Michael Jackson, Inc.

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “Michael was a person that really loved her,” says Gordy. “And they got to be really, really close friends. . . . Michael was a big, big fan of hers and probably a lot of other stars [but] ended up doing his own thing. He would take it a step further. Just like I might spend one million dollars on something that he would spend five million dollars on it when he got there.”17

  Money wasn’t a concern for Gordy when the Jackson 5 hit the studio to start recording “I Want You Back.” Jackson often sang his parts close to flawlessly the first time around (“He could hear a song and just go in and record it,” recalls his father18), but Gordy wanted the group’s Motown debut to be perfect. Whenever Gordy asked him for another take, Jackson was happy to oblige—and always managed to learn something from the experience.

  “Why you doing that?” Jackson would ask when Gordy demanded a do-over.19

  “We got to do it again,” his mentor would reply.

  “Why? It seems okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay, because right here you took a breath and you should have been, you know, coming down. Or coming out with it full, and in the meantime you were breathing. So you just got to do that over.”

  “Oh, my goodness!”

  Jackson’s patience, Gordy’s persistence, and an outsized recording budget all helped the boys craft a memorable debut, but they also benefited from the help of some classic Hollywood stagecraft. Their album was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5, an attempt to connect them to their famous label mate. Although Suzanne de Passe was the one who actually had brought the group to Berry Gordy’s attention, Ross made for a better story. That led to some amusingly hypocritical pronouncements.

  “Honesty has always been a very special word for me,” Ross wrote in the album’s liner notes. “A very special idea. . . . When I think of my personal idea of honesty, I think of something being straight out, all there on the table. . . . That’s how I feel about the Jackson 5—five brothers by the name of Jackson who I discovered in Gary, Indiana.”20

  Joe Jackson believes that the packaging of his sons as Diana Ross’s discovery was not only a bid to prop them up, but to deflect attention from the songstress’s impending departure from the Supremes. “Berry had to come up with some type of gimmick to fill that in to make it look good,” he says.21 At any rate, Jackson had just learned an important lesson about show business: there was a difference between public relations and truth.

  Ross introduced the boys in front of a national television audience on an episode of ABC’s variety show The Hollywood Palace that aired in October of 1969. “I Want You Back” debuted that same month, and by the end of January it had soared to the top spot on the Billboard charts. The single sold more than 4 million copies worldwide in its first year and pushed the group’s initial album past the 1 million mark.22

  When the brothers released two more chart toppers, “ABC” (February 1970) and “The Love You Save” (May 1970), Gordy’s prophecy was realized. They followed with “I’ll Be There,” which became the group’s fourth consecutive number 1 single. The mainstream press quickly took note.

  “Supplied with some good arrangements and instrumental backing from the Motown assembly line, the boys from Gary, Indiana, perform with an exuberance and flair which many of the older groups on the same label rarely achieve these days,” wrote Rolling Stone, which heaped additional praise on “the magnificent lead singer.”23

  A year later, Jackson found himself on the magazine’s cover, accompanied by the headline “Why does this eleven-year-old stay up past his bedtime?” Thanks to another Motown publicity trick, his listed age was incorrect—Jackson was just months from becoming a teenager—but nobody seemed to notice. The Jacksons were well on their way to becoming American icons.

  Michael understood his family’s newfound fame as well as anyone. Keith Jackson remembers seeing it firsthand while joining his cousins on the road just as they were exploding onto the national stage. One morning after waking up in an eleventh-floor hotel room, the boys noticed a group of mostly female fans congregating on the street below. Keith and a few of Michael’s brothers had a mischievous plan, much to the chagrin of the eventual King of Pop.24

  “We had these balloons, we filled them with water and we just dropped them on the people,” Keith Jackson recalls. “So Michael saw and he was like, ‘Keith, what you doing, no! Don’t do that to my fans!’ I was like, ‘Oh, sorry, cuz.’ ”

  Keith was struck not only by Michael’s concern for these total strangers, but by the intensity of the fans themselves. A few moments later, when he and his cousins walked into the hallway outside of their room, they discovered the fans had used the balloon-tossing incident to triangulate the boys’ location.

  “Next thing I know I heard this stampede, I’m thinking the building is falling down, I look to my left—and of course, back then, we all had afros, so of course they all thought I was one of them—and we all looked and, man, it’s like two hundred girls running our way, screaming,” says Keith. “So all the brothers and everybody, Mike and them, they run in the room and shut the door. Guess who got left out? Me. I got beat up, scratched up. All that, man. They kept calling me ‘Mike’. . . . I’m like, ‘I’m not him, I’m not him!’ So I got beat up by these girls.”

  * * *

  When the Jacksons weren’t on the road, they settled into an increasingly cushy life in California. Flush with new cash from Motown, Joe bought his family a sprawling estate at 4641 Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino, twelve miles from the heart of Hollywood. Though Joe and Gordy didn’t always see eye to eye, their children grew closer as the years went on (particularly Jermaine and Hazel, Berry’s daughter). And while schoolwork, recording sessions, and tours gobbled up most of the brothers’ waking hours, Gordy also made a bit of time for regular-kid fun—something unfamiliar to the boys’ father—scheduling baseball games every week.

  Michael usually played catcher in the Jackson vs. Gordy contests and didn’t exhibit anything close to the hand-eye coordination he displayed onstage (“He missed a lot of balls,” Gordy recalls). But Tito generally hit more than enough home runs to make up for his younger brother’s miscues, and Jackie pitched like a young Bob Gibson. Michael was still a cheerful participant despite his athletic flaws.

  “He was an old man in a kid’s body, but he had the childlike qualities about him that were so beautiful and so pure,” says Gordy. “And all the stuff that he did for the world and was trying to do for the world and for kids was so sincere. And he wanted to be a kid, and I gave him the opportunity to be a kid.”25

  At the same time, Jackson’s musical education continued in the studio. Gordy was prone to aphorisms, many of which his young charge would carry well into his solo career: the ideas that competition breeds champions and that songwriters should write semi-autobiographically. Once your audience was hooked on a song, according to Gordy, you had to spend the next three minutes telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The chorus should summarize the arc of the story, and the dynamics should swell steadily until the grand finale, closing with one final mention of the song’s name so that people would remember it (as they most certainly did when a young Michael Jackson yelled, “I want you back!” during the fade-out of the Jackson 5’s first number 1 single).26

  Gordy doesn’t recall spending a great deal of time consciously teaching Jackson about the business of music, but he believes that osmosis accounted for the basis of the future King of Pop’s acumen. He frequently took business calls in the studio, rarely lowering his voice or trying to disguise his dealings, and Jackson was all ears.

  “I was always very open with whatever it was because I was always doing twenty-five things,” says Gordy. “Multitasking, you know, problem over here, problem over there. . . . If I’m in the studio mixing or whatever it is, I just pick up the phone and do it. Michael listened to everything . . . he was always listening to everything.”27

  As he entered his teenage years, an increasingly confident Michael sta
rted to look for more artistic freedom. He told Gordy he wanted to sing songs his way; the Motown producers wanted him to be too “mechanical.”28 Gordy responded by allowing the young star to add more of his own creative input—and to debut solo material.

  Jackson’s first album, Got to Be There, came out in January of 1972. It featured covers of classic songs like “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Rockin’ Robin.” That same year, Jackson followed with Ben, a record whose title track was used in the movie of the same name (a 1972 horror flick whose titular character is a killer rat). Those first albums did reasonably well—they peaked at number 14 and number 5 on the US charts, respectively—but they were high school chemistry explosions compared to the sales supernova that would come just a decade later.

  Jackson’s international audience eventually became an essential element of his success. He now sells two albums abroad for every one sold stateside—a trend that began in the Thriller years, but whose roots were laid in 1972. That year, the Jacksons embarked upon their first world tour, a two-week whirlwind starting in the UK with a performance before the Queen of England.

  Somewhere over the Atlantic en route to London, the Jacksons received the first concrete indication of their European fame: their pilot announced that there were already ten thousand fans waiting for them at Heathrow Airport. The boys made it through the pandemonium safely and arrived on time for their show, where they shared a bill with Liberace and Elton John. They shook the gloved hand of the Queen backstage before continuing on to France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Spain.29

  “England was our jumping-off point, and it was different from any place we’d been before,” Jackson wrote, “but the farther we traveled, the more exotic the world looked. We saw the great museums of Paris and the beautiful mountains of Switzerland. Europe was an education in the roots of Western culture.”30

  * * *

  By the fall of 1973, Michael Jackson was a teenager whom most of the world still believed to be twelve, indefinitely embedded in his age like a Jurassic mosquito in amber. This was all by the design of Motown, his father, and even Jackson himself. But his brothers were growing up rapidly. The year before, Tito married his high school sweetheart, Dee Dee; the year after, Jackie got hitched to his girlfriend, Enid. And in between the two, Jermaine officially fused the Gordy and Jackson clans by tying the knot with the Motown chief’s daughter Hazel.

  If Berry Gordy didn’t spare any expense when recording “I Want You Back,” he certainly wasn’t going to skimp on the wedding of his eldest daughter. The ceremony took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel on December 15, 1973—one day after Jermaine’s nineteenth birthday—and included artificial snow, 175 white doves, and a musical performance by Smokey Robinson.31

  The boys released two studio albums that year: Skywriter and G.I.T.: Get It Together. The former peaked at number 44 on the US charts and the latter topped out at number 100, not such an inspiring performance after 1972’s Lookin’ Through the Windows climbed to number 7. The boys’ next two albums, Dancing Machine (1974) and Moving Violation (1975) did reasonably well, reaching the number 16 and number 36 spots on the charts.

  Michael was growing up, too, and the transition from child prodigy to adolescent superstar wasn’t always smooth. He had few meaningful interactions outside his family, which continued to be a major source of stress. His father and brothers teased him mercilessly about his looks—particularly his nose and the acne that was suddenly spreading across his face. Jackson later admitted he was so depressed that he’d often wash his face in the dark so that he wouldn’t have to look at himself in the mirror. “I just hated it,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1993. “I cried every day.”32

  There was little time for brooding as the boys circled the globe in the early 1970s. They stopped in Japan and China, where, even as local economies were starting to boom, Michael Jackson marveled at how the locals “didn’t value material things as much as they did animals and nature.”33

  They flew to Australia and New Zealand, where they received warm welcomes from English speakers and outback tribesmen alike. But it was their trip to Africa that influenced Jackson perhaps most of all. From the moment he and his brothers disembarked and saw a welcoming party of native performers dancing and drumming, Jackson was entranced. As he visited game lodges, crowded markets, and abandoned slave camps, he soaked up the rhythms and the sights of the continent. “The African people had given us gifts of courage and endurance we couldn’t hope to repay,” he later wrote.

  The crowds seemed to follow the Jacksons wherever they went. When they traveled to Jamaica in 1975, they decided to play a basketball game against a local high school powerhouse, filling out their roster with students from Priory, a nearby school whose team didn’t quite measure up. The squad typically drew crowds of twenty to fifty people to games at its outdoor home court, but when Michael and his brothers arrived, the setting was decidedly different.

  “The place was packed, absolutely packed,” recalls Neil Weinberg, who was a fourteen-year-old player for Priory at the time. “You could barely get to the basketball court.”34

  Michael skipped the game; his brothers and their new teammates were handily defeated. But in a gesture of gratitude, the Jacksons invited the Priory players to their hotel for a pool party afterward. The crowd never really receded (one girl even asked Weinberg, who couldn’t possibly have been mistaken for a Jackson, for his autograph). By the time everyone arrived at the Sheraton, the edges of the hotel’s pool were stacked five-deep with young women desperate to catch a glimpse of one of the Jacksons.

  “It was really kind of creepy,” Weinberg recalls. “It was like, ‘I guess this is what it’s like to be famous, but it’s making me kind of nervous.’ ”

  * * *

  Michael Jackson had gotten used to many aspects of show business, including the crowds, but back in Los Angeles, he was beginning to feel musically stifled. After watching Stevie Wonder take creative control of his career from Gordy, he wanted the Jackson 5 to be able to do the same, instead of plugging along with the same bubblegum pop sound they’d been producing for years.

  “Basically, we didn’t like the way our music sounded at the time,” Jackson wrote. “We had a strong competitive urge and we felt we were in danger of being eclipsed by other groups who were creating a more contemporary sound.”35

  Furthermore, the monetary value of songwriting was becoming clearer and clearer to Jackson. As he learned at a young age, the two main revenue streams for a song come from its master recording and its publishing rights. The former is the recording of a musical composition from which all future copies of the song are made. Record labels tend to own these “masters” and pay artists a royalty (typically 10 percent to 15 percent of the retail price) every time a copy is purchased as a CD, tape, vinyl record, or digital download.

  Publishing rights, on the other hand, encompass songwriting and musical composition. The concept dates back to at least 1501, when Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci landed rights to publish “Harmonices Musices Odhecaton” for twenty-one years.36 Publishing has since evolved far beyond sheet music; these days, a producer who uses synthesizers to come up with the backing track to a rap song would be entitled to a share of publishing royalties, as would the rapper who penned the words spoken on the track. Like recording artists, songwriters are entitled to a royalty every time someone buys a record, but only songwriters earn royalties from US radio play (though this is beginning to change); they also cash in when songs are covered or licensed for movies and television.

  Like the early Jackson 5, many pop musicians don’t write their own music—and lose out on the associated revenue. Of the ones who do, most sign away the rights to music publishing companies, which split the proceeds with songwriters. A select few musicians are able to gain complete ownership of their publishing rights—either by never giving them up in the first place or by buying them back—and simply pay a music publisher a small administrative fee (5 percent to 20 percent) to ensur
e that their creations continue to generate cash. Master recordings are similarly difficult to pry away from music companies.

  Michael Jackson was one of the rare artists who eventually did both. He started by asking the right questions. “He was interested in what publishing was—what this was, what that was,” says Gordy. “You know, he was just an inquisitive kind of person.”37

  As the 1970s wore on, many of Motown’s top artists left the label in search of greater artistic freedom. Gladys Knight and the Pips departed in 1973, followed by the Temptations in 1977. Marvin Gaye convinced Gordy to let him write his own songs, as did the Commodores, who opened for the Jacksons on some of their tours. But Motown kept Michael and his brothers on a steady diet of compositions penned by the Corporation. That became a matter of increasing frustration for the young singer and his father. “I wanted my boys to be able to produce their own stuff, write their own songs,” recalls Joe Jackson. “And that was kind of hard for Berry.”38

  Accounts differ as to how the duo addressed the issue with Gordy. Michael Jackson wrote that, without consulting his brothers or father, he arranged a one-on-one meeting with the Motown founder in the mid-1970s to discuss the situation—and he wasn’t able to convince Gordy to allow the Jacksons to write their own music.39 Gordy, however, remembers no such meeting.

  “I didn’t even know Michael could write as well as he did because he never expressed that to me,” he says. “He was too busy listening. . . . He may have wanted to do that, but never mentioned it to me . . . as far as I was concerned, he was extremely happy.”40

  So it came as something of a surprise to Gordy when Jermaine approached him in 1976 with some unsettling news: Joe Jackson had landed a lucrative contract to move his sons to CBS’s Epic Records. With the Jackson 5’s Motown deal set to expire, the group was free to go to the highest bidder.

  “Jermaine said that his father controlled everything and had made the deal,” Gordy recalls. “I don’t think the boys had even talked to the company.”