You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

  ‘Are you okay?’ we asked her.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I just invited them in and gave them some drinks.’

  ‘Why did you have to invite them in, Mother?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t be impolite and turn them away, could I?’

  Janet would tell us that different posses of girls would sit around the kitchen table for hours, staying until about eleven o’clock at night because Mother couldn’t bring herself to be ‘rude’ and ask them to leave. We all took a while to adjust to fame back in those days. It was a different age of ‘celebrity’.

  Back then, the hunt wasn’t led by the paparazzi looking for a photo but by the fans wanting a piece of us, tracking us down to hotels, and camping outside our house. It didn’t upset us, and previous suggestions that Michael was reduced to constant tears after a mobbing are not true. We all found the mad pursuits scary at times, but Michael thrived on the adulation, as we all did: it told him we were doing good; it told him we were loved. His only frustration was that the finale was ruined or cut short most nights, but he accepted early on that the craziness was part of the transaction made with the fans. ‘They’re the ones buying the records and coming to the concerts,’ he said. ‘They’re making this happen, not Joseph, not Motown, not us.’

  He never lost his respect for the fans: he regarded them as a second family and he, like the rest of us, would share a unique relationship with them in an age when accessibility was far greater than it is today. He always viewed his fan base as peripheral friends, people he truly cared about and loved.

  Of course, there are always extremes, and some fans would make an impact in strange ways. But it would be a little longer before the ‘Billie Jean’ type showed up.

  POST-SHOW, POST-GREAT ESCAPE, WE’D TURN ON the television in our hotel room and catch the local news. It was the strangest thing, watching ourselves – and all that mania – on TV. Michael watching Michael was a sight to see, because he studied himself in the concert snippets as closely as he had previously examined James Brown or Sammy Davis Junior. It was the one time of day when he was quiet, critiquing himself, watching every move, finding room for improvement. He didn’t know how good he was. People rave about Michael Jackson the artist who erupted in the eighties, but he had it back then in the seventies, too. Take it from someone who was alongside him for every show: he was electrifying as a boy and he knew how to get the crowd going. His personality, delivery and sheer vocal authority bossed it, and he spoke like a leader, not our 12-year-old brother. ‘Are ya READY, fellas?’ he said, counting us in, or, when a song had gone really well, he yelled, ‘Right on!’ – taking a phrase from Marvin Gaye – and the audience cheered. ‘Riiiight ooon!’ he said, louder, and the place went nuts.

  And Jackie stoked the hype by goading everyone’s emotions: ‘Do you want to take it higher? YOU WANT IT HIGHER?’

  Performing provided a sense of euphoria that is hard to describe. Imagine being Clark Kent turning into Superman and every city believing in your power. I guess that’s pretty much how it felt.

  During press junkets, reporters were always fascinated by Michael’s precocious talent and they tried to extract the great, grand answer by asking the most unoriginal question: ‘Michael, how do you do it? Where does it come from?’ Michael, usually flipping the pages of a magazine that was his defence barrier, looked up and practised the device taught at Motown: repeat the question to give yourself time to think about your answer, ‘How do I do it?’

  ‘Yes … everyone wants to know.’

  Then came the great, grand answer: ‘Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just doing my best – I’m just performing.’

  It was like asking a bird how it flies: it doesn’t know, it just flaps its wings and takes off.

  With all that adrenalin in our systems, it was almost impossible to get to sleep and it wasn’t as if we could release it with a quick sprint around the local park or a brisk walk in the fresh air because the fans not only laid siege to our hotel, they roamed the corridors to find us, looking for the one man they recognised – our security guy, Bill Bray. Find Bill, and you had the Jackson 5. He was always sitting on a chair outside our rooms or in the room directly opposite, door open, watching the television. Bill’s job description was, he told us, ‘to make sure no girls come up and none of you go down to get girls.’

  Once – I think it was in Chicago – three girls turned up at the exact moment he’d thought it was safe to take a toilet break. Michael, Marlon and I had just ordered room service when we heard an over-keen knock on the door – Bill was neither keen nor a knocker. He’d always say, ‘Open the door, jokers.’

  We looked through the peep-hole and saw three young concave faces holding their mouths, trying not to scream. Until they heard Michael ask, ‘Who is it?’

  Then they couldn’t help themselves. They started hammering on the door, screaming to be let in. ‘MICHAEL! MICHAEL! Just let us see you … just let us in … one minute …’ On one side, three fans hammering for their lives on a door. On the other, three brothers with their backs pressed against it, heels dug into the carpet, just in case the girls tried to barge through. That sounds crazy, but trust me, when you’ve seen a mob of girls tear up a stage, there’s no question which is the stronger sex.

  Because the fans were everywhere, our enforced confinement didn’t provide too many options to relax and breathe, which meant seven boys were bouncing off the walls with pent-up energy. We had to release it somehow so, with Bill’s approval, we used to hold sprints in the corridor, or see who could walk to one end and back fastest. We had the wildest pillow fights and I don’t know how many mattresses we wrecked by using them as trampolines.

  Within our own unconstrained craziness, Michael was in his element. As chief prankster, he had a hoard of itching powder, whoopie cushions, stink bombs and water balloons. Dropping water balloons on to strangers’ heads from hotel windows, letting off stink bombs in elevators, and leaving plastic ice buckets of water balanced on a door left a little way open were among his favourite tricks and booby-traps. He’d get us all doing it, mainly dousing Suzanne de Passe, Bill Bray, Jack Richardson and Motown’s PR man, Bob Jones. Suzanne always knew we had something up our sleeves and entered with extra-caution, but Bob walked into it every time.

  Those nights in hotels were probably hardest for Jackie, then 20 going on 21, and Tito, 17. They knew that roadies not much older than them were going to nightclubs and blues cafés, and yet they remained under curfew; Jackie on his bed, watching sports on the TV, Tito at his desk, gluing Airfix models of planes and battleships.

  I think Bill Bray felt sorry for us, because he saw how hard we travelled, rehearsed, performed and ran, yet there was no real down-time on the road. We did about 15 dates in 1970 before our first major national tour in ’71, when we did approximately 46 dates, east to west, plus numerous television shows, media interviews and appearances. Bill was an ex-detective assigned to us by Motown, an avuncular figure. Broad, light-skinned, with thinning hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, he was hard of hearing so we always had to yell. We nicknamed him ‘Shack Pappy’ and respected him enormously, mainly because he could take a joke. Sometimes the pace of our schedule got to him and he fell asleep backstage or at the hotel before a performance. Michael, lightest on his feet, would creep up and tie his shoelaces together and retreat to the door. Then we’d scream in pretend panic, ‘BILL! BILL! HELP!’ He’d jump up and fall flat on his face.

  Our rapport with Bill was special and it meant he was more forgiving if, beyond eleven o’clock, he spotted us trying to tiptoe by his station. ‘I see you, joker! I see you!’ he’d shout.

  ‘Bill!’ I’d say. ‘I just want a midnight feast!’ There was always a vending machine down by the icebox at the end of any corridor and it became the focus of many late-night sorties to get extra cookies, chips and Coke.

  ‘Now get yourself to bed before Joseph comes back,’ he’d say.

  MIC
HAEL VIEWED MUSIC AS A ‘SCIENCE’ as well as a feeling. From the moment we moved into Bowmont Drive, he started to study composition. He strove to understand the make-up of someone’s song in the same way a scientist set out to understand a person’s DNA. Together we tuned into any classical station we could find on the radio, listening to the structure of a piece of music and ‘seeing’ what colour, mood and emotion each instrument would create. ‘It’s about seeing the music, not just hearing it,’ he said. Hear a tinkling piano, see rainfall. Hear the English horn, see the sun rise or set. Hear the cello played with the bow, see mystery or sadness. Hear the song, see the story.

  Michael’s favourite composition was The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky but he loved so many classical pieces, how they started slowly with the strings, swelled into something dramatic or racing, then calmed again. This structure – the A-B-A form – was something we constantly dissected. And this classical inspiration runs as a thread through so much of his music because his forte was being able to combine a melodic structure and great lyrical content with a beat that gave it the pop feel. Next time you listen to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or ‘Dirty Diana’, for example, you’ll better detect the classical thread running through them: the instrumentation he used to enhance the story. Listen to the cello in both those songs and the set-up it provides. Or listen to the opening chord progressions of ‘Thriller’ and the suspense they build, the dread you feel. Michael always wanted you to listen to his music, close your eyes and visualise.

  AS CO-LEAD VOCALS, MICHAEL AND I shared a bedroom on the road. From a bunk-bed for five, we progressed to the luxury of a twin bed each. On occasions, Marlon would share with us, too, but he usually doubled up with Tito, then it was Johnny and Ronny, and Jackie had a room to himself. Different bedrooms didn’t really affect our togetherness because we still went everywhere as one unit. It infuriated Michael that Joseph always insisted on an adjoining room to keep an eye on us, probably because he knew Michael was the prankster and that my interest in girls had awakened. As Motown’s designated ‘heart-throb’, that was my role!

  Joseph could walk into our room whenever he liked via his connecting door, which Michael hated: it made him feel policed. Unable to be free outside the hotel, he was also unable to escape our father’s scrutiny inside. If we ever laughed beyond eleven o’clock, Joseph thumped the wall several times: ‘GO TO SLEEP, YOU TWO! REST THOSE VOICES.’ Michael rolled his eyes. ‘IF YOUR VOICES GO, THERE’S NO SHOW, AND IF THERE’S NO SHOW …’ The unspoken end to that sentence always hung in the air. We understood. ‘The Hawk’ never missed a thing.

  But Michael was no better. Whenever he heard our father’s booming voice on some telephone call, he would grab a glass, cup it to his ear and listen at the wall. He did this whenever we were asked to leave the room at Motown, too: he was fascinated by what was being said, especially when he heard his name mentioned. Michael was born nosy, a trait inherited from our father’s mother, Mama Chrystal. He said the best gadget to have would be a hearing aid to amplify people’s distant conversations and whispers, allowing him to eavesdrop. ‘Can you imagine how cool that would be?’ he mused. ‘Then we’d know everything Joseph was planning!’ His need to know what was being said would extend to label executives and attorneys, but that came later, in his solo career.

  He was curious as to what the fans talked about, too. In many cities, we turned out the lights and knelt at the window to look down on the courtyard or parking lot to watch car loads of fans arrive. At times, it looked as busy as a drive-in theatre, with clusters of people around many pairs of headlights. They chanted our names and blared their horns, oblivious that we were watching them silently. It was a spectacle to us, and kept us fascinated for many an hour. This window was no more than a grander version of the one in our bedroom at 2300 Jackson Street. We had advanced from wannabe rehearsals to dreamy stardom but it had done nothing to alter the sense of ‘them and us’. Now we looked out from the dream and the other kids looked into it. And the grass, at times, looked greener from both sides. Especially to Michael.

  We knew one thing was certain, though: other kids didn’t wake up to find two or three pretty chambermaids standing at the foot of their bed, taking photos and giggling … with a laughing Joseph standing alongside, endorsing it. Our father was an early bird; we liked to sleep in. With his access via our connecting door, we’d hear him in our half-sleep brightly offering to introduce his sons. ‘Do you wanna see the boys?’ Next thing we knew the bedclothes were being pulled off us, leaving us lying there in our pyjamas with squinting eyes and smashed-up Afros. For a man who was all about us presenting the right image, it seemed an odd thing to do. But that was Joseph’s joke – catching us unawares.

  On the occasions when Michael got wise and locked the door, we’d be woken by an angry Joseph. ‘OPEN THIS DOOR NOW, BOY!’ He didn’t stop yelling until we did. When he brought the maids in, we got mad internally but we couldn’t speak up because we had to respect him. That was just how it was.

  Michael and I seemed to spend all our down-time together in those days and the bond between us was sealed tight. I cannot remember an argument or a fight in our childhood. In fact, there was rarely any friction between any of the brothers. I had no reason to fight with Michael or Marlon because they were too little. My rumbles were always with Tito when play-fights got out of hand, instigated by Jackie. But we had too much of a team spirit among brothers to get real mad at one another. Michael looked up to me; I looked out for him. Onstage, he was always to my right. In hotels, he was always in the bed to the left. If I couldn’t see Michael, and know he was okay, I didn’t feel at ease. At night, either on the road or back in LA, his bedtime reading was either The Jungle Book or The Guinness Book of Records. ‘I want to be the entertainer that sells the most records,’ he said one night. ‘I want my name to appear in this book!’

  We talked ourselves to sleep about anything and everything, and we shared each other’s fan mail – the racy, romantic, mushy stuff to me from 16-year-olds, and the cutesy, you’re-adorable stuff to him from 10-year-olds.

  He laughed at the marriage proposals I received and teased me about how ‘coooool’ I thought I was. We even introduced this to an onstage skit he did during a talk spot between songs. ‘Ladies, Jermaine thinks he’s sooooo cooool on his gueee-tar …’ the arena roared ‘… but, ya know, we gonna change all that …’ cue more hysteria ‘… because we gonna do our own thing and be just like Jermaine!’ And we launched into a performance of ‘It’s Your Thing’.

  The only thing Michael and I fought over was the bathroom mirror. Each brother had a blown-out Afro and we were always picking and patting our hair, using a hair pick to fluff it out, then patting it down with our hands to create that perfectly round shape before we added the Afro Sheen for shine. We were proud of our voluminous hair: they were our Afro crowns. On planes, we learned to sleep with our heads dropped forward to avoid crushing the Afro. Not good for the neck, but it maintained the shape! Michael’s time spent in front of the mirror was almost as long as mine, so it was always a chase to pole position first thing each morning. I argued that I had the biggest and thickest hair, and he argued that he was front of stage and had the hair the girls most wanted to grab. Every detail about our hair – and skin – had to be just right.

  ON THE ROAD, MICHAEL’S OTHER HABIT was room service; the most decadent perk of the music industry in his eyes. When he felt particularly mischievous at night, he’d ring up as someone else’s child and place the biggest bogus order to a different room. But his funniest ruse was calling one of the roadies and using his high voice to impersonate a girl fan. Jack Nance, our road manager and Jack Richardson, our driver-come-right hand man, were always our favourite targets. When they picked up their room phone Michael spoke into the receiver and introduced himself as a girl fan: ‘I saw you tonight … I love the way you looked,’ he squeaked, and then detailed what Jack had been wearing that day for added authenticity, ‘… and I was a fan of Michael’s
but you stole my eye …’

  I was laughing so hard that I had to go into the bathroom, but Michael kept it going with a straight face: ‘What do I look like?’ (cue the shy giggle) ‘Well, I’m tall, slim and very pretty … all my girls tell me so … How old am I? I’m almost sixteen,’ he’d say. He kept this going for a good ten minutes, teasing them and pumping their egos, but we never once let on it was us. We just let them believe that they, too, had adoring fans. The next morning, when we saw either Jack in the hotel lobby, looking all dour and serious, Michael nudged me and whispered: ‘Old dogs – they dirrrrty.’

  IF THERE WAS ONE CITY THAT didn’t totally put out the Jackson-mania welcome mat, it was Mobile, Alabama. We had looked forward to this date because it returned us to Mother’s roots, but there was no warm home-coming. The fan reaction wasn’t the problem – that was typically raucous. It was the reception outside the arena that provided a sober lesson in the rich diversity of America. Our parents had warned us about the infamous prejudices of the Deep South and how black communities were still awakening after the Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s, and the civil rights stand that had brought violence from the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan. We had seen images of grown men walking around with sheets on their heads, and we had seen them burning crosses, but our knowledge of history was scant until our first-hand experience in Alabama, in January 1971.

  The first difference we noted was when the white driver of our limousine was cold and abrupt, not talkative like other drivers we’d had. At our hotel, he refused to get out of the car and open our doors, and no staff came out to help us with our bags either. This wasn’t a spoiled-kid expectation, it was just an observation of a sharp difference in our treatment. It was as we pulled our bags out of the trunk that one of us noticed some KKK paraphernalia, clearly intended for our eyes. We froze. It was like one of those moments in a thriller movie when you realise your driver has been the killer the whole time; it felt that sinister. We stayed quiet and kept our heads down. At the hotel reception, we faced the same cold awkwardness. ‘We don’t seem to have got any rooms booked for you,’ said the man at the front desk, all curt and stern. Suzanne de Passe, or someone, argued that this was a long-standing booking; we were the Jackson 5 and there must be a mistake.