Man in the Music

by Joseph Vogel

  Yet of all the heartfelt statements and tributes, one of the most intimate and powerful eulogies came from Jackson’s longtime friend and peer from Motown, Stevie Wonder. Wonder, of course, never saw Jackson perform; he never witnessed the changes in his appearance; he never saw the music videos or costumes or masks. However, he knew Jackson on a much deeper level than most. And he heard his music. Michael, he often said, was “a gift.”

  In the immediate aftermath of Jackson’s death, Stevie Wonder made no public statement or appearance. “He is emotionally distraught and chooses to be quiet right now,” said a representative. Weeks later, when he took the stage at Michael’s memorial, it was clear that he was still devastated. “This is a moment that I wished I didn’t live to see come,” he said, his throat tightening.

  Then he began playing the opening chords to “I Can’t Help It”—a song he wrote for Jackson more than thirty years earlier that was featured on the artist’s Off the Wall album. As Wonder played, he seemed to be channeling Jackson’s energy: that strange mix of wonder, yearning, and sadness. Then he transitioned to “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer,” his singular, elastic voice filling the dark arena. The aching ballad speaks of something beautiful cut short. “Michael, why didn’t you stay,” he sings.

  And then he began “They Won’t Go When I Go.” The tone shifted from wistful to somber. The song has the weight and depth of a spiritual. There’s real pain and anger in it. “No more lying friends, wanting tragic ends,” he began, as the hushed audience in the arena—and millions of others around the world on television and online—watched and listened. Wonder was both lamenting and testifying. It was a song about losing a friend, not an icon. The pain was visceral.

  But it also communicated a sense of indignation. “Unclean minds mislead the pure,” he exclaimed. “The innocent will leave for sure / For them there is a resting place.” As the song built to its emotional climax, an anguished Wonder poured his soul into it, as if getting it out might finally redeem his friend—might push through the noise and reveal the essence, the humanity, and the tragedy of Michael Jackson. “Michael, they won’t go,” he cried. “They won’t go, where you go.”

  For Wonder (and many others), Jackson’s death at least meant he no longer had to deal with the crushing weight of his unusual life in the spotlight. When Jackson first arrived in Hollywood in 1969 at the age of ten, it was almost like Dorothy landing in Oz. “We were awestruck by California,” he remembered. “Trees had oranges and leaves on them in the middle of the winter. There were palm trees and beautiful sunsets, and the weather was so warm….To come from our part of Indiana…and to land in Southern California was like having the world transformed into a wonderful dream.”

  He later learned the darker side of that dream. Perhaps no entertainer in American history experienced higher highs and lower lows than Michael Jackson did. In the mid-1990s, his former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, remembers him, in the midst of a conversation about her father, staring at her very intensely and saying with “an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did.’ ”

  It was not something he wanted. A student of history—particularly show business history—Jackson tried desperately not only to learn from his predecessors’ successes, but also from their mistakes, their blind spots. Yet by his later years, he understood why so many great artists’ lives ended in tragedy. It wasn’t easy to survive—particularly with the level of fame Jackson reached. He became a Jay Gatsby–like figure, simultaneously blessed and cursed by the American Dream.

  For more than forty years he chased it, hid from it, believed in it, denounced it, wrestled with it, and described its effects in his work. In the end, the world lost him, but retained the music.

  “Who wants mortality?” Jackson said in his final print interview with Ebony in 2007. “Everyone wants immortality. Everyone wants what you create to live, whether it be sculpture or painting, music or composition. Like Michelangelo said, ‘I know the creator will go, but his works survives. That is why to escape death I attempt to bind my soul to my work.’ And that’s how I feel. I give my all to my work because I want it to just live.”

  Jackson continued to make music right up until his final days. He told his fellow collaborators he couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t turn it off. The ideas kept coming; his imagination was restless. It was like stepping into a river, he said, and joining its flow, never knowing exactly where it might take him. “It’s an adventure,” he told his final creative team in 2009, “a great adventure.”

  1

  OFF THE WALL

  (1979)

  I’m interested in making a path instead of following a trail and that’s what I want to do in life—in everything I do.

  —MICHAEL JACKSON, Ebony, 1979

  Off the Wall did for R&B what the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds did for rock. It was a turning point, a sonic revelation, a distillation of an era and mood. Music critic Rob Sheffield called it the record that “invented modern pop as we know it.”

  While it doesn’t explore the full range of themes Jackson would take on in subsequent albums, Off the Wall perfectly captures the exhilaration and energy, the pent-up desires and ambition of its creator. It represents a moment when everything still seemed ripe with possibility. Many critics and listeners alike now consider it the purest expression of Jackson’s genius.

  Due to the seismic cultural impact of Thriller, it is often forgotten that, in 1981, its predecessor became the bestselling album ever by a black artist. It would chart an unprecedented four Billboard Top 10 hits (two of which reached #1). Perhaps more important, it was the album that effectively transitioned Michael Jackson from child star to mature solo artist. Before its release, the popular image of Jackson was still as the ten-year-old prodigy of the early Jackson 5. After Off the Wall, there was no mistaking it: Michael Jackson, the then–“Prince of Pop,” had arrived. He was twenty-one years old.

  DISCO FEVER

  In the late ’70s, America found itself in a rut. It wasn’t just the recession, or the Iranian hostage crisis, or the energy crisis. It was a general sense of malaise. President Jimmy Carter described it as a “crisis of confidence.” “It is a crisis,” claimed Carter in his famous 1979 speech, “that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

  It is easy to see the appeal of disco in this context. Many Americans were looking for an escape—and that’s what disco provided. Michael Jackson marveled at its impact for precisely this reason. “I think that’s the psychological reason for the disco craze,” he told Jet. “You get to be that dream you want to be. You just go crazy with the lights and the music and you’re in another world.”

  Emerging out of the New York City nightlife in the mid-1970s, disco was created by African American and Latino musicians as a kind of hybrid of R&B, funk, and electronic dance music. The sound was characterized by both its extravagance (not only in terms of its lavish sound, but also its flamboyant styles) and its simplicity (its trademark four-on-the-floor beat and easy-to-learn dance moves). Disco clubs exploded in the mid- to late ’70s, as songs like Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” and Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” surged up the charts. In the early days, it was particularly popular among urban LGBTQ communities. Notably, many of the genre’s biggest stars were women of color, including Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and Chaka Khan.

  Within a few short years, disco went from underground subculture to global phenomenon. It was the era of Chic, Sylvester, and the Village People. In 1977, Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta and featuring the music of the Bee Gees, became the bestselling soundtrack in music history. Jackson was
taking notes. Not only was he a huge fan of the Bee Gees; he liked the idea of making music visual. He told those around him that his goal was to make a similar multimedia album that sold even more.

  Meanwhile, Studio 54 in midtown Manhattan became the most famous disco club in America, attracting A-list celebrities while generating endless stories of excess and hedonism. Jackson was also taking notes on this. In fact, he was literally there, both during and after the shooting of The Wiz, voyeuristically watching the activities like Nick Carraway at Jay Gatsby’s parties. At the time, Jackson was still a devout Jehovah’s Witness and wary of licentiousness, given both his conservative religious teachings and his life experiences to that point. But he was fascinated by the costumes and theatrics and glamour.

  In many ways, Jackson seemed, as music journalist Anthony DeCurtis noted, “entirely in tune with the times, coming of age at the epicenter of the urban nightlife scene sweeping the culture, and creating a smart, sexy sound for it.” Yet he was also somehow detached from it—as Rob Sheffield observed, “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.”

  Disco, incidentally, reached its apex in 1979—the year Off the Wall was released. It was the year of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” and Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic “I Will Survive.” But not everyone was happy about disco’s takeover of the airwaves, charts, and clubs. The year 1979 also marked the beginning of a virulent backlash to the genre, embodied by the “Disco Sucks” movement. On July 12—less than a month before Off the Wall hit stores—a bizarre promotional stunt known as Disco Demolition Night took place at Comiskey Park in Chicago. In between a doubleheader of baseball games that night, thousands of disco records were burned at center field, inciting a near riot from fans storming the field.

  In addition to public demonstrations, music critics at the time were almost universally skeptical of disco, favoring instead the “authenticity” and “seriousness” of rock. While rock pushed boundaries and opposed mainstream culture, critics argued, disco was a slick, shallow product aimed at a mass consumer audience. While this assessment contained a measure of truth—disco, like all genres of popular music, could be, and was, propelled by commercial pressures—it also betrayed some obvious biases. It was not as if rock or punk or new wave were somehow untainted by the pressures and constraints of the industry. By 1979, formulaic, commercial rock was just as prevalent as disco.

  At least part of the distaste seemed to stem from long-held stigmas about “black” music that went back at least as far as jazz in the 1920s. It also had to do with what disco represented. Inclusive in its sound, message, and audience, disco represented diversity, acceptance, experimentation, and escapism. “Disco was diametrically opposite to the macho posturing of white rock,” observed cultural critic Daryl Easlea. “A few journalists wrote passionately about it, but in the main it was ignored or treated with disdain.” Derisive descriptions of disco’s effeminacy, theatricality, emotional extravagance, and even its ability to make people want to dance were not merely neutral observations. As music historian Craig Werner wrote, “The attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism, and homophobia.” (Interestingly, from early in Jackson’s adult career, these same attacks were aimed at him.)

  Disco, of course, wasn’t the only presence in music in the late ’70s. It was also the era of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, Queen, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, and Blondie. Disco, R&B, prog rock, glam rock, soft rock, punk, and pop all competed in an evolving and diversifying music scene.

  In the world of dance music, Off the Wall has often been seen as emblematic of the trends of the time. Yet part of what distinguishes the album, then and now, stems from the sustained tension it strikes between opposites. Unlike much late-’70s disco, Off the Wall is not merely a celebration of excess. It is an album of innocence as much as experience, wonder as much as indulgence. It is highly sensual, but subtly, often euphemistically. It never speaks of politics directly, yet it is implicitly political. It never speaks of race, yet it broke numerous racial barriers. It references nothing specific about its historical context, yet it clearly signifies for many listeners a specific moment in time. It is disco, but it is also jazz, pop, funk, soul, R&B, and Broadway. Off the Wall, then, is a difficult album to pin down. This elusiveness, however, is part of what makes it so compelling.

  “I LIKE THAT IT’S A SECRET”

  In 1977, when Jackson was chosen to play the role of the Scarecrow in The Wiz, alongside his longtime friend and mentor at Motown, Diana Ross, he was just nineteen years old. Rolling Stone described him as “utterly beguiling, brimming with boundless curiosity, good humor, and clarity of purpose….Childlike playfulness and tempered mettle have rarely blended so well in a performer’s facial features: bright, sparkling, man-child eyes gazing out from beneath feathery eyebrows and fairly illuminating the gently rounded caramel lineaments. A gracefully sloping, mildly puggish nose strengthened by high cheekbones and a strong, angular jaw. A symmetrical halo of wiry hair hovering confidently over it all.”

  Yet beneath that radiant exterior things were more complicated. His adolescence had been difficult—in some ways, traumatizing. “I think every child star suffers through this period because you’re not the cute and charming child that you were,” reflected Jackson. “You start to grow, and they want to keep you little forever.” The artist became deeply self-conscious about his physical appearance. He struggled with acne and was teased about his “big nose.” “I’d hide my face in the dark,” he remembered. “I wouldn’t want to look in the mirror, and my father teased me, and I just hated it and I cried every day….Those were very sad, sad years for me.”

  He also remembered his father, Joseph, physically abusing him. “My father would kill me, just tear me up,” he recalled. A particularly painful memory was his father forcing him to strip down, completely naked, before whipping him with an ironing cord. The pain wasn’t just physical. It was a mix of terror, rejection, and confusion about his father (whom he always called Joseph). “There’s been times when he’d come to see me, I’d get sick, I’d start to regurgitate,” he confessed to Oprah Winfrey in 1993.

  While Jackson felt close to his mother, Katherine, and, in certain ways, to his siblings, he remembered these years as profoundly lonely. “I had very few close friends at the time,” he recalled, “and felt very isolated. I was so lonely that I used to walk through my neighborhood hoping I’d run into somebody I could talk to and perhaps become friends with. I wanted to meet people who didn’t know who I was.” He rarely went out to parties or events. He did date actress Tatum O’Neal on and off in 1977 and ’78. Yet, according to friends and family, he spent most of his time either working or in his bedroom reading, drawing, watching movies, and plotting his career.

  When he did go out in public, he often wore disguises, including fake mustaches, buckteeth, or fat suits. Sometimes he would even go door to door in disguise, Bible in hand, evangelizing to people about his Jehovah’s Witness faith. Meanwhile, back at the family home—called Hayvenhurst, in Encino, California, just north of Beverly Hills—he put mannequins in his room for companionship. “I guess I want to bring them to life,” he said. “I like to imagine talking to them.”

  Leaving for New York City to work on The Wiz in the summer of 1977, then, was a big step for Jackson. His older sister LaToya accompanied him. During the months of production, the two lived in a high-rise apartment in Manhattan. In this new setting, film producer Rob Cohen observed, he was “like a little kid in a playground….[It] was full of excitement for Michael.” The experience changed him in a number of ways, opening him up to a world he hadn’t known and inaugurating his lifelong love of cinema.

  It also a
llowed him, at least temporarily, to escape from being “Michael Jackson.” “My complexion was still a mess during the filming of the movie,” he remembers, “so I found myself really enjoying the makeup. It was an amazing makeup job….The other people who were being made up were amazed that I didn’t mind sitting there having this done for such long periods of time. They hated it, but I enjoyed having the stuff put on my face. When I was transformed into the Scarecrow, it was the most wonderful thing in the world. I got to be somebody else and escape through my character.”

  Jackson felt so attached to the character that he would sometimes wear his makeup and costume home. “I like how different it feels,” he said in an interview at the time. “I can be in a whole ’nother place with it. Sometimes I wear it home, and people—kids—I look out the back of the window of the car and let them see me. Whoa, they get frightened! They don’t know who or what it is! It’s a trip, it’s really a trip. It’s a secret; that’s it. I like that it’s a secret.” That year, he confessed to journalist J. Randy Taraborrelli that what he liked most about his character was his “confusion. He knows that he has problems, I guess you could call them. But he doesn’t know why he has them or how he got that way. And he understands that he sees things differently from the way everyone else does, but he can’t put his finger on why. He’s not like other people. No one understands him. So he goes through his whole life with this, uh…confusion. Everybody thinks he’s very special, but, really, he’s very sad. He’s so, so sad. Do you understand? Do you understand his sadness?”

  The Wiz didn’t suddenly end Jackson’s sadness or loneliness, but it did give him more confidence. Most crucially, in terms of his musical career, it introduced him to Quincy Jones, who was musical supervisor for the film. As Jackson remembers it, they hit it off immediately. As they got to know each other better during production, he decided to ask Jones if he could recommend any producers for his next album. Jones said sure: him.