Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  First, it was the three oldest sons, with Jermaine singing lead. Two sisters, Maureen (the oldest of the Jackson children) and Latoya, played violin and clarinet (the instrument Mrs. Jackson played) outside the group.

  Shortly after Marlon and Michael joined, the group won a talent show at Roosevelt High and, the next two years, won regional talent competitions. And the rest is in Soul magazine.

  (Oh, yes-there's Randy, 8, who plays congas and is just about ready to make it the Jackson 6. And Janet, 4, in the wings, still learning words.)

  What happens at Motown, in the studios? Motown acts usually won't talk about record production, as if some conspiracy transpires in secret rooms in Detroit and Hollywood. Few people know who actually decides what songs, what producers, what musicians make up "The Sound of Young America."

  I mean, when I heard the first several Jackson 5 singles on the radio-"I Want You Back," `ABC," and "One More Chance"-I had thought, crazy: Diana Ross and the Family Stone. All the albums are gems. On the first, Michael turns Smokey's "Who's Loving You" into a noodly little blues number; on the second, he leaves his band and orchestra behind on the Stevie Wonder tune "Don't Know Why I Love You." Michael is causing heartbreaks while the Osmonds are still learning the ABCs of white-skinned soul. And all the albums are planned, Motown's publicist says, with the black market in mind. "We try and have at least two hits on every album." The third album includes "I'll Be There" and "Mama's Pearl," which was remixed for its release as a single. Now, Michael's in the studios with his producer, working on his tracks for the next album.

  From what Joe Jackson says, the deal with the Jackson 5 apparently works like this: He has raised, trained, and furnished them; Motown will now do the rest. For example: "What is your role in the studio?" "My role is getting the boys out to the studios. I'm the legal guardian. They listen to me 100 percent." There is, however, a road manager from Dick Clark Productions and a young Motown employee, Suzanne DePasse, handling choreography and the selection of stage numbers.

  "Who writes the songs?" "I've written some songs, the boys have written some." But none of them have yet been recorded, and many of the tunes on the three albums (not counting the Christmas record) are by "The Corporation," who are credited as arrangers and producers, along with Hal Davis. Who're they? "The Corporation," Jackson says, "is the company itself-people, producers within Motown. They're called `the clan' back in Detroit."

  Here in the suite the Jackson 5 are using for a parlor at their hotel in Columbus, the most noise is being made by several men, white men. A couple of them are playing cards. Joe Jackson, watching the card game, remains quiet, except to help herd his sons over to talk.

  They do interviews like most boys get their hair cut, worried if they move their mouth the wrong way they'll get nicked. But they are as amiable as they are bashful.

  Jackie, 19, talks about going into business school with an eye to "maybe take care of the financial part of the group someday." For now, "all I do is enjoy what I do onstage. It's something like a hobby."

  Tito, 17, is more into music (Jackie dropped out of a high school music course and is learning to read charts now from Jermaine, Tito, and cousin Ronnie). "In the studios, I sing bass and play some lead guitar, and I'm going into music theory." In school, he learned to play the violin, bass fiddle, and saxophone. And he can play some piano, too. Tito listens to Hendrix and B.B. King records. "Ever since I started playing guitar, about three years ago. And I have one B.B. King record about as old as me. It's my father's."

  Tito shook his head slowly, like an old bluesman reminiscing, when I asked about the old days, seven years ago, when Michael first joined: "It was hard. Money was short. It was a drag."

  Jermaine Jackson, 16, laughs easily, with an open face and smile. Right after the initial introductions, while everybody else was watching TV or playing the card game Tonk, he walked over, looked at my cassette recorder, and asked, "Wanna talk right now?" And he sat against the headboard of a bed and told about school-how he and his brothers go to a private school in Encino, five classrooms and twenty-nine students: how a tutor, assigned by the state board of education, follows them on their short tours to keep them doing schoolwork.

  Jermaine played bass on a guitar before getting a bass guitar. "I started guitar at 11, before we became professional. That's when I was 14." Next, Jermaine wants to learn piano. And he's writing songs-"all kinds; a lot of short songs. I've got some saved up... for when we go bankrupt."

  I asked Jermaine to name me some of his favorite artists, people I wouldn't guess (like the Motown acts). He smiled. "Barbra Streisand...and Bread.. .Three Dog Night. I met them at the Forum when we were there."

  Marlon, 13, is considered the quietest of the Jackson 5. On stage, Michael has the spotlight, but Marlon is as visible as any corner of a polished diamond. Those smooth moves he and his brothers execute while Michael works the front lines-left hand up, right arm and hand joining left, both arms slashed diagonally past the hip; a spin and a grab of the mike stand with one hand, taking it down to knee level and singing into it-Marlon looks the best at it. Vocally, his singing goes into the harmonic mix-he sings no leads-but once in a while, you hear him. After a rousing "coin' Back to Indiana," while the electric piano and drums and Michael swirl to a finish, Marlon stays at his mike and lets out three happy whoops.

  Tito looks the toughest, so, over a sandwich at the coffee shop in Chicago's airport, I asked him about what the Jackson 5 were saying to kids-especially to black kids. Peace and freedom and unity, right? Or are you singing these songs just to entertain? Tito thought it over, worked an overload of lettuce into his mouth, and swallowed. "Just to entertain," he said.

  Michael Jackson is 11 years old, 75 pounds. And he's sung lead on almost all the Jackson 5's songs-six hit singles in 1970: three gold albums (plus a Christmas LP that is sure to play forever) and two hit singles so far this year.

  Michael is the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and the Tempts and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum: of all the spirit that is meant when Brown does his all-out dance-sweat-and-relate act, when the Miracles or the Tops line up, all dressed alike, and do their black-is-beautiful drill team maneuvers, tall, proud, and smiling, sounding like rivulets of soul. Or when Sly & the Family Stone, five blacks and two whites, all outfitted different but funkadelic, come on stomping, raising you up, by flashes, to a feeling of exhilaration and to some syner gistic sense-all of you there in your $5.50 seat section-of potential power and present glory. Color, flash, and a mayfield of messengers, drumming, pounding, screeching, blowing out the word.

  The Jackson 5 are this and more: They are peers. Stars, untouchable in their sleek black Fleetwood Cadillacs that roar off behind police escorts after all their shows. Yet peers, backstage in Gary, Indiana, looking for old friends to drop by. One of them sheepishly walks in, and Marlon and Michael brighten. The friend is dressed OK, but he's not in pink top and Indian rainbow-print slacks with puffballs down to the bottom of the bell, like Marlon. He's checking Marlon out, stands back a little, you know, but Marlon just wants to find out about all the old friends from grammar school, and they talk a little, hands reach out, slap, slap, and the friend leaves with a power salute.

  Eight 10-year-old kids in Columbus, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, where we visited; in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where I work-they love and emulate the Jackson 5. There's a bit of fantasy-the kind of gush white teenies direct at Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy (of the TV Partridge Family). But there isn't that real distance. It is a style of clothing, for one thing. Preteen blacks are blossoming out in Afros and fringed bells and Apple hats. And it is different from that Hollywood notion of fashion for fad's sake; hot pants for a hot minute. This is an approach to brothers and to others; in a way, a statement. It is a feeling of camaraderie, of the kind of spirit that bought Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young so close to so many last year; it is a feeling that, in white circles, might best be counterparted by Grand Funk and its "
brotherhood" kind of magnetism.

  It is in the posters that the kids in Gary drew and cut out and painted for the J-5 contest. "You can make it if you try." "On Top with our Jackson 5." And it is in the songs-in the first album, "Stand" (There's a midget standing tall, and the giant beside him about to fall/Stand/stand/stand); in the second, "Make Way for the Young Folks." In the third, "I'm on your side, when things get rough and friends just can't be found, like a bridge over troubled water." On the Christmas album, along with the rousing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," and the most soulful "Little Drummer Boy" ever, Michael sung an antiwar song, "Someday at Christmas."

  Michael Jackson, round eyes, round dimples on a round face, under a round Afro, has placed himself on a couch in the hotel suite and looks up, to indicate he's ready to be interviewed. He's done his two shows, and he's been relaxing-playing cards, doing card tricks, and waiting for the inevitable pillow fight. So his brown eyes dart around now and then, watching for the first move.

  Backstage in Columbus that day-and he must've heard this line a dozen times-when a columnist for the local black paper patted him paternally and tried: "I heard you were really a midget, man, that you're actually 30 years old," Mike gave him this side-swipe smile, like ha-ha, very original.

  Michael began singing with his brothers when he turned 4. The first show "was a hospital we did. They had a big Santa Claus." Another early show was at the Big Top; it was a shopping center. "We were doing it free so the people could hear the music." Now, seven years later, Michael is playing drums and learning the piano. And, in the Motown studios in Hollywood, backed vocally by his brothers and instrumentally by the usual full crew of Motown session men, he sings lead. "It takes me about two hours to do one whole song," he says. "I do my part first, then they do theirs."

  The first songs Michael remembers singing were the Drifters' "Under the Boardwalk" and the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout," both from 1961. Today, on stage, Michael does a talk bit about how he feels the blues. It is not convincing; the Jackson 5 are not great actors just yet. But, with their median age still 15, they have paid dues. "Before Motown," Mike recalled, "we used to do five shows a night for theaters" and clubs around Chicago and Gary where their youth was no barrier, doing the circuit with groups like the Emotions and the Chi-Lites. The Jacksons also worked in Missouri and Wisconsin, and even in Arizona once. They got there by bus.

  Michael soon perfected a James Brown imitation and made it his routine. "It was amazing," says Suzanne DePasse, who plans and coordinates the J-5's stage show. "He had it down to a T"-every twist, turn, jerk, and thrust. "And I had to work to get him away from a lot of it."

  Mike is a skilled mimic. He watches TV cartoons and can sketch profiles; now he wants to take art in college. "Also I'd like to be an actor, like the kinds of things Sidney Poitier does." And when I told Michael he was a good blues singer, he laughed. "I learned by ear."

  By the time Diana Ross introduced the Jackson 5 to her world-at the Daisy discotheque in Beverly Hills in September 1969-the group was reported to have "a repertoire that ranges from Ray Charles to Liberace." Soul magazine didn't elaborate, but Michael, talking about his favorite kind of music, made it sound almost plausible. "I like classical music," he said, "and soft listening music. Sometimes I sit and listen to soft stuff like Johnny Mathis. I like Ray Charles. And most of the time, I listen to Three Dog Night."

  And what about the screaming audiences? The Jackson 5 did their first major tour last fall, hitting the big arenas, in Boston, Cincinnati, and New York. They set an attendance record by drawing 12,275 to a show in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had a majestic triumph in home territory-at the Chicago Amphitheatre before 19,570.

  Kids fainted in Cincinnati and Boston, rushing through fences and human barriers to reach the stage. Michael Jackson, the understanding diplomat: "If it weren't for the screaming, it wouldn't be exciting. The kids help us by being the way they are."

  "I'D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ALL TONIGHT about the blues. Yeah, the blues." Mike's brothers are standing around pretending like this is the first time they've heard this, and do a mocking-the-kid-brother routine. "Don't nobody have the blues like I do," says Michael. "I may be young, but I know what it's all about." He tells about this girl he met at school-in the sandbox. "We toasted our love during milk break." (The brothers snicker; Marlon walks off from the group disbelieving, shaking his head)...'And then I said to her...."

  A slam of the drums, and Michael oomphs up a crotch-thrust, the head goes down, and when it comes up again, he's crooning: "When I... " broken up into about ten syllables altogether, the first words of Smokey Robinson's fifties song, "Who's Loving You." And the brothers are an A-framed unit behind him, hands behind their buttocks like the Miracles, doing steps in place and weaving a perfect vocal backing.

  Marlon, two years older and two inches taller, is a superb dancer: confident and workmanlike in his younger brother's shadow.

  Jackie has grown to a bit over 5'10 ", and looks not unlike Sly onstage, an Indiancostumed stone among pebbles. Sometimes he looks out of place, his high cheekbones drawing his soft features into a just-about-adult face.

  Tito is sturdy, serious, an Ali in demeanor, with a developing bass voice and a developing skill at lead guitar. With tinted shades and brown suede apple hat on, Toriano (the given name means "bull") rarely looks up and out to the audience to acknowledge all the Tito fans.

  Jermaine plays strong bass on his Fender jazz model, and has sung lead on several tunes, including the single, "I Found that Girl," but now he's worried a little 'cause his voice is changing. At 16, he's the perfect idol figure for those who can't seriously get into 11-year-old Mike.

  Now Michael's to the end of his woes, and he stretches it out, microphone tipped over his mouth: "Who-o-o-o-o...Is loving you," the "you" broken down and up into six parts. Then a James Brown spin and another pump of the still-forming pelvis while Marlon, Jermaine, and Jackie are just completing their spins, and they're ready to sing "Darling Dear." The show moves fast, from "Stand" right into the hits-"One More Chance" and `ABC," then a Traffic song they credit to Three Dog Night-"Feelin' All Right," which gives Tito a chance to move out on lead guitar; then the blues; then, usually, another nine or ten numbers.

  If the J-5 show lacks anything, it's surprises. Whatever happens, you can tell it's been worked out in long rehearsal sessions at home in the Hollywood hills or at Motown: Cousin Ronnie Rancifer stepping out to show off his funky chicken; Jermaine being directed by Jackie to sing a song to a particular girl in the audience: "That one there, in the red dress," and Jermaine does a job on her, serenading, "Won't you take me with you...." Or the singularly excellent dance routine for "Walk on By." And the song salute to Gary, "Goin' Back to Indiana," met by power salutes by the preteens in Gary, at the West Side High gym. Fans stand up, here and there, to their full four or five foot heights and scream; girls soul-slap with each other to celebrate eyecontact with one of the Five; everywhere, kids are holding hands tightly in their excitement. But there is no mass movement, no jumping atop chairs and flooding of aisles, articulations of defiance, like at Sly concerts. The kids are like the Jackson 5; there is a lot of unself-conscious fun, but also a remarkable lack of tension.

  The concert, the first of two in Gary, had followed the City Hall ceremonies. Now, we go to the Mayor's home for a private party. The Jackson 5 watch the Disney hour on TV; they pose with the Mayor, with their father, with their traveling teacher, for the local papers; they have some food; they play cards, and they play ping-pong with Hatcher.

  When the second show is finished they run out the back doors, pile into the puffing limousines and motor over to another section of Gary-for a Jackson family reunion at Joe Jackson's cousin's. She has worked a day and a half with friends and relatives to turn out two dozen sweet potato pies, mountains of cold cuts and fried chicken, tubs of salad and black-eyed peas, and now she stands at the door, almost crying, so happy that her basement den is stuffed with people, a
nd Joe and the boys are all here, along with members of their opening act, the Commodores, and just pla toons of Jackson relations. They arrive, as if planned, in shifts, so that the aunts and cousins and sisters, beaming behind the food tables, stay busy serving all night.

  Joe's matronly cousin, damp-eyed, keeps asking if anybody wants more food. She steals a look or two at the various brothers of the Jackson 5, who eat lightly (the Mayor, a few hours before, hadn't exactly been skimpy with his food) and settle down around folding tables for a few rounds of Tonk. Relatives and friends keep calling them away for a picture, little boys and girls ask for autographs, and the Jackson 5 does it all graciously, saying "Thank you" afterwards. They're glad to be here. There's no place like home.

  -April 29, 1971

  Rolling Stone

  Six years after their cover story, I met up with the Jackson 5 again. Now, they were the Jacksons. They had left Motown, leaving Jermaine, who'd married a daughter of label founder Berry Gordy, Jr., behind. And the hits kept coming but less frequently than they did in that first rush. One thing had not changed: Michael was still the star, the dancing, spinning center of attention. The Jacksons were in town for a few concerts, and we met for a television profile for the syndicated magazine show Evening. The program's producer, Bob Zagone, wanted a comfortable setting for my interview with the Jacksons, far removed from the typical pop star settings of concert halls, green rooms, and hotel suites. Dianne and I were living in a Victorian flat a few blocks north of the Japantown area of San Francisco, and so it was that late one morning, a week before Christmas Day, 1976, a black stretch limousine pulled up to our place, and to our neighbors' astonishment, the Jacksons popped out and trooped up our front steps and into our home. As he and his brothers arranged themselves around our dining table, it became apparent that Michael, half of whose eighteen-year life had been spent in the spotlight, was extremely shy. In front of the camera, however, he was a trouper, answering questions in a soft falsetto and happily sharing air time with brothers Marlon, Tito, and Jackie. In my closing remarks, which we always taped in my office at Rolling Stone, I took note of a few tidbits we hadn't fit into the piece: that Marlon would soon be a father, and wanted to adopt a couple of additional children; and "Michael wants to do the same thing: adopt a couple of kids, and set an example for others."