You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (33 page)

MY MOVE WAS A BIG DEAL.
I took everything but the kitchen sink and enrolled the kids in a new school as Margaret and I set up home in Buckhead, Atlanta, in a nice colonial-style property in West Paces Ferry Road. I signed a year-long lease and spent the initial weeks ensuring the family was happy and settled into the community. We even took in a baseball game or two and adopted the Braves as our team.

Meanwhile, I placed calls with L.A. Reid and Babyface’s people to chase the album start date, but was told there had been a delay. Never one to sit around doing nothing, I made the most of the lull and started talking business with Stan Margulies, the producer of the TV mini-series
Roots
and
The Thorn Birds
(and later
The American Dream
, our family’s life story up to 1992). Stan told me that he had 17 hours’ footage from research he’d done on Tutankhamun and wanted Michael to play the pharaoh in a movie. He asked if it was something my brother would be interested in. ‘He’d jump at the chance,’ I told him. ‘Just give me a few days, let me put it to him and I’ll come back to you.’

I left a message for Michael with his office. I waited up in Atlanta until 3am for his call back. Nothing happened. I did this – leaving a message and waiting up – for the following few days, but there was still no response. I couldn’t understand why there was silence when the Michael I knew didn’t like wasting time when such an opportunity arose. But this was becoming the norm.

Before I knew it, three months had passed in Atlanta and nothing had happened on any front. Ninety days of nothing going on is a long time when you’re raring to go, revving on the spot. It was the slowest, most wasteful, most frustrating of times. Eventually someone at the record label called to give me the heads-up. They told me I wasn’t going to be happy about it, but they thought there was something I should know: L.A. Reid and Babyface were working in California with another artist. I was furious. No wonder they didn’t have the guts to pick up the phone and tell me themselves, I thought. ‘Who’s this other artist?’ I asked.

‘That’s the bit you’re not going to like,’ I was told.

‘Why? Who the **** is it?’

‘It’s your brother, Michael.’

I put the phone down and Margaret asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t tell her, because I couldn’t find the words. I was too busy fighting the forces of gravity as my head spun with questions.
Michael had shared my excitement about my project: why would he retain the very same producers? Why, when I was committed to LaFace Records, wouldn’t they have the courtesy to tell me? Why would everyone go behind my back, leaving me hanging in Atlanta?
Over the coming weeks, those questions festered unanswered. I heard nothing from the producers or my brother. Instead I embraced the teachings of the Qur’an, as I tried to become a better human being. I hung on to one particular
hadith
– a piece of wisdom from the Prophet Muhammad – and recited it in my head over and over: ‘The strong is not the one who overcomes the people by his strength, but the strong is the one who controls himself while in anger.’ As with all wisdom, though, it’s not about reciting it, it’s about living it.

I WAS CONTRACTED TO LAFACE RECORDS
and obligated to Arista for one more album, so I had no option but to wait for my producers and get used to the sour taste in my mouth. But when they were finally ready to start work, it turned out that they, too, were upset with Michael. I don’t know what studio set-up L.A. Reid and Babyface had expected with my brother, but I don’t think it included the prominence of his preferred audio engineer/ producer Bruce Swedien. He was integral to capturing and finessing Michael’s unique sound over the years and was viewed as indispensable to his production team. At Michael’s insistence he
always
sat behind the boards in the control room. Something about Michael’s reliance on Bruce didn’t go down well with L.A. Reid and Babyface. Nor did they appreciate the fact that Michael wasn’t going to continue with any of their songs. That, I think, was the real slap in the face. That much was obvious when, during a phone call, they shared a hook from a song they had already written for me called ‘Word To The Badd’. The hook that resonated – because of its implied selfishness – went like this:

The lyrics they had written in anger met with my still-brewing anger towards Michael. Not only that: all my pent-up energy to get into the studio combined internally with a deepening sense of injustice. It was a perfect emotional storm in which no one was thinking, just letting fly. If a studio session is an outlet for anything, it is for releasing unexpressed emotion. Music can be cathartic that way and I won’t have been the first artist to arrive at the mic with an intention to get it all out. In fact, it was typical of me to vent on my own instead of saying anything direct to Michael.

It’s one thing to write vocals, quite another to release them as a single. I guess it’s like keeping a diary: you let the emotion pour on to the page. You write it and in the moment, you believe it. But you’d never think of publishing those words. When I arrived at the studio to start work, I was presented with the finished song and L.A. Reid and Babyface had come up with one particular verse that went like this:

It was a clear dig at Michael, and I knew it. Those lyrics were consistent with a mistaken perception about him and I didn’t agree with them – but I did agree with the angry tone. I was mad. I embraced this secret retaliation. The moment that song sheet was in my hand, I was singing with an anger that therapists would have applauded, even if Michael’s fans would not. In my naïvety, I didn’t expect for a single second that those words would be heard outside the audience of two producers and one engineer because, in my mind, they were lyrics never intended for release. After I’d laid down my angry vocals – and felt much, much better for getting it off my chest – we recorded another version: the
intended
version of ‘Word To The Badd’, featuring T-Boz from TLC. It kept the same hook but ditched all of the innuendo towards Michael. I didn’t think about it again as we went on to cut the rest of the album – due for release in 1992 – which included my biggest hope: a high-energy song with an explosive beat that never lets up. It was called ‘You Said, You Said’.

I CAN’T REMEMBER WHERE I WAS
when the bomb dropped. I just remember a phone call asking if I’d heard the radio, and that was how I found out that the angry, boot-legged version of ‘Word To The Badd’ had been leaked.

Someone had found it irresistible, and it was receiving blanket air-play on a radio station in Los Angeles and its affiliate in New York. Some smart-ass DJ had a field-day swapping between the lyrics ‘you changed your shade/Was your colour wrong?’ and Michael’s soon-to-be-released single ‘Black Or White’. I was mortified: I was the man caught on some surveillance videotape holding the gun in a crime I hadn’t committed, yet the evidence was damning. Now my image was being flashed everywhere with the headline: ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS ASSASSIN?’ Guilty as sin. With a sense of shame to match.

My stupidity in trusting the catharsis of the studio, and leaving that version floating around, came back to haunt me and I was damned by the face-value evidence: Jermaine Jackson singing lyrics that attacked and ridiculed Michael Jackson. Crimes against loyalty apparently didn’t get any worse.

I got on the phone straightaway to Mr Gordy, the one person I knew who would be calm in a crisis.

His advice was as straightforward as I needed it to be. ‘Did you write it?’

‘No.’

‘But you sang it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you upset when you sang it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you have to take full responsibility, Jermaine. There’s nothing more I can say.’

I must have sat in my car for an hour after that call, berating myself, wanting to slam my head first against the dashboard and then through the windshield. I wanted to ring Michael instantly, but what was the point? I’d only leave a message that would go unreturned. Especially now. I wanted to tell the world that I hadn’t
done this and hope they believed my lie. Because the real me hadn’t done it, and that was the truth. But I had to own up and step up.

I owned up on CNN with Larry King. I tried to explain, find context and plead mitigating circumstances. I tried to explain it was a song I should never have sang, let alone recorded. But none of that public stuff mattered in the scheme of things. What mattered now was repairing the damage with Michael. Inevitably, he called Mother, wanting to know what the hell was going on, and he wanted to double-check that it was
really
me singing those lyrics. He couldn’t believe it. No one could. Everyone I cared about looked at me and asked, ‘
What
were you thinking?’ and I had no answer. Anger never has made sense after the fact.

But Mother has always been one for brokering peace in the family and it was she who called a meeting at Hayvenhurst so that we could speak one-on-one. ‘Don’t listen to the media,’ she told Michael. ‘Don’t listen to your advisers. Listen to what Jermaine has to say and sort this out like brothers, like men.’

For the first time that I could remember we were going to confront an issue face to face. We were going to point to the biggest, fattest elephant that had ever taken refuge in one of our rooms and we were going to call it what it was.

I WAS UPSTAIRS AT HAYVENHURST WHEN
I heard Michael in the lobby and formal, ominously hushed voices – a sound you’d normally associate with a grim summit. I came down to find him, Mother and Joseph waiting for me in the library. He looked solemn as he took the sofa seat 90 degrees to my right, our knees almost touching. He had Mother at his side, and Joseph took the sofa directly opposite me, at the far end of the coffee-table. I cannot remember a time when we’d previously had a bust-up of any kind, not even as children. So the awkwardness between the two of us was alien. First, the distance. Now the discord.

At first, we avoided eye-contact. Michael looked down. I stared at Mother. Joseph looked like he wanted to bang our heads together,
but said nothing: a father intently watching his sons work something out on their own.

It was Mother who got things going, reminding us about love and how close we were; that it should never have come to this. I went first. Not with an apology, but with the undercurrents. It is a conversation that remains vivid. ‘We used to be close,’ I said, ‘but it’s been eight years … eight years, Michael. Eight years that we haven’t spent proper time together. I’m speaking for all of us, not just me.’ He looked at me. Now we had eye-contact. I continued: ‘In those eight years, everyone has said everything they can about this family as if they know us and know you, and we should have stuck together but you went off and –’

‘And for those eight years you thought I deserved that song?’ he interrupted. ‘
That
is hurtful, and I didn’t expect that … not from you, Jermaine.’

‘I didn’t write it.’

‘You sang it.’

‘I sang it when I was upset, but those lyrics don’t reflect how I feel about you and you know it,’ I said.

‘You put
your voice
to those lyrics,’ he said, forcing his point home.

I could see in his eyes how hurt he was, and it killed me, knowing that I was responsible. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ I said. My betrayal acknowledged, I tried to explain how I had reached out to him numerous times, leaving messages, and how frustrating that felt. ‘Like the King Tut movie idea you ignored …’

‘I don’t know anything about a King Tut movie,’ he said, looking genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t get any of those messages.’

‘Doesn’t that tell you
something
? That the people around you are not passing on messages from us!’ I said, feeling agitated all over again, renewing my suspicion that our messages were being filtered by his gatekeepers.

Michael promised to look into it.

‘But that still doesn’t excuse how much time you let pass during those eight years,’ I reminded him.
If we’re going to do this, let’s bring it all out
, I thought.

Michael went into a long-winded justification, saying it wasn’t deliberate, he was just busy. There had been a lot of travelling and touring, and recording and shooting videos. He went on and on with what I considered to be rationalising.

Eventually I had heard enough. ‘BUT, MICHAEL, WE’RE YOUR FAMILY! You’ve GOT to make time for family!’ I yelled, and in a fit of frustration, I slammed my fist on the coffee-table. The cups and saucers jumped on the silver tray and Michael almost leapt out of his skin. There was something so timid and fragile about him, so easily startled, that I felt bad for raising my voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you jump …’

Then he smiled. ‘Look at your face,’ he said, and then he started to laugh. ‘You’re so uptight!’ As kids, we’d laughed nervously in the most serious of situations and Michael’s chuckling, made me laugh now. With that, everyone relaxed. Everything that had seemed so serious now seemed silly and pointless, and we wrapped up the big talk by mutually accepting fault. We both stood, gave each other the biggest hug and said, ‘I love you,’ almost in unison.

From that day on, Michael turned up to more Family Days, even if he never again became regularly available to us, as he had been in the old days. The main thing was that we had cleared the air.

To this day, some of Michael’s fans hold ‘Word To The Badd’ against me in a way that he did not, but ultimately what mattered was forgiveness between brothers. As family, you don’t look at a dispute in the same way the public does – the issue was blown out of proportion on the outside, increasing the perception of us as a dysfunctional family. Sometimes it seemed that we weren’t allowed to argue, lest someone suggest we were a family ‘at war’. The truth was that our difficulties were no bigger or smaller than any other family’s, but they became magnified by my actions and Michael’s fame. Thankfully, we’ve always been able to put matters into perspective and move on. It takes a lot more than a few ill-considered lyrics to break the ties of kinship between us.