Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
A source will later claim that Michael once, in a moment of anger, broke into a deep, gruff voice she’d never heard before. Liza Minnelli also claims to have heard this other voice.
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,
Living with Michael Jackson
, 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
, Michael remembers a moment from years before 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 intrafamilial one, which he has long dominated. That was checkers; he wants 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 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. You hear not slickness but sophisticated instincts.
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 sake now but for hers. 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 the year had bigger records. He wants to make something, he says, that “refuse[s] 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. Being Michael Jackson working on the follow-up to
Off the Wall
means sometimes your demos are recorded at your home by the greatest audio 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. And what sounds like:
[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 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 jazz 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 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. Its tempo is like the pulse of a sleeping person.
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 that business, his brothers, Motown, the Jackson 5, the past: that’s all a cocoon he’s been writhing inside of, 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. That 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.