MJ (4 page)

The Jacksons, says Delroy Bridgeman, a Gary singer who worked on
the sessions, were
“very quiet, well-mannered kids.” It took about four hours to record a song they’d learned at One-derful and had incorporated into their club sets: “Big Boy.” They also came up with “You’ve Changed,” “We Don’t Have to Be Over 21,” and “Some Girls Want Me for Their Lover,” all written by local artists, R&B songs designed for adult listeners. Michael was an accomplished mimic, sounding as smooth as a grown-up. The sessions were long and difficult, and the boys stayed until ten or eleven nightly.

The Steeltown version of “Big Boy” was Michael Jackson’s formal introduction to the world. He comes in after thirty seconds, following drums, bass, a trebly blues-guitar riff, and backup harmonies that sound too polished to be Jackie or Jermaine. (Because they weren’t—after the Jacksons had finished recording, Keith and his colleagues decided to overdub the boys’
vocals, other than Michael, with professionals.)

“Big Boy” is like a house built out of fine materials by a not-terribly-proficient work crew. (Tito plays guitar and Jermaine plays bass, but Keith beefed up their contributions with four or five session musicians.) The song is lazy and flat, with no dynamism—until Michael comes in, effortlessly brassy, stretching out the syllables to the first words: “
faaaaairy-taaaaaalessssssss
.” The single, with its flip side, “You’ve Changed,” came out on
January 31, 1968. The Jacksons couldn’t believe they finally had a record.

Back then, South Side blues label Chess Records owned an AM radio station whose call letters,
WVON, stood for “Voice of the Negro.” At a puny one thousand watts, the mostly R&B station became a trusted news source for the growing civil rights movement. (In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the Rev.
Jesse Jackson made his first phone call to King’s wife. His second call went to WVON.) The station also had a stable of regionally famous DJs known as the Good Guys, who developed a reputation for breaking the best singles.
“If you got a hit on WVON—literally, this is not ego—it spread across the country,” recalls Lucky Cordell, a retired DJ and manager at the
station who still lives in Chicago. WVON put “Big Boy” on the air, and within a month the record went into regular rotation. On March 5, 1968, hallowed
Atlantic Records, which had introduced Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin to the world, struck a deal with Steeltown to distribute the single nationwide.
“I honestly heard something that I felt was the beginning of something big,” Cordell says.

*  *  *

In 1967, while the Jacksons were driving around Gary and Chicago, winning talent shows, Ronnie
Rancifer was playing blues and touring at clubs. His band, Little Johnny and the Untouchables, had a floor show—a revue—including snake dancers. One weekend on the road in Alabama, the snake got loose and Rancifer was so freaked out he threatened to jump out the window while speeding down the highway. The band stopped, secured the boa, and resumed.

Rancifer lived in Hammond, Indiana, a mostly white, working-class neighborhood outside Gary. Joe Jackson knew his mother from when the Rancifers and the Jacksons had lived near each other in nearby East Chicago. One day, on a tip from a worker at a music shop in Hammond, Joe called Ronnie’s mom. Then he dropped by the Rancifers’ house, and the next thing Ronnie knew, he was in the Jackson 5.

The best way to gain national stardom as an African-American musician in those days was to perform at a network of clubs and theaters known as the chitlin circuit—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Count Basie, James Brown, Sam Cooke, and the Temptations were among its alumni. Every big city had a theater on the circuit—the Uptown in Philadelphia, the Howard in Washington, DC, the Fox in Detroit, and, of course, the
Regal in Chicago. Built in 1927 on the South Side, the 3,500-seat Regal was at first a segregated movie house, but it supplemented the pictures with performances by Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and others.
Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, flanked by silk
drapes and floors of Italian marble. Ushers wore full-length capes to lead customers to their seats.

The Jackson 5 were not new to this circuit—they’d already won an amateur talent show at the Regal—but after “Big Boy,” they began to land regular slots alongside established performers from James Brown to Etta James to Jackie Wilson.
“You’d go in there, you’d do three or four shows a night, come back to the hotel, and be ready to do it again the next night,” Rancifer says. “You know what a musician’s steak is? A musician’s steak is crackers and cheese. Crackers and cheese in a van. And potato chips.” Although the Jackson 5 were rivals to the
Five Stairsteps, another family band on the circuit, Stairsteps singer Clarence Burke remembers befriending the Jackson boys, particularly Jackie, who at sixteen was around his age. Outside one of the theaters was a basketball hoop, and the two teenagers used to shoot around until Michael came out. Burke tried to put Michael on his shoulders to help him with the shots, but Michael, like any nine-year-old younger brother, insisted on doing it himself—endlessly.

Joe, the Jacksons’ driver Jack Richardson, and sometimes Rancifer took the wheel on the road trips. The boys listened to music in the back and tried to out-jive each other. By far, the champion trash-talker was Michael Jackson.
“Michael was a very watchful guy. Whatever weak spot on you he saw, he could blow that up and throw it back at you. Say if your socks smelled bad. Then he would get on you about your socks,” Rancifer recalls. “If you came around and you had some eyeglasses on that looked real funny, he’d say, ‘Oh, God, you got microscopes on!’ ”

The
Apollo Theater, on 125th Street in Harlem, had a distinctive kind of legend. It was in a lively part of town, the street corners jammed with moaning brakes and honking horns, storefronts packed with jukeboxes blaring Ray Charles and Dionne Warwick, and people yelling from shoe-shine parlors, restaurants, and appliance stores. Underneath the Apollo’s purple vertical neon sign, stars such as Sammy Davis Jr.
and Jackie Robinson could be spotted chatting with box-office staff and managers about securing front-row seats.

The Jacksons had killed at the Apollo in 1968, winning the Superdog talent contest, and had been gathering strength and skills on the circuit, but the Stairsteps were the hotter group. They had a
two
-year-old singer, Cubie. They did not, however, have Michael Jackson, who was absorbing technical information from superior singers and dancers at an alarmingly fast rate.
“I carefully watched all the stars because I wanted to learn as much as I could,” he would say. “I’d stare at their feet, the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it.” He was always looking for mentors. Feeling isolated from his brothers, who were older and able to wander the streets, and not being able to connect with his father, Michael spent most of his time in those days standing behind dusty stage curtains. Headlining a different night at the Apollo in
May 1968, blues singer Etta James said Michael freaked her out by watching her set so intently. She told him to scat, and he ran away, wide-eyed, but returned ten minutes later to the same spot. Later, Joe made Michael apologize, and the gruff, hard-living diva was so charmed by Michael’s sincerity that she wound up giving him advice while he sat on her lap.
“I don’t remember what I told him,” she said, “but I remember thinking, as he was leaving, ‘Now there’s a boy who wants to learn from the best, so one day he’s gonna
be
the best.’ ”

It wasn’t only Michael Jackson who was learning from the best. Every chitlin circuit band was stealing from other acts in those days. Motown’s Temptations actually derived the famous Temptation Walk (“. . . put your right foot down, start walking all around”) from a doo-wop group called the Vibrations. Best known for “Peanut Butter” and “The Watusi,” the Vibrations did fast steps and splits and ran and jumped in the aisles. Carl Fisher, the Vibrations’ front man, occasionally noticed the Tempts’ Paul Williams watching intently from backstage. Not long after that, Williams’s band would be onstage doing one
of the same steps. Trained by television, mentored by Chicago studio pros, exposed firsthand to Jackie Wilson and the Temptations, Michael used these chitlin circuit stages as a master dance class.

“Everybody was ranting and raving about how great the Five Stairsteps were,” recalls Teddy Young, drummer in R&B star Joe Simon’s band, which headlined one night with the Jacksons and the Stairsteps. “So the Jacksons came on. Nobody knew who they were. They did their set the first night. The second night. Then Michael kept asking: ‘How’d Jackie Wilson do that dance, and that quick turn he do?’ He kept asking, kept asking. Joe Simon is not known for dancing, but Joe actually showed him, while we were rehearsing, before showtime, how to pivot that little turn.” By the end of those Apollo dates, Michael was fluent in both James Brown and Jackie Wilson. “Right there, at the Apollo, Michael and the Jackson 5 took the torch from the Five Stairsteps,” Young recalls.

Word spread about the Jackson 5. Motown star Gladys Knight, leader of the Pips, happened to catch the group at a Regal performance in Chicago. Like everybody, she was transfixed, especially by Michael and his steadily growing collection of super-smooth dance moves. She invited a few Motown executives to catch one of the band’s shows. They communicated their enthusiasm back to the company’s president, Berry Gordy Jr.

In
July 1968, backstage before a show at the Regal, Joseph Jackson was nowhere to be found. The Jackson 5 were about to open for Motown act Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, famous for a rock-and-soul hit about interracial dating, “Does Your Mama Know about Me,” and Michael’s older brothers were hungry. They wanted to grab dinner out, in Chicago, for the hour they had left before returning to their dressing rooms to prepare for the evening show. Vancouvers’ guitarist Eddie Patterson and keyboardist Robbie King were chilling in the green room, which contained bunks, a coffee machine, and a little rehearsal area with some mirrors. They agreed to keep an eye on the younger Jackson boys, Michael and Marlon.

Patterson and King sat around and read magazines while Michael queued up funky tunes on an old record player, practicing his steps in front of the mirror. Michael didn’t say much, and Patterson wasn’t especially interested in conversing with a ten-year-old.

Later that night, Patterson found himself in the audience, watching the singer he’d just babysat.
“Michael was like a little magic kid on a top, just bopping and singing and smiling and dancing,” he says. “In his last days, he was awesome. But when he was a kid, he was defying gravity.” Like Gladys Knight before him, the Vancouvers’ front man, Bobby Taylor, spread the word to Berry Gordy Jr. at Motown.

This time, Gordy listened intently.

I
. Reynaud Jones would forever brand himself an enemy of the Jackson family when he, with two other people, sued Michael Jackson in 1993 for copying songs without permission that they’d written and sent to him. Reynaud’s side lost. However, he says everything’s okay with the family, to the point that his old friend Tito Jackson gave him the famous guitar that once belonged to Joe, before a recent concert in Indiana. Several credible sources, including Ronnie Rancifer, Gordon Keith, and Shirley Cartman (in her book), acknowledge Jones was instrumental in the Jackson 5’s early development. In his book, Jermaine said Jones “played bass on a couple of occasions,” and Michael would say in court that Jones came over on a couple of occasions for “hello—goodbye.”

II
. Gault, who rarely does interviews, says he prefers to be remembered not as a footnote in the Jacksons’ biography but as a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

III
. Jessye Williams, who fixed windows for the Gary Community School Corp., gave me a new perspective on the famous detail that crowds threw dollars and coins and Michael picked up the money while singing. Williams, a neighbor in a rock-and-soul band called the Tempos who regularly shared bills with the Jackson 5, recalls: “When they would finish the song, I’d go throw five bucks, and then everybody would follow suit in the audience.” I have no reason not to believe Williams, who died in August 2014, other than people have a tendency to write themselves into Michael Jackson’s history.

T
he
Snakepit was a messy room. Microphones hung from the ceiling. Cables were spread everywhere. A set of drums was in one corner, a grand piano in the other. There was a
worn spot on the floor near the mixing board where producers had tapped their feet for a decade. But when the Jackson 5 showed up at Hitsville in Detroit, they didn’t care about the housecleaning. They could feel the presence of the singers who’d come before them—Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops. The Jacksons had shown up to cut vocals for their first songs for Motown Records. The Funk Brothers, the label’s famed house band, had already laid down the instrumental tracks, and like any discerning singer, Michael Jackson—at ten years old—was self-critical. He didn’t like the way he sounded on a few lines, and he wanted to overdub some things onto the tape over an extra hour or two.
“He wouldn’t let himself get away with anything unless it was right,” recalls one of the freelance Motown engineers, Ed Wolfrum.

But Michael’s perfectionism was too much for his father. The Jacksons had to pay expenses for every recording session. “Michael, this is advanced against royalties!” Joe hollered as he hit him. “This is costing
us a fortune!” Wolfrum had worked with difficult artists, but he had never seen anything like this. He and his fellow engineers intervened.
“If you’re going to deal with it like that,” they told Joe, “then we’re stopping the session until you cool down.” Wolfrum happened to be studying for the priesthood at the time. “I certainly morally couldn’t leave it alone,” he recalls, years later. “It really struck me.” Bobby Taylor of the Vancouvers, the producer, knew what to do in situations like these. “I wouldn’t let Joe Jackson interfere,” he said.
“I once pulled a gun on him in the
studio and told him not to come back while we were working.”