MICHAEL MICHAEL WHEN BECAME

Transcription

1 MICHAEL WHEN MICHAEL BECAME MICHAEL In the late 1970s, the pop prince was a fading teen icon. But that s when he figured out how to make the world dance. By Rob Sheffield 43

2 43 DISCO KING Jackson surrounded by dancers at Studio 54, in 1977

3 MICHAEL The jacksons 1979 hit shake your body (down to the ground) begins with a piano rumble, a cymbal glide, bass zooming from speaker to speaker. Tito Jackson tries out a staccato guitar lick. And then Michael Jackson lets loose the first whoops and gasps of his brand-new adult voice. See that girl over there? Michael can t tell if she notices him, if she recognizes him, if she even remembers he used to be in a big-deal kiddie group called the Jackson 5. All he knows is he needs to get close, so he slithers up to her on the dance floor with one of the all-time great disco opening lines: I don t know what s gonna happen to you, baby, but I do! Know! That! I! Love ya! This song hit Number Seven in the spring of 1979, and it was more than the pivot point of MJ s career in many ways, it s the pivot point of pop music in the past 40 years. If there was a moment where Michael grew up and turned into Michael Jackson, this is it. On Shake Your Body, he sounds totally confident even though he was a very scared, emotionally ravaged, washed-up child star whose last big hit was years behind him writing and producing his own material for the first time. He didn t know it, but he was just a year away from Off the Wall, the solo joint that made him the most beloved and desired creature in the pop universe. The disco years are the only time Michael Jackson had anything close to a low profile for the last time in his life, he was just another celebrity. By any standard, he was living a lush life of Hollywood fantasy: palling around with stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli, playing the DRESS FOR SUCCESS Scarecrow in The Wiz with Diana Ross, dating Tatum O Neal, dancing at Studio 54. He was a strangely innocent boy-child in the era of Boogie Nights fleshpots, untouched by sex or drugs despite the manic indulgence all around him, a Jehovah s Witness lost in the pleasure dome. His private zoo grew like his collection of famous friends; he had to be the only virgin in Freddie Mercury s Rolodex. Everybody liked having this kid around. But nobody had any way of knowing that for him, this was just a warm-up. The two Jacksons records that came out of this period, 1978 s Destiny and 1980 s Triumph, are disco classics that give a fascinating glimpse into MJ experimenting with his ideas in a family setting, inventing the sound that would explode in O ff t h e Wall and Th r i l l e r. But they re also a document of his uneasy identity as a Jackson brother trapped in the family business, a megastar forced to keep pretending he s just another mem- In 1977, Michael shows off a drum-major-like outfit that would presage his mid-1980s look. At right: Tito, Jackie, Michael, Jermaine and Marlon (from left) in Jamaica in 1975, the year they left Motown and went out on their own. ber of the band, still living at home behind the iron gates of his father s compound. By 1973, the hits had dried up for the Jackson 5, and the boys were given up for dead. Who wants yesterday s bubblegum? The comeback hit Dancing Machine it reached Number Two in 1974 must have seemed like a novelty fluke to the old guard at Motown, but it proved to be a prophetic hit. Disco was a new sound in 1974, and it was rare for a name R&B group to give up its major-artist prestige and go all out to reach the discothèque die-hards. Dancing Machine introduced the world to the Robot, which the Jacksons took all over the TV talk-show circuit, doing the dance with Cher and on The Merv Griffin Show. The Jacksons left Motown for CBS Records in 1975, leaving their 5 behind, as Berry Gordy claimed it was his corporate property. The newly renamed Jacksons also left behind Jermaine, who d married Gordy s daughter and stuck with Motown to start his solo career. With Dancing M achine as their exit strategy, the Jacksons seemed primed to become a fluffy pop family act like the Sylvers, the DeFranco Family or the Captain and Tennille. They went on The Carol Burnett Show to introduce their newest fullfledged member, Randy, the youngest Jackson brother and a burgeoning musical talent. They made a pair of flops with the Philly-soul producers Gamble and Huff, who fed the brothers material while allowing Michael to write a couple of songs per album. The Jacksons has some moments the Top 10 hit Enjoy Yourself, the funk-rock Think Happy, with its proto- Beat It guitar eruption, and Michael s solo songwriting debut, Blues Away. But even the letter 76

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5 MICHAEL S on the cover could be mistaken for a 5, dropping fans a hint of who these guys used to be. The pressure to save the family empire was crushing for Michael, now a tall, gawky teen with a changing voice. New visitors to the Jackson mansion would ask him if he knew where that cute little Michael was. The brothers had a short-lived variety series on CBS where Michael boogied with Dom DeLuise and shadowboxed with Muhammad Ali. In early 1977, Michael talked to Andy Warhol for Interview magazine. He s really tall now, but he has a really high voice, Warhol wrote in his diary. He didn t know a thing about me he thought I was a poet or something like that. The Jacksons finally took creative control on Destiny, writing and producing the whole album except for the first single, Blame It on the Boogie, written by an obscure English disco singer named (of all things) Mick Jackson. Boogie was a sizable R&B hit, but the album re ally caught fire the following spring, when Michael and Randy s Shake Your Body started shaking millions of bodies down to the ground. Destiny was a fantastic rec ord, combining the relentless forward motion of disco with the romantic heat of Michael s voice. Even before he d started working with key collaborators like Quincy Jones or Rod Temperton, Michael had nailed the Michael Jackson sound on vinyl. And the ballads did anyone notice them as a cry for help? In That s What You Get (For Being Polite) and Bless His Soul, he keeps singing about nice guys who get exploited by everyone around them. In the title song, he longs to escape ( I ve tasted the city life, and it s not for me/now I do dream of distant places ), poignant from a kid just turned 20. The mood of the album is cartoonishly upbeat. The back cover has a painting of a peacock, with a poem written by Michael and Jackie for Peacock Productions: Of all the bird family, the peacock is the only bird that integrates all colors into one, and displays this radio of fire only when in love. We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one through the love of music. It s a family affair still co-managed by their father, they dedicate the record to their mother, and on the picture in the inner sleeve, the brothers pose by the studio mixing board. All smile confidently for the camera all but Michael, who hangs in the back and turns away nervously. Less than a year later, Off the Wall made Michael the biggest star in pop music, but he was still stuck with a group he couldn t quit they were blood and more than that. So, immediately after Off the Wall, he headed back into the studio for Triumph, back into the increasingly strange role of team player, pretending he s just another one of the brothers. You can hear his confidence surge on Triumph it s like watching how different Pacino is in the first two Godfather movies, knowing that he had a solo smash in between with Serpico. The Jacksons went back to the discos for this record the singles were huge R&B hits but never reached the pop Top 20, as if paying back the hardcore black audience that had kept listening when the pop masses had given up on them. Can You Feel It suggests they were listening to a lot of prog rock; it s like they threw some Electric Light Orchestra albums into a blender with some Earth, Wind and Fire. Heartbreak Hotel (an original, not an Elvis cover) is a first taste of the groupie- paranoia vibe that Michael would soon make one of his songwriting trademarks. Sometime after Heartbreak Hotel had already become a smash, CBS mysteriously changed the song s title to the totally nonsensical This Place Hotel. After Thriller, the family naturally came calling again, for the debacle of the Victory tour. In 1984, any whiff of plastic with a hint of the Jackson magic was guaranteed to hit the charts: The newly returned Jermaine got Michael to sing on Tell Me I m Not Dreamin, sister Rebbie had a glorious oneshot hit called Centipede, and old family friend Kennedy William Gordy, calling himself Rockwell, enlisted Michael s star power for the grand goof Somebody s Watching Me. But fans resented the Victory tour and album as soon as they were announced it looked like Michael was getting bullied into a family project, and it also looked like the brothers were crowding his action. You could see their swagger in the omnipresent Pepsi ad: The other Jacksons believed they were just as cool as Michael. Victory turned out to be an overblown mess, a laughingstock the day it was released. Michael barely appeared on the album beyond the hilarious Mick Jagger duet, State of Shock. He also sang a nice duet with Jermaine on Jackie s Torture and contributed a wretched hymn called Be Not Always that must have been designed to make Marlon s and Tito s songs look good. Michael had been working on tracks for Victory with Queen s Mercury it was Michael who encouraged Freddie to release Another One Bites the Dust as a single and there s an early demo where they sing State of Shock, with Freddie taking the part that went to Jagger. The Jacksons didn t play a single Victory song on their massively hyped summer tour, but they made headlines for sky-high ticket prices (30 bucks those were the days), and the whole project became a legendary symbol of superstar arrogance. The sad part was that the only superstar in the group was the one who wasn t arrogant enough to say no. As far as the American public was concerned, Victory was the end of the line for the Jacksons. Their only other album was 1989 s universally ignored 2300 Jackson Street (if you listen through a microscope, you can hear Michael in the title track). Destiny and Triumph were so overshadowed by the Michaelsolo juggernaut, they re buried treasures that most Michael fans haven t even heard. But in many ways, they re the sound of Michael struggling to rip himself free of his past. You could hear in his voice that he knew what it felt like to be rejected and abandoned by the music world. You could also hear his determination that it would never happen again. BOOGIE NIGHTS Clockwise from above: With Steve Rubell, Steven Tyler and Cherie Currie of the Runaways; with the Village People and Valerie Perrine (bottom left) and Jane Fonda (bottom right), 1979; with Andy Warhol, 1981; with Diana Ross at the premiere for The Wiz in October

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