You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (28 page)

During the eighties, we both separately collaborated with this great man and neither of us could get over how many keyboards he had, sent by every supplier in Japan and stacked like folded sun-loungers in one corner.

When the music began, Stevie was like a kid in a candy shop, darting from keyboard to different instrument and back again, ‘seeing’ its brush strokes, humming its sound with his earphones on, head back, swaying in his seat. When he threw back his head
and laughed, you knew he’d nailed a particular sound – and you knew what it meant to him. If my post-Jackson 5 years at Motown were memorable for one thing, it was for the times I got to work with Stevie on ‘You Were Supposed To Keep Your Love For Me’, ‘Where Are You Now’ and ‘My Cherie Amour’.

I’ll never forget the night I went to his Hollywood apartment to start collaborating on ‘Let’s Get Serious’. We were supposed to leave for a studio in Irvine at 8pm but I arrived to find a lot of Asian folk showing him the latest and greatest keyboards.
Why are you wasting your time on this when we’d arranged to be somewhere?
I thought, irritated. By the time Stevie had stopped messing around, it must have been 10 o’clock and not far from midnight when we arrived in Irvine. I was tired, ready to crank it out, and I couldn’t see a mic on a stand. That was when Stevie pointed to the wall and this flat-mounted plate. ‘That’s the mic? Are you kidding me? I’ve got to sing with my nose two inches from the wall?’ I said. Apparently, this ECM-type mic picked up sound better.

‘Before we start, you want a game of air hockey?’ he said. Had he been able to see my face, it would have told him everything. ‘You’ve only got a blind man to beat,’ he told me. I hesitated. ‘Then we’ll get to work,’ he added.

I took the bait. He was right: it would be no contest. But, of course, I’d walked right into it. He kicked my ass not just in one game but in the second, third and fourth that I insisted we play until I beat him – and never did. Stevie Wonder is not just good at hide and seek, he’s a demon at air hockey, too. In victory, he was standing opposite me with both hands on the table and rocking from side to side, head rolling, with that trademark grin on his face.

It was now about 1.30am, and I saw red mist. In a fit of pique, and feeling pissed that I’d been messed about and then beaten at air hockey, I lifted up the table and let it smash back down on its legs. ‘Oh, man,’ said Stevie, ‘you’re fired up – you want to sing now?’

And that was how we came to record ‘Let’s Get Serious’ – because the best producers know exactly how to bring out the best in their artists.

MICHAEL’S COLLABORATION WITH HIMSELF WAS POETIC
and unique. To imagine his music-making process is to peel back his hit songs to their rawest form: captured on his tape recorder from his mouth. Nearly all the songs you’ve ever heard that were written and created by my brother were first arranged in full in his head. No sitting at a piano or a keyboard and seeing what came to him; no experiments with technology: his inspiration arrived at any time. If he was in a meeting or a restaurant and you suddenly saw him grabbing a sheet of paper or a napkin to write on, you knew something was forming in his head to be captured on tape at the soonest moment. For example, ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ came to him one morning when he was in bed. He grabbed his tape recorder and laid it down there and then. These flashes of inspiration were ‘God’s work,’ he said. He would grab his tape recorder and, like the most skilled beat-boxer, he used his mouth as an instrument to create the beat and then imitated each part: the drums, the bass, the horns, the strings and so on. He did this until the structure and feeling of the song were just as he wanted them.

Once in the studio, he’d find the instrument he’d first imagined, then play his recording to get the song from his head into everyone else’s heads. As he sang it on tape, they played it – and it had to match
exactly
what he’d first envisaged. In effect, Michael was channelling an orchestra and this sonic blueprint from head to musical imitation was just as impressive to hear as one of his finished songs. He also had the knack of running through a tune once and knowing how to sing it. I don’t think he ever struggled for the right sound – or words: when he surrendered to inspiration, everything fell into place. For him, music was an endless source of material from within; a constant stream that he just had to step into and take from.

Then came the writing, and whenever Michael sat down with his pad and pencil, he was always looking at how the video was going to be at the same time. He wrote visually – finding the image or scene in his head, then applying the words. He loved what he did because he felt it was such a magical, spiritual process. As he said, around this time in 1983, ‘I just love to create magic. I love to put something together that’s so unusual, so unexpected, that it blows people’s heads off.’

Which was exactly what I was thinking when I called him in the Fall of that year to invite him to do a duet.

I DON’T KNOW THAT I HAD
completely given up on sharing a studio again with Michael, but I’d reached the point of thinking it highly improbable. Especially after his career-defining
Thriller
album. But sometimes it takes just one thought and phone call to change everything. ‘Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming’ was written for my début album with Arista,
Jermaine Jackson
, and my co-writers Michael Omartian and Bruce Sudan – Donna Summers’ husband – helped create a slamming track. The moment I started humming the melody, I knew exactly whose voice was needed for this duet. ‘I have a new song … and it’s perfect for me and you,’ I told Michael on the phone.

He had no problem coming to the studio, even if he hadn’t properly understood what was required. ‘Am I singing on this? Or doing backgrounds?’ he asked. I don’t know many ‘superstars’ who’d ask such a question
after
showing up. I had ensured that no one was there but me, him and an engineer to push the buttons. After
Thriller
, the last thing he needed was a bunch of eyes staring at him, so the fewer people the better.

The moment we got to work and he heard the instrumental, he was dancing. ‘I love this … I love the sound of this,’ he said, holding the earphones to his head with both hands. What struck me most about that recording session was how well we knew our way around the studio and console. The last time we’d recorded together, in 1975, we were surrounded by a team, being told what to do. Now, there we were, as fully-fledged producers. Just the two
of us. We talked about those good old days and how green we were, and we joked and laughed about memories, almost forgetting that we were there to record. But there was that clock again, reminding us that we only had one afternoon to get this done.

I laid down my verse and he produced me, then vice versa. After that we traded ad-libs, singing into our individual mics, across the floor from one another. ‘I think this has got No. 1 written all over it,’ I said.

‘You think it’s going to outsell “Thriller”?’ he teased. ‘What if it does, Jermaine? What if it does?’

‘Maybe I should write it on my mirror.’ Michael liked that. ‘The sales don’t matter,’ I added. ‘I’m just happy that you’re singing this with me.’

That’s why that record remains special: because it was a personal collaboration between Michael and me. Ultimately, the song was never released as a single in its own deserved right. There was a big conference call between our labels that we both listened in on. Sony didn’t want him on a song that would, they said, conflict with his own new releases. I think Michael wanted to help a brother. I think Sony was never going to lift a finger to help Arista with a song featuring its artist. When you’re tied up in recording contracts, brothers helping brothers is not an argument. Not that the wily Clive Davis was going to be outdone and I always knew he’d find a way of getting it out there. ‘Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming’ became the poor-relation B-side to my later hit ‘Do What You Do’ because, that way, it didn’t classify as an official release.

I lived with the setback because the amount of air play that song received confirmed my instinct: it was a deserved No. 1 in everything but name. Anyway, there was increasing talk in the family of doing a reunion tour as brothers. First, the studio. Then, maybe, the stage. It sounded too good to be true.

PAUL MCCARTNEY WAS AN ARTIST WITH
whom Michael had always wanted to collaborate and 1983 saw them create ‘The Girl Is Mine’ for the
Thriller
album and ‘Say, Say, Say’ for Paul’s
Pipes of
Peace
. But two significant things happened behind the music. First, when Michael was in London with Paul and Linda McCartney, one topic of discussion was the lucrative business of music publishing. Paul showed off a booklet from MPL Music Publishing, detailing a catalogue of songs he owned, including Buddy Holly’s hit-list. Music publishing is the smart end of the industry: while you can be an artist with a timeless hit it’s the person who owns the rights to the song who makes the money each time it’s played, covered or performed live. The more prestigious the song catalogue, the more money you make. I can see my brother now, soaking up another lesson from another great artist he admired and quietly telling himself that he, too, must follow suit. One day.

After London, Paul came to California to shoot the ‘Say, Say, Say’ video in which the storyline was about a pair of vaudeville con-artists rolling through different towns with their horse and cart – Michael built in a cameo role for La Toya. The location was a ranch at Los Olivos in the Santa Ynez Valley, about two hours’ north of Los Angeles. It was isolated and idyllic – a world away from Encino, LA’s smog and the fame that surrounded him. If he longed for anything, it was for a sense of freedom and the ability to breathe. Ever since he’d spent time at my old ranch in Hidden Valley, he had dreamed of owning one. I don’t know if Michael knew it then, but the ‘Say, Say, Say’ video brought the idea of ‘home’ to Sycamore Valley Ranch – the very place he would purchase five years later and name ‘Neverland’.

IF THERE IS ONE YEAR THAT
stands out like a trophy across the decades, it is 1984. It was the greatest of years and, looking back, there was a distinct theme of victory, milestone and record-breaking running right through it. Our family friend Jesse Jackson became the first major black presidential candidate in US history. My NFL buddy Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears broke Jim Brown’s career record of 12,312 yards gained with a ball (and gave me one of his cracked helmets). And America’s newest athletics hero, Carl Lewis, equalled Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in LA.

It was also the year in which American Bruce Chandliss became the first astronaut to float free in space with his self-controlled backpack and the Statue of Liberty had her torch removed for the first time in 100 years so the flame could be repaired.
Ghostbusters
set the box office alight, making $212 million in its first six months. It was also fitting that this was the year Michael collected his record haul of Grammys and was awarded the 1,793rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

And then there was the ‘Victory Tour’. This was our monster reunion. Six brothers back together for our most ambitious concert as a group. It would represent the pinnacle of our collective dream because we set a new record for the most consecutive stadiums sold out back-to-back in a summer that saw Bruce Springsteen and Prince also touring. It is a record that still stands today. I’m not embarrassed to boast about it because I have a lot of pride where that tour is concerned and
nothing
about that achievement came easy.

Onstage and in the dressing room, everything clicked as before. Offstage and in the meeting rooms, the whole set-up was fraught with politics and tension, proving that when outside ‘advisers’ enter a family equation, the whole dynamic changes. Like acid dropped into still water. But no matter how rocky the road, it was like any victory: it doesn’t matter how many times you’re down in the game, it’s the end result that matters. It’s about perseverance. And with all the blood, sweat and tears that went into the tour and its accompanying album,
Victory
, it was the hardest-earned triumph I can remember.

THE VICTORY TOUR WAS ANOTHER IDEA
that had to be sold to Michael before he agreed. And, as with Motown 25, his change of heart walked him into another page of
The Guinness Book of Records
. It also led to reports that we, as brothers, ‘pressured’ or ‘coaxed’ him into taking part. This was the start of a mistaken and enduring belief that we were only interested in coat-tailing Michael’s fame for profit, as if he were an overnight sensation and we had just woken up to his talent, as opposed to having grown up alongside it.

I didn’t see the barren financial landscape that some have attempted to paint as our motive for touring. My début album with Arista was set to release singles like ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Do What You Do’; I was excited about my collaboration with Whitney Houston, and a duet with Pia Zadora, singing ‘When The Rain Begins To Fall’ (No. 1 in four European countries). But this would become a
recurring theme for the family: a showdown of fact versus perception – and fact would always be the underdog.

Unlike Epic and then Sony, we never viewed Michael as a robotic money-making machine. We viewed him as a brother with whom we wanted to share more glory. Our passion to perform with him never changed en route from our bunk beds to Hollywood. That desire between brothers was always consistent, pre-fame, post-fame. But somewhere in the transition between Jackson-mania and ‘Michael Jackson mania’, sacks of fanmail morphed into printed pages of lies and fiction. We read accounts of constant feuding, rampant jealousy and how the brothers ‘refused to talk to each other on their way to the stadiums’. I guess this was another side of Michael’s new-found fame: that for every public hero, the rules of myth demand villains, too.

Michael didn’t help the confusion over the back-story to ‘Victory’. In an interview we did for
Ebony
magazine, he said, ‘I didn’t say that I didn’t want to tour. I’m doing it for the joy of touring and the family as a whole …’ Four years later, in his autobiography, he said, ‘I didn’t want to go on the Victory tour and I fought against it …’ Both accounts represent the truth at different times and accurately illustrate his indecision about taking part, but the expression ‘stage addict’ best sums up why he finally agreed to take part. As much as he had vowed to take a break from touring in 1981, he was like any other performer whose intimate relationship with the stage began as a child: he couldn’t resist it.

In fact, in the end, he insisted on the tour. He spent hours drawing up storyboards for its stage design and concept. He became
the
self-designated stage designer and, as a result, everything the tour needed it got. Including two giant spiders he sketched for either side of the stage – costing $250,000 each – plus stage hydraulics, advanced lighting and full-on pyrotechnics. Before we knew it, he had presented his vision, complete with costume designs, to tour co-ordinator Larry Larson.
That
’s the truth of how hands-on keen he was. He had always been passionate about touring. That is why we never felt awkward about
approaching him with a new idea because creative ideas had filled our childhood, and we knew his heart was tied to that shared past, too, as seen inside his private picture gallery. What he loathed were the politics, the legal posturing and the tension between our individual attorneys and promoters. That was what ground him down, and it was present from the moment Joseph first mentioned the tour.

OUR FATHER WAS NEVER GOING TO
accept being sidelined and the thrill of Motown 25, combined with the success of the
Thriller
album, had got him thinking on the same grand scale as his daydreams in Gary had. In partnership with Mother, he was the architect of ‘Victory’ and, for all the doubts the brothers had shared about his managerial capabilities, it was no small feat to plan a national tour. I think Joseph felt he had a point to prove. His early proposal had La Toya and Janet in the line-up, which was when Michael first balked, no doubt flashing back to Vegas vaudeville and worrying about what our father’s vision might be, but Jackie was the most vociferous, insisting it should be brothers only. Then Michael reconsidered his opposition.

I always suspected his camp told him the tour was a bad idea – that it would get in the way of his solo focus; that it was a backward step – just as it had with Motown 25. After
Thriller
, we, Michael’s family, saw his people ring-fencing him as an artist and digging a moat around him to keep us out; over time, the moat would grow deeper and wider. Entourages keen on building empires don’t necessarily promote family values in Hollywood, as we would learn. As always, when conflicted, Michael turned to Mother, explaining that he’d planned to spend 1984 working on movie ideas. ‘I think it’s important to grow,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve been doing this [touring] for so long I sometimes feel like I should be 70 now.’

If anyone knew that he was wrestling with advice he’d received and his sense of family, it was Mother. ‘Just think about it,’ she said, giving him space.

Days later, he warmed to the idea on his own. He was aware that CBS Records was not honouring contracted release dates for the other brothers as the Jacksons. I think that made him feel that his success had left his old group hanging. It is a blocking tactic used in the music industry: put the other group members on the shelf and, if they try to leave, wave the contract and say, ‘Can’t go anywhere – you owe us albums.’ Michael knew that a tour would trigger a new album, and help out his brothers, so he agreed to take part. If anything, his decision spoke of his selflessness. But in the back of his mind, he always wanted it to be his last tour with us – even if we didn’t. He proposed a tour name: ‘The Final Curtain’.

You can imagine how that went down. It sounded so negative, signalling the point of no return. For us, the tour represented the summit of everything we’d built as kids. It was, therefore, a conquering moment. That was why we wanted, and eventually agreed on, ‘Victory’. As Michael set to work on the stage design, everyone was committed to making this an event that was ‘out of this world’. As he and Marlon both joked later, ‘The mothership [the group] was calling.’

THE MOMENT WE ALL SAT AROUND
the table at the first meeting to discuss the tour, I noticed one jarring difference between past and present. Instead of being one unit behind Joseph, we now arrived as individual players with different legal representatives. Michael had his attorney and manager, I had mine, and the four other brothers had a manager and attorney they shared. As Mother astutely observed, ‘You all brought too many chefs into the kitchen without first agreeing as brothers.’ The reality of this set-up was that, in the event of a difference of opinion, Jackie, Tito, Marlon and Randy had the casting vote as a block of four. Their attorney could – and would – say that he spoke for four brothers, not one: the power of veto. In theory, Michael and I were powerless on any issue – and we knew attorneys didn’t get rich by brokering peace. With lawyers involved, the odds on harmony didn’t look good from the start.

And there was Michael’s incredible success.
Time
magazine called him ‘the hottest phenomenon since Elvis Presley’ and yet there he sat around a table – the now eight-Grammy-award winner – holding a ‘vote’ that carried least sway. The tone for the way ahead was set when the team behind the four brothers felt it had found the right promoter. A man named Cecil Holmes stepped up and presented a cheque for $250,000 as an upfront fee. It wasn’t enough to split individually, and only just covered one of the giant spiders Michael had envisaged.

Joseph ripped up the cheque in front of us all and threw it at the man’s feet. ‘Are you kidding me? We’re not going to be undersold like this!’ he said. Michael liked this new attitude. In the old days, Joseph might have taken it.

Soon afterwards, our father announced that he’d found the right man to stage the tour: boxing promoter Don King – a flamboyant man with wild, upstanding hair, white limousines, gold chains and mink coats. But his image preceded him and made everyone doubt him. If he was serious, they said, tell him to put his money where Joseph’s mouth was. Within a day or two, Don turned up and wrote each one of us a cheque for $500,000. ‘Because you boys need to know I’m serious about making this happen,’ he said.

We signed contracts that week. The media had a field day with this appointment, because it wondered what Don – famous as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard’s promoter – could possibly know about putting on a Jacksons concert. But a promoter is a promoter: someone who should be able to hype a boxing match or a concert as the biggest and best event of the year – and Don King could. Many in the music industry turned up their noses at his involvement, and that was the grapevine the media tapped into. But the claim that we thought him ‘too ostentatious’ and not someone we wanted was inaccurate. At the start anyway. If there had been initial doubts, our friendship with Ali convinced us that Don was a good man. Now, what Michael’s associates told journalists might have been a different story.

Don didn’t win awards for tact and diplomacy, and his giant ego was the reason he was a promoter. He was brash but effective. Had you seen him – the loudest mouth – and Michael – the quietest soul – interacting, you might have thought, There’s the kid with the embarrassing uncle he can’t help but find funny. I’ll never forget being in a meeting when we were discussing something about the show’s direction and Michael was talking about how he wanted to pay back the fans and keep pushing higher.

‘Michael!’ said Don, cutting dead the monologue. ‘Remember this. It don’t matter whether you’re a rich nigger, a poor nigger or just a nigger. No matter how big you get, this industry’s still gonna treat you like a nigger.’ In other words, and in his opinion, you’ll always be a servant to the music industry, so don’t ever think of becoming more powerful than that. Everyone in the room froze. If the music industry blew smoke up everyone’s ass, Don blew in an icy blast of straight talk.

It was Michael who was the first to laugh, cracking the suspended silence. He found it funny, in a shocking way, and wasn’t offended. None of us was. A black man had been addressing black men, and that kind of talk was hardly foreign to someone from Gary, Indiana. Don always came out punching because he had sensed, as had I, a lot of corporate envy about the fact that he’d brought in the big money and was pulling off the biggest-ever tour with Michael Jackson attached to it. If that didn’t make the phalanx of record-label executives, entertainment attorneys and cynical journalists look like chumps, I don’t know what did. But as Mother observed about the politics and dirty tricks that would soon follow, ‘We always knew there was a mood that certain people would do everything they could to stop the tour for as long as Don was involved. That’s why I could never be in a business like this – it’s dog-eat-dog.’

MICHAEL DIDN’T DRINK PEPSI BECAUSE HE
didn’t like it. Which was a potential problem when Joseph and Don lined up a $5 million Pepsi sponsorship deal, together with two television
commercials that would rewrite ‘Billie Jean’ and use it as a jingle. When it was explained to Michael that he didn’t need to drink Pepsi or be filmed drinking it, he was happier to compromise. During the tour, there was a funny moment which would have given Pepsi executives a heart attack had they witnessed it. Michael was in his dressing room one day when he decided to grind a can into a plate of food, poured Pepsi over all over it like gravy, and then posed for a photo: a close-up of his sequined glove presenting his ‘dish’. If ever there was an image that summed up both his devilish humour and the difference between brand Michael and the real Michael, that might have been it.

We got down to the serious business of filming the two Pepsi commercials in January 1984. The first was at a Hollywood lot in a ‘New York street’, where we free-styled with kids representing ‘the new Pepsi generation’. The second was at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, where we performed ‘a concert’ in front of screaming fans holding Pepsi cups. On this second shoot, with our favourite music video director Bob Giraldi, the planned sequence was for the brothers to play Michael in as he made a grand entrance, standing atop a lit stairway as an explosion of magnesium flash bombs showered him with sparks.