MJ (6 page)

Joe stayed away, for the most part. Richards kept a sign near the
studio phone that said
CALL PAPA JOE
, and whenever the boys became too wiggly, he merely pointed to it.
He never called. Thanks to Jackie’s stern hand as the older brother, the boys’ mischief rarely went out of control, even when Marlon and Michael couldn’t seem to stop poking and hitting each other, Three Stooges style. “When you’ve got one [song] you have to do over and over again, the monotony brings out the little one-liners and the joking around and silly stuff,” Richards says. “They have no idea how close you are to capturing the last part of it. You’ve found the one spot that you need so badly, and they’ve picked [that] particular time to go [into] their Disneyland joke arena. It’s like, ‘Jesus! No, not now!’ But you have to be careful. You couldn’t talk to them too rough, because then you’re going to turn around and the kids are going to rebel—and they get enough of telling them what to do from their dad.”

Motown in Los Angeles, from the company’s offices near Sunset and Vine in Hollywood to its various studios, including one across the street from a huge park on Romaine Street, became a sanctuary for Michael Jackson. He could, for the most part, escape his father. And inside Motown, the Jackson 5 didn’t have to flee from screaming fans or worry about image.
“They just felt comfortable away from the public,” recalls Russ Terrana, Motown’s chief recording engineer. “They could be kids again.” But Motown was not a true sanctuary—even top artists complained of exploitation. The Jackson 5 received a minuscule two cents for every album they sold. That was not far from the same low rate that established Motown stars such as Marvin Gaye and the Supremes received—6 percent of 90 percent of the wholesale cost of an album for every sale, only it was divided five ways among the Jackson brothers.
“Just about everyone got ripped off at Motown,” said Clarence Paul, the late songwriter and producer. “Tunes were stolen all the time, and often credit wasn’t properly arranged.” In person Berry Gordy seemed like a benevolent father figure, but as fond as he was of Michael, the singer was just another racehorse in his stable.

*  *  *

Back home in Gary, life was getting worse. Richard Hatcher had become a national phenomenon as the first African-American mayor of a major US city, but his aggressive social programs such as
Operation Crime Alert and Operation Safe Gary were no match for the decline of the steel mills and white flight. In 1968, the city’s crime rate increased by 11 percent. One day, Tito Jackson walked home from school and a kid held him at
gunpoint, demanding lunch money. Another time, two rival gangs approached each other at Twenty-Third Avenue and Jackson Street,
West Side Story
style, rumbling as Katherine frantically locked the doors and windows. Joseph once had to yell,
“Everyone down!” as a gang fight escalated to the point of gunfire. Jermaine, Tito, Janet, and Marlon would defend their father’s violence as necessary discipline to prevent the boys from falling into dangerous lives.
“Joseph did rule with an iron fist, but that wasn’t abnormal in the neighborhood,” Marlon said. “As I got older, I understood why he did certain things.” How this translates into Joe Jackson smacking his son within the confines of a recording studio is unclear.

Joe, Tito, Ronnie, and Johnny arrived in Los Angeles via
Dodge Maxivan, which replaced Joseph’s old Volkswagen van. Michael, Marlon, Jackie, and Jermaine flew out later at Motown’s expense. The brothers shared rooms at the Tropicana, a not-exactly-high-class motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. Joseph would attempt to upgrade their homes during their time in Los Angeles, moving them to the Hollywood Motel (
“which was nothing special either,” Joe said), then a house at
1601 Queens Road. At first the older boys, Jackie and Tito, attended
Fairfax High School, while Michael went to
Gardner Street Elementary School. Girls started to come around, such as Susan and Sherry, fifteen-year-old twin sisters who met the boys a week before “I Want You Back” came out in October 1969.

“We’re from Gary, Indiana. We’re part of the Jackson 5,” they told the girls.

“Jackson who?” they said.

“And then: boom,” Susan recalls.

The boys sent for the rest of the family. They went to the beach. Michael became obsessed with the Hippodrome carousel on Santa Monica Pier. They drove around looking for a vantage point to see the
Hollywood sign. They drove to San Francisco and back. Michael developed a love for Disneyland. Between cannonballs into the Tropicana’s outdoor pool, they were regular visitors at Gordy’s wooden, ranch-style home in the Hollywood Hills. Sometimes they lived with him. They spent hours in Diana Ross’s nearby home—“all white and bright, with sumptuous cushions, billowing curtains and shag-pile carpets that we would do our best to ruin,” Jermaine said. Although many accounts, including several from Michael himself, insisted he lived with Ross for lengthy periods during this time, Jermaine declared such claims to be Motown hype: “That’s not to say we didn’t spend good times there. Diana taught me to swim, coaching me in her pool, holding me afloat as I held on to the sides and kicked my legs while Michael and Marlon played ball in the deep end.”

Motown’s plan to turn the Jacksons into kids singing like kids for kids worked. Although
“I Want You Back” hit the pop charts at just No. 90 during the week it came out, within ten weeks, in January 1970, it built to No. 1. That was enough to inspire a full-fledged Motown marketing campaign. Tours were planned. Costumes were designed. The short hair Michael and his brothers displayed in that grainy audition video turned into Afros so huge that you had to wonder how Jackie managed to get through doorways. As for the Jackson 5’s biggest star, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. explained:
“People responded viscerally to Michael Jackson’s beauty.” Their first national appearance was on
The Hollywood Palace
, a variety show that ABC hastily added to its schedule after a show featuring Jerry Lewis had tanked.
“Every host
was a giant star—Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Milton Berle, Sinatra,” recalls William O. Harbach, one of the
Hollywood Palace
producers. “The Jacksons were darling, and they were cute looking, and Michael was nine or ten.”

As Jacksonmania began to spark on television, the songwriting group Gordy called the Corporation was thinking about the follow-up to “I Want You Back.” The song that kept sticking in Deke Richards’s head was “1-2-3,” an up-tempo, nursery-rhyming soul hit by Philadelphia singer Len Barry. Richards had the LA studio musicians cut the music, and his working title was “ABC.” Gordy didn’t like it. He wanted to change the title and lyric to “1-2-3.” They argued about letters and numbers for days. Finally, Richards cut another version according to Gordy’s specifications and gave Gordy the impression that he’d erased the old one completely. Gordy heard it and realized immediately he’d made a terrible mistake. Richards let Gordy sweat, then told him he’d actually saved a copy of the original. The Motown boss laughed. Richards didn’t feel too bad borrowing from Len Barry. Really, the original
“1-2-3” had been an obvious Motown rip-off in the first place.

Richards and the Corporation were desperate for hits and scavenged inspiration from everywhere. Richards knew he wanted to do a Sly Stone–style “bum-ba-bum-bum” breakdown during “ABC,” and he planned to have Michael shout something lively at that point. He had no idea what that would be. Finally, the group was laying down vocals in the studio. It was crunch time. Richards flashed back to his days of playing LA clubs as a rock-and-soul singer and guitarist, to funny costumes and slathered hairspray. On the last day of a gig, he’d vowed to jump off the four-foot stage in dramatic fashion. It was hot, he was sweating, the hairspray was dripping into his eyes, and he couldn’t see. But he jumped anyway . . . and landed in an aisle, bowling over a young woman on her way to the restroom. “I wiped my eyes real clear so I could see her, and I sang especially to her,” Richards recalls. “I said, ‘Sit down, girl! I think I love you! No—get up girl! Show me what you can
do!’ And we did a little dancing.” It was gobbledygook in most contexts, but somehow it made perfectly charming sense when Michael Jackson made the same declaration on “ABC.”

Motown’s musicians and producers would record
469 Jackson 5 tracks, although the boys sang on only some of them. They did a version of Lulu’s hit “To Sir with Love” and the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony,” and Michael sang a solo cover of a later Supremes track called “Love It Came to Me This Time.” The vaults filled up with live tracks (like a version of Sly Stone’s “Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin]”) and elaborate instrumentals. At first, Motown was stingy about releasing them—by 1974, only 174, or 37 percent, had appeared in record stores—but many have dribbled out over the years, most recently on 2012’s thirty-two-song
Come and Get It: The Rare Pearls
. The group’s first album,
Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5
, released in late 1969, packaged “I Want You Back” with some of the blues and R&B material Bobby Taylor had cut early on.

The
ABC
album, five months later, took the same approach, packing filler around the smash title track as well as the band’s third hit, “The Love You Save.” Jermaine and Michael trade verses in their complementary timbres as wah-wah guitar, strings, and bass lines operate beautifully at rhythmic cross-purposes. Plus, as with “ABC,” there’s an alphabet lesson: “
S
is for ‘Save it!’
T
is for ‘Take it slow!’
O
is for ‘Oh, no!’
P
is for ‘Please, don’t go!’ ”

The Jacksons didn’t get it at first (although, obviously, they would come around):
“God, Deke, that’s some real jive stuff,” they told Richards.

Gordy’s opinion mattered more. “Who came up with this stuff?” he said. “It’s genius.”

The Jacksons were beginning to find a home on television—they’d performed a pivotal December 14, 1969, performance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, which had transformed the Beatles and Elvis Presley from singers into legends. Suzanne de Passe was responsible for the absurdly clashing, psychedelic, form-fitting costumes the boys draped over their
skinny frames throughout the band’s Motown career. She started relatively conservatively. On a 1970
American Bandstand
appearance, most of the band wore brightly colored dress shirts with subtle floral patterns and huge collars and dark vests, while Jackie stood out at the center with a flowing, powder-blue, fringed cape. As the seventies wore on, de Passe supplemented the Jacksons’ growing Afros with over-the-top pop art. During a Los Angeles Forum performance in 1972, Marlon’s bell-bottoms were three quarters green, one quarter orange, all Day-Glo, with purple stripes at the knees, while Michael covered his bright-orange dress shirt with a black-and-white daisy-print vest. Their look was a hybrid of Parliament-Funkadelic, Black Power, and Andy Warhol, engineered somehow to appear both cuddly and timeless.

Then there was the matter of reproducing the music onstage. No Jackson ever played a note on any Motown recording—with one exception. Jackie happened by the studio during the recording of the band’s fourth single, “I’ll Be There,” and picked up a tambourine. Ironically, the Jacksons had to learn to play their own music in order to take it on the road.

De Passe and Motown’s agents secured big-time tour dates, beginning with the Philadelphia Convention Center on May 2, 1970. To the boys’ surprise, every arena they played sold out, sometimes setting attendance records—18,675 at the Forum, 18,000 at the
Hollywood Bowl, 13,500 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Basketball star
Elgin Baylor’s production company sponsored several shows, reporting gross profits of as much as $105,000 per event. After all the No. 1 singles, offers jumped from $2,000 per show to $20,000—and even
$25,000, for one night at the Forum.

Motown royalty money eventually kicked in. In
March 1971, Joseph and Katherine bought a
$250,000 home in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. They picked 4641 Hayvenhurst for its size—eight thousand square feet—and unusual details like a pattern of two dolphins etched into the bottom of the swimming pool. The one-story ranch
house was nothing special, although its previous owner,
Earle Hagen, the Emmy Award–winning composer of the whistling
Andy Griffith Show
theme and other TV hits, had left behind a built-in recording studio. The house was at the center of two woodsy acres, including gardens full of lemon and orange trees, a flagstone patio overlooking the garden, and a basketball court. The Jacksons slept two to a room. Tito and Jermaine handled the vacuuming and laundry; Michael, Randy, and Janet washed windows; Jackie and La Toya mopped floors and raked leaves. The family, especially Michael, accumulated a menagerie of exotic
pets—birds were everywhere, from peacocks on the lawn to a yellow-and-green parrot in the study, as well as tigers, lions, ostriches, and two intimidating German shepherds called Lobo and Heavy (in addition to Johnny Jackson’s Doberman, whom the drummer mischievously named Hitler). As Johnny and Ronnie Rancifer grew older, they drifted away from the Jackson household, enjoying life on LA college campuses as well as the Sunset Strip, an emerging hangout for rockers.

It was a comfortable life, except for the snake.
“I came home one night from partying in Hollywood and a freaking boa constrictor was in the bed,” Rancifer says. “I didn’t like that. The only boa constrictor in the bed is supposed to be attached to me.” Regular Motown drummer Gene Pello visited the house to give Johnny Jackson lessons on how to play a shuffle beat for Jackson 5 shows, and noticed his music stand moving around in a strange way. Michael walked in and asked,
“Anybody see my boa constrictor?” Pello soon noticed the snake on his stand, slithering into and out of a hole. “I got to go home,” he meekly told the family. The lessons resumed, though, when Michael retrieved his snake.

The boys wound up at the
Walton School in Panorama City, where the “liberal attitude better suited our touring requirements and we were treated as equal with everyone else,” according to Jermaine. The Walton School, built for Hollywood stars’ children, was liberal, all right. Teachers didn’t mind when, after family driver “Uncle Jack” Richardson
dropped off the Jackson boys in the morning, Tito and Jermaine took off in a young female teacher’s powder-blue
Chevy Malibu for Hollywood to hang out at the wax museum and the drugstore instead of attending classes. “It was like we had a groupie for a teacher,” recalls Mike Merkow, who befriended classmates Tito and Jermaine at Walton. “We loved it—are you kidding? There was no such thing as homework.” Once, playing hooky as usual, the boys spent the day exploring Hollywood and managed to lose Michael. After looking everywhere, they finally worked up enough courage to call Joseph, who blew up and alerted all the Jackson friends’ parents. Michael was quickly located at Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard, eating candy and reading comic books, but the damage had been done. Everybody was grounded.