Beneath bright Broadway and traffic-choked avenues, there were other worlds that existed; worlds of magic and music and miracles. And tonight this was to be the world of Michael Jackson.
Another Jackson. Just what I needed.
Thousands of fans who fantasized about being like Mike, or simply liked Mike, would get a special spectacle this evening because the Prince of Pop was already in the house and rumored to be loosening up his nearly liquid limbs in some private pocket along the passageways by the time I finished my set. He was to be a very special delivery and join me and Stevie when we closed the evening. I got to see different performers join us onstage from Houston to Hollywood. You couldn’t predict the next surprise Stevie would spring on his audience as we crossed the U.S.A. and Canada. It had become so routine for rockers and high rollers to finagle their faces into the finale that there was hardly a double take from the regulars or roadies, but the Michael Jackson rumor sent some shivers through both the rulers and the riffraff.
I was pleased that everyone else was pleased. From the road representatives of Dick Griffey’s Concerts West to certain venue venerables of the Madison Square Garden hierarchy, there was a noticeable neurosis and noise in the arena that evening.
I had met Michael and a couple of his brothers before, but I couldn’t say that I knew him or that he would have remembered me. I admired him, of course, since there was no way not to appreciate an artist who had sold as many records as McDonald’s had sold burgers. I had been a guest of Greg Phillinganes on one sunshine-splashed afternoon at a studio in L.A. where the Jacksons were regrouping to do an album. Michael was one of the few phenoms remaining when I arrived and Greg organized a brief introduction to folks. I was cool with that, even pleased to meet them in person. It had not been as electric as meeting Quincy Jones or Miles Davis, but I wouldn’t forget that it had happened. But what did I know? Only that this youngster, with the hair falling over one eye and a voice so soft and quiet that your ears had to reach for it, was record royalty.
Maybe all performers are schizophrenic, with a broader distance between their jobs and their homes and with more space between their fame and their families. The bigger their marquee, the greater the gap.
But I had never noticed that as a certainty. There was a separation, to be sure, between personalities in public and when they were relaxing offstage. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was always recognized and greeted everywhere he went. He was obviously outsized and outstanding, even while seated. In public the brother was always serious. But there was a private person, cringing and covering up with the rest of us when the alien burst from some astronaut’s chest or collapsing and holding his sides while watching an Amos ’n’ Andy video.
Thanks to my access to folks who were no strangers to success, I had met a thousand names more recognizable than those who owned them. I had met Muhammad Ali on several occasions, always a bit awed by his size and agility, but relaxed by his natural warmth and humor. He kept a smile at the ready, at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes as they searched out his surroundings.
But these casual encounters with artists off duty gave me no warning about how the electricity would elevate, how the excitement level would rise in the arena when Michael Jackson joined us onstage as the band went into the reggae rhythm of “Master Blaster.” He would raise the voltage.
I often try to tell people how special Michael Jackson was, as though they don’t know. Because I myself didn’t know. I thought I did—until he came out for “Master Blaster” at Madison Square Garden.
Stevie called for the monitor man to pull the rhythm track up and with a wide grin beckoned for his “special guest,” someone who needed no introduction. I looked behind me as he took three steps, paused a beat, and stood straighter and taller, turning solid then as from mist to man. I don’t see that well. Sometimes.
He didn’t just walk onto the stage. He turned solid as he came. A trick of the light. He glided past me into the spotlight. There was a surge of energy from the crowd that lifted the sound in the arena from stereo to quadraphonic and even the temperature seemed to rise when he touched the perimeter of the spotlight. And as the crowd’s suspicions were confirmed by recognition, the buzz turned into an active roar. The monitor volume was overcome and Stevie’s smile got wider and he clapped his hands close to his chest and waited for the turn, caught the opening when it swung around again and the house roar slid down to thunder again.
When the hook arrived it was like a huge transport landing on foam: “Didn’t know you would be jammin’ until the break of dawn . . .” Michael and I began on the beat and on the same harmony note, but as smoothly as he had floated from the shadows to my side, his voice climbed to the next harmony note where he seemed to cancel our collision and make himself at home again, two notes further up the scale.
After another chorus with me holding the mike for Mike I realized how prepared he was to do this and how unprepared I was to do it with him.
He knew the song. All of it. The lyrics, the changes, and all of the harmony parts. Hell, I hadn’t got my part right until we got to Hartford. Tonight I felt like a six-foot mannequin clutching the base of the wireless like a giant gray ice-cream cone, frozen into a position of extending my arm between us, trying to collect both of our voices. It felt like reaching for water with a butterfly net. I was committed to remaining stationary and holding the sound stick steady. Michael might have been, but even while standing still he seemed to flow in every direction. Without a further thought I handed him the microphone and strolled to the shadows on our side of the stage.
In essence I got to watch two wonders at once. Up close: a smiling Stevie at center stage behind his keyboard bank with his head slightly tilted in what had been my direction; and sliding in and out of the circle of soft light that usually told me where to stand I saw this youngster, bending with impossible balance, twisting the tempo around him like a thread that spins a top. And then he reversed it, twirling like a boneless ice skater. The symmetry was perfect because he was as still as a statue when the foundation of the verse appeared and Stevie came in again. I was looking ahead and saying I had thirty more shows to try that, to get it like Mike. Probably not.
37
I suppose that as long as we live, Stevie Wonder will call me Air-reez. But only when it’s appropriate. Like at night, after a show, at a group gathering in somebody’s hotel space.
There was a game the members of Wonderlove seemed to set up with Stevie. The door to a back room was closed. Stevie would have a seat beyond the room’s double beds and the group members would sit along the walls and on the beds. Quietly. Holding conversations with the people near them. Waiting. To near silence I opened the door, an unsuspecting party seeker, and threw a freezing rope that fell on the shoulders of the occupants. I saw Stevie in a straight-backed chair leaning toward me with a half smile. There was an empty second in a room full of expectation and then Stevie pulled himself erect and shouted, “Air-reez!” and everybody laughed and clapped and looked at me like a pickpocket with his hand caught in a mousetrap.
I never knew how he did that, and I never asked him because I always thought I would figure it out. And it wasn’t as though I gave up there, threw my hands up in disgust and vowed to change my aftershave. I was not born on April 1st thirty years before this get-together for the future amusement of Wonderlove. I got caught because somebody whispered my name and I knew Stevie could hear a fly pissing on a piece of cotton down the block. Just wait until next time, I thought.
The next time was less than two weeks later. A similar situation. It was after a concert and all the band and crew rooms were in the one hotel. I wasn’t sure that things were arranged until I was directed toward the back of a suite by a grinning Calvin. I nodded my understanding and, taking no chances at all, I tiptoed with rubber soles on carpet up to a door that I inspected with suspicion. I had a plan.
With a quick wrist flick I twisted my way in and put a finger against my lips to the group as I shu
t the door behind me. My expression said, “Nobody breathe!”
Stevie was stunned. He’d been quicked and he knew it. He was sitting up straight and his head was rotating slowly like a gyroscope. I was watching for breathers, but then with his face to the ceiling, he grinned my way and shouted, “Air-reez!”
I don’t know what to tell you about that. It was probably the time I should have asked him how he knew it was me. After a while, however, I started to feel like a guy waiting backstage for a magician to ask him about his performance. They were not telling and I shouldn’t be asking.
I took a glass of punch somebody offered and a seat on the bed next to Stevie, clapping him on the shoulder. The room had resumed a party’s volume. Music. Teasing. Guys and girls who had become close friends on the road or maintained relationships over the hundreds of highways were telling each other secrets. Stevie was humming something and tapping the table in front of him like a keyboard.
Malcolm Cecil always had stories about incidents that took place when he was recording Stevie. Like a game they used to play in the hallways at the Record Plant in L.A. The hallway was about ten-feet-wide, and Stevie would stand in the middle of the floor with about four feet of space on either side. The object of the game was to get by Stevie on one side or the other without him catching you. According to Malcolm it couldn’t be done. I would have suspected that Malcolm, practitioner of Tai Chi, would certainly have perfected a silent step among the pirouettes and paces I’d seen him go through, but no matter. Evidently Stevie was a master of a superior art. Ears like an eagle.
When you spent time with Stevie, the extraordinary became commonplace, the unusual was unremarkable and the previously overwhelming could be overlooked. The things that made him seem extraordinary to me were not confined to the stage. In fact, they had nothing to do with this stage presence. But I’d also been going out more and more to catch earlier parts of his show, well before he called out for me to join him.
I liked the opening. I liked the strength of it, the sudden flashes of light and color and movement. I’m sure I got as big a kick as anyone else when he was captured by the spotlight rocking like a pendulum with dreads from side to side and cranking “Wonderlove” into “Sir Duke.” I was also pulled from the reverie of my dressing room to catch the transition that took place in the middle of the set, when the band members seemed to evaporate like mist and Stevie was left alone at the keyboards. There was something unbelievably poignant about the isolation. The darkness of the giant arena was filled with silent memories and “Lately” became a magic carpet he rolled out for us to ride.
I still wanted to believe I was a better lyricist but there was mounting evidence to the contrary on an album of surgical sensitivity called Hotter than July. I left my dressing room during the solo section of Stevie’s set to listen to lyrics that were more than something to say while playing piano. If you happened to notice a man leaning at an awkward angle in the shadows of the tunnel connecting us to privacy, it was only me eavesdropping on the chill and lonely certainty of “Lately.”
38
Different dates on the tour were memorable for different reasons. Some days I took notes, though most of those notes seem to have been done as a joke, some kind of acrobatic way of pulling my own leg. There were either a few lines written before the show along with whatever expenses I needed to note, or, after the concert, in the early a.m., there was a separate page or two that described something that happened or that I felt during the day or evening. There was rarely both, rarely an occasion when I wrote something before and after a show. December 8, 1980 in Oakland was a before-and-after day. I still remember the after feelings now.
I rarely missed things Stevie said to me. But when I saw him at the bottom of the backstage stairs at the arena in Oakland, I thought I must have misheard him. Maybe it was the shock at what he had said. Maybe I hadn’t missed what he said and just thought I did. It was something I didn’t want to hear.
But no, I must have mistaken Stevie for sure.
“What did you say?” I asked him, trying to get above the noise.
“I said some psycho, some crazy person, shot John Lennon!” Stevie said. “And I’m wondering how to handle it.”
I am not so silly or naive as to suspect that there is an ultimate evil. But the death of a good man, so rare as to be nearly extinct, is a thorough tragedy. And what do you say about it to seventeen thousand people who have come out to see you and enjoy themselves?
I got that same feeling I’d felt when I heard that Dr. King or someone else was killed; that sense of a certain part of you being drained away, a loss of self. There were certain events in your life that had such historical significance that you were supposed to remember the circumstances under which you received the news for the rest of your life. That was probably what some section of humanity used to illustrate man’s superiority over other animals: “memories of miseries that memorialize.”
Having those memories was like turning down the corner of a page in your life’s book. But maybe animals turned down corners of pages, too. They might not choose the date of the death of John Lennon to see as a date of loss and mourning, they would be more likely to remember the date the Ringling Brothers died or the day the woman from Born Free was born.
I was sure they talked about important things. I didn’t have the dialogue down pat, but I could picture a conversation between two lions on a late-night walk across the savannah.
“Yeah, that’s where it was, man,” one of them says. “Right over there by the watering hole. A big mean-looking thing with sharp teeth and the strongest grip you ever heard of. The gorilla called it an animal trap. Man, that thing grabbed Freddy Leopard and held him for hours. The gorilla got Freddy loose but his leg was all fucked up and he’s still walking with a limp.”
Just exactly what did those recollections, those dog-eared pages, prove? That you were connected to the human race? It couldn’t be. Because if so, people born since then, who weren’t around then, couldn’t be connected. That’s why there were history books and parents and other folks to tell you what happened before you got here.
And why did you need to remember those things? Most of them were about someone being killed or assassinated. You could almost feel as though you needed an alibi: “Where were you the day that such-and-such a person was murdered?” They were pages in history books, however. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it proved. That you were connected to the human race? They were usually the least human things you could imagine. Unnatural disasters.
I always knew where I’d been. I was in last period history class at DeWitt Clinton High School when the principal announced from the bottom of an empty barrel: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that your president is dead.” He was talking about John Kennedy, shot to death by someone in Dallas.
I was in the little theatre at Lincoln when a guy everyone called “the Beast” had thrown open a rear door and shouted, “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King has been shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.”
I was in my bedroom on West 17th Street when man first reached the moon and I had written a poem called “Whitey on the Moon” that very night (for which my mother had come up with the punch line: “We’re gonnna send these doctor bills air mail special to Whitey on the moon”).
I was drawn back to a conversation with my grandmother as she reenacted the national shock that shook America when the news came down that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead: “It was just incredible,” she said with her eyes getting wide. “Nobody seemed to think that he would ever really die.”
And now I would always remember the night John Lennon died. Yeah, because of who told me and where, but also because of the effect the news had on the crowd. It proved we had been right, Stevie and I, when we hastily decided that it would serve no purpose to make that announcement before he played.
“No, just wait until the end, before we play them songs,” I told him. “Hell, ain’t nothin’ they ca
n do about it.”
And that had been soon enough. The effect of Stevie’s somber announcement on the crowd was like a punch in the diaphragm, causing them to let out a spontaneous “Whaaaa!” Then there was a second of silence, a missing sound, as if someone had covered their mouths with plastic, so tight not even their breathing could be detected. I was standing at the back of the stage outside of the cylinder of light that surrounded Stevie, next to Carlos Santana and Rodney Franklin, who were joining us for the closing tunes.
Stevie had more to say than just the mere announcement that John Lennon had been shot and killed. For the next five minutes he spoke spontaneously about his friendship with John Lennon: how they’d met, when and where, what they had enjoyed together, and what kind of a man he’d felt Lennon was. That last one was the key, because it drew a line between what had happened in New York that day and what had happened on that motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, a dozen years before. And it drew a circle around the kind of men who stood up for both peace and change. That circle looked suspiciously like a fucking bull’s-eye to me. It underlined the risks that such men took because of what all too often happened to them.
Stevie said it made the rally five weeks in the future just that much more significant. All I was thinking about was that it made security more significant. That was for damn sure.
But it was another stunning moment in an evening of already notable cold-water slaps, a raw reminder of how the world occasionally reached inside the cocoon that tours and studios and offices on West 57th Street provide. It stopped your heart for a beat and froze your lungs for a gasp; showing you how fragile your grip on life was and how many enemies you didn’t know you had.
The Last Holiday Page 22