By the way "Sugar Bum Bum" by Lord Kitchener was performed with Randy as lead in Trinidad & Tobago in 1978
youtube.com/watch?v=TCX1Udc3UqQ
Originally published in People Monthly, The Caribbean Magazine, April-May 1978.
Performance
Some of us remembered The Stylistics from way back when. But their performance is just a fuzzy memory of flashy movements. The Jacksons were real, immediate, and very, very slick.
The Jacksons perform three kinds of song, crawling mushy ballads (
Ben,
Got to be there) medium-paced, loping numbers (
Let me show you the way to go, I wanna be where you are) and scintillating high-energy soul (I want you back,
Enjoy yourself).
The audience lapped it all up, but it was their old hits that really scored, which offers some kind of indicator as to who their audience really was. Not today's reggae-disco swayed youngsters, but the people who were young when The Jacksons were younger. The grown-up kids who grooved to I
want you back and
ABC.
The show, of course, was Michael's. The others had their own individual appeal, but it was Michael who strutted and skipped to the delighted approval of the crowd. His is the honeyed-sweet voice that lances through the heart with almost surgical precision, dragging songs like
I'll be there and
Never can say goodbye back from the borderline of mediocrity and cliché.
Then, with appropriately theatrical buildup, they unleashed their gift to Trinidad and Tobago, a respectful facsimile of Lord Kitchener's
Sugar Bum Bum. Randy, with impish sprightliness ran out from behind his congas, grabbed the microphone in fine Elvis style and began to sing with the cutest lisp: "Orgeee, way you get that sugahhh."
And there was The Sun's Keith Smith, holding his pate, looking up to the heavens for a sign and bawling, "This can't be happening, this ain't true, ah must be dreaming."
It was total pandemonium. But the Jacksons, savouring the novelty of the rhythms, carefully let the band carry most of it, wisely recognising their limitations in front of the Trinidadian audience.
By the time the group reached the end of their show, encoring with
Enjoy Yourself, enjoyment had become frenzied excitement and a winin' grinin' mob prepared to show their appreciation.
