MJ (17 page)

The next single, “Beat It,” contained the Van Halen guitar solo engineered to break rock radio’s racial barriers. Programmers were at first resistant. In Detroit, WRIF had a playlist based on Zeppelin and Hendrix. Fred Jacobs, the station’s program director, did not always
share his audience’s opinions, and one night, DJing at three
A.M.
in the days before
Thriller
, he had thrown on a new song by Prince. The phones exploded.
“What are you doing?” came the irate calls. “Are you out of your mind? Why are you playing
that shit
?” Lee Abrams, a rock-radio specialist who consulted for 125 stations, adds:
“Historically, the Michael Jackson sound was not us, just like the O’Jays wasn’t us.” But some of Abrams’s stations, including Detroit’s WLLZ, played “Beat It” anyway. “What’s that song?” listeners asked when they called stations en masse. “Can you play it again?”

CBS had commissioned Steve Barron for a $50,000 video for
“Billie Jean,” and the British director saw firsthand what the public was about to learn about Michael Jackson. In the video, holding his black leather sports coat over his shoulder, Sinatra-style, MJ spins, makes sharp, knee-bending movements, then lands on his toes and holds the pose for a solid two seconds. Barron held a camera on his shoulder, moving backward and forward as the music played, straining to catch everything. “He burst into this incredible movement. The heat and the energy coming off me as I was tracking him made the whole thing just steam up,” Barron recalls. But MTV did not play Barron’s video for “Billie Jean” at first, and the reason is convoluted. In its early days, following the example of Top 40 and rock stations in the
post-disco era, the network had a reputation for refusing to play artists from Rick James to James Brown. Frustrated with the lack of broadcast time for his funky classic “Super Freak,” James said the channel was
“taking black people back four hundred years.” Miles Davis approached J. J. Jackson, the channel’s only African-American VJ, at a party and grilled him; David Bowie did the same to VJ Mark Goodman after an on-air
interview.

“Billie Jean” was No. 1 and had been out for two months by the time it landed on MTV in April 1983. It was impossible to ignore. Yet CBS Records executives swear the channel refused to play it until Walter Yetnikoff, the label’s fiery president, delivered an ultimatum.
“He called up top MTV executive Bob Pittman and in so many words basically said, ‘You know all those Bruce Springsteen and Cheap Trick and Charlie Daniels videos that you guys are playing over there? Pack ’em all up, put ’em in a box, and send ’em back. We are no longer in business together,’ ” recalls Ron McCarrell, an executive at Epic Records. Responds Les Garland, a top MTV executive at the time:
“People ask me if Sony threatened to pull their videos off MTV. It never happened. Folklore, man, folklore. The whole Michael Jackson story about MTV and the racism and all that is such a bunch of bullshit.”

Who’s right? It’s impossible to say for sure.
“If key CBS executives are lying, it’s to exaggerate their power and importance,” write Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks in
I Want My MTV
. “If MTV executives are lying, it’s to disguise the fact that they had to be forced to play a singer who more or less saved their network.”

Either way, MJ integrated radio and MTV. In the three and a half years after white rock fans stamped out disco, and before
Thriller
, black stars such as Lionel Richie had to make middle-of-the-road pop music and behave in a certain inoffensive way in public in order to cross over to broader stardom. Barack Obama would run into this same issue twenty-five years later during a similar kind of time in politics and navigate it with as much grace as Michael Jackson did during the
Thriller
days.
“He broke the boundaries,” the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am says of MJ. “There wouldn’t be an Obama if it wasn’t for the Jackson 5. There wouldn’t be an Obama if there wasn’t a Motown.”

For “Beat It,” the follow-up to “Billie Jean,” Michael’s heart was already set on a
West Side Story
dance concept involving gangs. By this time, MTV’s power had kicked in, and director Bob Giraldi’s budget was quadruple that of “Billie Jean.” It was Jackson’s idea to use real gang members. Ron Weisner, his manager, helped with the logistics. He went to downtown LA with a couple of Jackson’s security guys and
some police officers and met with Crips and Bloods.
“Look, here’s what we’re looking to do,” Weisner told them. “If you’d like to participate, we’d love to have you. But we can’t afford any problems.”

“We’re in,” they said.

The actors and crew had been rehearsing in a downtown LA warehouse when two busloads of Crips and Bloods pulled up and walked in, girlfriends on their arms, eyeing the dancers in tights. They put on menacing faces and scared the crap out of just about everyone. They temporarily calmed down upon discovering the free cigarettes available on the set, then nearly pushed Giraldi into walking off the set,
“smacking each other around.” When Michael Jackson finally strode in, the tough-guy gangbangers turned into sniveling fanboys.
“These people switched to the nicest people ever,” Popin Pete, one of the dancers, recalls. “He did something probably their parents couldn’t even do, which is to make them smile.”

One might think an openly gay choreographer of Broadway shows would not have the ideal skill set for soothing Crips and Bloods, but
Michael Peters was the right dancer for the job. He had grown up living in a housing project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, son of a white mother and a black father. Although his parents strived to live in integrated neighborhoods, Peters had been beaten up by classmates of both races. Just as piano became a solace for Quincy Jones, dance represented a more accepting world for Peters. He joined the prestigious Alvin Ailey dance company, did choreography for Donna Summer and Debbie Reynolds, and worked on the Tony-winning
Dreamgirls
. He represented an amalgamation of Fred Astaire and the Electric Boogaloos, old and new, white and black—just what Michael was looking for.

Until “Beat It,” Peters had essentially turned clumsy music stars such as Pat Benatar and Lionel Richie into competent video dancers. Michael Jackson was different. The star showed his broad physical ideas to the choreographer, who solidified them into routines and explained
them to other dancers.
“I worked with him totally on a rhythmic basis. He’s not a trained dancer, so he has none of the vocabulary,” Peters said. “He’d say to me, ‘I want a cool step here,’ or ‘I want a step that’s hot and angry.’ He’d describe it in emotional terms or even in terms of color.” Peters was heavily influenced by
West Side Story
, which made him ideal for the back-and-forth “Beat It” gang fantasy and to solve this new, real-life problem between the Crips and Bloods on the video set.

Peters, dressed in white and wearing sunglasses, and Vince Paterson, a dancer who portrayed the other gang leader in the video, attacked each other with rubber knives. They had been lovers at the time, so the impromptu performance contained real emotional chemistry. They didn’t know Giraldi had pulled off a sneaky, dangerous trick. For the second take, he called his assistant director and told him to secretly substitute a
real
switchblade for the rubber knife.
“That’s illegal,” the AD warned, but Giraldi felt the real blades had the effect of frightening Michael Jackson and Michael Peters and impressing the Crips and Bloods. (Popin Pete remembers the scene differently:
“Most of the gangbangers [said], ‘Using a switchblade, that’s like so 1950s.’ For them it was funny. ‘Where’s the gun? Who’s going to bring a switchblade to a fight?’ ”)

“Weird Al” Yankovic would memorably mock the poofy hair and ridiculous eighties fashion statements in “Beat It.” The tough guy in Al’s “Eat It” diner opens the video with a spit take; the guy emerging from his manhole is so fat he can’t squeeze onto the street; his dance in the shadowy hallway includes an exaggerated bite of a sandwich.
“Back when MTV was in its music-video heyday, the popular clips were played so often that they were seared into everyone’s brains,” Yankovic says today. “So I knew I would only have to tweak the slightest detail and people would get the joke immediately.”

“Beat It” transcends its parody. By then, Michael Jackson was putting everything together—Astaire’s grace, the spins and twirls he’d learned from Brown and Wilson, the sophisticated tap dancing he’d inherited from variety-show guest stars such as the Nicholas Brothers, the high leg
kicks and Robot moves from
Soul Train
, the miming from Marcel
Marceau, Shields and Yarnell, and Charlie Chaplin, and the popping-and-locking energy from underheralded TV dancers of the time such as Pop N Taco and Boogaloo Sam. For “Beat It,” Peters added the Worm. Vince Paterson described it this way:
“As you back up, the body makes a wormlike movement, like a wave,” Paterson says. “You just send this energy wave from your pelvis to the tip of your head.” MJ would use the move for years.

*  *  *

In 1983, Suzanne
de Passe, still Berry Gordy’s loyal number two, had an idea to revitalize the famous but fading Motown Records. She pitched Gordy a twenty-fifth-anniversary reunion show. Profits would go to charity. Gordy liked the idea and thought he could talk most of his former stars into it. He was wrong, at least at first. Diana
Ross was living a new kind of life—without Gordy. She spent her days hobnobbing with fashion designers like Halston and Calvin Klein, dining at the Four Seasons, hanging out at Studio 54, and vacationing at her new manor in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her first RCA album,
Why Do Fools Fall in Love
, hit the top ten, and the follow-up,
Silk Electric
, had gone gold, thanks in part to Michael Jackson’s heavy-breathing, finger-snapping contribution on the song “Muscles” (which Michael produced, wrote, and named after his boa constrictor). When de Passe called about
Motown 25
, Ross declined. But de Passe knew Ross. She went to the press, predicting Ross would show up as a “special guest star.” Ross fans became excited, and the singer realized she couldn’t back out without looking bad. So she accepted the invitation.

Stevie Wonder said okay, if he could make it back in time from a tour of Africa. Marvin Gaye was in, if Gordy asked him personally. Ross’s
Lady Sings the Blues
costar Richard Pryor, still the world’s hottest comedian despite his growing drug problems, agreed to emcee. And Michael Jackson . . . he agreed, too, but how he came to do so depends on who tells the story. According to Berry, Jackson felt overexposed on
television and was inclined to sit in the audience and silently show his support. So a cowed Gordy begged him.

Motown’s Suzee Ikeda, who worked as a liaison between the Jackson 5 and their record label in the old days, tells it differently. It was ten days before the taping when Jermaine Jackson, still a Motown recording artist, began to call her repeatedly.

“Nobody’s asked my brothers to do the show!” Jermaine complained.

“You’re kidding,” Ikeda said.

“Suzanne hasn’t asked them,” he responded.

Ikeda called Gordy and asked permission to go over de Passe’s head, to call Michael directly for a commitment. He agreed. When Ikeda and Jackson talked, old Motown friends catching up, she was careful to bring up other subjects before
Motown 25
. Finally, she said: “Everybody’s coming back to do this show. You’ve got to do this show,” she said. “If the Jackson 5, one of the biggest acts in the company, don’t come back to do it, it’s not going to be the same.”

“Okay,” Michael said.
^II

In both Jermaine’s recollection and in MJ’s autobiography
Moonwalk
, Michael asked for a solo performance on the spot. Ikeda says it was Gordy who suggested Michael do the song, only privately to Ikeda, without even discussing it with Michael. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ikeda told Gordy. Later, serendipitously, Michael called Ikeda and said, “Berry’s going to get mad, but I want to do something—‘Billie Jean.’ ” Delighted, Ikeda strongly advised Michael not to let the regular live
Motown 25
band perform the music—“because they’ll never get the groove.” Michael and Ikeda thus agreed he would lip-synch his performance to the original track. Ikeda communicated the news to Gordy, who was thrilled.

The dancing itself required no negotiation. Michael would handle everything about that himself.
“Nobody else worked with him on it,”
Ikeda says. “He told the director, he told everybody, how he wanted that stage, what type of lighting he wanted. He told them where to put the spotlight. ‘When I put my finger like this . . .’ He directed them.”

Michael often claimed he invented the routine to “Billie Jean” spontaneously, because he had spent so much time rehearsing with his brothers for the show’s Motown medley that he neglected everything else. What he did not say was how long he had been thinking about this performance.

The dance Michael chose, the backslide, was hardly new.
Bill Bailey, an African-American tap-dancing star, pulled it off as early as the 1950s. Rocker David Bowie does a bit of the move in an early video for “Aladdin Sane.” Mimes used it all the time—Marcel Marceau’s famous routine “Walking in the Wind” was essentially the backslide by another name, and Robert Shields of Shields and Yarnell learned it from Marceau
^III
himself. James Brown and Bill “Mr. Bojangles” Robinson, both influences on Michael, were among the greats who’d pulled it off. Many dancers would take credit for bestowing the backslide upon Michael Jackson—
Damita Jo Freeman of
Soul Train
makes a credible claim, recalling that her lesson came backstage in Vegas in the late seventies. But it was two young dancers, Casper Candidate and Cooley Jaxson, who taught it to him directly.

In 1979, Casper and Cooley had appeared on
Soul Train
. They performed a dance called the Boogaloo, named after a street-dancing group, the Electric Boogaloos. For four minutes, dressed in black, they ignored the laws of gravity and physics, pulling off hip thrusts and acrobatic leaps set to MJ’s “Workin’ Day and Night.”