MJ (3 page)

How the Jackson 5 landed their next gig is open to historical interpretation. In her book
The Jacksons: My Family
, Katherine said the suggestion came from Joe’s sister-in-law,
Bobbie Rose Jackson. Reynaud Jones, a sophomore at
Roosevelt High, belonged to an extracurricular theater group called the Masque and Gavel Organization, which sponsored Roosevelt’s prestigious annual talent show. He used his connections, he says, to get the Jackson brothers on the bill. It took Jones three days to convince Joe and Katherine to give permission for their kids to perform. In exchange, he promised them front-row balcony seats.

The band rehearsed the Temptations’
“My Girl,” James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and Robert Parker’s
“Barefootin’,” songs rooted in Joe’s blues but with the kids’ emerging style of upbeat soul, with a burst of showmanship provided by Michael. When the Jacksons finally performed in
September 1965, Michael flung his shoes off during “Barefootin’ ” and slid across the floor. The audience paid twenty-five cents per ticket to get into the gym, and it was packed. Dressed in white open-collar shirts, cummerbunds, and black slacks, the Jacksons competed against more experienced student groups. Carl Protho, a student at the time, wasn’t sure what to make of these little
kids in cummerbunds—until they got to “My Girl.”
“That was the performance that tore the roof off the auditorium,” he says. “Until then, [the competition for first place] was a very tight call, with so much talent in Gary. But I’ll never forget it—the noise level, the screaming, and how everyone was standing up.” Michael and Jermaine were the lead singers, but even then, Michael had evolved into the obvious star of the group.
“Jermaine had a few solo parts, as did Jackie, but the main focus was on Michael. He stood out,” says Benny Dorsey, one of Michael’s teachers at Garnett Elementary School, who saw the show in his capacity as a member of Roosevelt’s alumni association.
Joseph Jackson stood next to the stage, arms at his sides, staring intently as Michael did his James Brown screeches and skillful whirligigs.

After the exhilarated boys won the talent-show trophy, Joseph calmed them down.
“Overall, you did good,” he said soberly, “but we’ve got some work to do.”

The Jacksons worked some more in Reynaud Jones’s basement until they showed up one day to tell him band practice had been moved to their own living room. Jones continued to rehearse with them. Not long after that, he reported to
2300 Jackson Street, as per usual, and Jackie answered the door.
“My dad says you can’t come in,” Jackie told his friend.

Jones understood. He was not a Jackson. That meant he was not a star.

*  *  *

Once Joe Jackson took control of the family band, the lively little house at 2300 Jackson Street transformed into a barracks for future music professionals.
“These boys are going to take me out of the steel mill,” Joe wrote to his brother, Lawrence, who was in the air force. Joe insisted Katherine put dinner on the table and the boys ready their instruments by 4:30
P.M.
daily. He came home from work, the family ate, and the boys hit the living-room stage. If Joe was late, Katherine
pinch-hit.
“Sometimes we’d want to, you know, slack off, and Dad would make us practice,” Michael recalled. “He’d say, ‘Practice makes perfect.’ ”

As the lead singer of the family band, seven-year-old Michael began to develop
leverage over his father. Some days, he didn’t feel like singing. That halted the entire operation. When Joe attempted to spank Michael into submission, he withdrew further. To break the gridlock, Michael’s brothers would, as their sister Rebbie recalled, “try to laud him on, play to his little ego.” Michael fell in line once the band became successful. As they began to win every conceivable talent show, he started to see, like all the boys, that this kind of life was cooler than throwing a ball on a field or messing around the streets.

Slowly, during this time, the Jackson 5 began to take shape. Michael was the natural front man, but Jermaine had a specific skill—he could strain his vocal pitch into a pleading gospel style, like Levi Stubbs in the Four Tops or John Lennon in the Beatles. Jackie, the baseball player, was the ultimate utility man, with a sweet harmony vocal that always seemed to fit just right, especially above Michael’s bright and sharp leads. Tito mostly kept to his guitar and occasionally added a baritone in the style of the Temptations’ Melvin Franklin. Jermaine also started to play bass guitar. As for poor Marlon—even his mother didn’t think he was talented.
“His lack of singing ability bothered Joe even more than his dancing,” Katherine said. Joe kept trying to drum him out of the group, but Katherine stood up for him. Marlon worked five times as hard as his brothers on
dance steps, willing himself into a permanent position with the Jackson 5. His role, though, was eternally ambiguous. “It’s a fact that Marlon never sang a word as a member of the Jackson 5 until the boys began recording for Motown,” Katherine said.

Joe surrounded the boys’ voices with rock ’n’ roll instruments—not just guitar and bass, which Tito and Jermaine were handling, but drums. The band’s earlier drummer,
Milford Hite, had moved to
another neighborhood and was unavailable for regular rehearsals. So Joe started to recruit new musicians. Leonard Gault, a drummer, had bonded with Joe at Inland Steel, but he was too old to play with the Jackson boys. He volunteered younger brother Earl as a substitute. Gault showed up for rehearsal and fit in as both a band mate and a friend. “Their voices blended together . . . it was beautiful,” the retired railroad worker
^II
recalls by phone from his Merrillville, Indiana, home. “They had it.”

The evening rehearsals turned into events, with relatives such as Uncle Luther’s five-year-old son, Keith, taking exalted spots on the living-room floor.
“All the neighborhood kids used to be at the window wondering what’s going on,” Keith remembers. Friends and relatives, sensing the beginning of something, opened their dens and basements, too.
“They would rehearse in anybody’s backyard, anybody’s house, wherever,” says Johnnie Gault, who lived in the neighborhood and was married to Earl’s older brother.

Katherine funded Joe’s profligate purchases of new instruments by
tapping into the savings she’d gathered over the years through her Sears paychecks, which she had planned to use to remodel the house.
“Mom had some doubts about the soundness of this decision,” Michael said.

Joe networked up and down Gary and Chicago’s nearby South Side. It was a time of racial transition in the US. In 1968, Gary elected Richard M. Hatcher as the country’s first-ever black mayor, simultaneously breaking racial barriers and spurring white flight. In moving to the suburbs, whites left behind poverty, crime, gangs, and drugs—but also black-owned businesses, Black Power, black politics, and, of course, black music.
“Gary was called Chocolate City—a lot of gambling, a lot of prostitution,” recalls Maurice “Mo” Rodgers, a
Gary singer at the time who would help form Steeltown Records. “It was jumping, and there was music all over the place, artists and singers and groups.” As Joe began to tell everybody he could find about his talented boys, he went deeper and deeper into African-American neighborhoods, hanging around instrument shops and networking with merchants, promoters, producers, DJs, musicians, politicians, and policemen.

Joe made all kinds of deals, some in conflict with each other, but his persistence brought the band before adult Gary audiences—Bird’s Pub, the Elks Lodge, and Joe Green’s Club Woodlawn, run by a husband-and-wife team that specialized in blues singers and local bands. Club hoppers would start out at, say, Joe Green’s, bringing their own liquor and supplementing it with a five-dollar
“set-up” tray containing a small bowl of ice, a bag of potato chips, four or five cups, and maybe some Coca-Cola. If they were lucky, they’d catch a major touring act, like Motown’s
Jr. Walker and the All Stars or Chicago R&B star Tyrone Davis. The Elks Lodge had an after-hours license, so by two or three in the morning, music fans wound up there, among hard-drinking mill workers.

Mr. Lucky’s was a sophisticated bar turned club catering to black professionals, serving
one-dollar fried tacos. The Jackson 5 showed up regularly, making
eight dollars for
five sets per night, six or seven days a week. “We were playing between bad comedians, cocktail organists and strippers,” Michael recalled. Katherine, raising her kids Jehovah’s Witness, was suspicious of the nightly debauchery they were absorbing. Joe didn’t care. If Katherine was a Sunday-morning kind of lady, Joe was a Saturday-night kind of guy.

At Mr. Lucky’s, the Jackson 5 were finally allowed to play an entire show, rather than a song here and there. They loaded up their sets with hits by James Brown, Sam and Dave, and, of course, Motown. During Joe Tex’s
“Skinny Legs and All,” Michael dropped to his hands and knees, crawled into the audience, looked up
women’s skirts, then rose up into a dance.
^III
The boys were underage and technically not allowed to be in any of these clubs, but they helped the bartenders and waitresses sell food and liquor. Proprietors made
deals with the cops—they looked the other way as long as the boys didn’t drink.

In
summer 1966, the Jackson family journeyed 1,600 miles in Joe’s cramped Volkswagen van to see his father, whom the boys called Papa Samuel, in Winslow, Arizona, and play a concert at the Old Arcadia Hall. (They didn’t stop to sleep, but they did pull off in Oklahoma City to visit a relative, and Katherine and Rebbie made
fried chicken and pork and beans during a welcome five-hour respite from the road.) It was a torturous trip—at one point Jermaine watched as Joseph pulled the van to the side of the road and started
“vigorously rubbing his cheeks.” “Just tired,” Joe told his gaping son. Once they arrived, the boys, who had never been outside of Gary, were especially amazed by the color of Arizona’s soil.
“Michael used to like nature-type stuff,” recalls Earl Gault, the drummer who had become close enough to the family to make the trip. “He ended up putting some of that red dirt in this jar and bringing it back.” Upon their return to 2300 Jackson Street, Marlon began teasing Michael about his beloved dirt. He did it so often that one of the older brothers, Tito or Jermaine, hollered to Michael from another room, accusing Marlon of pulling all the dirt out of the jar. “And Michael jumped and ran out there,” Gault recalls. “They were just joking, but Michael wanted that dirt.”

When Gault had to quit the band because his father objected to the travel, Joe acted on a recommendation from Shirley Cartman, a
teacher at Beckman Junior High in Gary, and found the best drummer in the school. The Jacksons claimed
Johnny Jackson, then fourteen, was a distant cousin, but his name was a coincidence. Jermaine called him
“a bubbly, animated little guy with a cheeky smile” and “the best drummer around for miles, as confident with his skill as Michael was with his dance.” He had good timing and a knack for showmanship. In an early black-and-white
publicity photo, the first of the Jackson 5 to catch your eye is Michael, holding up an open palm and clutching a microphone in his other hand, staring seriously into the distance. The next is Johnny, in the center, holding a drumstick in mid-twirl above a snare, with a bass drum marked, in crude sticker letters:
THE JACKSON 5 AND JOHNNY
. Like Earl, Johnny grew close to the family.
“We were brothers,” he said. “We did everything together.”

The Jacksons were slowly becoming regional stars in Chicago and northwest Indiana. They needed records. Joe started to drag his sons, or sometimes just Michael, to studios for auditions. One day in 1966, on Chicago’s famous Record Row, Joe brought Michael to One-derful Records for a solo audition. Michael sang Lou Rawls’s
“Tobacco Road.” The lyrics may have resonated. “I was born / in a dump,” goes the first line.

George Leaner, one of the label’s cofounders, had been wary of working with underage performers, given the expensive complications of touring chaperones and child-labor laws. But in early 1967, he took a chance and signed the band.

Joe kept his boys on a strict schedule. Every day for five months, at five
P.M.
, One-derful professionals coached them on harmonies and chord progressions. Then they’d sing during jam sessions. This mentorship, concludes the
Chicago Reader
’s Jake Austen, helped “transform a talented teen band into an act on the verge of greatness.” In the end, One-derful, a small label without any major hits, lacked the resources to give the Jacksons a breakthrough record. The label’s founders filed the
session away, and the Jackson 5’s One-derful single, “Big Boy,” written by Eddie Silvers with fifteen-year-old hotshot
Larry Blasingaine on guitar, never came out. This version of the song was unknown to the public until Austen told the story in 2009, after Michael’s death.

Not long after the
One-derful sessions, the phone rang at 2300 Jackson Street. The caller was a young Gary singer, producer, and raconteur named Gordon Keith. He’d heard about the Jacksons through Shirley Cartman, Tito’s junior high orchestra teacher. Inspired by Motown, Keith and three of his best friends had formed Steeltown Records in Gary.
“It was tough,” recalls Mo Rodgers, one of Steeltown’s early principals. “[As] black entrepreneurs, we went up against the typical walls, and the banks and stuff.” But Keith knew a phenomenon when he saw one, especially after witnessing Jackson 5 posters all over Gary.
Cartman invited Keith to her house, where the boys sang two of her own songs, “The Scrub” and “Lonely Heart,” although Keith didn’t show up. Instead, he went later to the Jackson’s home, where he watched in disbelief as Michael
high-jumped Tito’s guitar cord, stretched chest-high between a guitar and an amp.

Despite the Jacksons’ One-derful contract, Keith signed the band to Steeltown and began recording the band after school days in
November 1967. His instinct was to use his usual Gary studio, but he had a feeling about the sessions, so he relocated to a more accomplished one on West Sixty-Ninth Street in Chicago.
Morrison Sound Studio was an enclave for African-American musicians in the heart of a white neighborhood. “Most sessions were done late—midnight till two in the morning,” recalls Jerry Mundo, a studio singer, organist, and guitarist. “A lot of cats would come in late, get blasted. We’d live on White Castle hamburgers. They’d have a bottle of gin on the floor, and an hour later they’d be gone, and the drummer would get into an argument with the bass player, and they’d get into a fistfight.” The nightly ruckus eventually cost the owner his lease, and he’d soon have to relocate the studio to a black neighborhood on the East Side.