Mourning an Icon

Reference : http://www.time.com/time/specials/michael-jackson/article/0,31682,1907409_1907486_1907481,00.html


Mourning an Icon
A Little Boy Takes Charge of His Family's Band, Then Leaves It Far Behind
By David Von Drehle Saturday, Jun. 27, 2009

The story starts with talent. Not the sort of talent that wins the lead in the school musical, or even the sort that wins American Idol. This is vanishing-point talent, so far to the right of the bell curve that it needs its own sheet of graph paper. It's lonely way out there — but that part of the story comes later.
So here's Don Cornelius, creator of Soul Train, taking us back to the beginning. It's the mid-1960s. Cornelius is a Chicago disc jockey and announcer at WVON, a powerhouse of the black-music scene. And he finds himself at a show where five brothers from a Gary, Ind., family are coming onstage to perform some predictable covers of songs from established groups like the Temptations. Family acts have a checkered history, talentwise, so Cornelius is ready to be underwhelmed. (See pictures of the young Michael Jackson in his own backyard.)
And then this kid, maybe a second-grader, spins his way out of the pack of older boys and opens his mouth to sing. And the sheer weight of Michael Jackson's talent lands as unexpectedly as a cartoon safe dropping from a desert sky. "He's only 4 ft. tall," Cornelius recalls, "and you're looking at a small person who can do anything he wanted to do onstage — with his feet or his voice. To get to the level of people who can do that, you're talking about James Brown as a performer. You're talking about Aretha Franklin as a singer. Michael was like that as a kid. He did it all, within the framework of one package. Nobody else did that."
Michael Jackson wasn't one of those child stars who was driven to success by an overbearing parent, though his father Joseph Jackson was indeed overbearing to the point of violence. He wasn't a child star who briefly captured the passing fancy of Tiger Beat with a mixture of tenor and bangs. Even his fluffiest boyhood smash, "ABC," was far more sophisticated than the abundant bubblegum sugaring the Top 40 airwaves circa 1970. He wasn't boosted to stardom by the Jackson 5; the group just tried to hang on to his rocket. Jackson was a force of nature, an inevitability. All the rest is biography, what-ifs and consequences. (See the top 10 Michael Jackson moments.)
He was born on Aug. 29, 1958. His mother Katherine was a dedicated Jehovah's Witness with a sweet singing voice who endeavored to protect her large family from the widespread sin of the surrounding city. His father was a crane operator and decent guitar player. Together the parents fixed on the idea of a family singing group, which might keep the boys off the streets and — just maybe — give the family a ticket out of their dead end. As first conceived, the group didn't even include Michael. He was too young. But when he was about 3 years old, he started singing the stuff he heard his brothers rehearsing. Talent announced itself. From then on, he was the acknowledged star.
Joe Jackson drove his sons relentlessly. He ridiculed their shortcomings and punished them for their mistakes. He supervised daily practice sessions with a whip in his hand; he beat the kids with fists, hangers, a razor strop. None of it was necessary to motivate Michael, for the boy was a sponge when it came to developing his craft. He studied the singing of Jackie Wilson, Diana Ross, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder. At an age when most kids are learning the basics of do-re-mi, he was self-administering an advance course in the Godfather of Soul. "I think James Brown is a genius, you know. When he was with the Famous Flames — unbelievable," Jackson once told Oprah Winfrey. "I used to watch him on the television, and I used to get angry at the cameraman because whenever he would really start to dance, they would be on a closeup, so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout, 'Show him! Show him!' so I could watch and learn."
Joe booked his boys into Gary's dives and strip joints, where they earned token fees plus whatever the audience tossed onto the stage. Six-year-old Michael crawled along the floor scooping coins into his pockets until his pants sagged. The next step was the so-called chitlin' circuit of black nightclubs, and from there, the Jackson brothers made it to Harlem's Apollo Theater, where the group won an amateur-night competition in 1967. That same year, the Jacksons opened for Gladys Knight and the Pips, who were part of Berry Gordy's astonishing catalog of artists at Motown Records. Knight was so struck by the adorable prodigy that she urged the Motown boss to take a look.
See the top 10 Motown performances including the Jackson 5.
Watch TIME's video "Appreciating Michael Jackson, the Musician."

Joe and Katherine sensed time was running short. Like countless stage parents before them, they understood that the moment to launch a child star is well before the hormones hit. As a family friend once said, "Katherine knew the only way out of Gary was through Michael ... One day she turned to me and said, 'Michael is cute now, but he won't stay that way forever. Then what do we do? They've got to get a record contract now.' "
This urgency wasn't lost on Michael, who had a grown man's sense of commerce behind his big brown eyes and cherub cheeks. Impatient, Joe took his boys to record a single at tiny Steeltown Records in Gary. Ben Brown, the label's president, recalled that the youngster was unhappy at the subsequent photo session. "Michael said the setup looked like a family portrait," Brown once told an interviewer. "He said, 'Isn't this supposed to be business?' So he set up the group the way he thought it should be and took his pose at the front, and that's the picture we used. He had some savvy. He knew even from then." (See the top 10 Michael Jackson songs.)
Gordy finally agreed to see the Jacksons the following year, 1968. The Motown mogul listened with a poker face to an entire set. Inside, Gordy later said, he was thinking that Michael's superhuman dancing was too mature for his piping voice, and he would need a brand of music written just for him. "We could not believe this old man in this young kid's body," said Gordy. When the music stopped, he handed Joe a contract, the brothers bounced with joy, then stepped onto Motown's conveyor belt to stardom. And what was that like? Wall-to-wall work. The house songwriters started cranking out "soul-bubblegum," as Gordy called it. The arrangers and producers and sidemen pushed the boys in search of a Jackson 5 sound. There were endless hours with the Motown fashion crew, trying on wild clothes, and more hours with the hair stylists, and still more hours with Gordy's etiquette teachers. Inside the studio, there was a name for the group handling the Jacksons: "the Corporation."
After a year in the Corporation's factory, the Jackson 5 were a finished product, released to the public with a single called "I Want You Back." The brothers traded snippets over a percolating bass and percussion line, but it was Michael's song; he owned it from the moment he soared thrillingly on a glissando to plead "Ooooh, ba-by, give me one more chance." And with that, he was forever stamped on the world's sound track. The song hit No. 1 in January 1970. Their next recording, "ABC," reached No. 1 in April — bumping "Let It Be," by a group called the Beatles. "The Love You Save" topped the charts in June, followed by "I'll Be There" in October. Of all the great Motown acts, the Jackson 5 were the first to chart four No. 1 hits in a single year. Sometimes lost in the dazzle of their debut is the fact that with "I'll Be There," Michael Jackson gave birth to a classic ballad at the age of 12. Not even Judy Garland managed that.
The price of success, as it was for Garland and other prodigies, was a lost childhood. "There was a park across the street from the Motown studio, and I can remember looking at those kids playing games," Jackson wrote in his memoir, Moon Walk. "I'd just stare at them in wonder — I couldn't imagine such freedom, such a carefree life — and I wish more than anything I had that kind of freedom, that I could walk away and be just like them."
See pictures of Michael Jackson's live performances on LIFE.com.
Watch TIME's video "Vigil At Michael Jackson's Hollywood Star."

Michael Jackson's glorious decade began with a forgotten failure. Michael hadn't yet turned 20 when he got his first co-starring role in a big movie: The Wiz, a black version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a hit on Broadway. Jackson was cast as the Scarecrow, and he studied hard for the role, his impossible flexibility and cheerful demeanor making him an ideal companion to Diana Ross's Dorothy. But nothing in the project jelled. The Wiz was an expensive flop, with one important asterisk: Jackson struck up a friendship with the film's musical supervisor, Quincy Jones.
For nearly a quarter-century, Jones had been helping singers sound their best: Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. The Wiz was just a bump in Jones' yellow brick road, or perhaps a fortunate detour. Jackson, already ensconced at Epic Records, asked Jones to produce his next album. It would be a great career move for both men. Off the Wall, their first collaboration and Jackson's fifth studio album, was the one that shaped MJ's style, spawned some hits and sped him toward superstardom. (See the top 10 Michael Jackson moments.)
The new assurance was evident from the album's first single, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." With a disco beat indebted to the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever and a lyric that was suggestive enough to reportedly incur the disapproval of Michael's mother Katherine, the song went to No. 1 on the U.S. charts. Jackson's voice hadn't changed, but he amped up the level of urgency and authority and tried out the first of the grunts and squeals that would become a vocal trademark. That was surely thanks to Jones; you can almost hear him pushing Jackson to stand tall and sing what he feels, even if words can't possibly express it. "Everybody sang high in Motown, even Stevie [Wonder]," says Jones. "I wanted to feel the full range of his voice, and I wanted him to deal with more mature kinds of themes. That's why 'She's out of My Life,' a song that Tommy Baylor wrote about the very bad ending of a marriage, that I was saving for Sinatra, I did with Michael. Because Michael I don't think had ever dealt with an emotion that deep in just a regular normal romance. And he cried on every take. Every take we did, he cried. I left the tears on the record because it was real." Off the Wall launched four singles into the Billboard Top 10 and eventually sold 20 million copies. That made it a giant of its day; it would be a midget next to the album that followed.
Even in his 20s, Jackson's ambition was as hard as his voice was soft. Privately he never hid his desire to become the biggest force in entertainment, and when he and Jones regrouped to begin work on Thriller in 1982, Jackson had every intention of making a career-defining colossus. The amazing thing is that he made such a lovable one.
Jackson and Jones sifted through more than 700 songs by the best professional songwriters in a quest to find nine perfect tracks. "We turned that album upside down," says Jones, and arguments over material were common. Jackson loved the iconic bass line for "Billie Jean"; Jones did not — score one for Jackson. But gradually the two felt confident that they had a record that was all hits and no filler, something the entire world would love — and purchase.

Put Thriller on right now and you'll be amazed at how easily the troubling last years of Jackson's life melt away. For Generation X the magic is partly nostalgic; everyone between the ages of 35 and 45 remembers exactly where they were when they heard "Beat It" for the first time. But as a piece of music, it remains the greatest pop album of all time. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" is the closest thing Jackson has to an overlooked song; not only does it open the album and set a frenetic pace, it also lays out Jackson's ambitious musical agenda — from the disco beat to the rock timbre of the vocals to the closing refrain of "Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa," cribbed from a hit by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango. Thumping and fraught, "Billie Jean" is a sound track to a late-night walk through a sketchy neighborhood. It actually makes Michael Jackson sound dangerous, which is no small feat. Jackson never got much credit for being a pioneer, but "Beat It," his melding of rock and R&B, preceded the collision of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith by four years. Besides featuring a guitar solo provided free of charge by Eddie Van Halen (in a move his accountant no doubt regrets), it's the best example of Jackson's ability to bridge moods and genres. It's tense and spooky. It rocks you while you dance to it. Like all of Thriller, it's a sophisticated joy. (See the 100 best albums of all time.)
On its way to becoming the best-selling album of all time (until it was eclipsed in 2000 by The Eagles Greatest Hits, 1971-1975), seven of Thriller's songs cracked the Top 10, and the record was immovable atop the Billboard chart for 37 straight consciousness-altering weeks. Consciousness-altering because Jackson was not just dominating the sound waves — he owned the world's airwaves too. After The Wiz, Jackson never had a major role in a Hollywood film. Didn't matter; in a way, he was too special a performer, too big a star, to be part of a director's vision. TV would be his multiplex, MTV his studio, in the minimovies that defined the genre. Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola, who tried to shepherd Jackson through the later, difficult years, is hardly exaggerating when he says, "There was nobody before Michael Jackson, and there will never be anybody after Michael Jackson, that can do for video what he did. It put the MTV culture into the forefront ... He totally defined the video age." In fact, it was Jackson's video that in effect forced the integration of MTV; until "Billie Jean," MTV was mostly lily-white and content to be so.
"Billie Jean," the first video off Thriller, snapped the neck of everyone who saw it. Based on an absurd real-life incident in which a woman accused Jackson of fathering one of her twins ("She says I am the one/ But the kid is not my son"), the song is a denial of paternity — a celebrity's cry of victimhood. But the video is a straight-on display of Jackson's star quality. Any pavement flagstone his feet land on glows a magical green. His moves are no less radiant. The spins, the strutting and hunching, show what Broadway missed out on when Michael decided to make pop music instead.
From "Billie Jean" to "Beat It" (both songs written by Jackson) was another leap forward, and up, with some dexterous star spins in every other direction. Jackson's first video connection to contemporary urban street life, it argues that, between fleeing and fighting, it's better to flee — dancing. The Michael character hears a rumble, dons his red jacket (the must-have fashion piece of 1984) and breaks up the battle by leading the gang members in a routine out of West Side Story but with starker, more staccato moves. A worldwide video as well as audio smash, "Beat It" helped send the MTV logo and format around the globe. For the next decade, if a performer wanted to promote a song, he or she had to make a minimovie to go with it.
See TIME's video tribute to Jackson's 50th birthday.
See the top 10 Michael Jackson songs.