Before You Judge Me

by Tavis Smiley

  At the end of the seventies, pop music was dominated by disco, a phenomenon that Michael embraced when he wrote and produced songs like “Blame It on the Boogie” and “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” for the Jacksons. When he encountered Quincy in 1977 while making his film debut as the dancing scarecrow in The Wiz, Michael decided that Jones, with his eclectic background in jazz, pop, and soul, was a master musician under whom he should work. Like Michael, Quincy was committed to a marriage of art and commerce. He wanted to make great music, but music that sold. Neither harbored any doubts about staying true to the demands of dance music. Dance music, after all, had been Michael’s calling card since the first three number one Jackson 5 records—“I Want You Back,” “ABC,” and “The Love You Save”—were designed for the dance floor. The boy band was shaped both sonically and sartorially under the heavy influence of Sly and the Family Stone, the best and most boldly revolutionary dance band to emerge in the late sixties. Sly was seen as the greatest groovemeister since James Brown.

  Brown was Michael’s first and mightiest musical master. In 1963, young Michael had already committed to memory Brown’s Live at the Apollo. From watching James Brown on television, Michael had also learned the slickest of his dance moves.

  “The little squirt did James Brown better than JB himself,” recalled Bobby Taylor, leader of the Vancouvers, a Motown soul band that included Tommy Chong, later of Cheech and Chong, on guitar. Taylor, a superb singer himself, discovered the Jackson 5 in 1968, when they played the Regal Theater in Chicago.

  Michael “broke out in a ‘Cold Sweat,’” said Bobby. “He sang ‘I Got the Feelin’” with feelings you can’t fake. He tore up the stage like JB’s long lost love child—the spins, the mic action, the fall-on-your-knees-and-beg-for-it moves. His voice grabbed me by the throat and said, ‘Take me to your heart. Take me to your leader.’ So right after the show, I did just that. I jumped up and told his dad, ‘Joe, we’re off to Detroit.’”

  A few months later, the Jackson 5 was produced by Taylor, who had brought them to Detroit, where Berry Gordy signed them.

  “I saw the J5 as a straight-up soul group,” said Taylor. “That’s what I knew and loved—and that’s what they knew and loved. Mike went to bed with James Brown and Jackie Wilson records under his pillow. The rest of the brothers idolized Smokey and Marvin. Like their old man, the kids were products of the great tradition. It was in my blood—and theirs—to cherish that tradition while taking it to the next level. It was my job to feed Mike’s soul.”

  But Taylor’s initial Jackson 5 productions, while vocal gems, were seen by Gordy as soul-centric and thus commercially limited.

  “When we promoted our acts in the sixties, we explicitly avoided the word ‘soul,’” said Michael Roshkind, one of Gordy’s closest lieutenants. “We wanted pop. Pop was the crossover dream, the golden goose. You’ll notice how decades later, when Michael hit his stride around the world, he didn’t name himself King of Soul. He crowned himself King of Pop. He got that pop fixation from Berry.”

  “One night Bobby had Michael in the studio singing Clyde McPhatter’s ‘Money Honey’ when Berry walked in,” remembered Motown producer Hal Davis. “Berry told Bobby he was making a mistake by restricting them to R & B. Berry wanted pop songs. In his spitfire manner, Bobby gave Berry the finger. Then Berry gave Bobby the boot.”

  By moving the boys from Detroit to Los Angeles, where he had relocated, Gordy took over their career. He joined the Corporation, a songwriters’ collective led by Deke Richards, who composed the initial string of Jackson 5 hits that captured the irresistible funk of Sly’s polypercussive playfulness and established the group as a pop act.

  In studying James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, young Michael Jackson realized the critical importance of rhythm guitar. That’s why, at the end of the seventies, a decade after he had been signed to Motown and poised to make his first solo record for CBS/Epic, Michael was delighted to discover in David Williams a guitarist whose seamless grooves inspired not only his dance moves but his singing as well.

  David became a steady presence in Michael’s musical life. In Off the Wall, he embellished “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” “Rock with You,” “Working Day and Night,” and the title tune. Three years later, in 1982, he contributed mightily to the feel of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ , ” “Baby Be Mine,” and “Thriller.” Most famously, it was David’s guitar solo that electrified “Billie Jean.” He also played all over Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory. He was Michael’s go-to rhythm guitarist on each of his world tours, from Victory in 1984 to HIStory in 1996.

  In his London hotel in early March of 2009, Michael is devastated by the news of David Williams’s death. A remarkably nuanced musician himself, Michael is aware of the significance of subtlety in the structure of song and the design of dance. Michael will miss David’s singular touch, especially during these upcoming This Is It shows.

  Death—unwelcomed and unexpected death—robs Michael of his peace of mind. He goes to the bedrooms of his children and sees that they are sleeping peacefully. But he cannot sleep, not while his mind is assaulted by thoughts of loss.

  3

  Stranger in Moscow

  On March 8, during the long plane ride from London to Los Angeles, while his children read books and play video games, Michael sits back and listens with headphones to a song he wrote sixteen years earlier. It’s a brooding meditation on loneliness in which he sees himself walking the streets of Moscow, wandering in the rain, feeling somewhat insane, and contemplating his fall from grace. Fame, he feels, has abandoned him. He fears what he calls an “Armageddon of the brain.”

  Although “Stranger in Moscow” is a sad song—you might even call it a dirge—its slow, steady rhythms comfort Michael as the private jet wings its way over the vast and brooding Atlantic Ocean. Writing the song while in Russia in 1993, during the Dangerous tour, he felt his world collapsing around him. Although not a formal blues, the song embraces the blues aesthetic so close to Michael’s musical heart.

  “Michael will never lose the quality that separates the merely sentimental from the truly heartfelt,” Marvin Gaye once said. “It’s rooted in the blues, and no matter what genre Michael is singing, the boy’s got the blues.”

  “I taught Michael that the best way to rid yourself of those down and dirty blues is to get hold of a down and dirty song and sing the hell out of it,” said Bobby Taylor. “So I gave him Ray Charles’s ‘A Fool for You,’ one of Ray’s downest and dirtiest. Mind you, Michael recorded it when he was eleven years old. Yet he nailed it. That’s because when he was a kid he was really a grown man with grown-up feelings, and when he grew up and became a man he was really a kid with kid-like feelings.”

  Now, with the long flight in front of him, Michael is feeling unusually calm, as though listening to his own lament to loneliness—a song written in the depths of despair—clarifies his current, improved condition. He was a stranger in Moscow during a time—September of l993—when the child molestation charges brought against him were still pending. He felt isolated and vulnerable. A month later, in a nursing home in Phoenix, his grandfather Samuel Jackson died. Michael was obsessed with loss and filled with fears. He was also heavily sedated.

  On November 12, 1993, he decided he could take no more and reached out for help. He canceled the rest of the Dangerous tour. Accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky, whom the actress had met at the Betty Ford Center and married at Neverland two years earlier, Michael flew from Mexico City to London, where, after conferring with Elton John, the artist took his recommendation and checked into the Charter Nightingale Clinic.

  The next day Pepsi ended its decadelong relationship with Michael.

  On November 16, 1993, the New York Times reported on a press conference at which Michael’s lawyer announced that Michael was in intensive treatment for his addiction to “very, very heavy-duty” prescription painkillers. The attorney further explained that Michael b
egan taking the sedatives after being burned during the making of a Pepsi commercial in 1984.

  Back at home five weeks later, Michael released Live from Neverland Valley, a televised explanation. With focused determination, he spoke about his recent treatment for drug dependency. He repeated the backstory: “This medicine was initially prescribed to soothe the excruciating pain that I was suffering after recent reconstructive surgery on my scalp.” He called the charges against him “disgusting” and “totally false” and complained about the “dehumanizing and humiliating examination” made by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department. He concluded by recounting his long history of trying “to help thousands upon thousands of children to live happy lives” and quoted Jesus: “‘Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of heaven.’ In no way do I think that I am God, but I do try to be God-like in my heart.”

  Five weeks after this statement, the case against him was settled out of court.

  Four months later, he married Lisa Marie Presley.

  Now, in March of 2009, Michael is flying home from London, just as he flew home from London after his rehab stay in 1993. As the chorus of “Stranger in Moscow” drowns out the drone of the jet engines, he reflects upon the difference between the present and the past. In 1994, his back was to the wall. Pundits said he was through. They said he’d never come back. But he did. He worked through the depression depicted so poignantly in “Stranger in Moscow.” In that song, he wrote of the danger he faced and the loneliness he felt. “We’re talkin’ danger, baby,” he cried. “I’m livin’ lonely, baby!”

  Yet he emerged from the emotional morass and found the strength to start a new project, HIStory, on which “Stranger in Moscow” is the signature song. HIStory became his most autobiographical and introspective work to date. His mind-set was clear: He would not crack up. He would not break down. He would not only face the music—the ongoing assumptions about his aberrant behavior—but make startling new music into which he would infuse all his bravado, anger, fears, and faith. He would turn confusion into art.

  “Scream” was the leadoff single from the album, a duet with sister Janet and the first song Michael released in the wake of the allegations against him. Written with Janet and Janet’s producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the song was Michael’s first musical response to the events of the previous two years. Beyond hitting number one and disproving predictions of Michael’s demise in the marketplace, “Scream” was a Grammy Award–winning video directed by Mark Romanek. It was a wildly creative fantasy about the way in which Michael deals with the pressures inside his head.

  At the time of the video’s release—the midnineties—Janet is at the height of her popularity. As she poses, sings, and dances by her brother’s side, she does more than support him; she lends him her own unchecked audacity. Trapped inside a futuristic vessel hurtling through space, they scream to be released from the pressures of a planet overrun by injustice and corrupted by a system fueled by lies. Dressed like Nikita, the fearless action heroine–assassin, Janet tackles the role of superaggressive sister protecting her brother under assault. Facing the camera, facing a world that would scorn and judge Michael, she flips the bird. She boldly assumes the macho stance of a scrapper as she positions herself in front of a urinal. There’s a strong sense of gender-bending, a notion that Michael and Janet, two extraordinary creatures, are too singular to be understood by ordinary human beings. Inside the space pod, in which they are both prisoners and artistic pioneers, they are able to access praying Buddhas, ancient sculpture, surreal paintings by Magritte, and pop art by Andy Warhol. All the while, an enraged Michael is smashing guitars and shattering vases. Even as “Scream” bemoans the pressures of being a Jackson, pressure is released and metamorphosed in a space odyssey drama set to furious syncopation.

  Metamorphosis is not only at the heart of Michael’s art; it is his salvation. It was true in the summer of 1995 and remains even truer here in the late winter of 2009. Ruminating on the towering obstacles he has already met and conquered, he knows he can do it again. He can do it because he can change, mutate, mold trauma into healing melody and heartache into joyful dance. Artistically, he has been changing—and advancing—since he was six. His initial work with the Jackson 5 led to even more astounding solo work that included masterpieces of the early seventies like “Ben” and “I Wanna Be Where You Are.” When the brothers left Motown for CBS’s Epic label, Michael assiduously cultivated his talents as a writer and producer. The Jacksons’ Destiny, released in 1978, only a year before Off the Wall, is a testament to his commitment to honing his studio skills. From Off the Wall to Thriller (1982) to Bad (1987) to Dangerous (1991) to HIStory (1995) to Blood on the Dance Floor (1997) to Invincible (2001) to the songs he has recently written, the artistic curve is up, up, up. His work has grown in complexity, brilliance, and courage.

  “Everyone knew Michael was the greatest child vocalist who’s ever lived,” said Smokey Robinson, who first heard him when Bobby Taylor brought the brothers to Detroit in 1968. “We knew he loved to learn from everyone around him. We saw him watching us from the wings. It was clear that he was absorbing everything from the performers he admired most. But what we didn’t know was that it wasn’t enough for him to outdo his colleagues. That was fine. That was the Motown credo that said competition breeds champions. But what blew me away was his drive not to best us but to always best himself. That’s why, as a singer and songwriter and producer and dancer, he kept growing, kept getting better, kept looking to reach a mountaintop that kept getting higher and higher.”

  “The difference between me and Michael Jackson,” Rick James once explained, “is that my music can be contaminated and Michael’s can’t. I’m not saying that I don’t think I’m great. I know I’m great. But I also know that I’m no purist. I don’t mind putting in a lick or a lyric not because I love it, but because I know it’ll sell. Michael’s incapable of doing that. He has to express his heart and mind exactly the way he’s feeling it. He’s pure. He’s the best and only example I know of a soul singer who’s an absolutely pure artist. I think that’s why he became bigger than any of us. When the world hears purity, they respond to it. They go crazy. A pure spirit is the most powerful spirit. But what happens to a pure spirit when that spirit has to move through an impure world? Sometimes I think that our world, filled with nasty poisons, can’t stand purity and ain’t happy till the purity and all the pure artists are wiped off the face of the earth.”

  The long plane ride is practically over. Michael is glad to have this quick trip to London behind him. Glad to have finally made the decision. Glad to have announced the concerts at the O2. Glad to see the reception so overwhelmingly warm and positive. Glad that he brought his children so that they can share in the mounting excitement surrounding this series of shows. Glad that, after years in the wilderness, he finally feels in control of his life.

  The plane lands. Michael and the children are driven to their temporary home at 100 North Carolwood Drive in the exclusive Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. This is the seven-bedroom, thirteen-bathroom mansion for which AEG, promoter of the O2 shows, is paying $100,000 a month to house Michael and the kids.

  Michael hopes that, after the long flight, he will be able to sleep. But after he has read the kids stories, kissed and cuddled them in bed, he’s unable to curtail the thoughts racing in his head. In his master bedroom, he looks over the messages that have piled up in his absence and feels optimism slipping away. Virtually all the messages can be ignored, but the most insistent ones are troubling. They come from a man who demands that Michael see him immediately. These are the messages from his father, Joseph.

  His father and the pressures brought to bear upon Michael from his family of origin are among the real reasons he vowed not to return to Southern California after the long and arduous trial that ended with his acquittal nearly four years earlier in Santa Barbara. Although his fami
ly supported him throughout the ordeal, he knew that allowing them back into his life, whether in a personal or professional capacity, always meant heartache. At the same time, excluding them never failed to fill him with painful guilt.

  Guilt is the card that his family has played ever since the early eighties, when Thriller turned Michael into the biggest star on the planet. It was after the megasuccess of Thriller that their pressure got to him. He caved in and reluctantly agreed to cut one more album with his siblings, Victory, followed by the chaotic Jacksons tour in 1984. Michael was miserable throughout the ordeal—not because he didn’t love his brothers, but because the great love he felt for them no longer translated into a viable creative relationship.

  Like his sister Janet, he craves control of his artistic product and freedom from family meddling. But unlike Janet—who, after expelling Joseph from her business life, never let him back in—Michael equivocates. He wants to make his mother happy, which means placating his brothers and ultimately his father as well.

  There are dark memories from his childhood but sweet ones as well. In his heart he carries the conviction that all families should be close and loving, and yet history has shown him that his own family, torn apart by dissension and jealousy, can never be trusted to bring him solace. In fact, time and again, his family has brought him grief.

  Grief keeps him up tonight—grief about the times he’s tried to reconcile with his brothers and father, the times he’s sought to forge a peace, the times he’s tried, mostly in vain, to establish healthy boundaries. But over and over again, boundaries have been violated, and in the end, he has felt that, aside from Janet, each of his family members wants to claim a piece of him.