The Jacksons were catching more and more eyes. Some of the other opening acts grew resentful of the group, complaining that those kids wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t have a damn midget as their lead singer. It seemed the only way to explain Michael Jackson, who at the age of eight was already using his voice to convey an impossibly complex range of adult emotions, from love and loss to hurt and betrayal to disillusion and yearning. He had no idea where it came from and neither did anyone else. Yet he got no compliments from Joe. “If I did a great show, he’d tell me it was a good show,” Michael recalled. “And if I did an okay show, he’d tell me it was a lousy show.” His father also never told him, not even a single time, that he was loved, Michael remembered. He was aching for something he didn’t even know existed, until he began to see it among some of the families they met in hotels.
Sam & Dave did say they loved him, though, and the kings of call-and-response finagled a spot for the Jacksons in the country’s most prestigious and competitive talent contest, the “Superdog,” held at the Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Harlem. Backstage, the boys touched the fabled “Tree of Hope,” a pedestal-mounted log that had been cut from the tree that stood outside the most famous restaurant in Harlem, the Barbecue, where Louis Armstrong and Count Basie had used the rehearsal halls upstairs. Then the Jackson Brothers went out and won the Superdog to a standing ovation. It was August 13, 1967, two weeks before Michael’s ninth birthday.
Their triumph at the Apollo helped the Jacksons land their first recording contract. Gordon Keith, one of five partners in Gary’s Steeltown Records, arranged for an audition at the family home. “They set up right in the living room,” Keith recalled. “The furniture was pushed back. They and their equipment took up pretty much the entire room. The whole family was there; Janet was a babe in arms. They were getting ready and there was a thick cord stretched between two of the amps Michael was near. It came up to his chest. From right where he was standing, without a running start, he jumped straight up from a flat-footed position right over this cord to clear it. He had all my attention from there on. I knew I was looking at a boy who was superhuman. When they sang, Michael sang like an angel . . . but when Michael danced, all while singing, he blew away James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Fred Astaire, and anyone else you can name . . . I was flabbergasted. Knocked out. Blown away. Speechless.” On January 31, 1968, Steeltown released the Jackson 5’s first single and one week later the whole family sat around the radio in the living room, stunned and giggling as they listened together to the first time “Big Boy” was played on WWCA, unable to quite grasp that they’d come to this. By the summer of 1968, the Jacksons were opening for the Motown acts Gladys Knight & the Pips and Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers at Chicago’s premier venue, the Regal Theater. After watching Joe Jackson’s boys from the wings, both Knight and Taylor phoned Detroit, urging Motown’s executives to take a look at these kids.
Even though Joe hated white people, he hired one—a lawyer named Richard Arons—to help him manage the group. Others had already contributed to the Jacksons’ development, people like Shirley Cartman, the junior high school orchestra teacher who persuaded Joe to replace the weak drummer and lead guitarist he’d recruited from the neighborhood with a couple of talented local musicians named Johnny Jackson (no relation) and Ronnie Rancifer. At Cartman’s urging, Tito moved up to lead guitar, while Jermaine switched from rhythm to bass. The result was a band that was tight enough to give Michael’s soaring boy-soprano vocals the structural support they needed, yet fluid enough to accommodate the dramatic pitch changes that the child seemed to pluck out of thin air. And it was that local talent agent in Gary, Evelyn Lahaie, who had convinced Joe to change the group’s name to the Jackson 5. “So many groups at that time that had names that ended in ‘Brothers’ or ‘Sisters,’” LaHaie remembered. “It was too common. I knew that they should have something different.”
Joe never surrendered even the tiniest percentage of control over his sons until Berry Gordy came into their lives. Joe had shown the boys just about everything you could get done in business when you combined ruthless with rough. Berry Gordy taught them how much more effective a man might be when he knew how to mix ruthless with smooth.
Like Joe, Gordy had a parent who was a schoolteacher, had tried to make his mark first as a boxer and, failing at that, had joined the blue-collar labor force. Gordy was still working on the assembly line at a Lincoln-Mercury plant when he opened a store called the 3-D Record Mart that featured jazz music. When that went under, he was reputed to have worked briefly and unsuccessfully as a pimp before going partners in a company called Rayber Music that recorded cheap demos for aspiring musicians. He was also writing songs by then, and one of them, “Reet Petite,” became an R & B hit for Jackie Wilson in 1957. That was the same year he discovered a group called the Matadors (later called the Miracles), whose lead singer, Smokey Robinson, encouraged Gordy to invest his songwriting royalties in music production. By 1959, Gordy had coauthored four more songs that were recorded by Wilson, including “Lonely Teardrops,” which not only topped the R & B chart, but rose as high as #7 on the pop chart. He founded what became Motown Records in a bungalow on Detroit’s West Grand Avenue in December of that same year. One of the first records the company produced, “Shop Around” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, not only hit #1 on the R & B chart in 1960, but climbed to #2 on the pop chart. A year later, Motown’s release of “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes reached the top of both the R & B and pop charts.
By the summer of 1968, when the Jackson 5 auditioned for the company, Gordy had a roster of talent that included the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder. Motown’s artist development division, which educated performers in subjects like etiquette, grooming, and fashion, had helped make the label’s black acts more successful in white America than any before them, and the Supremes’ lead singer, Diana Ross, was in a class by herself as a crossover talent. Nothing Gordy accomplished so amazed the rest of the music business, though, as his uncanny ability to create a sense among his artists that they were members of “The Motown Family” while at the same time effectively robbing them blind with the stingiest royalty rates in the business.
Gordy wasn’t even present at the Jackson 5’s Motown audition on July 23, 1968. After all the child labor law headaches he had suffered for signing Stevie Wonder, Gordy was reluctant to take on another underage act. When he saw the 16 mm black-and-white film his aides had made of the Jacksons’ audition, though, Gordy sent back word to sign them immediately. The contract Joe Jackson executed on his sons’ behalf paid each of the boys slightly more than 1 percent of what their records earned, which would come to about two cents apiece per album. Berry Gordy made a lot more from their music than the band ever would during the years the Jackson 5 recorded for his label.
This disturbed Joe far less than Gordy’s insistence that Michael was the star of the show and that his brothers were merely a supporting cast. The Motown chief had made his position clear from the moment of the Jackson 5’s public debut during the late summer of 1969 in Southern California, where Gordy was determined to relocate both his primary residence and his company. The press release-slash-invitation that announced the event was prepared by Gordy personally, even though it was “signed” by the young woman who had become Motown’s signature asset: “Please join me in welcoming a brilliant musical group, the Jackson Five, on Monday, August 11, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Daisy, North Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills,” it read. “The Jackson Five, featuring sensational eight-year-old Michael Jackson, will perform live at the party. Diana Ross.” Joe fumed, concerned that singling out Michael would not only create dissension among his boys, but further undermine his authority over them.
The major impact Gordy made on Michael with this event, though, was what he taught the boy about the malleability of so-called reality. When Michael tried to tell Gordy and Ross that they’d made a big mistake in the press
release because he was ten years old, not eight, Gordy explained that it wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t a lie, either, because a lie wasn’t a lie when you told it for the purpose of public relations. “It’s for your image,” chimed in Ross, who was already going along with Gordy’s story that she had “discovered” the Jackson 5 at a benefit concert for the campaign of Gary’s first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. “I thought I was going to be an old man before being discovered,” Michael had breathlessly confided to one interviewer after his performance at the Daisy. “But then along came Miss Diana Ross to save my career. She discovered me.” When a suspicious reporter told the young performer she had heard that he was almost eleven (his birthday was in eighteen days), Michael vehemently denied it. So how old are you, the interviewer asked. “I’m eight,” Michael answered.
Whatever his age, Michael’s performance at the Daisy wowed the crowd. Soul magazine’s reviewer hailed the Jackson 5’s lead singer as “an eight-year-old boy who became a man when a microphone was in his hand.”
Gordy was already finding other ways to separate Michael from his family. Joe and his sons endured Gordy’s cheapskate accommodations for more than a year after their signing with Motown, sleeping on the floor of Bobby Taylor’s apartment while they recorded fifteen songs during weekend sessions at the company’s studios in Detroit, driving up from Gary every Friday evening, then driving back during the predawn hours of Monday morning, all at their own expense. When Gordy moved them out to Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, he put them up at Hollywood’s most notorious palace of sleaze, the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where most of their neighbors were hookers and drug addicts. After a month, he moved them into an even more run-down motel on Sunset Boulevard. Gordy was himself ensconced at his stupendously opulent mansion in Bel Air, where the walls were covered with paintings of him dressed as Napoleon and Caesar.
A little more than a month after the Daisy show, though, Gordy arranged for Michael to begin living with Diana Ross at her lovely home in Beverly Hills. Gordy was just about to release the Jackson 5’s first single and, confident it would be a hit, urged Ross to help Michael understand that a star had to think of himself differently than other people. “Wherever you go from now on,” Ross told the boy, “people will be watching you.” Though Michael meant far less to Diana than the boy wanted to believe, she instructed him simply by letting herself be observed. When they were alone in the house, she usually wanted the boy to draw pictures and leave her alone.
Michael was still spending his days, and many of his evenings, with his brothers at Motown’s West Coast studios, where the five of them were working under the command of Deke Richards, the songwriter and producer who, as Motown’s creative director of talent, was running the company’s West Coast operation. With A-list songwriters Freddie Perren and Fonce Mizell, Richard and Gordy had formed what they called “The Corporation” to craft the songs and package the performances that would make the Jackson 5 a hit. Gordy and Richards, along with their producers, invested a remarkable amount of time and money in the recording and engineering of the song that would be the group’s first release, “I Want You Back.” The demands on his older brothers were not nearly those made of the group’s eleven-year-old lead singer, who was spending as many as twelve hours a day in the studio. His strongest memories of that time, Michael would say later, were of falling asleep at the microphone, and of staring out the windows between takes at the children on the playground in the park across the street: “I would just stare at them in wonder—I couldn’t imagine such freedom, such a carefree life—and wish more than anything that . . . I could walk away and be like them.”
Gordy and Richards and just about everyone else at Motown, though, were mesmerized by the seventy-pound boy standing in front of them. Watching Michael step to the microphone and summon up emotions that seemed to befit a forty-year-old man who had done a lot of hard living, then as soon as the song was finished go looking for somebody to play hide and seek with, was both eerie and enthralling. Gordy would talk to the press about Michael’s “deep and intuitive understanding” of things, but not even he seemed to have a clue about what its source might be. The things Michael did onstage were obviously practiced—anyone could see that he had copied and combined the moves of James Brown and the stage drama of Jackie Wilson—and yet he somehow owned the result entirely. Diana Ross had taught him about the power of the “oooh,” especially when it was used to put an exclamation mark on a lyric, something everyone agreed Diana did better than anyone ever had—until they heard Michael do it.
“Never seen anything like him,” Smokey Robinson would observe of Michael. And the whole world seemed to agree, in October 1969, when “I Want You Back” was released and shot straight to the top of both the Billboard and Cash Box pop charts. Shortly after the song’s release, the Jackson 5 made its national television debut on an ABC program called The Hollywood Palace. For Michael’s brothers, and for his father in particular, the experience was one more hard lesson in the reordering of their reality. Diana Ross was the special guest host for that episode of the show, but whenever she came backstage, Ross spoke only to Michael, whispering encouragement that was for him alone, and entirely ignoring the other boys. She introduced the group by saying: “Tonight, I have the pleasure of introducing a young star who has been in the business all of his life. He’s worked with his family, and when he sings and dances, he lights up the stage.” Sammy Davis Jr. came bounding out from behind a curtain wearing an excited smile, only to be politely rebuffed by Ross, who explained to the audience that she was talking about “Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5.” Stepping onstage in the lime green suits they wore with matching gold shirts and green boots, the same outfits they had appeared in at the Daisy, the other Jackson brothers looked stunned. Joe was incensed, demanding to know if Berry Gordy was trying to rename the group. Not at all, said Gordy, who stood with him backstage, but Michael was “obviously the star.” Surely Joe could see that. “They’re all stars,” Joe retorted, but what he thought really didn’t count anymore and deep inside he knew it.
The older Jackson sons absorbed another blow to their pride when their first album was released a month after “I Want You Back” came out. Under the title—Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5—the other boys were pictured holding instruments they had not been allowed to play, on an album to which they had contributed little more than a chorus of backup vocals. The truth was that Jackie and Tito possessed only modest musical talent, and Marlon had none at all. No one had ever told them this, though, until they were about to become big stars. The process by which Michael had been separated out from the others was perhaps hardest on Jermaine, who had a perfectly adequate singing voice but just not one that was remotely in the same league as Michael’s. Jermaine had suffered at the age of nine when he was replaced as the group’s lead singer—his family believed the spell of stuttering that followed was a direct result—but tried to accept that he was, as his father put it, the group’s “second soloist.”
Diana Ross wrote the liner notes for the Jackson 5’s first album. She began with the declaration that, “Honesty has always been a special word for me—a special idea,” then repeated the lie that the Jackson 5 was “five brothers by the name of Jackson that I discovered in Gary, Indiana.” By this time, Michael seemed to actually believe this was true, and more than a few of those who promoted the album were unnerved by the boy’s capacity for blending fiction and reality so seamlessly that lines of demarcation seemed utterly erased.
His brothers were back on their game by December 14, 1969, four days before their album’s release, when the Jackson 5 made its first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show wearing huge smiles and swaying in perfect rhythm behind their little brother as he took the stage in a crimson cowboy hat and delivered a performance of “I Want You Back” that had the girls in the audience pulling their hair from the first note to the last.
Satisfied that his investment would pay off, Berry Gordy m
oved the Jacksons out of the motel where they had been living and into a home he had leased on Queens Road in the Hollywood Hills, with a living room that offered more floor space than their entire house back in Gary, and a view of the Los Angeles Basin that after dark looked like diamonds spilled on sable. At Fairfax High School, where they had begun attending classes in September, Jackie and Tito were all but worshiped. Fourteen-year-old Jermaine saw the junior high girls from his classes literally fighting to sit next to him. It was not so difficult to nurse a bruised ego, the other boys found, when the whole world loved you.
In February 1970, the Jackson 5 released its second single, “ABC,” which also went to #1 on the pop charts, displacing the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Like “I Want You Back,” it sold more than two million copies. The Jacksons’ third single, released that May, was “The Love You Save.” It hit #1 too, bumping the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” from the top spot. They had become the first band of the rock era to send their first three songs to #1. Their second album, ABC, was released that same month and was even more successful than the first had been. In July, the Jackson 5 concert broke every attendance record at the Los Angeles Forum, and a screaming crowd that was largely composed of young black women got so out of control that the boys were hustled off the stage before they could finish their set for fear that the security staff would not be able to protect them. On October 10, 1970, just as their fourth single, “I’ll Be There,” was being released, the Jackson 5 sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Game 1 of the World Series in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. “I’ll Be There,” would provide a further revelation of Michael’s gifts. Even white critics who had dismissed the Jackson 5 as “bubblegum soul” loved “I’ll Be There,” which sold more than any of the three singles before it, and made the Jackson 5 the first group ever to send its first four releases to the top of the pop charts.
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