became infectious. ‘Come on, guys – you’ve got to take this seriously!’

  Previously, there hadn’t been much laughter in rehearsals. I guess we were letting it all out after holding it back while we were working under Joseph. But no one could seriously complain about our work ethic: we always stepped up and were eager to learn from a team who knew how to write and arrange a hit. More importantly, it knew what a hit felt like. It was all about the feeeeeling – just as Joseph first taught us. Fans of Michael would hear this echoed in future interviews: ‘I’m feeling the music … It’s all about the spirit … I’m feeling it in my heart.’

  The best feeling we had was when we cut our first original Jackson 5 song: ‘I Want You Back’. It was originally titled ‘I Want To Be Free’ and written for Gladys Knight by Freddie Perren, who had joined Motown as a producer after being with Jerry Butler’s band. In fact, there’s a certain serendipity to this song’s back-story because Freddie played with Jerry at the Regal one night and we opened for him. Now we were recording our first song together. We were convinced we had done a great job when we first listened back to that recording, but most of all we were excited because it was the birthing moment of our own sound, not a cover. It was something for us to own, not borrow – and we loved its beat.

  But when Mr Gordy heard it, he wasn’t impressed. ‘Sorry, not good enough … I’m not feeling it … Let’s start over,’ he said. Looking back, I can’t say who had more of an exacting standard: Joseph or Mr Gordy. But we were used to repetition so there were no groans.

  For Michael, it was his first real lesson in dissecting and understanding a song’s anatomy. Mr Gordy would hear something, find everything wrong with it and strip it away until the song was wearing nothing but its drumbeat. ‘Less is more … less is more,’ he said, tinkering with the lyric sheet, scribbling his changes with a pen. If he felt the drums needed something extra, he added it; if the bass was too busy or not busy enough, he changed it; if the keyboards needed less impact, he softened them; if the strings wailed too much, he’d pare them down. He put a song under a microscope and peeled away every element. He listened to its playback and instantly knew where the kinks were and what note needed fixing.

  And his painstaking attention to detail was worthwhile because when we heard the finished product of ‘I Want You Back’, it sounded incredible; the difference between a song sounding ‘sensational’ or like it contained everything but the kitchen sink. ‘Less is more, boys … less is more.’ He winked.

  Musicians who would work with Michael in the future would see this stringent perfectionism mirrored in his song production, too. ‘I’ll make musicians do something several hundred to a thousand times till it is what I want it to be,’ he once said. As taught at Motown.

  Everyone who ever came into Michael’s life during his musical journey was there to hone and enhance what was innate within him. When you have worked with the greatest writers and musicians of all time, the acquired knowledge enables your ear to listen to any song from anyone else, pick it apart and know what is wrong or missing, and your soul can’t rest until the feeling hits home. Mr Gordy was the first to teach us that music is a mosaic and every single piece matters. That is why, at the end of all my future solo albums, I wrote on the sleeve: ‘Thank you, Mr Gordy – you’ve taught me well.’

  WE GAVE ‘I WANT YOU BACK’ its first run out before a select, invited crowd at the Daisy Disco nightclub in Beverly Hills. It was some PR night and we were introduced by ‘the woman who discovered us’, Diana Ross. Days later, we opened for her and the Supremes at LA’s main venue, the Inglewood Forum, home of the LA Lakers. We were being teased gradually into the outside world, but the Los Angeles Times seemed indifferent to our inclusion on the bill with the Eddie Hawkins Singers and young soul singer Edward Starr: ‘Unfortunately, the supporting line-up was not nearly as interesting as the time they were given,’ it said. Not everyone could see the diamond in the rough at the start.

  We made our television début as musical guests at the telecast of the Miss Black America Pageant in Madison Square Garden, New York, and then we hit prime-time on ABC’s Saturday-night The Hollywood Palace Show, where guest host Diana Ross introduced us. In newspapers, there were articles with headlines like ‘JACKSON 5 – THE NEW DIANA ROSS GROUP’. In Variety magazine, the show was hyped with a full-page ad that read: ‘Pick up on Diana’s discovery … everyone will be picking up this red-hot single.’ Later, publicity photos from the show placed Diana at our centre, applying makeup to Michael’s face and lowering his microphone. Publicly, it must have seemed like we were joined at the hip to her and that was by design: she was already huge so Mr Gordy wanted to deflect some of her shine on to us. It’s like, if Michael Jordan presents a new basketball player, everyone is going to listen up and pay attention. And so it was with the whole ‘Diana Presents the Jackson 5’ vibe. That was why it became the name of our début album. She had the most juice in Motown, she liked us, we hung out at her house – and she was soon going solo. It was a perfect fit.

  Come the broadcast, we knew Mother would be watching with Randy, La Toya, Janet and whoever else could cram into our living room in Gary. She’d later tell us that she held her breath for those two minutes 44 seconds, with tears running down her face. Diana introduced us twice that night as ‘Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5’, which made Joseph frown, because we were the Jackson 5 and no one should get singled out, but the semantics were lost on us. After all, in our earlier days, club promoters had given special billing to Johnny. We had been ‘The Jackson 5 with Johnny Jackson’ for a few shows, and it said so on the front of his bass drum. So, special billing for Michael seemed no different. Besides, at the end of our song, she made amends in Joseph’s eyes when she came over to us to lead the applause: ‘YAY! The Jackson 5, ladies and gentlemen!’

  That was the night we first met the great Sammy Davis Junior. When Sammy saw what Michael could do, he referred to him as ‘the little midget’, which wasn’t usually appreciated but somehow sounded fine from the mouth of a legend. Sammy always rocked back on his feet in mock-astonishment when he saw Michael because he couldn’t believe how well he knew his movements and delivered a song. ‘This kid’s not supposed to know so much at his age!’

  Michael couldn’t watch enough of his movies and performances because Sammy was the ultimate all-round entertainer – song, dance, music, comedy, acting – as well as the first black cowboy we had followed on TV. And all that Michael could talk about was how Sammy played Vegas. ‘That’s where we need to perform – that’s where everyone performs!’ he said. ‘That’s what Sammy does and that’s what we should be doing – giving ’em a show they’ll never forget!’ This is why Michael became who he became, because of the greats we rubbed shoulders with. They were around to look up to. There were so many genuine greats back then and he took elements from that collective to mix into his
own pot and create something even greater.

  WE HAPPILY SURVIVED ANOTHER LIVE TELEVISION performance, this time on The Ed Sullivan Show. Just before air-time, we were standing alongside the host as he took several rapid draws on his cigarette. What’s that? Nerves? He caught me staring at him. ‘Do you do that each time before you go on?’ I asked.

  He threw the stub on the floor and squashed it like a fly, grinding it with his foot. ‘Sure do!’ He skipped out to start the show, all smiles.

  I remember this occasion for another image, too – Michael wearing a wide-brimmed pink hat with his blue waistcoat and brown-patterned shirt. It’s become a classic image over the years, but what people never saw was the panic behind that clashing costume choice. We had arrived at the studios and, by now, Michael had developed as great a love for hats as drummer Johnny. Headgear was now part of the look, especially for Jackie, Marlon and Michael. The problem was that someone had forgotten the hats for The Ed Sullivan Show. Poor Suzanne de Passe had to dash out and grab what she could from Greenwich Village Market – and pink for Michael was all that she could find. Michael stared at himself in the mirror – all pink, blue and brown – and said, ‘I like it!’ He never was afraid of standing out in a crowd when it came to fashion.

  FIVE BROTHERS, JOSEPH, HIS BROTHER LAWRENCE and Jack Richardson formed a welcome party at Los Angeles airport for Mother, La Toya, Randy and Janet. It had been almost three months since we’d seen them. When Mother came around the corner at Arrivals, it was like she had walked in the door with a pocketful of hot Spanish peanuts. We smothered her. We couldn’t wait to show her our new home: a three-storey, detached house with a front path that zigzagged its way to the front door, about 15 feet higher than the road. Below us was Sunset Boulevard. Behind us were different homes, stacked around the hills. But the main thing was that it was 10 times the size of 2300 Jackson Street.