Back In The Day
Before the weirdness claimed his legacy, Michael Jackson understood his talent—and what he was willing to do for it—better than we ever have.
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
How do you talk about Michael Jackson unless you begin with Prince Screws? Prince Screws was an Alabama cotton-plantation slave who became a tenant farmer after the Civil War, likely on his old master's land. His son, Prince Screws Jr., bought a small farm. And that man's son, Prince Screws III, left home for Indiana, where he found work as a Pullman porter, part of the exodus of southern blacks to the northern industrial cities.
There came a disruption in the line. This last Prince Screws, the one who went north, would have no sons. He had two daughters, Kattie and Hattie. Kattie gave birth to ten children, the eighth a boy, Michael—who would name his sons Prince, to honor his mother, whom he adored, and to signal a restoration. So the ridiculous moniker given by a white man to his black slave, the way you might name a dog, was bestowed by a black king upon his pale-skinned sons and heirs.
We took the name for an affectation and mocked it.
Not to imply that it was above mockery, but of all the things that make Michael unknowable, thinking we knew him is maybe the most deceptive. Lets suspend it.
Begin not with the miniseries childhood of father Joseph's endless practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, 11 to 14—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A dreamy child, he collects exotic animals. He likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals now.
His eldest brothers were at one time children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist.
Alone, he puts on classical records, because he finds they soothe his mind. He also likes the old southern stuff his uncle Luther sings. His uncle looks back at him and thinks he seems sad for his age. This is in California, so poor, brown Gary, with its poisonous air you could smell from leagues away—a decade's exposure to which may already have damaged his immune system in fateful ways—is the past.
He thinks about things and sometimes talks them over with his friends Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross when they are hanging out. He listens to albums and compares. The albums he and his brothers make have a few nice tunes, to sell records, then a lot of consciously second-rate numbers, to satisfy the format. Whereas Tchaikovsky and people like that, they didn't handle slack material. But you have to write your own songs.
Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn't the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group, from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents.
Michael wants access to the "anatomy" of the music. That's the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What's inside its structure that makes it move?
When he's 17, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while Songs in the Key of Life gets made. There's Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie's blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael's presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him.
Most of the Jackson siblings are leaving Motown at this moment, for another label, where they've leveraged a bit more creative sway. The first thing Michael does is write "Blues Away," an unfairly forgotten song, fated to become one of the least dated-sounding tracks the Jacksons do together. A nice left-handed piano riff with strings and a breathy chorus—Burt Bacharach doing Stevie doing early disco, and some other factor that was Michael's own, that dwelt in his introverted-sounding vocal rhythms. Sweet, slightly cryptic lyrics that contain an early notion of melancholy as final, inviolable retreat: I'd like to be yours tomorrow / So I'm giving you some time to get over today / But you can't take my blues away.
By 1978, the year of "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)"—co-written by Michael and little Randy—Michael's methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts. Where do they come from? Above. He claims to drop to his knees and thank Jehovah after he snatches one. His voice coach tells the story of Michael one day raising his hands in the air during practice and starting to mutter. The coach, Seth Riggs, decides to leave him alone. When he comes back half an hour later, it's to Michael whispering, "Thank you for my talent."
Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.
His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you've listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael's earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting. He will always be at his worst when making what he thinks of as "big" music, which he invariably associates with military imagery.
1979, the year of Off the Wall and his first nose job, marks an obscure crisis. Around the start of that year, they offer him the gay lead in the film version of A Chorus Line, but he declines the role, explaining, "I'm excited about it, but if I do it, people will link me with the part. Because of my voice, some people already think I'm that way—homo—though I'm actually not at all."
People want to know, Why, when you became a man, did your voice not change? Rather, it did change, but what did it change into? Listening to clips of his interviews through the '70s, you can hear how he goes about changing it himself. First it deepens slightly, around 1972-73 or so. (Listen to him on The Dating Game in 1972 and you'll hear that his voice was lower at 14 than it will be at 30.) This potentially catastrophic event has perhaps been vaguely dreaded by the family and label for years. Michael Jackson without his falsetto is not the commodity on which their collective dream depends. But Michael has never known a reality that wasn't susceptible on some level to his creative powers. He works to develop something, not a falsetto, which is a way of singing above your range, but instead a higher range. He isolates totally different configurations of his vocal cords, finding their crevices, cultivating the flexibility there. Vocal teachers will tell you this can be done, though it's considered an extreme practice. Whether the process is conscious in Michael's case is unknowable. He probably evolves it in order to keep singing Jackson 5 songs every night through puberty. The startling effect is of his having imaginatively not so much castrated himself as of womanized himself. He essentially evolves a drag voice. On the early demo for "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," recorded at home with Randy and Janet helping, you can actually hear him work his way into this voice. It is a character, really. "We're gonna be startin' now, baby," he says in a relaxed, moderately high-pitched man's voice. Then he intones the title, "Don't stop 'til you get enough," in a softer, quieter version of basically the same voice. He repeats the line in a still higher register, almost purring. Finally—in a full-on girlish peal—he sings. A source will later claim to have heard him, in a moment of anger, break into a deep, gruff voice she'd never heard before.
Interesting that these out-flashings of his "natural" voice occurred at moments when he was, as we would say, not himself.
On the Internet, you can see a picture of him near the end of his life, juxtaposed with a digital projection of what he would have looked like at the same age without the surgeries and makeup and wigs. A smiling middle-aged black guy, handsome in an everyday way. We are meant, of course, to feel a connection with this lost neverbeing, and pity for the strange, self-mutilated creature beside him. I can't be alone, however, in feeling just the opposite, that there's something metaphysically revolting about the mock-up. It's an abomination. Michael chose his true face. What is, is natural.
His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture. It must be carefully preserved.
It's fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person. During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them. The articles make me realize that about the only Michael Jackson I've ever known, personality-wise, is a Michael Jackson who's defending himself against white people who are passive-aggressively accusing him of child molestation. He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different. Not that the scenario was any more journalistically pure. The John H. Johnson publishing family, which puts out Jet and Ebony, had Michael's back, faithfully repairing and maintaining his complicated relations with the community, assuring readers that, in the presence of Michael, "you quickly look past the enigmatic icon's light, almost translucent skin and realize that this African-American legend is more than just skin deep." At times, especially when the "homo" issue came up, the straining required could turn comical, as in Ebony in 1982, talking about his obsessive male fans:
michael: "They come after us every way they can, and the guys are just as bad as the girls. Guys jump up on the stage and usually go for me and Randy."
ebony: "But that means nothing except that they admire you, doesn't it?"
Even so, to hear Michael laid-back and talking unpretentiously about art, the thing he most loved—that is a new Michael, a person utterly absent from, for example, Martin Bashir's infamous documentary, in which Michael admitted sharing his bedroom with children. It's only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people of all races have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive. What a pleasure to find him listening to early "writing version" demos of his own compositions and saying, "Listen to that, that's at home, Janet, Randy, me.… You're hearing four basses on there.…" Or to hear him tell less prepackaged anecdotes, such as the one about a beautiful black girl who froze in the aisle and pissed all down her legs after spotting him on a plane, or the blond girl who kissed him in an airport and, when he didn't respond, asked, "What's wrong, you fag?" He grows tired of reminding people, "There's a reason why I was created male. I'm not a girl." He leaves the reason unspoken.
*****
When michael and Quincy Jones run into each other on the set of The Wiz, each remembers a moment when Sammy Davis Jr. had taken Jones aside backstage somewhere and whispered, "This guy is something; he's amazing." Michael had "tucked it away." He knows Jones's name from the sleeves of his father's jazz albums, knows Jones is a serious man. He waits till the movie is done to call him up. It's the fact that Jones intimidates him slightly that draws Jackson to him. He yearns for some competition larger than the old intra-familial one, which he has long dominated. That was checkers; he wants to play chess. Fading child stars can easily insulate themselves from further motivation, if they wish, and most do. It's the more human path. Michael seeks pressure instead, at this moment. He recruits people who can drive him to, as he puts it, "higher effort."
Quincy Jones's nickname for him is Smelly. It comes from Michael's habit of constantly touching and covering his nose with the fingers of his left hand, a tic that becomes pronounced in news clips from this time. He feels embarrassed about his broad nose. Several surgeries later—after, one assumes, it had been deemed impolitic inside the Jackson camp to mention the earlier facial self-consciousness—the story is altered. We are told that when Michael liked a track in the studio, he would call it "the smelly jelly." Both stories may be true. "Smelly jelly" has the whiff of Jackson's weird, infantile sayings. Later in life, when feeling weak, he'd say to his people, "I'm hurting…, blanket me," which could mean, among other things, time for my medicine.
Michael knows he won't really have gone solo until his own songwriting finds the next level. He doesn't want inclusion; he wants awe. Jones has a trusted songwriter in his stable, the Englishman Rod Temperton, of Heatwave fame, who brings in a song, "Rock with You." It's very good. Michael hears it and knows it's a hit. He's not even worried about hits at this point, though, except as a kind of by-product of perfection. He goes home and writes "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." Janet tinks on a glass bottle. Trusted Randy plays guitar. These are the two siblings whom Michael brings with him into the Quincy Jones adventure, to the innermost zone where he writes. We don't think of the family as having anything to do, musically, with his solo career, except by way of guilt favors. But he feels confident with these two, needs to keep them fully woven into his nest. They are both younger than he. His baby sister.
From the perspective of thirty years, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is a much better track than "Rock with You." One admires "Rock with You," but melodically Michael's song comes from a more distinctive place. Sophisticated instincts are what you hear.
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 own sake now but for her own. 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 there were bigger records that year. He wants to make something, he says, that "refuse
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, with a sixteen-track recorder. Being Michael Jackson working on the follow-up to Off the Wall means sometimes your demos are recorded at your home by the greatest recording 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.
[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 wonderfully 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 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 also 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. The tempo is the pulse of a sleeping person.
I have no way of confirming this, but I suspect the reason it sounds like Michael's saying the chad is not my son is that on one take, he'd switched it up and sung the child is not my son. The ch of that child is faintly ghosting each kid, the word they went with. They liked the sonic effect of the slurring, one of those little unfakeable interior things, so they kept it. Possibly a stupid theory. One would love to have been there, the way Michael was with Stevie.
I recall across twenty-five years watching, as a young chad, David Letterman do a bit on the kid line. He claims to have solved it. "We've discovered the mystery word in 'Billie Jean.' Do we have the tape?" They play it, and it goes, She says I am the one / But the [suddenly, in a low, gravelly male voice] CHAIR is not my son.
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 of that business, his brothers, Motown, the Jackson 5, the past: That's all a cocoon he's been writhing inside, 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, which 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 account 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 he wipes sweat from under his nose in time, at about 3:25.
The intensity behind his face is 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. He was mostly bald and weighed scarcely more than 100 pounds. Two separate complete autopsies: They cut him to pieces. As of this writing, no one outside the Jackson camp knows the whereabouts of his body. He seems to be resting temporarily in Berry Gordy's unoccupied crypt.
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 major 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 celebrity journalist Ian Halperin's Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, a work obviously slammed into publication to capitalize on the death. Halperin, most famous for a book and movie suggesting Kurt Cobain's suicide was a disguised murder, is not an ideal source, but neither is he a dismissible 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 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, etc. 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 a 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 having lacked erotic interest 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 clinical speak—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 for you to 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 spider's web, 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.
Now, if you want a disturbing thought experiment, allow these—I won't say facts…feasibilities—let them percolate, and then watch Martin Bashir's 2003 documentary, Living with Michael Jackson. 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.
But when you put on the not-true glasses and watch, and see Michael protesting his innocence, asking, "What's wrong with love?" as his arm hangs around a cancer-stricken boy—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 50 percent chance that Michael was a martyr of some kind.
We can't pity him. That he embraced his destiny, knowing how fame would warp him, is 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 ought to call bullshit on it. We bawl 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 '90s. 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.
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