You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (17 page)

We talked ourselves to sleep about anything and everything, and we shared each other’s fan mail – the racy, romantic, mushy stuff to me from 16-year-olds, and the cutesy, you’re-adorable stuff to him from 10-year-olds.

He laughed at the marriage proposals I received and teased me about how ‘coooool’ I thought I was. We even introduced this to an onstage skit he did during a talk spot between songs. ‘Ladies, Jermaine thinks he’s
sooooo cooool
on his gueee-tar …’ the arena roared ‘… but, ya know, we gonna change all that …’ cue more hysteria ‘… because we gonna do our own thing and be just like Jermaine!’ And we launched into a performance of ‘It’s Your Thing’.

The only thing Michael and I fought over was the bathroom mirror. Each brother had a blown-out Afro and we were always picking and patting our hair, using a hair pick to fluff it out, then patting it down with our hands to create that perfectly round shape before we added the Afro Sheen for shine. We were proud of our voluminous hair: they were our Afro crowns. On planes, we learned to sleep with our heads dropped forward to avoid crushing the Afro. Not good for the neck, but it maintained the shape! Michael’s time spent in front of the mirror was almost as long as mine, so it was always a chase to pole position first thing each morning. I argued that I had the biggest and thickest hair, and he argued that he was front of stage and had the hair the girls most
wanted to grab. Every detail about our hair – and skin – had to be
just right
.

ON THE ROAD, MICHAEL’S OTHER HABIT
was room service; the most decadent perk of the music industry in his eyes. When he felt particularly mischievous at night, he’d ring up as someone else’s child and place the biggest bogus order to a different room. But his funniest ruse was calling one of the roadies and using his high voice to impersonate a girl fan. Jack Nance, our road manager and Jack Richardson, our driver-come-right hand man, were always our favourite targets. When they picked up their room phone Michael spoke into the receiver and introduced himself as a girl fan: ‘I saw you tonight … I love the way you looked,’ he squeaked, and then detailed what Jack had been wearing that day for added authenticity, ‘… and I was a fan of Michael’s but you stole my eye …’

I was laughing so hard that I had to go into the bathroom, but Michael kept it going with a straight face: ‘What do I look like?’ (cue the shy giggle) ‘Well, I’m tall, slim and very pretty … all my girls tell me so … How old am I? I’m almost sixteen,’ he’d say. He kept this going for a good ten minutes, teasing them and pumping their egos, but we never once let on it was us. We just let them believe that they, too, had adoring fans. The next morning, when we saw either Jack in the hotel lobby, looking all dour and serious, Michael nudged me and whispered: ‘Old dogs – they dirrrrty.’

IF THERE WAS ONE CITY THAT
didn’t totally put out the Jackson-mania welcome mat, it was Mobile, Alabama. We had looked forward to this date because it returned us to Mother’s roots, but there was no warm home-coming. The fan reaction wasn’t the problem – that was typically raucous. It was the reception outside the arena that provided a sober lesson in the rich diversity of America. Our parents had warned us about the infamous prejudices of the Deep South and how black communities were still awakening after the Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s, and
the civil rights stand that had brought violence from the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan. We had seen images of grown men walking around with sheets on their heads, and we had seen them burning crosses, but our knowledge of history was scant until our first-hand experience in Alabama, in January 1971.

The first difference we noted was when the white driver of our limousine was cold and abrupt, not talkative like other drivers we’d had. At our hotel, he refused to get out of the car and open our doors, and no staff came out to help us with our bags either. This wasn’t a spoiled-kid expectation, it was just an observation of a sharp difference in our treatment. It was as we pulled our bags out of the trunk that one of us noticed some KKK paraphernalia, clearly intended for our eyes. We froze. It was like one of those moments in a thriller movie when you realise your driver has been the killer the whole time; it felt that sinister. We stayed quiet and kept our heads down. At the hotel reception, we faced the same cold awkwardness. ‘We don’t seem to have got any rooms booked for you,’ said the man at the front desk, all curt and stern. Suzanne de Passe, or someone, argued that this was a long-standing booking; we were the Jackson 5 and there must be a mistake.

‘No mistake. We have no rooms booked,’ he repeated.

We effectively begged for a room, which we were eventually given – facing an alley and trash-cans. Michael was, typically, the first to question what had happened when we got to the basic quarters of our second-rate room. ‘Why would someone treat us like that because of our skin colour?’ he asked. It confused him because he knew our fans were both black and white, and it was the first time we had been made to feel unwanted, let alone unpopular.

It made us more determined to kick some butt onstage, because we soon recognised the importance of being black kids performing for black fans who could now identify with us. We were carrying the torch for our forefathers, winning respect for every black kid with a dream. The screams and cheers that night felt like a lot more than just Jackson-mania: they felt like defiance and victory. As
Sammy Davis Junior had said in 1965: ‘Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.’

Michael’s memories of Alabama were not the greatest back then, because when we left Mobile our 727 plane hit bad weather and severe turbulence. I think we were all nervous flyers to begin with and preferred touring in the VW camper van, but we seemed to have a concert every few days so we had no choice but to take to the skies. But this flight left Michael – and me – petrified when it abruptly dropped and started shaking violently. Sitting together, we gripped the armrests tightly. When I looked to my left, Michael was crying, his eyes screwed tight. Armageddon must have flashed through both our minds, and it didn’t help that the skies were dark and the cabin lights kept flickering. When the conditions calmed, a stewardess came over and crouched beside Michael to reassure us both of how normal such an event was. That calmed us – until the pilot ruined it after we landed: ‘The airplane was hard to control but we got through it, didn’t we?’

Our fears increased in 1972 when we saw news footage of some Eastern Airlines passenger plane going down in the Everglades, dropping from 2,000 feet during its descent into Miami.

Some time later, when it came time to leave the hotel for the airport in a city I can’t remember, we couldn’t find Michael. One minute he was with us, the next he was not. Bill and Joseph started to worry until instinct reminded us of a habit Michael had adopted when he was in trouble at 2300 Jackson Street. Sure enough, Bill found him hiding under the hotel bed, crying and refusing to come out. ‘I’m not getting back on that airplane – I’m not! I’m
not!
’ Outside, there was stormy weather and heavy rain.

Everyone tried the gentle art of negotiation – Bill, Suzanne and Jack Richardson – but the next memory I have is of seeing Bill walking from the limo to the plane steps, carrying a kicking and screaming Michael over his shoulders. Such tantrums happened a few times when Michael didn’t feel safe and he usually screamed for Mother. Joseph was there, of course, but he didn’t provide – or was
incapable of providing – the love and comfort when needed. Instead, we brothers and a stewardess often pulled him through. And, yes, plenty of candy helped, too.

The J5 juggernaut kept trail-blazing across America and demand for us spread across the rest of the world. We had calls to perform in every major city and it was hard to understand that we were big in Australia and Japan. They seemed like other planets, but Joseph said we were ‘going to conquer the world.’ Our fifth single, ‘Mama’s Pearl’, became our first song
not
to reach top spot. The same happened with ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ a few months later, and we had to settle for the No. 2 position on both occasions, but neither Joseph nor Mr Gordy complained.

Whatever we had started had grown bigger than anyone imagined and seemed unstoppable. Life was coming at us so fast and none of us brothers knew where it was leading or how much better it might become. But we understood that the day the fans stopped screaming was the day we stopped playing, so we rolled out second and third albums, lined up more tour dates, and kept the profile rolling with interviews to
Teen
magazine,
Soul
,
Time
,
Life
,
Ebony
and
Rolling Stone
, the latter calling us ‘THE BIGGEST THING SINCE THE STONES’. And somewhere within all of this, we managed to squeeze in school. Somehow. In Japan, we were declared ‘The Most Promising Vocal Group’, which followed our 1970 accolade in America – Billboard’s Top Singles Recording Artists and NAACP’s Image Award for Best Singing Group 1970. Motown hired Fred Rice, who had worked with the Beatles and the Monkees, to begin franchising us around the world with dolls, clothes … and hair-spray. He even started talking to New York animators Rankin & Bass, the makers of ABC’s
The King Kong Show
, about turning us into cartoon characters. ‘I’m going to have your faces everywhere,’ he said. ‘You’re the black Beatles.’

In our hotel room, Michael and I always expressed our dislike of that comparison. Why did everything white and great need a black equivalent? We were not the black Beatles, we were the black Jackson 5. Outwardly, when the press made the same comparison,
we smiled graciously and took the compliment but this comparison ignored one fact: two of our songs – ‘I’ll Be There’ and ‘ABC’ – had knocked Britain’s finest from the No. 1 spot and that felt as good as anything to us. That was how fiercely proud we were, carrying forward our competitiveness from the talent-contest days. We were winners. We had to be the best. And the talent of others always forced us to raise our bar the highest.

THE ONE PLACE WE WERE GUARANTEED
a warm welcome was Gary, Indiana, when we returned home to perform two concerts at Westside High School in early 1971 – our first visit ‘home’ in 14 months. Something like 6,000 people turned out each night, and it was all captured on camera for a television special called
Goin’ Back to Indiana
.

We had landed by helicopter in the school parking lot, in the snow, and there was a real carnival vibe. Even our helicopter joined the home-coming with a banner along its tail saying: ‘WELCOME HOME JACKSON 5’. We walked from the helicopter to a waiting limousine and the locals didn’t so much as mob us as ogle us, fascinated by the boys who had returned from their Motown makeover. We weren’t a distant fantasy on a bedroom wall to these people, we were one of them.

As we pulled around the corner and our old home came into view, we saw one difference straightaway: the new, if temporary, street sign – ‘Jackson 5 Boulevard’. Everyone held up duplicates and behind them, on the snow-covered lawn in front of our house, there was a bigger sign: ‘WELCOME HOME JACKSON 5 – KEEPERS OF THE DREAM’.

The street was swamped, and kids started shouting out memories.

‘Remember me? We went to elementary school together!’

‘You know me! I met you one time at …’

‘Michael! I was there when you sang “Climb Ev‘ry Mountain”!’

And then we found the one face in the crowd we had been looking for: our old buddy Bernard Gross. We pinched his chubby
cheeks and he laughed. ‘You out in the sunshine making all that money now!’ he said. ‘Congratulations, guys, you deserve it.’

‘We’re still the same – not changed!’ we said, which was internally true. But we noticed how most people, except Bernard, looked at us differently – looking
into us
curiously. Outwardly, the changes were obvious. We had a wardrobe department now, and we sparkled without using Vaseline. But we didn’t feel better than anyone else: we just felt lucky and privileged. And we’d never thought we’d ever stand outside our house and feel privileged. It was hard going back because the taste of California had broadened our horizons. Life had moved us on, and being in Gary felt like trying on a pair of shoes you’ve outgrown but don’t want to throw away.

Even our house seemed reduced somehow. Outside, everything appeared the same, right down to the bricks stacked in the backyard. But as soon as we stepped inside, we all said the same thing: ‘How did we fit in here, let alone live here?’ We brothers went to our old bedroom where our bunk-beds were no more.

Michael and I stood around, looking at the crowds in the street. ‘Can you believe they’ve done all this for us?’ he said. Then nostalgia rewrote history: ‘We left behind a lot of friends, didn’t we?’ he said.

‘Left a lot of folk behind, but gained fans around the world,’ I said. ‘We’ve got friends everywhere now.’ It was optimism, which made the reality seem rosier at the time.

Outside, Mother and Joseph basked in their deserved glory. Colleagues from ‘The Mill’ turned up and Mother’s friends from the street and Sears were there. Everyone seemed sincerely happy for us. At an official reception at the school, Gary’s mayor, Richard Hatcher, said we had put the city on the world map (which was probably also why they renamed the Palace Theater the Jackson 5 Theater) and he presented us with the ‘key to the city’. That was a huge honour for our family. We seemed to have the keys to the best things in life at this time, but there was something
earned
in the symbolic freedom that Gary offered; it officially recognised the struggle before the achievement.

The house still stands today, looking no different from the outside. It is occupied and still in the ownership of our parents. I’m not sure they will ever truly let go of our roots. In 1989, we came together as siblings – all nine of us – to release the song ‘2300 Jackson Street’. Those lyrics, which include Michael in the first verse, said more back then than I can convey without music now. It is the song of home and family, but Michael and I particularly liked the line that runs ‘My friends, I won’t forget your name, I’m still the same …’ And that was all Michael was ever really trying to say throughout his life.