Michael feels disappointed with Off the Wall. It wins a Grammy, spawns multiple number one singles, dramatically raises Jackson’s already colossal level of fame, redeems disco in the very hour and flash of disco’s dying. Diana Ross, who once helped out the Jacksons by putting her lovely arm around them, wants Michael to be at her shows again, not for his sake now but for hers. She isn’t desperate by any means, but something has shifted. Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien, the recording guru who works with him, both take to be absurd the mere idea of “following up” Off the Wall in terms of success. You do your best, but that kind of thing just happens, if it happens. Jones knows that. Not Michael. All he can see of Off the Wall is that the year had bigger records. He wants to make something, he says, that “refuse[s] to be ignored.”
At home he demos “Billie Jean” with Randy and Janet. When what will be the immortal part comes around, she and Michael go, “Whoo whoo / Whoo whoo.”
From Michael’s brain, then, through a portable tape recorder, on into the home studio. Bruce Swedien comes over. Being Michael Jackson working on the follow-up to Off the Wall means sometimes your demos are recorded at your home by the greatest audio engineer in the world. But for all that, the team works in a stripped-down fashion, with no noise reduction. “That’s usually the best stuff,” Michael says, “when you strip it down to the bare minimum and go inside yourself and invent.”
On this home demo, made between the “writing version” and the album version, you get to hear Michael’s early, mystical placeholder vocals, laid down before he’d written the verses. We hear him say, “More kick and stuff in the ’phones … I need, uh … more bottom and kick in the ’phones.”
Then the music. And what sounds like:
[Mumble mumble mum] oh, to say
On the phone to stay …
Oh, born out of time.
All the while I see other eyes.
One at a time
We’ll go where the winds unwind
She told me her voice belonged to me
And I’m here to see
She called my name, then you said, Hello
Oh, then I died
And said, Gotta go in a ride
Seems that you knew my mind, now live
On that day got it made
Oh, mercy, it does care of what you do
Take care of what you do
Lord, they’re coming down
Billie Jean is not my lover
She just a girl that says that I am the one
You know, the kid is not my son
A big round warm Scandinavian type, Swedien comes from Minnesota, made his mark doing classical, but with classical engineering it’s all about fidelity, he knew, and he wants to be part of the making, to help shape the songs. So, a frustrated anatomist himself, coming down from high to low formally and meeting Michael on his way up. Quincy, in the middle with his jazz cool, calls Swedien “Svensk.” The white man has the endearing habit of lifting both hands to massage the gray walrus wings of his mustache. He has a condition called synesthesia. It means that when he listens to sound, he sees colors. He knows the mix is right only when he sees the right colors. Michael likes singing for him.
In a seminar room in Seattle, at a 1993 Audio Pro recording-geek conference, Swedien talks about his craft. He plays his recording of Michael’s flawless one-take vocal from “The Way You Make Me Feel,” sans effects of any kind, to let the engineers in the audience hear the straight dope, a great mike on a great voice with as little interference as possible, the right angle, the right deck, everything.
Someone in the audience raises a hand and asks if it’s hard recording Michael’s voice, given that, as Swedien mentioned before, Michael is very “physical.” At first, Swedien doesn’t cotton. “Yeah, that is a bit of a problem,” he answers, “but I’ve never had an incident where the microphone has been damaged. One time, though…”
The guy interrupts, “Not to do damage, just the proximity thing.”
“Oh!” Swedien says, suddenly understanding. His voice drops to a whisper, “He’s unbelievable.”
He gives the most beautiful description. “Michael records in the dark,” he says, “and he’ll dance. And picture this: You’re looking through the glass. And it’s dark. With a little pin spot on him.” Swedien lifts his hand to suggest a narrow cone of light shining directly down from overhead. “And you’ll see the mike here. And he’ll sing his lines. And then he disappears.”
In the outer dark he is dancing, fluttering. That’s all Quincy and Swedien know.
“And he’s”—Swedien punches the air—“right back in front of the mike at the precise instant.”
Swedien invents a special zippered covering for miking the bass drum on “Billie Jean.” A muffled enclosure. It gives the song that mummified-heartbeat intensity, which you have seen make a dance floor come to life. The layered bass sounds on the one and the three lend a lurching feline throb. Bass drum, bass guitar, double synthesizer bass, the “four basses,” all hitting together, doing the part that started as Michael and Janet going whoo whoo whoo whoo, that came from Jehovah. Its tempo is like the pulse of a sleeping person.
Michael finds himself back in the old Motown building for a day, doing some video mixing, when Berry Gordy approaches and asks him to be in the twenty-fifth-anniversary special on NBC. Michael demurs. A claustrophobic moment for him. All that business, his brothers, Motown, the Jackson 5, the past: that’s all a cocoon he’s been writhing inside of, finally chewing through. He knows that “Billie Jean” has exploded; he’s becoming something else. But the animal inside him that is his ambition senses the opportunity. He strikes his legendary deal with Gordy, that he’ll perform with his brothers if he’s allowed to do one of his own solo, post-Motown hits as well. Gordy agrees.
What Michael does with his moment, given the context, given that his brothers have just left the stage and that the stage belongs to Mr. Berry Gordy, is outrageous. In the by-now totemic YouTube clips of this performance, Michael’s preamble is usually cut off. That makes it worth watching the disc (which also happens to include one of Marvin Gaye’s last appearances before his murder).
Michael is sweaty and strutting. “Thank you … Oh, you’re beautiful … Thank you,” he says, almost slurring with sexiness. You can tell he’s worked out all his nerves on the Jackson 5 songs. Now he owns the space as if it were the inside of his cage. Millions upon millions of eyes.
“I have to say, those were the good old days,” he rambles on. “I love those songs, those were magic moments, with all my brothers, including Jermaine.” (The Jackson family’s penchant for high passive-aggression at watershed moments is extraordinary; at Michael’s funeral, Jermaine will say: “I was his voice and his backbone, I had his back.” And then, as if remembering to thank his agent, “So did the family.”)
“Those were good songs,” Michael says. “I like those songs a lot, but especially, I like”—his voice fades from the mike for a second, ramifying the liveness till the meters almost spike—“the new songs.”
Uncontrollable shrieking. He’s grabbing the mike stand like James Brown used to grab it, like if it had a neck he’d be choking it. People in the seats are yelling, “‘Billie Jean’! ‘Billie Jean’!”
I won’t cloud the uniqueness of what he does next with words except to mention one potentially missable (because it’s so obvious) aspect: that he does it so entirely alone. The stage is profoundly empty. Silhouettes of the orchestra members are clapping back in the dark. But unless you count the dazzling glove—conceived, according to one source, to hide the advancing vitiligo that discolors his left hand—Michael holds only one prop: a black hat. He tosses that away almost immediately. Stage, dancer, spotlight. The microphone isn’t even on. He snatches it back from the stand as if from the hands of a maddening child.
With a mime’s tools he proceeds to do possibly the most captivating thing a person’s ever been captured doing onstage. Richard Pryor, who was not in any acco
unt I have ever read a suck-up, approaches Michael afterward and says simply, “That was the greatest performance I’ve ever seen.” Fred Astaire calls him “the greatest living natural dancer.”
Michael tells Ebony, “I remember doing the performance so clearly, and I remember that I was so upset with myself, ’cause it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be more.” It’s said he intended to hold the crouching en pointe at the end of the moonwalk longer. But if you watch, he falls off his toes, when he falls, in perfect time, and makes it part of the turn. Much as, closer to the end, he wipes sweat from under his nose in time.
The intensity behind his face looks unbearable.
Quincy always tells him, “Smelly … get out of the way and leave room so that God can walk in.”
A god moves through him. The god enters, the god leaves.
* * *
It’s odd to write about a person knowing he may have been, but not if he was, a serial child molester. Whether or not Michael did it, the suggestion of it shadowed him for so long and finally killed his soul. It’s said that toward the end, he was having himself put under—with the same anesthesia that may have finished him—not for hours but for days. As though being snuffed. Witnesses to his body on the morgue table report that his prosthetic nose was missing. There were only holes in his face. A mummy. Two separate complete autopsies: they cut him to pieces. As of this writing, no one outside the Jackson camp knows for certain the whereabouts of his body.
I have read a stack of books about him in the past month, more than I ever imagined I would—though not more than I wanted. He warrants and will no doubt one day receive a serious, objective biography: all the great cultural strains of American music came together in him. We have yet to accept that his very racial in-betweenness made him more and not less of an essential figure in our tradition. He grasped this and used it. His marriage to Elvis’s daughter was in part an art piece.
Of all those books, the one that troubles and sticks with me is the celebrity journalist Ian Halperin’s Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson. Most famous for a book and movie suggesting dubiously that Kurt Cobain’s suicide was a disguised murder, Halperin is not an ideal source but neither is he a useless one. Indeed, he accurately predicted Michael’s death six months before it happened and seems to have burrowed his way into the Jackson world in several places.
In the beginning, Halperin claims, he’d set out mainly to prove that Michael had sexually molested young boys and used his money to get away with it. I believe him about this original motivation, since any such proof would have generated the most sensational publicity, sold the most copies, and so on. But Halperin finds, in the end, after exhaustively pursuing leads, that every so-called thread of evidence becomes a rope of sand. Somebody, even if it’s a family member, wants money, or has accused other people before, or is patently insane. It usually comes down to a tale someone else knows about an alleged secret payoff. Meanwhile, you have these boys, like Macaulay Culkin (whom Michael was once accused of fondling), who have come forth and stated that nothing untoward ever happened with Michael. When he stood trial and got off, that was a just verdict.
That’s the first half of the Halperin Thesis. The second half is that Michael was a fully functioning gay man, who took secret male lovers his entire adult life. Halperin says he met two of them and saw pictures of one with Michael. They were young but perfectly legal. One told Halperin that Michael was an insatiable bottom.
As for Michael’s interest in children, it’s hard to imagine that lacking an erotic dimension of some kind, but it may well have been thoroughly nonsexual. Michael was a frozen adolescent—about the age of those first dreamy striped-sweater years in California—and he wanted to hang out with the people he saw as his peers. Have pillow fights, call each other doo-doo head. It’s creepy as hell, if you like, but victimless. It would make him—in rough clinical terms—a partial passive fixated pedophile. Not a crime yet, not until they get the mind-reader machines going.
I don’t ask that you agree with Halperin, merely that you admit, as I feel compelled to do, that the psychological picture he conjures up is not less and perhaps just slightly more plausible than the one in which Michael uses Neverland Ranch as a spiderweb, luring boys to his bed. If you’re like me, you’ve been subconsciously presuming the latter to be basically the case for most of your life. But there’s a good chance it was never true and that Michael loved children with a weird but not immoral love.
If you want a disturbing thought experiment, allow these—I won’t say facts, but feasibility structures—let them digest, and then go back again to Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary. There’s no point adding here to the demonization of Bashir for having more or less manipulated Michael through kindness into declaring himself a complete Fruit of the Loom–collecting fiend, especially when you consider that Bashir was representing us fairly well in the ideas he appears to have carried regarding Michael, that it was probably true about him and kids.
But when you put on the not-so glasses and watch, and see Michael protesting his innocence, asking, “What’s wrong with sharing love?” as he holds hands with that twelve-year-old cancer survivor—or many years earlier, in that strange self-released statement, where he describes with barely suppressed rage the humiliation of having his penis examined by the police—dammit if the whole life doesn’t look a lot different. There appears to exist a nondismissible chance that Michael was some kind of martyr.
We won’t pity him. That he embraced his own destiny, knowing beforehand how fame would warp him, is precisely what frees us to revere him.
We have, in any case, a pathology of pathologization in this country. It’s a bourgeois disease, and we do right to call bullshit on it. We moan that Michael changed his face out of self-loathing. He may have loved what he became.
Ebony caught up with him in Africa in the nineties. He had just been crowned king of Sani by villagers in the Ivory Coast. “You know I don’t give interviews,” he tells Robert E. Johnson there in the village. “You’re the only person I trust to give interviews to: Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”
May they have been his last thoughts.
THE FINAL COMEBACK OF AXL ROSE
1.
He is from nowhere.
That sounds coyly rhetorical—in this day and age, it’s even a boast: socioeconomic code for “I went to a second-tier school and had no connections and made all this money myself.”
I don’t mean it that way. I mean he is from nowhere. Given the relevant maps and a pointer, I know I could convince even the most exacting minds that when the vast and blood-soaked jigsaw puzzle that is this country’s regional scheme coalesced into more or less its present configuration after the Civil War, somebody dropped a piece, which left a void, and they called the void “central Indiana.” I’m not trying to say there’s no there there. I’m trying to say there’s no there. Think about it; get systematic on it. What’s the most nowhere part of America? The Midwest, right? But once you get into the Midwest, you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness. There are the lonely plains in Iowa. In Michigan there’s a Gordon Lightfoot song. Ohio has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to. All of them have something. But now I invite you to close your eyes, and when I say “Indiana” … blue screen, no? And we are speaking only of Indiana generally, which includes southern Indiana, where I grew up, and northern Indiana, which touches a Great Lake. We have not even narrowed it down to central Indiana. Central Indiana? That’s like, “Where are you?” I’m nowhere. “Go there.”
When I asked Jeff Strange, a morning-rock DJ in Lafayette, how he thought about this part of the world—for instance, did he think of it as the South? After all, it’s a Klan hot spot (which can be read as a somewhat desperate
affectation); or did he think of it as the Midwest, or what—you know what he told me? He said, “Some people here would call it ‘the region.’”
William Bruce Rose, Jr.; William Bruce Bailey; Bill Bailey; William Rose; Axl Rose; W. Axl Rose.
That’s where he’s from. Bear that in mind.
2.
On May 15, he came out in jeans and a black leather jacket and giant black sunglasses, all lens, that made him look like a wasp-man. We had been waiting so long, in both years and hours. It was the third of the four comeback shows in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was after eleven o’clock. The doors had opened at seven o’clock. The opening act had been off by eight-thirty. There’d already been fights on the floor, and it didn’t feel like the room could get any more wound up without some type of event. I was next to a really nice woman from New Jersey, a hairdresser, who told me her husband “did pyro” for Bon Jovi. She kept texting one of her husband’s friends, who was “doing pyro” for this show, and asking him, “When’s it gonna start?” And he’d text back, “We haven’t even gone inside.” I said to her at one point, “Have you ever seen a crowd this pumped up before a show?” She goes, “Yeah, they get this pumped up every night before Bon Jovi.”
Then he was there. And apologies to the nice woman, but people do not go that nuts when Bon Jovi appears. People were: Going. Nuts. He is not a tall man—I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness.
Pulphead: Essays Page 11