And then there was the ‘Victory Tour’. This was our monster reunion. Six brothers back together for our most ambitious concert as a group. It would represent the pinnacle of our collective dream because we set a new record for the most consecutive stadiums sold out back-to-back in a summer that saw Bruce Springsteen and Prince also touring. It is a record that still stands today. I’m not embarrassed to boast about it because I have a lot of pride where that tour is concerned and nothing about that achievement came easy.
Onstage and in the dressing room, everything clicked as before. Offstage and in the meeting rooms, the whole set-up was fraught with politics and tension, proving that when outside ‘advisers’ enter a family equation, the whole dynamic changes. Like acid dropped into still water. But no matter how rocky the road, it was like any victory: it doesn’t matter how many times you’re down in the game, it’s the end result that matters. It’s about perseverance. And with all the blood, sweat and tears that went into the tour and its accompanying album, Victory, it was the hardest-earned triumph I can remember.
THE VICTORY TOUR WAS ANOTHER IDEA that had to be sold to Michael before he agreed. And, as with Motown 25, his change of heart walked him into another page of The Guinness Book of Records. It also led to reports that we, as brothers, ‘pressured’ or ‘coaxed’ him into taking part. This was the start of a mistaken and enduring belief that we were only interested in coat-tailing Michael’s fame for profit, as if he were an overnight sensation and we had just woken up to his talent, as opposed to having grown up alongside it.
I didn’t see the barren financial landscape that some have attempted to paint as our motive for touring. My début album with Arista was set to release singles like ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Do What You Do’; I was excited about my collaboration with Whitney Houston, and a duet with Pia Zadora, singing ‘When The Rain Begins To Fall’ (No. 1 in four European countries). But this would become a recurring theme for the family: a showdown of fact versus perception – and fact would always be the underdog.
Unlike Epic and then Sony, we never viewed Michael as a robotic money-making machine. We viewed him as a brother with whom we wanted to share more glory. Our passion to perform with him never changed en route from our bunk beds to Hollywood. That desire between brothers was always consistent, pre-fame, post-fame. But somewhere in the transition between Jackson-mania and ‘Michael Jackson mania’, sacks of fanmail morphed into printed pages of lies and fiction. We read accounts of constant feuding, rampant jealousy and how the brothers ‘refused to talk to each other on their way to the stadiums’. I guess this was another side of Michael’s new-found fame: that for every public hero, the rules of myth demand villains, too.
Michael didn’t help the confusion over the back-story to ‘Victory’. In an interview we did for Ebony magazine, he said, ‘I didn’t say that I didn’t want to tour. I’m doing it for the joy of touring and the family as a whole …’ Four years later, in his autobiography, he said, ‘I didn’t want to go on the Victory tour and I fought against it …’ Both accounts represent the truth at different times and accurately illustrate his indecision about taking part, but the expression ‘stage addict’ best sums up why he finally agreed to take part. As much as he had vowed to take a break from touring in 1981, he was like any other performer whose intimate relationship with the stage began as a child: he couldn’t resist it.
In fact, in the end, he insisted on the tour. He spent hours drawing up storyboards for its stage design and concept. He became the self-designated stage designer and, as a result, everything the tour needed it got. Including two giant spiders he sketched for either side of the stage – costing $250,000 each – plus stage hydraulics, advanced lighting and full-on pyrotechnics. Before we knew it, he had presented his vision, complete with costume designs, to tour co-ordinator Larry Larson. That’s the truth of how hands-on keen he was. He had always been passionate about touring. That is why we never felt awkward about approaching him with a new idea because creative ideas had filled our childhood, and we knew his heart was tied to that shared past, too, as seen inside his private picture gallery. What he loathed were the politics, the legal posturing and the tension between our individual attorneys and promoters. That was what ground him down, and it was present from the moment Joseph first mentioned the tour.
OUR FATHER WAS NEVER GOING TO accept being sidelined and the thrill of Motown 25, combined with the success of the Thriller album, had got him thinking on the same grand scale as his daydreams in Gary had. In partnership with Mother, he was the architect of ‘Victory’ and, for all the doubts the brothers had shared about his managerial capabilities, it was no small feat to plan a national tour. I think Joseph felt he had a point to prove. His early proposal had La Toya and Janet in the line-up, which was when Michael first balked, no doubt flashing back to Vegas vaudeville and worrying about what our father’s vision might be, but Jackie was the most vociferous, insisting it should be brothers only. Then Michael reconsidered his opposition.
I always suspected his camp told him the tour was a bad idea – that it would get in the way of his solo focus; that it was a backward step – just as it had with Motown 25. After Thriller, we, Michael’s family, saw his people ring-fencing him as an artist and digging a moat around him to keep us out; over time, the moat would grow deeper and wider. Entourages keen on building empires don’t necessarily promote family values in Hollywood, as we would learn. As always, when conflicted, Michael turned to Mother, explaining that he’d planned to spend 1984 working on movie ideas. ‘I think it’s important to grow,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve been doing this [touring] for so long I sometimes feel like I should be 70 now.’
If anyone knew that he was wrestling with advice he’d received and his sense of family, it was Mother. ‘Just think about it,’ she said, giving him space.
Days later, he warmed to the idea on his own. He was aware that CBS Records was not honouring contracted release dates for the other brothers as the Jacksons. I think that made him feel that his success had left his old group hanging. It is a blocking tactic used in the music industry: put the other group members on the shelf and, if they try to leave, wave the contract and say, ‘Can’t go anywhere – you owe us albums.’ Michael knew that a tour would trigger a new album, and help out his brothers, so he agreed to take part. If anything, his decision spoke of his selflessness. But in the back of his mind, he always wanted it to be his last tour with us – even if we didn’t. He proposed a tour name: ‘The Final Curtain’.
You can imagine how that went down. It sounded so negative, signalling the point of no return. For us, the tour represented the summit of everything we’d built as kids. It was, therefore, a conquering moment. That was why we wanted, and eventually agreed on, ‘Victory’. As Michael set to work on the stage design, everyone was committed to making this an event that was ‘out of this world’. As he and Marlon both joked later, ‘The mothership [the group] was calling.’
THE MOMENT WE ALL SAT AROUND the table at the first meeting to discuss the tour, I noticed one jarring difference between past and present. Instead of being one unit behind Joseph, we now arrived as individual players with different legal representatives. Michael had his attorney and manager, I had mine, and the four other brothers had a manager and attorney they shared. As Mother astutely observed, ‘You all brought too many chefs into the kitchen without first agreeing as brothers.’ The reality of this set-up was that, in the event of a difference of opinion, Jackie, Tito, Marlon and Randy had the casting vote as a block of four. Their attorney could – and would – say that he spoke for four brothers, not one: the power of veto. In theory, Michael and I were powerless on any issue – and we knew attorneys didn’t get rich by brokering peace. With lawyers involved, the odds on harmony didn’t look good from the start.
And there was Michael’s incredible success. Time magazine called him ‘the hottest phenomenon since Elvis Presley’ and yet there he sat around a table – the now eight-Grammy-award winner –
holding a ‘vote’ that carried least sway. The tone for the way ahead was set when the team behind the four brothers felt it had found the right promoter. A man named Cecil Holmes stepped up and presented a cheque for $250,000 as an upfront fee. It wasn’t enough to split individually, and only just covered one of the giant spiders Michael had envisaged.
Joseph ripped up the cheque in front of us all and threw it at the man’s feet. ‘Are you kidding me? We’re not going to be undersold like this!’ he said. Michael liked this new attitude. In the old days, Joseph might have taken it.
Soon afterwards, our father announced that he’d found the right man to stage the tour: boxing promoter Don King – a flamboyant man with wild, upstanding hair, white limousines, gold chains and mink coats. But his image preceded him and made everyone doubt him. If he was serious, they said, tell him to put his money where Joseph’s mouth was. Within a day or two, Don turned up and wrote each one of us a cheque for $500,000. ‘Because you boys need to know I’m serious about making this happen,’ he said.
We signed contracts that week. The media had a field day with this appointment, because it wondered what Don – famous as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard’s promoter – could possibly know about putting on a Jacksons concert. But a promoter is a promoter: someone who should be able to hype a boxing match or a concert as the biggest and best event of the year – and Don King could. Many in the music industry turned up their noses at his involvement, and that was the grapevine the media tapped into. But the claim that we thought him ‘too ostentatious’ and not someone we wanted was inaccurate. At the start anyway. If there had been initial doubts, our friendship with Ali convinced us that Don was a good man. Now, what Michael’s associates told journalists might have been a different story.
Don didn’t win awards for tact and diplomacy, and his giant ego was the reason he was a promoter. He was brash but effective. Had you seen him – the loudest mouth – and Michael – the quietest soul – interacting, you might have thought, There’s the kid with the embarrassing uncle he can’t help but find funny. I’ll never forget being in a meeting when we were discussing something about the show’s direction and Michael was talking about how he wanted to pay back the fans and keep pushing higher.
‘Michael!’ said Don, cutting dead the monologue. ‘Remember this. It don’t matter whether you’re a rich nigger, a poor nigger or just a nigger. No matter how big you get, this industry’s still gonna treat you like a nigger.’ In other words, and in his opinion, you’ll always be a servant to the music industry, so don’t ever think of becoming more powerful than that. Everyone in the room froze. If the music industry blew smoke up everyone’s ass, Don blew in an icy blast of straight talk.
It was Michael who was the first to laugh, cracking the suspended silence. He found it funny, in a shocking way, and wasn’t offended. None of us was. A black man had been addressing black men, and that kind of talk was hardly foreign to someone from Gary, Indiana. Don always came out punching because he had sensed, as had I, a lot of corporate envy about the fact that he’d brought in the big money and was pulling off the biggest-ever tour with Michael Jackson attached to it. If that didn’t make the phalanx of record-label executives, entertainment attorneys and cynical journalists look like chumps, I don’t know what did. But as Mother observed about the politics and dirty tricks that would soon follow, ‘We always knew there was a mood that certain people would do everything they could to stop the tour for as long as Don was involved. That’s why I could never be in a business like this – it’s dog-eat-dog.’
MICHAEL DIDN’T DRINK PEPSI BECAUSE HE didn’t like it. Which was a potential problem when Joseph and Don lined up a $5 million Pepsi sponsorship deal, together with two television commercials that would rewrite ‘Billie Jean’ and use it as a jingle. When it was explained to Michael that he didn’t need to drink Pepsi or be filmed drinking it, he was happier to compromise. During the tour, there was a funny moment which would have given Pepsi executives a heart attack had they witnessed it. Michael was in his dressing room one day when he decided to grind a can into a plate of food, poured Pepsi over all over it like gravy, and then posed for a photo: a close-up of his sequined glove presenting his ‘dish’. If ever there was an image that summed up both his devilish humour and the difference between brand Michael and the real Michael, that might have been it.
We got down to the serious business of filming the two Pepsi commercials in January 1984. The first was at a Hollywood lot in a ‘New York street’, where we free-styled with kids representing ‘the new Pepsi generation’. The second was at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, where we performed ‘a concert’ in front of screaming fans holding Pepsi cups. On this second shoot, with our favourite music video director Bob Giraldi, the planned sequence was for the brothers to play Michael in as he made a grand entrance, standing atop a lit stairway as an explosion of magnesium flash bombs showered him with sparks.
We’d already done five takes when Bob wanted Michael to wait a few seconds longer at the top of the stairs so that he could be captured in silhouette. So we did it again. Take six. I was on the bass, right of stage, facing the audience. ‘And … action!’ someone shouted. The audience stood and started screaming. Cue the familiar ‘Billie Jean’ beat. Then the popping sound of flash-bombs. I knew Michael was now skipping down the steps. I turned side-on and that was when all hell broke loose. I glimpsed flames in Michael’s hair, but he was oblivious. He kept dancing. Then he spun so fast that he doused the flames, resulting in a halo of smoke, but the damage was already done. Five people raced from the wings and bundled him to the floor. Everything happened so quickly that my brain didn’t compute at first what I had just seen. I was convinced my brother had been shot, because the panic reminded me of the President Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, the way everyone pounced on him. I dropped my bass and raced over as Michael was getting to his feet. Dazed. Blowing out his cheeks. I saw him patting the top of his head; I saw a bald patch covering his crown, his hair scorched away. One of the flash bombs had rained sparks that had ignited the flammable hair-spray we all used. Later, when watching the footage back, it was clear that a flame was shooting out of his head as he skipped down the steps. Within five seconds, his entire hair was engulfed. Going up like a haystack.
Backstage, he was lying down, remarkably calm. I think the shock stopped him freaking out. I crouched down and rubbed his arm, and all the brothers huddled around. ‘He’s going to be okay … You’re going to be okay, Michael,’ I said, as much for me as for him. Thank God Mother wasn’t there. She didn’t need to see him like that. Thank God for Bill Bray, too, who carefully broke the news to her over the phone and managed to conceal our panic.
An ambulance rushed him to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood and we followed in one car, still wearing our colourful costumes. The whole family headed there, because that’s what happens when something bad happens to one of us: everybody drops everything and runs to that person in need. One for all, and all for one. Michael had suffered third-degree burns to his scalp – almost down to the skull – and no one needed telling how lucky he was to be alive. He was later transferred to the Brotman Memorial Hospital in Culver City, where he sat up in bed watching videos, his head swathed in bandages. He actually admitted that he’d got a secret thrill from the ambulance ride. He’d wanted to taste that kind of excitement since he was a kid, he said. Thank God for Michael’s spirit.
Michael never intended to sue Pepsi but, after seeing the plight of other burns victims, he developed a plan. Instead of talking damages, he talked charity and renamed the Brotman Burns Unit the ‘Michael Jackson Burns Unit’ – and got Pepsi to donate $1.5 million. In litigious America, it was humbling to see someone bypass their own suffering to help those worse off. And, trust me, Michael was in pain. Although he’d make a full recovery and be okay to tour, come July, he had to undergo surgery to laser the scar tissue and stretch part of his scalp over the burned area. Michael also had some kind o
f implant and all of the treatment left him in excruciating pain. Not just for those first few weeks, but for many years afterwards. It was so bad that you’d see him pulling at his head in agony. All he could rely on to alleviate the pain was a prescription drug called Demerol. This was no regular anti-inflammatory. It was a morphine-strength painkiller that brought numbing relief. Imagine the worst pain of your life and wanting to do anything to end it – that was what my brother went through. In that state, I doubt he gave a second thought to Demerol’s side-effects, one of which was ‘can be habit-forming’.
THE NEXT BROTHER TO BE LAID up in a hospital bed before the tour began was Jackie. He was at some movie drive-in when he was hit by a car. It busted his knee. He was in the hospital for days with a cast from thigh to ankle. Like Michael, his injury would heal but, sadly, not in time for him to tour. He was devastated because he knew how special the concerts were going to be. He’d still ride with us, provide input, and come on stage to make appearances, but he couldn’t perform. It was a blow for everyone as six performers became five, and I don’t think I was the only one wondering if the tour was cursed.
‘THEY’RE DIGGING UP DIRT TO DESTROY the man,’ Joseph said, as a smear campaign began against Don King. Someone somewhere had put out word that he had a 1966 conviction for manslaughter. Don King had killed a man, and he was promoting a concert with Michael Jackson. This ‘revelation’ was lapped up by the press – and every enemy Don had on the tour. I felt for him because there was something coincidental and dirty about its timing, and it didn’t matter that he could speak from a four-year prison education about the futility of violence. His rehabilitation and plea of self-defence weren’t going to get a fair hearing. It was now open season in the badmouthing of Don King.