Authors: Steve Knopper
* * *
The Jacksons told reporters Diana Ross discovered them and brought them to Motown—their debut album was called
Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5
. Over more than four decades, Bobby Taylor has meticulously corrected the record. Upon spotting the Jackson 5 at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, Taylor called Motown executive Ralph Seltzer. Seltzer had reservations. Stevie Wonder, who’d begun his Motown career at age twelve in 1962, was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but issues with child-labor laws and chaperones had been almost too much.
“I had a reluctance to sign really young people,” recalls Seltzer, in his late eighties, by phone from a senior living center in Grants Pass, Oregon. “I felt that I’d rather sign a twenty-two-year-old adult who lives around the corner from our studios and was in high school or Wayne [State] University or whatever. This was five minors—with a father who supervised their career and had to be dealt with.”
Seltzer trusted Bobby Taylor, but he needed another opinion. He turned to Suzanne Celeste de Passe. At just twenty-one, she was a rising creative executive at Motown and a confidant of Berry Gordy Jr., the label’s founder; in 1968, she listened to the Jackson 5, dubbed them “terrific,” and recommended Motown sign them. Gordy responded obstinately. “I don’t want kid acts! Do you know how much trouble
Stevie Wonder is?” De Passe snapped back:
“Oh, no you don’t. Not if they’re great.”
Days later, Gordy, de Passe, and a few others were in an eighth-floor office.
I
Dick Scott, Gordy’s assistant, had set up a new video camera, a piece of technology rare for 1968. The footage Scott made of the Jackson boys was grainy and black-and-white and eventually leaked to the public. In the foreground, a short-haired ten-year-old Michael Jackson, wearing long pants and a tight long-sleeved shirt, claps his hands and glides from side to side, keeping his upper body still while moving his legs in perfect rhythm, like a tap dancer, to James Brown’s “I Got the Feeling.” In the background, his brothers provide the music—Tito on guitar, Jermaine on bass, Jackie on
tambourine, and Johnny Jackson steady as usual on the drum kit. In the video, the brothers’ heads are out of the frame, so you can see only their long, skinny legs stepping in well-rehearsed choreography. Only Marlon, because he’s almost as short as Michael, appears in full, albeit briefly. Toward the end, Michael spins with fantastical grace, drops to his knees like Jackie Wilson, snaps back up, grabs his belt, then goes into a long, James Brown–style side-stepping routine.
Gordy recalls giving a brief congratulatory speech at the audition, after they’d finished the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “I Wish It Would Rain” and Michael’s road-tested version of “Tobacco Road.” But the boys were confused.
“Uh, Mr. Gordy, does that mean you’re gonna sign us?” Jermaine asked. “Yes, yes, it does,” Gordy said. They cheered.
* * *
There were contracts. Seltzer, the label’s legal specialist, met for nearly two hours with Joe Jackson at Motown’s Detroit offices on
July 26,
1968. After haggling over the number of years the band would be signed to the label, Joseph signed. He didn’t read the contracts. He didn’t have a lawyer. He let Seltzer explain everything. Joe wanted a one-year deal. Motown wanted seven years. Seltzer made a show of granting Joe his wish. It was a mirage. Joe didn’t realize the contract forbade the Jacksons from recording for another label for seven years. This type of subterfuge was the way record executives did business in those days, especially with poor and desperate artists who couldn’t afford to hire their own attorneys. And Joe wasn’t far removed from Gary’s steel-mill hell. He saw to it that all the boys signed, too.
Seltzer credited Jackson 5’s father on one level.
“Most of our artists, we supervised and managed completely, and Joe Jackson, with very good reason, didn’t feel he wanted some strangers he’d never met before to walk in and have one hundred percent say about everything,” he recalls. He also believed Joe was a rube: “I didn’t have gigantic respect for him. Because I thought he thought he knew a lot more about the music business than he actually did.”
Bobby Taylor hounded
Gordy to let him take over the Jacksons’ career. Gordy agreed. Taylor succumbed to the irresistible novelty of Michael Jackson—he could sing like an adult, so Taylor connected the band with adult songs, such as Smokey Robinson’s simmering blues “Who’s Lovin’ You” and Ray Charles’s ballad “A Fool for You,” as well as a slow burner from their Steeltown Records days, “You’ve Changed,” and Sly and the Family Stone’s funky hit “Stand!,” which would be something of a blueprint for the Jackson 5’s Motown career.
The Jacksons spent weekdays attending school in Gary, then drove the laborious four or five hours to Detroit during weekends and summers, plopping mattresses and sleeping bags onto the floor of
Taylor’s small apartment. He taught the group how to properly use microphones and not to worry about
“projecting” over built-in amplification.
Taylor cut fifteen tracks in all, and when the Jacksons finally joined him in the studio to sing, the revelation was Michael’s voice. He could
embody the blues just as Ray Charles did, and he had an extra gear that none of his brothers had, an inspired brightness that could overwhelm a song, like when he shouted “I love you!” in the background of the Philly soul classic “Can You Remember.”
“He got it,” Taylor said. “I didn’t have to explain, didn’t have to analyze. I went in and sang it for him, then got out the way while Michael tore it up. When he got through, there were tears in my eyes.”
Contractual issues—mostly thanks to Steeltown, which insisted on waiting for the Jacksons’ original agreement to expire—prevented the band from putting out Motown singles until 1969. While they waited,
they continued performing, at the Apollo in New York, the Twenty Grand Club in Detroit, and familiar Chicago hot spots such as Guys and Gals and the High Chaparral. To add to all this work, Gordy paraded the Jacksons around Motown. Back then, he lived in a million-dollar mansion on Boston Boulevard in Detroit and brought in the Jackson 5 for a charity event. On this night, Motown stars Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and Diana Ross were like kings and queens in Gordy’s royal court. And then there was ten-year-old Michael Jackson.
“How in the world—’cause this little boy, and he was a
kid—
be so talented? That’s what everybody went away talking about,” singer Brenda Holloway said. It was at this party that Michael, wide-eyed, met Ross for the first time. Michael reacted with typical subtlety:
“DIANA ROSS!” he shouted to his brothers. “I’VE JUST SEEN DIANA ROSS!” Jackie, the oldest, the leader, got them to concentrate.
“We was quite nervous,” Tito acknowledged.
* * *
When Motown signed the Jackson 5, the small record label had been tied to Detroit as intimately as the Ford Motor Company or Al Kaline of the Tigers. It was in Detroit that Berry Gordy had started out as a boxer. He wasn’t bad, but he had an epiphany upon seeing
boxing and big-band handbills plastered on the same wall: the twenty-three-year-
old boxers looked like they were fifty, while the fifty-year-old bandleaders looked like they were twenty-three. Joseph Jackson had been a failed boxer, too, but while he channeled his ambitions into fiercely driving his sons, Berry channeled his into building a factory-style assembly line in Detroit for hit records.
Motown songs, according to Gordy, had to be short, catchy, and fun. They had to avoid politics, even when race riots were threatening to destroy Detroit (although, beyond his control, songs like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” became unofficial civil rights anthems). With Gordy’s hands-on guidance at all levels, from songwriting to quality control to charm school, the company released immortal sixties hits such as “Baby Love,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and “I Heard It through the Grapevine.”
By the time the Jackson 5 signed with Motown in 1968, Gordy and Motown were going through a transition. The Supremes (who hated each other) and the
Temptations (whose front men had drug problems and hated each other) were not the reliable superstars they had been for much of the sixties. The company’s famous songwriting team, brothers Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, had left the company, then sued Gordy over money. Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were beginning to envision a world beyond two-and-a-half-minute singles, plotting albums that would change music for decades. And, fairly or not, Gordy didn’t see much of a future on Motown’s bench, as stars such as Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Contours, and Jr. Walker and the All Stars represented the previous decade rather than the new one. He knew the real clout was in Hollywood. He bought his first Los Angeles home in fall 1968 and began to contemplate a company-wide move. The idea was to make movies with his muse, Diana Ross, but first he needed to consolidate his base. For this, he required fresh music stars who’d play by his rules, stars who would roll off a new Motown assembly line that was strict and streamlined even by Gordy’s standards. Gordy saw in the
Jackson 5 a new franchise player, crucial to Motown’s LA future. A group he could fully control.
The new Motown sound, based in LA, would have hints of Motown’s familiar “Sound of Young America”—catchy, sophisticated pop melodies set to a steel-beam rhythmic mixture of jazz, R&B, and gospel music. But it would be more scripted, less improvisational, and fully dictated by Gordy and his producers—which is to say, less vulnerable to mutiny by self-determined studio musicians such as the Funk Brothers, Motown’s storied in-house backup band throughout the sixties.
“Their music was not the R&B that we were typically known for,” Martha Reeves says. “When we recorded with the Funk Brothers, the Funks initiated the sound. Jackson 5 were closer to disco than to R&B.”
“They thought the West Coast was going to generate a new sound that would perpetuate the company and make it go on and on,” adds Clay McMurray, a longtime Motown arranger and quality-control staffer who worked as a Jackson 5 songwriter and producer. “It just worked in the reverse, with the exception of Thelma Houston and Brenda Holloway and the Jacksons. They just never came close to what we did here in Detroit.”
Made in Detroit, Bobby Taylor’s Jackson 5 recordings were not hits. Gordy could tell that right away. Taylor had to go.
“Berry was very, very direct about his instructions,” Motown arranger Paul Riser recalls. “He would say, ‘I need hits. I don’t want anything else.’ ” In Taylor’s place, Gordy installed a team of songwriters—Fonze Mizell, Freddie Perren, and Deke Richards, the latter of whom had just helped write Diana Ross and the Supremes’ megahit “Love Child.” The trio created an instrumental called “I Wanna Be Free.” They assembled all-star Hollywood musicians at the
Sound Factory and other studios. These were hired hands, Los Angeles session players paid handsomely (about
$105 per session, or double union scale) to record exclusively for Motown. Some, including guitarists David T. Walker and Louie Shelton, were given the
freedom to improvise within the context of an established
instrumental, while others were on hand for their ability to efficiently read sheet music and play the notes flawlessly. They were not, however, the Funk Brothers, and they knew it.
“The Funk Brothers were all jazz musicians who played at night and came to the studio in the daytime. The piano parts were so outrageous and so loose. Genius,” says Don Peake, one of the LA session guitarists who would play on numerous Jackson 5 recordings as well as other Motown hits. “On the West Coast, we were a little straighter.”
Hype had been building for the Jackson 5 throughout 1969 as the group steadily played gigs. They performed at the Daisy, a posh club in Beverly Hills, with the help of Motown’s publicity machine. Diana Ross introduced the band she’d “discovered.”
“All we needed was a hit,” Tom Noonan, the late Motown executive, would say. By August 1969, Gordy sent for Joe and the Jackson boys, including keyboardist Ronnie Rancifer and drummer
Johnny Jackson, to join him in LA.
Richards, Mizell, and Perren were thinking
Gladys Knight when they assembled their musicians to cut “I Wanna Be Free.” The song begins with a piano glissando by moonlighting Jazz Crusader Joe Sample, and every instrument carries its own sing-along hook, from fellow Crusader Wilton Felder’s loping, simplistic bass lines to the siren quality of the guitar to the string section (recorded at a different studio) to the omnipresent hand claps.
Satisfied, Richards, Mizell, and Perren booked a flight at the airport, “I Wanna Be Free” tapes in hand, so they could meet Knight in the studio to lay down the vocals. Gordy paged them before they could board. “Don’t get on the plane,” the boss told Richards. “Come straight to my house.” Surprised, they obeyed.
Gordy asked them to rewrite the song to be more teen-pop Frankie Lymon and less Ray Charles, and give it to the Jackson 5.
“Direct it towards kids, so they can identify with it,” he told his new writers. Thus did “I Wanna Be Free” morph into “I Want You Back.”
Michael could sing the hell out of a blues song, but as critic Nelson
George has observed, Motown’s immaculate decision was to
make the Jackson 5 sound like themselves. Like kids. The LA musicians’ more controlled approach fit the Jacksons, who had experience from
Joe’s relentless home rehearsals and the chitlin circuit, but they needed rules.
“The writers were different on the West Coast. The energy was a little different,” recalls arranger Paul Riser. “The Jackson 5 were kind of a mechanical group—very, very regimented. The songs are very lockstep. It wasn’t as soulful as we did it in Detroit.”
Deke
Richards recognized the Jackson 5’s vocal versatility immediately, and played to each singer’s strengths—with Michael being the central, unifying voice. On “I Want You Back,” he establishes himself as a superstar the moment he comes in with “Oh-oh-oh-oh, lemme tell ya now.” Jermaine’s yearning style is a great foil, especially in the dueling “baby!” bursts at the end. Jermaine was useful to Richards. They sang in the same register, allowing Jermaine to pick up Richards’s vocal parts and communicate them easily to the rest of the group. The
Jacksons worked long hours on vocals. Due to time and labor, the session for “I Want You Back” cost $10,000, which was $7,000 more than Motown had ever spent on any single. They often were in the studio ten to twelve hours a day, five to seven days a week. “I had to stop it,” Richards recalls. “They brought in the labor force and it seemed like it was Nurse Ratched that came in with her crochet needles and sat there in the corner and the kids came in and sang for a certain point and they got their ten-minute breaks and they had to leave at a certain time for their schooling.” Actually, it was Rose Fine, a tutor and welfare worker, who formed a lifelong bond with Michael. He would later praise Fine as
“more than a tutor” and credit her for providing soothing and tenderness when his father, Joe, was incapable of doing so. The sessions became so strict that Richards, who had a habit of listening to playbacks with his eyes closed, once looked up at 3:02
P.M.
and found the room was empty.