You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

  As Mother went on her disbelieving tour of the house, we followed her everywhere. When she reached her new master bedroom with a near-panoramic view of Los Angeles, she almost cried. It was night-time so the city was bejewelled with lights. ‘That is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen,’ she said.

  We all remembered the bricks in our old backyard. ‘I told you I’d get you a bigger house, didn’t I?’ said Joseph.

  QUEENS ROAD MARKED THE BEGINNING OF our fondness for wild and exotic animals. Michael acquired some pet rats, finally earning reluctant parental approval nine years after his beating for feeding the rodent behind the fridge in Gary. And Hazel Gordy, knowing I loved reptiles, turned up on my sixteenth birthday with a wooden box housing a boa constrictor we called Rosie – coincidence, or a deliberate reminder of the stripper we met? I honestly can’t remember …

  Michael preferred the faster pace of rats. He allowed one to hang from his back, digging its claws into his shoulder-blades, then scurrying up and over his arms, neck and head. His pets soothed him. In 1972, he sang the Oscar-nominated title song for the movie Ben – a story about a lonely boy whose best friend is his pet rat, Ben: art was accidentally imitating his life because our house was soon overrun with rats. Michael – unknown to anyone – had started breeding his pets with the wild rats outside, so a cage of two or three soon became a small colony and there must have been eight or 10 of them, running through the closets, over our shoes, in our clothes. Mother was furious and told him to stop breeding them or he’d lose them all.

  That was when we started feeding them to Rosie. We figured she needed to grow, and Michael needed to control his rat population. Plus it honoured the natural food chain. ‘We’re getting ready to feed Rosie!’ Michael shouted, and a dozen footsteps pounded up the stairs to watch the great event. We opened the front lid of the aquarium and let the rat scurry from the palm of his hand, leaving us all eating our clenched fists, barely able to observe Rosie’s first banquet. ‘Poor rat,’ said Michael. From that day on, we fed the rats to her until they’d all gone.

  We didn’t tell our neighbours about the pets we kept – we didn’t wish to alarm anyone. Anyway, we had enough complaints about the noise we made in rehearsals. It became so bad that Motown had to transfer us to a new rented home north of Beverly Hills in Bowmont Drive. It was a 12-roomed, one-level house built on stilts, which meant we had to drive under it to get inside. But I liked it because the actor James Cagney was our closest neighbour. In my mind, this meant we really had arrived in Hollywood.

  OUR LIFE IN LOS ANGELES WAS soon a repetitive loop of school, studio, sleep, school, studio, sleep. We just kept on working with new songs, building material for our début album, Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. Its prospects looked good because our single releases had gone through the roof. ‘I Want You Back’ went to No. 1 not just in the R&B charts but in the Billboard Hot 100, selling two million copies in six weeks in America, then catching fire in the UK, the rest of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Israel. In February 1970, we followed up with ‘ABC’ which also went No. 1, selling two million copies in three weeks. Three months later ‘The Love You Save’ sealed our hat-trick of No. 1s with another two million copies sold – and all three 45s would keep on selling. Mr Gordy’s forecast had come good: three back-to-back No. 1s. We couldn’t have felt more on top of the world. And now Motown was ready to take our music on tour across America – and that was when the madness started.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jackson-mania

  IT WAS LIKE THE BEGINNING OF a small earthquake: a first tremor felt in the balls of the feet. We must have been five numbers into a 15-song set at our first official Motown concert at the Spectrum arena in Philadelphia and we knew something wasn’t right. What was that? Did you feel that? Michael kept singing. All I could see was his back as he bobbed and danced and clicked his fingers on the stage’s edge. In front of him – almost within touching distance – a mass of fans was pulling at their own hair, screaming hysterically and crying; a wailing wall of teens and pre-teens, and outstretched arms.

  Hundreds of fans from a 16,000 crowd had left their assigned seats and poured down the aisles, getting the most from their $5.50 tickets and pushing their combined weight against a stage not designed for a crush. That was when the tremors started; the first hint of trouble. Michael looked back at me as he sang. Now the stage was slanting as its underneath supports started to buckle. Behind me, my bass amp fell, Johnny’s cymbals crashed down and five mic stands were swaying.

  This wasn’t the curtain raiser we’d had in mind. We looked to the wings – Joseph, Suzanne de Passe and Bill Bray, our new security man, were waving us off, yelling, ‘GET OFF THE STAGE! GET OFF THE STAGE!’

  Afire marshal marched out front, waving his arms. ‘SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!’ The lights came up and the screams reached breaking-glass decibels as fans realised the concert was ending abruptly – at which point the fun and games really started. I hurriedly unhooked the strap across my shoulder and dumped my bass – leaving it there – and we brothers ran for the wings. ‘GO! GO! GO!’ Michael and Marlon were always the quickest, running up front. We were shepherded by someone, leaping down the side steps and sprinting backstage, through the corridors and into the belly of the arena. We knew fans had swarmed the stage and given chase.

  ‘DON’T STOP! KEEP RUNNING! KEEP RUNNING!’ someone shouted. From backstage, a crowd’s roar always sounded like a constantly crashing wave, and that wave was coming down the corridors. In those days there was no such thing as crowd barriers or tight security. Not at first, anyway. So, we bolted for the up-ramp of the loading zone, leading outside from beneath the arena, where our limo was waiting, engine idling, doors open. Ahead of us, girls were running down the ramp. Behind us, girls were closing the gap. With seven running jumps, we bundled into the limo, ending up in a heap on top of one another as the doors slammed shut, back in the relative safety of our leather seats and blackened windows, breathless, shaking, exhilarated and bewildered.

  ‘You all okay?’ asked Bill Bray, leaning back from the front seat. Yeah, we’re okay. As the limo crawled up the ramp into daylight, the fans surrounded us, throwing themselves on the hood, running alongside the vehicle, banging on the windows, crying for us not to leave. From stage to stadium exit, it was crazy, and somewhere in that kinetic bond between group and fans, people had lost it. Michael had one word for it: ‘wild’ – ‘We sent ’em wild, huh?’ – and then he bemoaned the fact we never got to finish the song.

  As our limo disentangled itself and managed to pull away from the arena, he knelt on the back seat and looked out from the narrow rear window. That was when we discovered how determined our fans were. ‘BILL! THEY’RE STILL COMING! THEY’RE RUNNING! THEY’RE RUNNING!’ yelled Michael. A bunch of girls were sprinting after us as if their lives depended on it.

  ‘Look at how fast that girl is running!’ one of us said, as the pack receded into the distance. Michael was already chuckling. ‘LOOK at that girl’s titties wobbling!’ he added, and we giggled all the way back to the hotel, mainly out of relief.

  NOTHING COULD HAVE MADE US READY for what they called ‘Jackson-mania’. The scale of our popularity had been invisible to us before Philadelphia. Sure, it had registered in record sales, chart positions, newspaper articles and sacks of fan mail, and we had jumped around in celebration as the first child group to sell more than a million records. But there was nothing tangible because we had been ‘hidden away’, confined to our Motown cocoon, the windowless walls of the recording studio and the sleepy, late-night limo rides home. In the television studios, we only ever received sedate applause. Even at school, nothing hinted towards the crazy days ahead. At Bancroft Middle, which Marlon, La Toya and I attended, we had kids asking for autographs and everyone wanted to befriend us. Suddenly we became the ‘cool kids’ from Indiana and the increased attention was something we laughed about when we arrived home at the end of the day: Jackie and Tito from Fairf
ax High, and Michael from Gardner Elementary, where his main buddy was Mr Gordy’s son, Kerry. It was only when we stepped onstage that the reality of Motown’s making truly hit us. ‘You boys better get used to it!’ said Mr Gordy, ‘I told you there’d be pandemonium!’

  Sure enough, the craziness continued at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and the Inglewood Forum back in LA, where two things happened: we set a new record for the highest attendance at an entertainment venue (18,675) and we caused ‘a near riot’ among the fans, according to the newspapers. Chaos would become a regular event at every venue around the world. Someone in the camp tried to explain the fans’ reaction to us, saying that they ‘own your music, love your music, and think they own you – that’s what they’re plugging into every time you perform.’

  The beginning of this communion felt peculiar at first because we weren’t stars, we were five brothers from Indiana. With that initial mind-set, we looked at girls and thought, what’s gotten into you? or why you crying like that? Why are you falling to pieces? We had met our idols – Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Jackie Wilson – and had maintained our composure. Don’t get me wrong, we soon got used to it because when something becomes an everyday occurrence, it loses its strangeness. The very thing that had bewildered us turned into a thrill we thrived on. This was the beginning of fame and we had never considered ‘fame’ before. Or adulation. We had only ever thought about success and being the best. The change was swift and dizzying.

  At the Forum, Papa Samuel and Mother, holding Janet asleep in a blanket, sat in the front row. I think Janet, then four, was the only person in America who could ever claim to have slept through a Jackson 5 concert.

  Mother said she couldn’t believe her eyes. ‘All I could see was my babies being chased and running for cover, and I worried for you.’ Rebbie came to see us in Kentucky, but spent half her time watching the fans, not us. ‘How can they hear the music if they scream like that?’ she asked.

  Even Joseph was intrigued. ‘The last time I saw people wail and faint like that was when I was a kid at the Baptist church,’ he joked. It was mass approval that he couldn’t argue with.

  From state to state, the craziness and record sales kept escalating, heightened by the June 1970 release of our fourth single, ‘I’ll Be There’, which topped the charts – making us the first group to come out of the gates with four straight No. 1s. In our first year, we sold 10 million singles worldwide. It was unbelievable then, it’s unbelievable to me now.

  By the time of our fourth concert at Boston Gardens, Boston, Motown had installed increased security, so we had police protection at arenas and motorcades to sweep us through each city. Venues ensured that police were posted to the front and side of the stage. We rehearsed our ‘exit strategy’ during sound checks, running through our evacuation like it was a dance routine. The roadies told me never to dump my bass again, so Tito and I learned to run with our guitars (which turned running to the limo into a fine art, let me tell you). As brothers, we also made a time-saving pact: ‘When it’s time to run, it’s every man for himself. Don’t hang around, just keep running and head for the car.’ Ultimately, we had our mad-dash exit – at the end of a finished show or an interrupted one – down to a personal best of 30 seconds from stage to limo.

  We savoured the build-up and beginning of a concert: backstage, standing in a huddle, stacking our hands in the middle, vowing to go out there and ‘hurt ’em’. Then the arena was plunged into darkness, triggering the roar. In that pitch-black, we took our positions at our microphones, heads down, feeling the energy emitted by the crowd. Feeling everything, seeing nothing. Johnny played the opening drum-beat of ‘Stand!’. Then Ronny on the keyboards. The lights beamed on and everything went wild.

  From the stage, the sight of fans rushing forward was one unforgettable spectacle. At its worst, if you happened to be sitting in a row in the path of this stampede, it was time to run or be trampled. From Michael’s front-of-stage perspective, he said it was an optical illusion – ‘like the walls are falling in as everyone funnels down the middle.’ We saw girls fight and climb over one another to reach the front. They wept. They fainted. They were carried away on stretchers.

  One thing Michael never understood was why teenage girls took off their bras and panties and threw them onstage. ‘Ugh! Why do they do that?’ he said. It probably reminded him too much of Rosie from the striptease nights, but the rest of the brothers didn’t mind. I lost count of the nights I had underwear hanging from the neck of my bass as I played. Many times, girls ran onstage and the police often seemed stretched to keep order. We learned to expect fans to appear out of nowhere mid-song, grabbing or hugging us until they were bundled away.

  Often, we had to retreat offstage. I remember being in Detroit and our one-time promoter E. Rodney Jones took the mic to appeal for calm: ‘The Jackson 5 want to finish the show, but you must go back to your seats … Go back to your seats otherwise the show will be cancelled for safety reasons,’ he warned.

  After three futile warnings, the fire marshal ran out and the lights went up. ‘SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!’ It was a joke among us that being a fire marshal almost guaranteed a walk-on part in most cities.

  Ironically, the times when we really had to run for our lives were at the end of a completed concert, because fans left early and bolted for the venue’s exit to mob our car. Those were the scariest times because it was as comfortable as running through a giant rosebush. Once inside the vehicle, we could never see out of the windows because the mass of bodies eclipsed daylight. When that limo rocked on its wheels, it was one unnerving experience. Once we tried to calm the situation by rolling down the window to slip out an autograph: 10 hands grabbed at the piece of paper, tearing it to shreds, piranha-style. Bill Bray yelled, ‘Never do that again! They’ll pull your arms off!’

  He didn’t seem to appreciate that we already knew what it felt like to almost lose a limb, because getting through the mob – at venues or airports, or when out and about – was a bruising experience. Everyone pulled on our arms, hands, shoulders, faces, heads and hair. For me, there was only one way to negotiate the mêlée: take running jumps, because the bouncing momentum kept me going without getting snared. Michael just stayed low, hands covering his face, and ducked through like a little dynamo.

  Back at the hotels, we compared the cuts, scratches and bruises that became souvenirs from different cities, and Wardrobe assessed the damage to our ripped shirts. None of the fans intended to hurt us, we knew that much, but we still had to talk it through and get it out of our systems, especially about those girls who ran on stage.

  Michael: ‘Did you see the way she just flew at me? Didn’t see her coming!’

  Tito: ‘I was thinking, damn, he better start running.’

  Michael: ‘Did you see how she was acting? Kiss me, kiss me – she was stuck to me!’

  Me: ‘And she did that thing – went all limp to make herself heavier.’ And I’d do the play-dead impression that girls used to do and we’d die laughing.

  Management’s concern was always our welfare and one day, someone came up with the idea of a decoy strategy: use a VW as our getaway car and let the fans follow the empty limo. Which they did. Unfortunately, the brains that ordered the Volkswagen hadn’t reckoned on enough space for seven boys, Joseph and Bill Bray. We had no choice – and no time – but to cram in. We were all legs and feet, kissing the car’s roof, the windows and each other, but we got away. Back then, that was all that mattered.

  But the fans tried to outsmart us, too, by trying to catch us unawares. Instead of rushing the stage (which we expected) they started rushing the planes. This trend started in Detroit in about 1971. We landed, the plane was taxiing and we prepared to disembark when Jackie glanced out of the window and shouted, ‘THEY’RE COMING!’ In the days when airport security was as tight as it was at a supermarket car-parking lot, this mob of fans had broken free from a police cordon in the distance and was wheeling towards us. We couldn
’t hang around for the plane’s steps to arrive: the stewardesses opened the door and we jumped to the ground, piled into the limo and got away in the nick of time.

  Undeterred, other fans waited in cars at the airport exits to follow us, girls tracked us down to our hotels, and some hid in the bushes in the hotel grounds to sneak inside later as ‘hotel guests’. They followed us to sound checks and shopping malls, and the chase was back on, causing chaos on the occasions when we dared go sightseeing in different cities. If a counter or shelf was in the way, the fans just bulldozed through as we ran and ran.

  I’ll never forget the time we managed to blend unnoticed into a massive crowd – there must have been 50,000 people – when we went to the Grambling–Cal State Fullerton Classic at the LA Coliseum to catch some football. Jackie was in heaven, and all was going so well until the announcer got overexcited and revealed to the crowd that (a) we were inside the stadium and (b) where we were seated. We looked at each other, we watched all these people stand and turn, and we knew what was coming next. As the Los Angeles Sentinel said: ‘The Jackson 5 had to literally run for their lives when they were introduced …’

  The weirdest thing was ringing home to check in with Mother and being told that fans were camped outside the house, having made the trek from Sunset Boulevard.