Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  Cries of angry disagreement shot up from the floor. The mood in the room became riled, like that of a piqued political caucus. But Brown stood his ground. “You don’t really know what Michael had to go through to make this tour happen. I won’t stay here and let you attack somebody who isn’t present to defend himself.”

  What Brown didn’t mention is that he had reportedly declined Michael Jackson’s invitation to sing with the group at Madison Square Garden because he privately felt the ticket prices would exclude any real soul audience. He could have scored big and easy points with the NMS crowd by divulging that, but it was a testament to his integrity, and to his respect for the difficulty of Michael Jackson’s position with the press and public, that he kept his censure measured, and made his defense sound reasoned.

  Of course, it would have been even better if Jackson had expressed more concern for the audience who sustained him during his singular rise to pop stardom. But like Presley before him, Michael Jackson was now in uncharted territory, and every move he made would either map out his redemption or his ruin.

  THE JACKSON’S TOUR came to its close in early December 1984, with six sold-out performances at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium. I almost skipped the whole thing. I was weary of all the arguments and vitriol surrounding Michael Jackson by this time, plus I’d already seen the show in Kansas City and Manhattan, and the experience hadn’t been worth either trip. But on the tour’s last night, I went. It was my job.

  As it turned out, this was the only Victory tour show I saw that had a good dose of something that the other dates had lacked: namely, Michael Jackson’s unbridled passion. Let me say it without apology: It was a hell of a thing to see.

  Pass it off, if you like, as Jackson’s possible sense of relief at leaving the long debacle behind, but from his wild, impossibly liquid-looking glides and romps during “Heartbreak Hotel” (still his best song), to the deep-felt improvisational gospel break at the end of the lovely Motown ballad, “I’ll Be There,” and the fleet-tongued, raw-toned scat-rap exchange he shared with Jermaine at the end of “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming (Too Good to be True),” Michael accomplished as much as was likely possible that night—short of kicking his brothers offstage and setting Don King afire. At moments, he seemed so refreshingly lively and acute that it almost worked against him. What I mean is, watching Jackson at this peak is a bit like watching pornography—something so provoking it can rivet you and seem incomprehensible (maybe even unbearable) at the same time. Which means a little goes a long way, and a lot can seem plain numbing.

  In any event, on that last night I thought: Maybe there’s hope for the guy after all.

  FOUR YEARS LATER I was on the Michael Jackson road again, writing coverage (this time for Rolling Stone) of the opening dates of his first solo tour. Jackson had a recent album to promote, Bad, and once again he was nominated for some key Grammy Awards. But in 1988, Jackson was up against some hard competition. Artists like U2 and Prince had fashioned some of the most ambitious and visionary music of their careers—music that reflected the state of pop and the world in enlivening ways. By contrast, Jackson’s Bad seemed mainly a celebration of the mystique and celebrity of the artist himself.

  More important, in 1988 there was suspicion among many critics and observers that Jackson’s season as pop’s favorite son may have passed. When Jackson arrived in New York to attend and perform at the Grammys and to give a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, he was met with some bitter hints of this possibility. In the 1987 Rolling Stone Readers and Critics Poll, Jackson placed first in six of the readers’ “worst of the year” categories (including “worst male singer”); in addition the 1987 Village Voice Critics Poll failed to mention Jackson’s Bad in its selection of 1987’s forty best albums. This was a startling turnaround from four years before, when Jackson and his work topped the same polls in both publications.

  Plus, Jackson still possessed a knack for grand gestures that often seem overinflated. I remember one morning in a Manhattan disco, where Michael Jackson stood, smiling uneasily before a throng of reporters and photographers. The occasion was a large-scale press conference, convened by Jackson’s tour sponsor, Pepsi, to commemorate a $600,000 contribution from the singer to the United Negro College Fund. But the philanthropy of the event was somewhat overshadowed by Pepsi’s other purpose: namely to premiere Jackson’s flashy new four-episode commercial for the soda company, which would make its TV debut the following night, during the broadcast of the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All in all, it was an odd excuse for a press gathering, and Jackson looked uncomfortable with the stagy formality of the situation. Not surprisingly, he was willing to say little about the occasion, nor would he take any questions from the nearly five hundred journalists who were crowding the room. In short, like most Michael Jackson press conferences, the event proved little more than a grandiose photo opportunity—and yet it had all the drawing power of a significant political function. In a sense, it’s easy to see why. It’s as close to Michael Jackson as most members of the press will ever get, and though many reporters remain put off by the singer, they still find him fascinating and are quite happy to ogle at his transfixing, part beautiful, part grotesque countenance.

  But why Jackson would find it necessary to endure an occasion like this is another story. According to one associate (who like most people around Jackson would prefer not to be quoted for attribution), high-profile media galas like this—or the following night’s Grammy program—have a special significance for the singer.

  “You have to keep in mind,” the associate told me, “what happened to Michael during the 1980 Grammy Awards. His album Off the Wall had sold over 6 million copies. In effect, Michael was the biggest black artist America had ever produced. He fully expected to be nominated for the Album of the Year and Record of the Year awards, and he deserved to. But instead, he won only one award—best male R & B vocal.

  “That experience hurt Michael, and it also taught him a lesson. You could be the biggest black entertainer in history, and yet to much of the music industry and media, you were an invisible man. That’s why he aimed to make Thriller the biggest record of all time, and that’s why he has aligned himself with Pepsi. Pepsi gave him the biggest commercial-endorsement contract that anybody has ever received, and to Michael, the more accomplishments to your name, the more people have to recognize you. That’s what an event like this is all about. Michael still wants the world to acknowledge him.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT, as the Grammy show progresses, things go better and worse than expected. The good news is that Jackson turns in an inspired performance that also serves as a timely reminder of an almost forgotten truth about him: Namely, that whatever his eccentricities, Jackson acquired his fame primarily because of his remarkably intuitive talents as a singer and dancer—talents that are genuine and matchless and not the constructions of mere ambition or hype. Moreover, it is also plausible that in certain ways, Jackson’s phenomenal talent may not be completely separable from his eccentricity. That is, the same private obsessions and fears and reveries that fuel his prowess as a dancer and songwriter and singer may also prompt his quirkiness, and perhaps without all that peculiarity he would be far less compelling to watch.

  In a sense, Jackson’s opening moments on the Grammy telecast—in which he delivers a slow-paced, Frank Sinatra-inspired reworking of “The Way You Make Me Feel”—are exemplary of his famed quirkiness. He seems self-conscious and strained pulling off the song’s cartoonish notion of streetwise sexuality, and his overstated hip thrusts and crotch snatching come off as more forced than felt. And yet when the music revs up, all the artifice is instantly dispelled. Jackson seems suddenly confident and executes startling, robotic hip-and-torso thrusts alongside slow-motion, sliding mime moves that leave the audience gasping.

  But it is in his next song, the social-minded, gospel-inflected “Man in the Mirror,” that Jackson defines for himself some surprising new strengths. It is a deceptively str
aightforward delivery, and yet its simplicity prompts Jackson to an increasingly emotional performance. By the song’s middle, he isn’t so much singing or interpreting as he is simply surrendering to the song. At one point—spurred on by the majestic vocal support of Andrae Crouch and the New Hope Baptist Church Choir—Jackson breaks into a complex, skip-walking dance step that carries him across the stage and back. He then crashes hard to his knees in a posture of glorious, testifying abandon, sobbing fervently as Crouch comes forward and dabs the sweat from his forehead, then helps him back to his feet.

  It is a moment that reminds some viewers of James Brown’s famous stage routine, but in truth, Jackson has taken the move from the same sources that Brown appropriated his from: archetypal gospel shouters like Claude Jeter and James Cleveland.

  But a few minutes later, as Jackson takes his seat in the front row alongside producer Quincy Jones, his triumph comes to a fast, sobering end. As many observers expected, U2’s album The Joshua Tree takes the Album of the Year Award, and before the evening is out, Jackson will also lose all the remaining awards that he is nominated for.

  Perhaps Jackson’s most telling response comes during an uproarious incident when Little Richard, presenting the Best New Artist Award, playfully castigates the academy for neglecting him throughout his career, stating, “You all ain’t never gave me no Grammys, and I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock & roll.” Jackson is among the first spectators to his feet, bouncing up and down and clapping hard.

  Maybe it’s only the hilarious spirit of the moment, but maybe it’s something more. In a way, Jackson is Little Richard’s vengeance. He is the brilliant, freakish black prodigy who would not tolerate being snubbed, and so he figured a way to win pop music’s attention and acclaim. But as the late James Baldwin once wrote, “[Michael Jackson] will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.” On this night, Jackson may have learned the hard lesson behind Baldwin’s words: What can be won big can also be taken away—and losing it is sometimes harder than never having had it in the first place.

  JACKSON’S GRAMMY LOSS serves to raise expectations for his Madison Square Garden shows, which get under way the night following the Grammys with a benefit performance for the United Negro College Fund. Some of his supporters speculate that Jackson intends to use the concerts to redeem his reputation by putting on the most impressive and assertive shows of his career—and that is precisely what he does. In contrast to the tour’s opening shows a week earlier in Kansas City, Missouri—where he had often seemed overwhelmed by glitzy and relentless staging—Jackson seems not merely involved and animated but often flat-out magnificent in his New York shows.

  But it is during the two songs toward the show’s end, “Billie Jean” and “Man in the Mirror,” that Michael Jackson’s greatest strengths—as well as his greatest problems—as a live performer are displayed. “Billie Jean,” in fact, conveys both at once. When Jackson first performed the song in public—during his startling appearance on the 1983 “Motown 25” TV special—he was still close to its meanings, to the fear and anger that inspired the song. In addition, he was performing it as the first public declaration of his adult independence—as if not only his reputation depended on it but also his future. Now, though, with all its letter-perfect maneuvering and moonwalking, “Billie Jean” seems less like a dance of passion than a physical litany of learned steps; less like an act of personal urgency than a crowd-pleasing gesture. Even so, “Billie Jean” is still a marvelous and bewitching thing to behold.

  But as Jackson demonstrated the night before at the Grammys, his live version of “Man in the Mirror” is an act of living passion. In fact, it now seems a more personal and heartfelt song for Jackson than “Billie Jean.” Back in 1983 the latter song seemed like his way of negotiating with the world—a way of attracting the world’s curiosity in the same motion that he announced that he was afraid of being misinterpreted or used up by that world. But with “Man in the Mirror,” a song about accepting social and political responsibility, Jackson may be trying to integrate his way back into the world, or at least to embrace his place in it a bit more. It is hardly an easy peace that Jackson seeks. After all, at the end of the song he retreats back into his real world, a very private and isolated place. What’s more, it may be that the world no longer loves or wants him as much as it once did. But after watching Jackson on nights like this, when his power and passion are so undeniable, the idea of his audience rejecting him amounts to a sad loss on everybody’s part.

  A FEW NIGHTS later, Michael Jackson sits on a dais between Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor at the United Negro College Fund’s annual benefit dinner. The dinner is being held to honor Jackson for the major contributions he had made to the UNCF in recent years, and consequently it is a full-fledged gala, attended by a legion of black educators and business people, as well as numerous celebrities, such as Whitney Houston, Spike Lee, and Christie Brinkley.

  Like much of the rigmarole that surrounds Jackson, this event tends to cast the singer in superhuman terms. In speech after speech, adulators lionize Jackson embarrassingly, and even Ronald Reagan—who will later make history as the first president in a century to veto major civil-rights legislation—turns in an appearance, via video, apotheosizing the star’s talents and humanitarianism and his merits as a model for the black race.

  This is all fine, but in a way it has nothing to do with what is genuinely great about Michael Jackson: Namely, that he is at heart an absolutely terrific rock & roller, an astonishing singer whose vocalizing is both a consummation of R & B history as well as a fresh new start, and a matchless mover, who embodies the whole spectrum of black dance style from Cab Calloway to James Brown and then some. What’s more, on his best nights, Jackson can combine these gifts in an electrifying, stunning way that can outdistance even the finest work of Bruce Springsteen or Prince—a way, in fact, that has only been equaled in rock history by Elvis Presley. Like Presley, Jackson is at his best when he reacts on troubled-yet-joyous impulses and makes a liberating, riveting public performance of them. And again like Presley, Jackson is a half-mad and extraordinary talent in a nation that both sanctifies him and hates him for his prowess—and either response spells a difficult artistic future.

  Just how much pressure Jackson constantly faces as a result of his fame becomes plain in an incident at the UNCF benefit, during the lull when the dinner is served. No sooner have the speakers stopped speaking than literally hundreds of people—most of them sophisticated, intelligent people—begin streaming toward the table where Jackson is seated, hoping for an autograph, a photograph, maybe even a chance to talk. Immediately, a half dozen or so bodyguards and publicists line up in front of the singer, attempting, first politely and then adamantly, to turn people back to their tables. Finally, it is a stalemate. The people cannot get any closer to Jackson, but they will not turn away from him. They just stand facing him, staring, craning to get a view of his remarkable, enchanting, and disturbing face—a face that, at this moment, looks terribly frightened but is holding its place.

  Jackson’s face, of course, is probably his most famous and controversial aspect, and while some critics suspect he has reconstructed it to seem forever childlike, others charge that he has had cosmetic surgery so that he would appear “less black.”

  In his autobiography, Moonwalk, (Doubleday), Jackson explains:

  You must remember that I had been a child star and when you grow up under that kind of scrutiny people don’t want you to change, to get older and look different. When I first became well known, I had a lot of baby fat and a very round, chubby face. That roundness stayed with me until several years ago when I changed my diet and stopped eating beef, chicken, pork, and fish, as well as certain fattening foods. I just wanted to look better, live better, and be healthier. Gradually, as I lost weight, my face took on its present shape and the press
started accusing me of surgically altering my appearance.

  I’d like to set the record straight right now. I have never had my cheeks altered or my eyes altered. I have not had my lips thinned, nor have I had dermabrasion or a skin peel. All of these charges are ridiculous. If they were true, I would say so, but they aren’t. I have had my nose altered twice and I recently added a cleft to my chin, but that is it. Period. I don’t care what anyone else says—it’s my face and I know.

  In any event, it’s a visage that disturbs many people, and earlier in the week one person who has been observing Jackson offered an explanation: “I think people find it upsetting, because they know they’re looking at racism made flesh. They’re looking at a tacit admission that to make it in a white world, you have to be white. It’s an indictment. It’s a face that says, ’You made me this way. I can’t be really black if I want to be really famous.’ And people don’t want to look at that face, because they don’t want to look at their own racism.”

  This may well be true, but if so, is that really what is on the minds of the people standing here staring at Jackson, most of whom are black? Are they staring at somebody who represents dark truths, or somebody who embodies a complex history of hopes and dreams made good or simply at somebody who is the biggest star of all stars? Maybe they are looking at all these things. At one point in the evening, the dinner’s host, Ossie Davis, stares at Jackson for a long moment and then utters a line as illuminating and resonant as scripture. “God bless the child,” he says, “that’s got his own.”