Jackson Michael - Thriller: the musical life of Michael Jackson

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Table of Contents

DEDICATED TO MY EDITORS AND COWORKERS AT BILLBOARD MAGAZINE 1982 TO 1989

STARTIN SOMETHIN AN INTRODUCTION

IT IS 1971. I AM FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, AND I AM lacing up my black platform shoes. My mother is putting on her lipstick, and my sister, three years younger than I and a Jackson 5 fanatic, is picking out her Afro. As I wait on the ladies in my life, I sit on my bed in the public housing bedroom I share with my sister, flipping through copies of Right On! magazine, which, in the years before BETs 106 & Park, is the way young black kids kept up with their teen idols. I read about a pickup basketball game at the Jackson familys Encino home and wonder if I could take Jermaine off the dribble.

My sister and mother are now ready. We grab our coats and then knock on our neighbors door. Betty and her son exit their apartment, and we all ride down the elevator from the sixth floor. We live in the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, an area that is one of the worst ghettos in America.

We walk down Livonia Avenue, with the sixteen-story Tilden buildings to our right and the elevated IRT subway tracks looming to our left. Before we go upstairs to the elevated train, my mother buys Wrigleys Spearmint gum at the local candy store on Rockaway Avenue, as we all keep an eye out for the junkies who hang menacingly on the corner.

The long ride takes my family and friends from Brownsville, near the end of the IRT line, across Brooklyn through Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope, downtown Brooklyn, and then into Manhattan, running under Wall Street, through Greenwich Village up to the garment district, and finally to West 34th Street. On that long ride we talk about previous trips to Manhattan. My mother, whos studying to become a teacher, has taken us to many events in the city, from Mary Poppins at Radio City Music Hall to Ossie Daviss Purlie Victorious, with Melba Moore, on Broadway.

But this family outing will be one of the most memorable of our lives. We get off at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue, joining the throngs of black and white families filing into Madison Square Garden. This version of the Worlds Greatest Arena is only about four years old and has already been the site of the first Ali-Frazier heavyweight championship fight and the New York Knicks first NBA title. Ive listened to so many games on the radio being played in this building, and yet its only my second time inside.

We sit up high in the green seats to the right of the stage, but we are too excited to be upset about our nosebleed location. My mother is happy because Chuck Jackson, a deep-voiced soul singer and a longtime favorite, is one of the opening acts, obviously placed on the bill as an acknowledgment to all the parents in the house. (I dont realize until a few years later that the Commodores with Lionel Ritchie were the other opener; they performed a brief set.)

When the Jackson 5 takes the stage, the piercing screams of teenage girls fill the Garden. Michael moves swiftly across the stage, a little dynamo who reminds me of Mighty Mouse, the hyperactive Saturday morning cartoon character I love. The Jackson boys in their multicolored outfits glide across the Garden stage, and their Afros, perfect ovals of jet-black hair, look like halos. Though the crowd is very integrated, theres a palpable sense of pride emanating from the many black families in attendance.

The Jackson brothers, as well as their parents, Joe and Katherine, represent our potential and dreams. If they could emerge from the working-class slum of Gary, Indiana, so might my family escape public housing in Brooklyn. The Jacksons represent a growing sense of possibility for my family and me. Maybe one day I could even write a book about Michael Jackson. In a world where a black family, lead by an astoundingly talented little boy, could sell out an arena in New York City, anything could happen.

PART 1

2009

IWAS TAKING MY SEAT AT A PANEL DISCUSSION AT Brooklyns Long Island University to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Spike Lees landmark film Do the Right Thing when I received a text from Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite, a friend and former host of Yo! MTV Raps. TMZ.com was reporting that Michael Jackson was dead. As the news filtered through the crowded lecture hall, folks were commenting on the irony of talking about an iconic 1980s film on the day that decades most important pop star died.

But the connection among Spike, Michael, and me was more intimate than most folks at the event knew. In January 1984, on the night that Jackson was honored by the Guinness Book of World Records at the American Museum of Natural History, Dell published my first book, The Michael Jackson Story, a pocket-sized quickie biography of the singer. It would go on to sell more than 1 million copies and reach number three on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. I was twenty-six years old, and because of that book, for the first time in my young life I had something that could be described as disposable income.

With the money I made from the Michael Jackson book, I was able to afford my first apartment without a roommate. It was in a beautiful but then-unfashionable, brownstone-filled section of downtown Brooklyn called Fort Greene. There I befriended a young filmmaker named Spike Lee and saw an early cut of his film Shes Gotta Have It. Over the course of 1985 I would invest $3,500 in Spikes film, a cinematic event that not only began his historic career, but also heralded a black film movement that still has impact today.

If I hadnt written that book, I would have never moved to Fort Greene or invested in Spikes work. My life, and to some small degree, black pop culture would have been different without my book and, far more significantly, without Michaels ascension to megastardom.

After the panel, I turned on my Blackberry and found it filled with messages from friends and a slew of interview requests from publications, television shows, and radio broadcasts. LIU is a short walk from my apartment, so I went home, warmed up some leftovers, and sat quietly most of that evening, not returning messages or following the news.

At that moment, I didnt want to mourn in public. Nor did I want to speak to any aspects of Michaels life I didnt know anything about. I hate that cable news has become a place of empty speculation where supposed expertsmany only with expertise in their own opinionsclutter the twenty-four-hour news cycle with hot air. My feelings were complicated by the fact that I had just signed a deal to write a book (this book) about the enduring influence of Thriller as a recording and cultural artifact. In anticipation of this work, Id already looked into buying tickets for one of Michaels fifty shows at Londons O2 arena. In the immediate aftermath of his passing, I wrote a eulogy and posted it on my web site and did a few interviews, focusing on music and trying not to engage in the tabloid narrative of his death.

That night I thought about the great American cinema masterpiece Citizen Kane, Orson Welless epic vision of the rich, brilliant, and ultimately doomed Charles Foster Kane, who died disgraced, alone, and unloved in his California mansion, far removed from the glory years of his media empire. The parallel to Jacksons life wasnt seamless, of course. Whereas Kane left this world at Xanadu, his own personal fantasyland of secret rooms, art, and creatures collected from around the globe, Michaels home, Neverland, had been taken from him by debtors. Instead, he died in a rented house under the care of a sketchy doctor who has been charged with manslaughter. In some ways, the better parallel was the director/actor Orson Welles himself, who was hailed as a genius in his twenties, declared a has-been in his thirties, and resurrected as a figure of camp appeal in the last decades of his life. With

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