{"id":30,"date":"2010-11-01T15:13:46","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T15:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/?p=30"},"modified":"2010-11-01T16:51:44","modified_gmt":"2010-11-01T16:51:44","slug":"interviewing-michael-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/?p=30","title":{"rendered":"Interviewing Michael Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s January 1980, and I\u2019m in California to collect interviews for a music documentary series which Capital Radio has commissioned me to write. Makin\u2019 Waves<\/em> \u2013 in the middle of what kind of night did I wake with that title in my head? – will cover the decade that\u2019s just ended: from the break-up of the Beatles to synthpop and 2-Tone, via prog-rock, heavy metal, reggae, punk, disco, and, somewhere among its dozen hour-long episodes, the laid-back West Coast rock whose metropolis is the sun-kissed sprawl of Los Angeles. Having made trips like this before, for Radio 1, I know what to expect: fewer interviews than I\u2019m hoping for and, undoubtedly, not as many big names as Capital is counting on. But the brief I\u2019ve set myself is so broad that I\u2019m ready to interview almost any of the active artists on every record company\u2019s roster.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

My outbound ticket had been London-Los Angeles, but I would be flying home from New York, and had a five-leg Travel America pass to get me from coast to coast, so, in theory, I would be able to visit most of America\u2019s music centres. Neither time nor money was on my side, however, since the series was scheduled to start in March, and the budget benchmark for an hour\u2019s airtime on commercial radio was always the cost of a presenter with a pile of records. I had pleaded my case to earn more than a rookie DJ on the graveyard shift, but I knew the only way I could extend a tight interviewing itinerary would be by a) eating into scripting time, b) working the extra days for nothing, and c) skimping on my expenses. In LA, where I planned to spend the best part of a fortnight, I was lucky. Rather than fork out for a hotel, I was able to stay with friends, my pal Ian McLagan, his wife Kim and her daughter Mandy having moved there in 1978.<\/p>\n

I had a tape recorder, blank tapes, and an address book bristling with out-of-date phone numbers. What I didn\u2019t have was a single appointment. In an era impatient for the arrival of e-mail or even the inefficient fax machine, spewing reams of made-to-fade thermal paper from wrong numbers onto the office carpet whenever you were out, the response to every phone call made before leaving London was, \u201cCall just as soon as you hit town, John.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I\u2019d spent my first days in LA making those calls, reciting names from my wish list, then waiting for the phone to ring. Where I waited \u2013 a house built artfully into a cliff, its supporting piles buried in the sand of Malibu beach – might sound idyllic; indeed it was idyllic, especially when compared to the room at the Ramada Inn on Sunset where I\u2019d twiddled my thumbs on a previous trip, but I was nonetheless housebound. It took an indignant inquiry from Kim whether I didn\u2019t think her capable of taking and passing on messages even to get me dipping a toe in the Pacific surf, still within shouting range, should a record company call.<\/p>\n

During my vigil I practised operating the reel-to-reel Uher recorder. I looped \u00bc\u201d tape, plugged in the microphone, watched the needles respond to my voice, then listened back to make sure the level I\u2019d selected was suitable. I timed myself swapping spools, removing a full one from the right-hand spindle, replacing it with the empty reel from the left, and loading and lacing a new reel. This drill became as slick as a Ferrari pit-stop, but there was a point to it, beyond killing time. Each five-inch reel lasted twenty minutes, and I\u2019d rarely talked to anyone for less. Sod\u2019s law promised that the reel would run out while an ear-catching point, perhaps the interview\u2019s only one, was being made, so the faster I could execute the change-over, the less chance that the golden train of thought would become uncoupled.<\/p>\n

I left Kim in charge of the phone again while I shopped for groceries. Outside the supermarket I spotted Martin Sheen, handsome and beaming, in an open Jeep. From the kitchen window of the house on the beach, I\u2019d already seen a bearded old man shuffling around next door, his age an illusion created by the cancer which would kill forty-nine-year-old Steve McQueen before the year\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Each day the sun came up and began its slow slide across a sky unblemished by clouds. Kim took Mandy to school, then went back to bed to watch the morning soaps on TV. I made more phone calls, waited for more replies. Eventually the sun had teased me enough and ducked quickly behind a garish horizon. Time to admit office hours were over. My Alamo car had clocked up another day\u2019s rent, but no meaningful mileage. Tomorrow it would be even more vital not to leave the phone in case I missed the call that told me Don Henley or David Crosby or Jackson Browne had okayed my interview request and expected me within the hour it would take me to drive in from North Malibu.<\/p>\n

The wait seemed interminable, but it was only the third day when a call came from the Warner Records promotion office in Burbank. Bad news first: neither The Eagles nor Fleetwood Mac were talking \u2013 \u201cnot even to each other!\u201d This leavening humour was lost on me, not least because Hotel California<\/em> and Rumours<\/em> had been the biggest albums of the decade. I held my breath for the good news.<\/p>\n

There had been a provisional \u2013 and unexpected by me – yes from Van Morrison, whose 1973 concert at the Rainbow remained, notwithstanding all that had happened since, one of the musical highpoints of the decade. It would mean a trip to San Francisco, but I\u2019d also put out feelers for Carlos Santana, who lived up there. Interviewing both would make the trip worthwhile, and the 400-mile flight would be cheap enough, I knew, to fund from my per diem, rather than squandering coupons that could get me to Memphis, Nashville or New Orleans. Despite my tight schedule, would I be willing to fly up there? You bet.<\/p>\n

Alice Cooper had also said yes, so had Emmylou Harris, but Prince, whom I\u2019d earmarked for the closing \u2018Into The Eighties\u2019 crystal ball episode on the emphatic evidence of his first single, \u2018I Wanna Be Your Lover\u2019, had turned me down. I didn\u2019t hide my disappointment.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you explain what the interview was for?\u201d I whined. \u201cHe\u2019ll be singled out as someone to watch out for in the 1980s. On the most listened to music radio station in the UK,\u201d I added, lying.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course I did, John.\u201d Like we were old friends, who both knew better than Prince. \u201cIt\u2019s just that he\u2019d rather let his music talk for itself.\u201d Miffed as I was to be knocked back by a newcomer, I grudgingly admired the upstart\u2019s attitude.<\/p>\n

As if to compensate for the lack of Eagles or Fleetwood Mac members, more calls came in, more interviews were confirmed: recording artists, record producers, music industry movers and shakers. The remaining days of my limited stay would be busy. The handwriting in my diary shrank as I crammed in names, times and addresses, more often than not the home of the interviewee, because Mark Chapman was still eleven months away from murdering John Lennon and, besides, the word was that I was from the BBC, a misunderstanding that prompted no disabuse from me.<\/p>\n

So, with three interviews lined up, I set off at 9.30 the next morning with my Uher and microphone, an optimistic dozen reels of tape, more questions than I needed to ask, and a well-thumbed Thomas Guide, the Los Angeles street bible. If three interviews sounds a less than arduous schedule, I\u2019d already calculated, with Thomas\u2019 help, that I would have clock up well over 100 miles by the time I returned to Malibu.<\/p>\n

Poking the button on the car radio as I waited for a gap in the traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, I caught Cliff Richard halfway through \u2018We Don\u2019t Talk Anymore\u2019. I had never expected to hear a Cliff Richard hit on American radio, but \u2018We Don\u2019t Talk Anymore\u2019 was in the Top 10 and, what\u2019s more, sounded as if it belonged there. Although I owned none of his records and my interest in his music had not outlived Oh Boy!<\/em>, the audacious TV show that had ended more than twenty years before, I was genuinely delighted for him, imagining how proud he must feel to finally be a success in the country whose music had provided his original inspiration. (It was only when I was back in London, my Billboard Hot 100 book open on my desk, that I realised that he had had a US Top 10 hit with \u2018Devil Woman\u2019 as recently as 1976.)<\/p>\n

My first interview was in Hollywood. If I hadn\u2019t known already, I would have been in no doubt when I arrived, because Alice Cooper\u2019s eyrie nestled below the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, whose renovation the singer had helped to fund. He greeted me himself \u2013 not a flunkey in sight – and, before leading me from the main building to the pool house, where he thought the interview would work best, showed me part of his autograph collection, each signature on a themed mount: Marilyn Monroe\u2019s cushioned on red satin, supposedly snipped from the dress she wore in The Seven Year Itch<\/em>; Bela Lugosi\u2019s in a frame fashioned like a coffin, an appropriately ghoulish touch, not least because Alice himself looked ready for a role in a horror movie. His wizened appearance at the door had shocked me. A ponytail pulled taut enough to perform a facelift could not uncrimp the folds in his sagging skin, but it was his stooping posture that surprised me most. It could have been Igor leading me through the house.<\/p>\n

But Alice answered my questions animatedly and entertainingly, explaining that it was the Pretty Things that had got him started, rather than the Beatles; that he regarded Kiss\u2019s appropriation of his make-up and theatrics as a compliment; likened his stage shows to, successively, The Exorcist<\/em>, a Salvador Dali painting, and the \u2018Springtime For Hitler\u2019 sequence in The Producers<\/em>; insisted that the sanatorium where he was treated for alcohol abuse had been a writer\u2019s dream; owned up to hating disco \u2013 he was not alone; Chic concerts had recently been disrupted by protesters waving \u2018DISCO SUCKS\u2019 placards – and had no time for politics, an aversion that had not blunted his enthusiasm for the unwitting comedy of the Jeremy Thorpe conspiracy trial, which had him giggling again six months after the disgraced Liberal leader\u2019s unlikely acquittal. Alice\u2019s ambition for the eighties? As ever, to make audiences\u2019 ears bleed.<\/p>\n

Norman Whitfield was late for our appointment at his Whitfield Records offices in the San Fernando Valley, north of the Hollywood Hills, and he kept me waiting longer while he met with the members of Rose Royce in a room separated from the waiting area by walls too thin to mute the boom of his big voice. Gwen Dickey, who had sung lead on \u2018Car Wash\u2019, \u2018Wishing On A Star\u2019 and \u2018Love Don\u2019t Live Here Anymore\u2019, had quit the group to go solo, and I could hear her marooned musicians pleading with Whitfield for a chance to show they could get along just as well without her. Evidently unimpressed by their arguments, he dumped them from his label, while I listened. As they exited past me, shoulders slumped, heading for obscurity, I was careful to avoid their eyes.<\/p>\n

Four years previously, I had been kept waiting for another interview, in the lobby of All-Platinum Records in New York. I was preparing a documentary for Radio 1 on Women In Rock<\/em>, which Marianne Faithful would voice with her leg in plaster from a sketchily explained fall, while her boyfriend shot up in a Broadcasting House basement loo. I wanted to ask Sylvia Robinson, a hit-maker as long ago as 1957 with Mickey & Sylvia\u2019s \u2018Love Is Strange\u2019 and a solo million-seller in 1973 with \u2018Pillow Talk\u2019, what had made her want to run a record company.<\/p>\n

While I waited, I overheard a planning meeting. I couldn\u2019t miss it, these three hip black dudes sitting a few feet from me, getting boisterously excited about a new signing, a sixties R&B diva who was overdue a come-back. From what I picked up, All-Platinum was going to be her ticket back to the big time. Punctuated by laughter and the slap of high and low fives, it was nonetheless a predictable conversation about sourcing material and selecting musicians to play with her, and, as such, occupied only the periphery of my concentration as I scanned and re-scanned my notes, until I became aware that this apparently up-beat discussion masked a plot to scupper the woman\u2019s career before she\u2019d had a chance to revive it.<\/p>\n

I felt myself redden with outrage as I heard what they had in mind. They would come up with names of musicians, bass players, for instance, and when they\u2019d all agreed on one, they\u2019d go through the laughing and hand-slapping routine, then one of them would let slip the truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next it would be guitarists, same thing, they\u2019d pick the \u2018baddest\u2019, and so it went on, until they\u2019d come up with a backing band composed, without exception, of the worst musicians around. I couldn\u2019t believe what I was hearing. Their scheme still had me seething as, a tad distracted, I interviewed Ms Robinson. I would have let her in on it, since it was her money the saboteurs would be spending, but since these people were her representatives, I couldn\u2019t be certain that she wasn\u2019t in on the plot. Music was a tough business, and Ms Robinson had been in too long not to have made enemies. Perhaps she was getting her own back on an old rival. So I suppressed my anger and politely, professionally, conducted my interview.<\/p>\n

Determined not to let the incident go unreported, the next morning I called Nelson George, a Billboard<\/em> journalist I was counting on to provide me with an overview of black music in the 1970s. Now I had a trade to offer him: in exchange for an unpaid interview for my series, I would tip him off about the All Platinum scam. I listened to his laughter, wondering if the whole world apart from me was part of this plot, then turned red again as he set me straight. How was I to know? This was 1976, after all, and, where I came from, bad meant bad. Not the best.<\/p>\n

Having sacked his act, Norman Whitfield sent out for a sandwich, and joined me on a vinyl sofa that squealed in painful protest each time he shifted his enormous frame. The sandwich still unfinished, he proposed in a tone that precluded any outcome except unquestioning assent that I should start the interview, so some of his early answers were unbroadcastably indistinct. Muffled in a mouthful of chicken and mayonnaise on wholewheat, the old Motown motto \u201cCompetition breeds champions\u201d lost much of its gladiatorial ring, notwithstanding the speaker giving me the hard eye, just in case he had left any room for doubting the validity of this belief.<\/p>\n

Whitfield\u2019s favourite words were innovator, innovative and innovation, each of which, with rare exceptions, he applied exclusively to himself. At Motown, where he had been a writer, arranger and producer from the company\u2019s early days in Detroit, you had to be an innovator to reap the rewards; his had been a plentiful harvest. \u2018Papa Was A Rolling Stone\u2019 had been an innovative mix of soul and psychedelia with lyrics drawn from his own life experiences; it had taken his unique talent to express them so persuasively. The syn-drums he had recently plonked into the production of \u2018Love Don\u2019t Live Here Anymore\u2019 were proof that he still had the power to innovate, although, to my ears, the most obvious impact of the electronic percussion had been to burden an otherwise soulful ballad with studio gimmickry that made the record unlistenable after half a dozen hearings. Not that I shared this view with Norman.<\/p>\n

En route back to Hollywood, I pulled over by a telephone booth on Ventura Boulevard. Kim sounded agitated when she answered, but only because a publicist had left a message that if I couldn\u2019t call her back before three, not to bother. It was 2.45. I had enough coins to make the call, but not enough to then call Kim to warn her that I would be late.<\/p>\n

Emmylou Harris lived off one of the canyons above Sunset in a mature, elegantly decorous cottage which smelled of cedar. Our interview was one of those tricky t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates where the interviewee has been led to believe that the conversation will only cover topics pertinent to her current career, but the interviewer wants something more. Emmylou was gracious, patient and compellingly beautiful, which made my task trickier, but I needed an authoritative voice to talk about country rock, a fusion blueprinted by Gram Parsons in 1968 with the Byrds\u2019 Sweetheart Of The Rodeo<\/em> and whose now vilified apotheosis had arrived in the mid-seventies with the multi-million selling, but presently mute Eagles.<\/p>\n

Politely, but firmly, Emmylou pointed out that she had only sung back-up on two of Gram\u2019s albums, GP<\/em> and Grievous Angel<\/em>, that she hadn\u2019t spent a great deal of time with him in Los Angeles, because she had been living in New York at the time and had a baby, that it was more than six years since his death, and, what\u2019s more, like him she vehemently opposed the juxtaposition of the words \u2018country\u2019 and \u2018rock\u2019. So we talked about her own work with the Hot Band and the role of women in country music. It was good stuff, but it wasn\u2019t really what I was after.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, when the Eagles were<\/em> talking and I had boned up for an interview with Don Henley, I would find myself, wide-eyed and momentarily speechless with surprise, in a room with Don Felder, who had a solo album to plug and no interest in discussing whatever bands he might once have been in. I had to inveigle him into giving me what I wanted by saying things like, \u201cMaking your own album must have been s-o-o-o<\/em> much more rewarding than recording with the Eagles, who, as I understand it, weren\u2019t always a whole lot of fun to work with,\u201d prompting him to spend several minutes telling me he was not going to knock the Eagles because really they were just the greatest bunch of guys creatively you could ever choose to be with in a studio, blah, blah, blah, until his eyes narrowed and he refocused on the theme for the day. I would enjoy getting one over on the wrong Don, but I left Emmylou\u2019s house embarrassed by my intent.<\/p>\n

Instead of heading back to Malibu, I aimed my rental car north over the Hollywood Hills again towards the Valley. I would need to check the precise location in my Thomas Guide, but I knew the way to Encino, where my unforeseen \u2013 until that afternoon – fourth interview would take place. I had, of course, prepared no questions, but I knew a bar on Ventura, near Coldwater Canyon, called The Tail O\u2019 The Cock, one of those places that was considered old for LA, having been there since the 1940s, when Clark Gable had reputedly knocked back whiskeys at the bar. I parked, locked the Uher in the boot, but took my notepad with me, so I could compose questions with a drink at my elbow. Once I\u2019d written all I could think to ask, I raised the chunky glass, empty now apart from ice, and waved it at a waitress as a signal for a second Tanqueray and tonic, tore the page from the pad, and copied my questions neatly in large letters, so they would be easy to read with a glance.<\/p>\n

It was dusk by the time I drove through the unguarded gates of 4641 Hayvenhurst Avenue. An alsation bounded up and bared his teeth, strings of saliva smearing the car window, paws skittering against the door. But barking dogs didn\u2019t bother me, I knew it was when they switched to a growl that you were in trouble. This one barked a lot and bounced about in front of me, but I toughed it out until a woman I recognised as Shirley Brooks appeared under the porch light. Either she was nervous or knew more about the dog than I did, because she stayed where she was, beckoning from the lighted entrance, apparently ready to slam the door on the dog, and me too, no doubt, were it to turn its noisy attention to her. Shirley was a publicist for Epic Records, and we\u2019d met before. As we shook hands, she told me I looked tired.<\/p>\n

\u201cLong day,\u201d I explained, \u201cbut I wouldn\u2019t have missed this for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Permanently preoccupied throughout the short drive to Encino, in case I\u2019d omitted a crucial question, I had been feeling drained and slightly drunk, but not any more. The dog, as much as anticipation for the interview, had seen to that. I waded through the shaggy ivory carpet, chandeliers twinkling on either side like lights in an elfin grotto, until, just as we were about to enter the next room, Shirley slowed, then stopped me with her arm.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing,\u201d she said, as if it was an insignificance she had overlooked and just remembered, \u201cyou don\u2019t mind if his sister sits in on the interview, do you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Already aware of a distant figure on a marshmallow sofa, I shook my head readily.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course not, Shirley,\u201d I assured her with a smile. \u201cWhat\u2019s her name?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJanet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJanet,\u201d I repeated.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, and one more thing…\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirley paused, to ensure she had my attention. Anticipating another trivial afterthought, I wasn\u2019t ready for the bomb Shirley was about to drop.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you could direct your questions to Janet, she\u2019ll put them to Michael.\u201d<\/p>\n

My mouth opened and I turned to query this extraordinary request, but the arm that had been barring my way was behind me now, launching me through a double doorway and down several carpeted steps into the presence of he-who-must-not-be-addressed-directly, while I struggled to convert a confused backward glance into a great-to-meet-you grin, and wondered whether I was permitted to say hello face to face or expected to channel my greeting via the kid sister too.<\/p>\n

Michael Jackson stood up. I stuck out my hand and so did he. I held his flimsy fingers carefully, fearful that I might hurt him. He was stick thin, with fine skin and hairs that had never seen a razor sprouting feebly here and there on his cheeks and chin. He still had his own nose, brown skin and an afro, as Off The Wall<\/em>\u2019s cover shot confirms. The voice that welcomed me was tremulous. When I turned to say hullo to Janet, she grinned as if this might all be a game. Michael sat down again, and I perched on a hassock between brother and sister, separated by the glass top of a low table. Shirley Brooks had melted deep into the room, but not, I would have bet the programme budget on it, out of earshot. I un-slung the Uher from my shoulder, set it on the floor beside my seat, plugged in the microphone and fumbled with the controls. Then I leaned across the table, waving the microphone like a metal detector in front of me, unsure where to point it.<\/p>\n

I found out later that I wasn\u2019t the only interviewer who had been asked to go along with the wacky ritual of using thirteen-year-old Janet Jackson as a conduit for questions. While it was happening, I was too taken aback – and too concerned that a transgression of this ridiculous rule might bring the interview to an abrupt end – \u00a0to ponder Michael\u2019s motives, but I wondered about them afterwards. Could it have been that it was Whitey he didn\u2019t want to be addressed directly by? It didn\u2019t seem likely. Nothing Michael ever said or did suggested he was a racist. Indeed he would publicly berate his father Joe for a provocative comment on the colour of his white managers, adding, \u201cOne day I strongly expect every colour to live as one family,\u201d as emphatic an anti-racist statement as the video he made for \u2018Beat It\u2019.<\/p>\n

Was he acclimatising a treasured sibling, intent herself on musical stardom, to the irritating, but necessary attention of interviewers? Just possibly, but again unlikely. In the end I concluded that what Michael craved wherever and whenever it could be accomplished was the erection of a protective barrier between himself and the rest of the world, symbolised by his habitual wearing of dark glasses \u2013 and later, several notches more bizarrely, a mask – in public.<\/p>\n

As long as he was the nabob of Neverland, he could justify his reclusion by claiming that owning a theme park and zoo meant never having to leave home. This hermetic lifestyle mirrored that of Elvis Presley, who had his own cinema and a TV room with one of several screens featuring a 24-hour feed from a CCTV camera mounted by the Graceland gates, so he could watch real people to-ing and fro-ing along the boulevard that bore his name. It was a dangerous isolation, which contributed to Elvis\u2019s decline just as surely as the daily Demarol. When I met Michael, even though our verbal communication was indirect, we sat face to face, eye to eye, breathed the same air, pressed flesh on flesh. Our interlocutor apart, he was actually no odder than Norman Whitfield. It\u2019s easy to conclude that what would change him was fame. Granted he had already been famous for ten years, but the eminence that awaited him in the eighties was of an entirely different magnitude.<\/p>\n

For a sizeable stretch of the years that separated Muhammad Ali\u2019s retirement from the ring – too many big fights too late – in December 1981 and Nelson Mandela\u2019s release from Victor Verster Prison in February 1990, Michael Jackson must have woken each morning with a giggle. How else to treat being the most famous black man on the planet? He hadn\u2019t achieved that status by thrilling the world with agility and sleight of hand and unprecedented speed allied to reckless bravery, then risking all he had won to assert his belief; nor had he languished in prison for 28 years, hoping to live, but prepared to die for his cherished ideal of a democratic, free and equal South African society. No, during those eight years of world domination the greatest danger Michael Jackson faced was during a shoot for a Pepsi TV commercial, when an exploding firework set light to his hair. But he did make the biggest-selling album of all time, a record whose sales have topped 40 million copies.<\/p>\n

True, in achieving this Guinness-Book-Of record, he united black and white record buyers in greater numbers than any other recording artist, and even overcame apartheid of a kind when Thriller<\/em> and its seven top ten hit singles were played on otherwise lilywhite American radio stations. But Jackson was an exception and, unlike Ali or Mandela, changed no rules.<\/p>\n

As his fame spread across the globe, his behaviour became incrementally erratic. He dressed like a foppish despot, pampered himself with the gewgaws of a princeling, raised a drawbridge between himself and the outside world, eventually completing his metamorphosis into a chimp-hugging, fairground-owning, toddler-dangling, pigmentation-denying, cosmetic-surgery-junkie, underage-bed-sharing freak.<\/p>\n

Did I miss media-shunning? That was one of the first symptoms of his unravelling. In the whole of 1982, he would grant just one interview, to Rolling Stone<\/em>, and after that none – not one, just eleven years of total silence – until his vainglorious, self-defeating confessional with Martin Bashir in 2003. But in January 1980, with his Off The Wall<\/em> album cresting the album charts and its sublime stand-out track, \u2018Rock With You\u2019, a No 1 single, he had agreed to be interviewed by me. Was it the weight of this honour that had me clearing my throat several times?<\/p>\n

\u201cYes… so, er, I was going to… I mean, um,\u201d I began, ever the polished professional, looking from one Jackson to the other, unsure whose eyes to settle on, \u201cif we could sort of go back to er… to er, you know, when you got started… er, when the Jackson Five got started… um, I was going to ask Michael how… they… fitted in to the Motown set-up?\u201d<\/p>\n

A pause.<\/p>\n

\u201cMichael, how did you fit into the Motown set-up?\u201d<\/p>\n

Thank you, Janet. Yes, that\u2019s what I was trying to say.<\/p>\n

A longer pause.<\/p>\n

\u201cErrrrrr…\u201d Michael\u2019s own hesitation was prolonged and curiously musical. If it had cropped up on a vocal track, his new producer Quincy Jones would, I\u2019m sure, have kept it on the record for texture. \u201cWe were doing a show at the Regal Theatre in Chicago and it was like a talent show type of thing and we won, and Gladys Knight was there as well as a guy named Bobby Taylor, and they told Motown about us, and Motown was interested in seeing us audition for them…\u201d<\/p>\n

The version originally offered for public consumption was that Diana Ross had discovered the Jackson 5, so I was chuffed to hear Gladys Knight given due credit, especially as she was an infinitely superior singer to la Ross and her and the Pips\u2019 \u2018Didn\u2019t You Know You\u2019d Have To Cry Some Time?\u2019 was one of my favourite records.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026So we went to Berry Gordy\u2019s mansion in Detroit – indoor pool – and all the Motown stars were there, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, and we auditioned and they loved it, and Diana Ross came over to us special after the concert we did for them and she kissed us all and said we were marvellous and she said she wanted to play a special part in our career and that\u2019s how it started…\u201d<\/p>\n

Berry Gordy\u2019s mansion made a big impression on Michael and his brothers, the indoor pool especially. It was by far the biggest house the Jacksons had ever been invited into. Their own place in Gary, Indiana, was one storey with two bedrooms, one for parents Joe and Katherine, the other for their nine kids. Signing to Motown split the family up, some of the boys moving in with Gordy, the rest with Diana Ross, until Joe bought the house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in 1971.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026And we did our first single, \u2018I Want You Back\u2019, it was gold, as well as \u2018ABC\u2019, \u2018The Love You Save\u2019, \u2018Never Can Say…\u2019, on and on and on.\u201d<\/p>\n

A tinkerbell giggle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how it started.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s how the interview continued: me pinging a question to Janet, she ponging it to Michael, he pinging it back to the microphone. I almost got used to the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cMotown was supposed to have been one big happy family. Was it still like that when the Jacksons were there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWas Motown like a big family then, Michael?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, that\u2019s very true, they were. Everybody worked together. You\u2019d be doing a session and Berry Gordy would just walk in and change things around and nobody would get mad. It was like the way Walt Disney would go from one studio to the other like a bee, you know, and pollen, just go from one place to another, just stimulating people, keeping them on the right track. Berry was wonderful with taking a song and leading it to the right direction, giving it the right flavours to make it a hit. He knew just what it takes and everybody can\u2019t do that. He\u2019s really something.\u201d<\/p>\n

That something, I reminded myself silently, was a heavy-handed patriarch who allowed his energy to be diverted by a hubristic desire to make Diana Ross a movie star and himself a Hollywood mogul.<\/p>\n

Although no one close to the corporation was going to admit it, especially with my Uher running, Motown had been in trouble from the moment Lamont Dozier and the Holland brothers jumped ship in 1968. True, Norman Whitfield still had several masterpieces up his sleeve, notably a trio of chart-topping Temptations singles, whose apogee was the six-minute psychedelic soul symphony of \u2018Papa Was A Rolling Stone\u2019 in 1972, the same year Stevie Wonder came out with Talking Book<\/em> and a year after Marvin Gaye\u2019s magnificent, troubled What\u2019s Going On<\/em>. But with Holland-Dozier-Holland went Motown\u2019s bread and butter – though that is altogether too mundane a meal to represent the rich and varied diet of black pop they served up time and time again through the mid-sixties. More than any other in-house team or individual, Smokey Robinson included, it was the records Brian, Eddie and Lamont wrote and produced for the Supremes and the Four Tops that propelled Motown, and with it black music, into pop\u2019s mainstream.<\/p>\n

However persuasively Motown\u2019s mouthpieces might insist that the departure of Holland-Dozier-Holland had not been lastingly hurtful, it was a fact. Mary Wells, Motown\u2019s first major solo star went, the Supremes lost founder Florence Ballard and became, ominously, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and in spite of their continuing success, Wonder and Gaye, like their counterparts in white rock, were turning their attention to albums rather than singles. The label that Berry Gordy started in 1959 with the money he\u2019d made writing crossover hits for Jackie Wilson had become the most profitable black-owned business in America, but by the end of the 1970s, the decade of my documentary, its boast of being \u2018The Sound of Young America\u2019 no longer rang true.<\/p>\n

Even while the Temptations were hitting their peak, Motown\u2019s status was under threat, not just as chart leaders, but in the black music marketplace as well. The sound that took its name from the Detroit \u2018motor town\u2019 of its birth was losing ground to the sweet soul of another industrial centre, Philadelphia. The Philly sound was smoother, slicker than Motown\u2019s, and it earned a whole slew of hits for the Stylistics, the O\u2019Jays, Motown refugees the Spinners, the Three Degrees, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. As with Motown, acts and material were often interchangeable. The crucial constants were in the back room: arranger-writer-producers Thom Bell and the hit-making partnership of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Confirmation that the city was hot, if wall-to-wall platinum discs in the Philadelphia International offices weren\u2019t enough, came when David Bowie chose Sigma Sound Studio as the location to record his 1975 Young Americans<\/em> album. So, when the Jacksons – Berry Gordy having used the law to reinforce Motown\u2019s claim to the Jackson 5 name \u2013 moved to CBS in 1976, naturally their new record company put them into a studio with Philly kings Gamble and Huff.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up with some pretty good songs with them – \u2018Show You The Way To Go\u2019, which was a big hit, as well as, um…\u201d<\/p>\n

Janet had to prompt Michael here, \u201c\u2018Enjoy Yourself\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Enjoy Yourself\u2019 – thank you,\u201d he giggled, as did his sister, but excused himself by adding, \u201cso many songs. And, er, since we\u2019d been in the studio so many years, something just told us that we should start doing our own thing, so we went in and we wrote the Destiny<\/em> album, and that was double platinum.\u201d The memory of this achievement released another cascade of giggles.<\/p>\n

Sales statistics clearly counted with Michael. All he had to say about the wonderful \u2018I Want You Back\u2019 was that it went gold. Who else gave a damn how many copies it had sold? What mattered was that it was two minutes and forty seconds of pop-soul heaven. And Destiny<\/em>? Double platinum. As if that made it better than \u2018I Want You Back\u2019, which it wasn\u2019t. Come March 1984 CBS would host a party to celebrate Thriller<\/em>\u2019s inclusion in the Guinness Book Of Records<\/em> as the biggest-selling album of all time, prompting Michael to admit that his entry in the book marked the first time in his career that he felt he had accomplished something. But if art were all about sales figures, then surely Vladimir Tretchikoff, painter of the blue-skinned \u2018Chinese Girl\u2019, would be revered as the No 1 artist of the 20th<\/sup> Century, rather than Pablo Picasso.<\/p>\n

There was room in my head for these thoughts, because I was barely listening to Michael\u2019s answers, which were consistently unilluminating. It quickly became clear that he had little understanding either of the history of black music or of his place in it. In almost every interview there are moments when things are said that allow you to put a tick against a list \u2013 there\u2019s my opener, that\u2019s the closing observation, more ticks for key points commented on between – but the second reel was already underway and, as yet, there had been none from Michael. Not a single killer quote. I wondered whether this would be my least revealing interview since quizzing QPR\u2019s twinkle-toed wizard Stan Bowles for Time Out<\/em>, when the one interesting thing I learned was that he\u2019d skipped training that morning, not because he told me, but because a greasy breakfast plate had only lately been abandoned and half an inch of striped pyjama leg was showing between his jeans and carpet slippers.<\/p>\n

Aware that I couldn\u2019t expect insights, I knew nonetheless that I had what I had come for: the voice of Michael Jackson on tape. So I didn\u2019t bother correcting Janet when my question about Destiny<\/em> \u2013 \u201cApart from its commercial success, since the Jacksons had written and produced the album themselves, were they also pleased creatively with what the record?\u201d – emerged from her mouth as, \u201cD\u2019you think your brothers could\u2019ve done better?\u201d In fact, it was what I should have asked him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI certainly did. I\u2019m sure the brothers did too, because I\u2019m never satisfied with anything \u2019cause I do believe deeply in perfection. I\u2019m still not satisfied with a lot of things, and I like to stay that way, because if you\u2019re satisfied with everything, you\u2019re just going to stay at one level and the world will move ahead.\u201d A thought that had him laughing again. \u201cThat\u2019s not good either.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Destiny<\/em> recording was the last time the Jacksons enjoyed Michael\u2019s undivided attention. Even while they were on tour promoting the record, he was flying back to LA, as often as the schedule allowed, to work on tracks for Off The Wall<\/em>. This was the first record for which he had been allowed to choose his producer, and he had picked Quincy Jones, whom he had got to know two years before during the filming of The Wiz<\/em>, a Motown-produced remake of The Wizard Of Oz<\/em> in which Michael played The Scarecrow and Diana Ross an absurdly over-aged Dorothy. Jones had been musical director. The film was a disaster, and ironically, in view of what happened subsequently, Jones made a hash of his brief, which was to inject the score with danceable music.<\/p>\n

\u201cI called Quincy up one day, I said, \u2018Quincy, I\u2019m ready to do a solo album, I\u2019ve written the songs that I want to do, but I want a real good producer to work with me.\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m going to produce it too, but I want somebody to work with me.\u2019 I said, \u2018Can you recommend somebody?\u2019 And I wasn\u2019t trying to hint around at all\u201d \u2013 Michael laughed at the notion \u2013 \u201cI didn\u2019t even think about him, and he said, \u2018Smelly\u2019 – he calls me Smelly (the nickname deriving from Michael\u2019s aversion to the word \u2018funky\u2019) – he said, \u2018Smelly, why don\u2019t you let me do it?\u2019 I said, \u2018That\u2019s a great idea.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael knew this story by heart. Just a month or so before, in conversation with Stephen Demorest, another interviewer who was asked to channel his questions through Janet, he had told it all but word for word: \u201cQuincy calls me Smelly and he said, \u2018Smelly, why don\u2019t you let me do it?\u2019 I said, \u2018That\u2019s a great idea.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever Michael\u2019s mounting problems, his voice, an instrument of rare beauty and expression, was not one of them. The purity of note, the timbre, was, I suppose, an accident of nature, but in order to express feelings, a singer has to be able to feel, to have felt. Yet Michael\u2019s mollycoddled existence must have isolated him from a multitude of essential feelings. So from where did the experience come that imbued his beautiful voice? My question didn\u2019t quite come out like that, especially after it had been paraphrased by Janet, but Michael got the gist of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no real explanation. It\u2019s nothing to do with personal experience. My singing is just – I\u2019ll say it simple as possible – it\u2019s just Godly really. It\u2019s no real personal experience or anything that make it come across, just feeling and God, I\u2019ll say, mainly God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael was twenty one at the time I talked to him, and he had been a star half his life. Ten years is a longer career than most in music. How did he see the next ten?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think secretly and privately, really deep within, there\u2019s a destiny for me. I\u2019ve had strong feelings for films, that something\u2019s directing me in that way for motion pictures, musicals and drama, that whole thing, to choreograph the films as well, even get into writing the pictures and doing the music.\u201d<\/p>\n

The closest he has come to realising that destiny was the fourteen-minute werewolf video he created for Thriller<\/em>, hardly a Hollywood career. He also recorded a narrative E.T.<\/em> spin-off album, The E.T. Storybook<\/em>, at Steven Speilberg\u2019s invitation. The package included a poster of Michael with his arm round E.T.<\/em>\u2019s shoulder, the two most easily identifiable eighties icons side by side. But I didn\u2019t know that at the time, so I couldn\u2019t contradict him. Instead I asked him how he felt about his music being labelled disco.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate labels, because it should be just music. Call it disco, call it anything, it\u2019s music to me, it\u2019s beautiful to the ear, and that\u2019s what counts. It\u2019s like you hear a bird chirping, you don\u2019t say, \u2018That\u2019s a bluejay, this one is a crow.\u2019 It\u2019s a beautiful sound, that\u2019s all that counts, and that is a ugly thing about men. They categorise too much, they get a little bit too racial about things, when it should all be together. That\u2019s why you hear us talk about the peacock a lot, because the peacock is the only bird of all the bird family that integrates every colour into one, and that\u2019s our main goal in music, is to integrate every race to one through music, and we\u2019re doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the sleeve of the Jacksons\u2019 Triumph<\/em> album, released later that year, Michael would write, \u201cIn all the bird family, the peacock is the only species that integrates all colors into one… We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one, through the love and power of music.\u201d Evidently he wanted to try the image out on me before airing it to a wider public. Just as well that I nodded approvingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go to our concerts, you see every race out there, and they\u2019re all waving hands and they\u2019re holding hands and they\u2019re smiling. You see the kids out there dancing, as well as the grown-ups and the grandparents, all colours, that\u2019s what\u2019s great\u201d – cue one last nervous giggle – \u201cthat\u2019s what keep me going.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second reel of tape was about to spool off, so I told Janet that sounded like a good place to end, pressed stop, wound off the rest of the reel and stowed it carefully in the box from which I\u2019d unwrapped it. Michael withdrew from me the moment the interview was over. He remained in the room, but he wasn\u2019t there for me. Shirley Brooks showed me out without offering an explanation for her extraordinary precondition. The alsation had either been locked away or, knowing I was unafraid, couldn\u2019t be arsed to come out and bark. When I keyed the ignition in my car, \u2018Rock With You\u2019 came on. I lowered the volume and drove west on Ventura Boulevard, then took Topanga Canyon to the coast, slowing where Topanga crested Mulholland Drive so I could look back at the Valley lights glittering all the way to the horizon.<\/p>\n

My thoughts were a mixture of amusement and annoyance at the pantomime I\u2019d allowed myself to take part in and disappointment that I hadn\u2019t learned anything about Michael Jackson or Motown that I didn\u2019t already know. I reminded myself that I hadn\u2019t really expected to, and, as long as my Uher hadn\u2019t let me down, I had his precious voice on tape. I could even hear the bit about the peacock in one of my programmes.<\/p>\n

As I skirted the ocean, I turned off the radio and rolled down the passenger window, so I could hear the surf. The flames of a small bonfire burning on Zuma Beach reflected in the wet suits of surfers as skinny and angular as matchstick men. Night had fallen more than an hour ago. Surely they hadn\u2019t been surfing in the dark? It was January, but in Southern California it was endless summer. This was the land mythologised in Brian Wilson\u2019s early Beach Boys songs, and for some that dream was evidently still alive. Meanwhile a different dream, a dark, incursive nightmare, was disrupting the lives of other Californians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s January 1980, and I\u2019m in California to collect interviews for a music documentary series which Capital Radio has commissioned me to write. Makin\u2019 Waves \u2013 in the middle of what kind of night did I wake with that title in my head? – will cover the decade that\u2019s just ended: from the break-up of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}