Authors: Steve Knopper
The Jackson 5 were coming off three straight No. 1 hits—“I Want You Back,” “ABC,” and “The Love You Save”—and Berry wanted a fourth. Originally, the Corporation had agreed, with Gordy’s blessing, to divide its lucrative songwriting
royalties in such a way that Deke Richards received 50 percent, Mizell and Perren took 20 percent each, and Gordy grabbed 10 for his (minimal) input. “After ‘I Want You Back,’ he got so excited, and got more involved than he thought he would be,” Richards says, adding that Gordy rejiggered the percentages so they were more favorable to himself. The Corporation kept pushing for a
Jackson 5 hit, something upbeat that
“bounced and kicked,” as Richards says, but Hal Davis was scavenging for hits, too. He found one that had been lying on his desk for months, a ballad by bassist and arranger Bob West. Excited, and not worried that it was late at night, Davis called an experienced songwriter he knew, Willie Hutch, and showed up at his house at 3:45
A.M.
Hutch finished the song in ninety minutes. Davis was at Gordy’s house by eight. The song, a ballad about peace and love (this was the seventies), was built around the killer line “you and I must make a pact / we will bring salvation back.” Gordy loved it, especially the way the word
salvation
fit the song. He instructed Hutch to convert it to a boy-girl love song. The Sound Factory musicians cut the track. The Jacksons launched hit number four: “I’ll Be There.”
Richards’s grand plan for the Jackson 5 at Motown had involved spinning each member of the group into a solo star, with hits created by the Corporation. First would come Michael, then Jermaine, then Jackie, then a Duane Eddy–style instrumental rockabilly album by Tito, then something from Marlon.
“I thought [Marlon] was a little bit ‘under,’ ” Richards says. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with him, but I thought, ‘Jeez, if I could get these other two boys going, there would be enough fans clamoring for Marlon.’ ” But by the time Jackson solo albums started to come out, beginning with Michael’s
Got to Be There
and
Ben
, both in 1972, the Corporation was falling apart. Their most recent Jackson 5 hits, including “Mama’s Pearl” and “Sugar Daddy,” had failed to hit No. 1, thanks in part to competition from a rival boy band, the Osmonds. The subsequent Jermaine and Jackie solo albums didn’t sell well.
Davis, who had been more recently successful than the Corporation with Jackson 5 hits, including the No. 2 “Never Can Say Goodbye,” picked Jerry Marcellino and Mel Larson as the group’s new songwriters. Marcellino had found a hit novelty tune from the fifties, “Rockin’ Robin,” and given it to Michael for his first solo album. At first, Gordy, whose Jobete Music didn’t own publishing rights, buried the song on the B-side. Radio DJs didn’t go along with his plan.
“Berry Gordy was
actually kind of pissed off because the DJs wanted to play that. They forced out a big hit,” Larson recalls. “But he worked with [the other publishing company] and finally got them to agree with some royalty to split.”
The Jackson brothers—not counting Michael—began to focus on more personal endeavors. Eldest sister Rebbie had wed in 1968, but Tito was the first of the Jackson band to get married, in 1972, to his girlfriend Dee Dee. (He told reporters she “treats me nice and shows me the same respect I gave her.”) A year later, Jermaine married Hazel Gordy, Berry’s daughter, in a ceremony that
Soul
estimated to have cost
$80,000 to $200,000—the bride wore a white satin dress with a twelve-foot mink-lined train and 7,500 pearls hand-sewn into the fabric; the seven thousand flowers included camellias, white carnations, and chrysanthemums; the menu was papaya with San Francisco bay shrimp topped with Lorenzo dressing; and the happy couple released 175 white doves. Joe Jackson was never a big supporter of his kids’ marriages. He felt Tito’s betrothed status would deter female fans. And Jermaine’s marriage was part of some kind of testosterone-competition triangle between Joe and Berry. Plus, Joe was distancing himself emotionally from his family, cheating on Katherine to the point that one of his girlfriends had a child. Katherine filed for divorce in March 1973. For this, some of her children, including Michael, would forever turn against Joseph. Katherine was more malleable, however, and rescinded the divorce two months later.
The Jacksons, especially Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael, grew up in public. They became skinnier, more lithe, and Michael and Jermaine’s voices were lighter and more precious as they changed. (It’s possible to identify the point on record when Michael Jackson makes the transition from bright-sounding child prodigy, effortlessly belting out high vocals, to the more nuanced balladeer’s voice he would use on “She’s Out of My Life” and “Human Nature.” It occurred on the band’s 1973 album
Skywriter
, via hippie-dippie singles such as “Hallelujah Day” and “Corner of the Sky.”) Michael was famous among friends and family for
rarely eating, other than the most healthy vegan dishes, and he was distressed when acne broke out on his face when he was fifteen or sixteen. Blotchy photos of him began to appear in teen-beat magazine features.
When Jermaine and Michael brought their urgent acne worries to Motown’s Nancy Leiviska, she set them up with an LA dermatologist.
“They had really greasy skin, especially Jermaine,” recalls Leiviska, head of the company’s video operations at the time. “They both had to go to major sessions.”
The Jacksons were no longer the cuddly little kids who had been on
Ed Sullivan
.
Skywriter
and its follow-up,
Get It Together
, were full of flat performances and uninspired writing and production—a
“mishmash of material,” Deke Richards said. It lacked the snap of “I Want You Back” or even “Rockin’ Robin.”
“It was a searching period,” songwriter Jerry Marcellino says, “when you have a lot of different producers coming up with tracks and trying to come up with a newer direction as they got older.”
What rescued the Jackson 5’s career was an invisible man with stiff arms, uncontrollable legs, and a following of thousands of young dancers in urban nightclubs.
* * *
Drummer James Gadson showed up at the studio, sat behind the drums, and waited for the “Dancing Machine” intro to begin. Then, almost uncontrollably, as if he had some kind of rhythmic spasm, he spewed out an impromptu, off-beat
ba-bump-ba-bump.
Everybody stopped.
Oh, no, I’m fired
, Gadson thought.
Producer Hal Davis and arranger Arthur Wright conferred for five minutes, then turned back to him. “We want to know something,” they finally said, as Gadson sweated behind his drums. “Can you do that again?”
“Dancing Machine” would not only kick off Gadson’s accomplished career as a session musician, it would rejuvenate the Jackson 5 and give Michael Jackson his first “what-the-hell-was-that?” signature
dance move—the Robot. (Davis and Wright had pointedly engineered “Dancing Machine” so listeners could dance to it, employing a variety of moves, particularly the Robot, in clubs. The “automatic, systematic” lyric was a clue.)
Get It Together
’s title track and first single stalled out at No. 28 on the pop charts in August 1973, but dancers and radio DJs picked up on “Dancing Machine,” which Motown then rushed out as a single. The label built an entire new album around it,
Dancing Machine
, a year later. The single hit No. 2 and became one of the Jackson 5’s most enduring songs.
Technically speaking, “Dancing Machine” was not a disco hit, as critic Vince Aletti would define the genre in
Rolling Stone
:
“The music nurtured in the new discotheques is Afro-Latin in sound or instrumentation, heavy on the drums, with minimal lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language, and a repetitive, chant-like chorus.” Gadson adds:
“What was disco? One hundred twenty beats per minute. That was a little faster than ‘Dancing Machine.’ ” But the hit inspired countless disco singles, and the Jacksons would influence disco culture throughout the seventies—the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” is not so far removed from “Dancing Machine”—while letting it wash over them. Disco would eventually be blamed for destroying the music business, turning the world into polyester, threatening rock ’n’ roll, and killing off the sixties. Eventually, MJ would be called upon to help destroy disco—then pick up its pieces for his own purposes—but for now he was content to wear the tightest, brightest, loudest, sparkliest, most open-collared jumpsuits in the entire history of TV. How he was embarrassed by the size of his nose and the blotchiness of his acne but not these incomprehensible, disco-era fashion monstrosities remains one of the greatest mysteries of Michael Jackson’s mysterious life.
* * *
Joe Jackson soured on Motown after Gordy allowed the Jermaine and Jackie solo albums to flop. He began to learn the terms of his family’s Motown contract were more unfavorable than he’d ever realized. In
court documents, Joe’s own lawyers would acknowledge he had only an eleventh-grade education and signed his sons’ July 1968 contracts
“without reading them or having their meaning explained to them.” By industry standards, Motown’s
royalty rates were obviously low, and the company had an ironclad rule against stars writing or producing their own material, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye notwithstanding. Writing and producing was where the real money was, Motown’s executives well knew. Motown even owned the name “Jackson 5,” and wasn’t about to give it up.
“Dancing Machine” temporarily reinvigorated the Jacksons’ career, but many in the record business believed they were done. The kids had, tragically, grown up.
Joe didn’t buy it. He convened his sons. It was time to leave Motown, he said to everybody but Jermaine, who was married to Hazel, daughter of Berry. Jermaine came home one day from fishing with R&B singer Barry White. His father called. “Come over without Hazel,” he said. Jermaine dutifully went to Joe’s room at Hayvenhurst and found new contracts on the bed. Everybody else had signed, including Michael.
“Sign it,” Joe told his son.
“No,” Jermaine said.
Joe’s voice rose. He said something about his blood, not Berry Gordy’s, flowing through Jermaine’s veins. Katherine heard the commotion and demanded to know what was wrong. Jermaine’s brothers were angry, too. For six months, the family was gloomy and tense. “I was open to talk to them,” Jermaine said. “But I have my pride. They didn’t want to talk to me. Why should I keep calling them if they didn’t want to talk to me?”
The new record contract had come from CBS, at the time one of the world’s biggest labels, home of Barbra Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, and distribution deals with important indie soul labels Stax and Philadelphia International. Joe Jackson had been looking for
$1 million. At first, the label’s top executives said no, but a fast-talking, schmoozing, veteran record-promotions man from Long Island, New York, talked them
into it.
I
. There is some dispute about whether Gordy was, in fact, present for the audition. In his account, he was leading it and making speeches; others recall Seltzer overseeing the recording and sending the film to Gordy afterward.
O
n a June evening, Ron Alexenburg left work at the CBS building in midtown Manhattan and walked to his car at the garage next door. Alexenburg was one of those larger-than-life record men, a ten-year veteran of Epic Records. He resembled a mutton-chopped, crazy-haired, wider-faced Wolfman Jack and, like many promo guys, was well-known for his slap-on-the-back handshake. Alexenburg drove past the
Warwick Hotel a few blocks away from the garage and noticed kids swarming everywhere. CBS put up guests at the Warwick all the time. Alexenburg spotted a familiar doorman and pulled over.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“Oh, the Jackson 5 are here,” the man told him.
In addition to being a record man, Alexenburg was an R&B man. Growing up in Chicago, he’d drive to see Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, and the Temptations on the same bill for four dollars, then return home in the morning to get ready for high school. He had even caught the Jackson 5 in their early days on the South Side. At Epic, he had been patiently turning the label around—sales had increased 62 percent in four years—thanks in part to soul-music superstars from Sly and the Family Stone to Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. He remembered
seeing the Jacksons’ name on the Radio City Music Hall marquee earlier that year. He knew the Jackson 5 were no longer the smash band it had been in the days of “I Want You Back” and “The Love You Save.”
Alexenburg stowed his car, walked into the hotel, picked up a house phone, and asked to be connected to Michael Jackson’s room. Miraculously—or maybe just because it was 1975—Michael picked up the phone. “I’m Ron Alexenburg, I’d like to meet you. And just talk, actually.”
The Jacksons were off that night, resting up for a show the next day at the
Nanuet Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York. Michael, Joseph, and the Jacksons’ longtime attorney, Richard Arons, took the elevator to the lobby and shook hands with Alexenburg. The Epic executive knew the group was unhappy with its contract at Motown. Everybody in the industry did. Ron knew Joe was trying to shop his sons to a label deal for more money and more control over their production and songwriting. But he avoided talking business. After Michael left, Joe and his attorney mentioned the smart job Epic had done in working with the R&B stars at Philadelphia International Records.
Ron ventured a key question about Motown: “How long do you have on your agreement?” He didn’t get a direct answer, but he secured an invitation to see the group in New Jersey.
The show Alexenburg caught the next night at the Nanuet was not the kiddie Jackson 5 of the early 1970s. MJ was seventeen. Movie producer Rob Cohen would say of him during this period:
“He was in a state of such innocence and purity, it was almost hard to fathom.”
The group had spent the previous two years expanding its act from teen pop and bubblegum soul to a more grown-up, supper-club style. It’s a transition just about every child pop star has tried to navigate—Stevie Wonder and Justin Timberlake succeeded, David Cassidy and Leif Garrett not so much. In retrospect, it’s easy to recognize Michael Jackson’s talent as so transcendent that he was never at risk of falling into this trap. But at the time, Joe Jackson was worried. He had booked
the Jackson 5 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, beginning in April 1974, and was desperately rebuilding the band into a family variety act.