The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (363 page)

In guitarist Jan Savage, keyboardist Daryl Hooper and drummer Rick Andridge, Saxon found kindred spirits, the foursome finally planting The Seeds in 1965. Image-wise, the group immediately offered something ‘different’ to pop’s landscape, their sullen, Stones-esque pouting in stark contrast to immaculately pressed velour shirts and bell-bottoms. And the music wasn’t bad, either: The Seeds’ first recording was the excellent beat/trash moment ‘Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ - a tune that Saxon touted around the labels until GNP Crescendo released it later that year. The record wasn’t a hit, but its follow-up ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ (1966) finally broke the charts after disc jockeys began playing the song some months after its release. Over the decades, this track - reportedly written in fifteen minutes as Saxon waited while his girlfriend shopped for groceries - has effectively cemented Saxon and The Seeds’ exalted position in psychedelic folklore. For a record that barely scraped the Top Forty, this is some achievement - ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ still regularly featuring in ‘best-ever’ polls. ‘Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ then fared similarly on reissue, with other cuts ‘Mr Farmer’ and ‘A Thousand Shadows’ also reaching the Hot 100 during 1967. For a short time, The Seeds were one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles, taking some $6K a night for their live shows.

The band’s popularity was to remain markedly polarized however, their third album
Future
(1967) failing on account of its descent into sub-Sgt
Pepper
conceptualising. Saxon’s apparent disillusionment with The Seeds began to manifest itself with
A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues
(1969) - a record now credited to The Sky Saxon Blues Band. When this, like its predecessor, was roundly ignored, Saxon broke up The Seeds to record as a solo artist. His much-documented substance usage was clearly illustrated by the array of names under which the singer released (mostly unheralded) material throughout the seventies: The New Seeds, Sunstar, The Universal Stars Band - and a number of variations thereupon - appeared on a variety of labels. Saxon, now largely divorced from reality, had joined the Source Family religious sect during the seventies - a fringe movement whose leader Ya Ho Wha (Jim Baker, to his parents) had given Saxon his main new identity of ‘Sunlight’. The musician then moved with the cult to Hawaii, and remained largely anonymous, barring a mid-eighties collaboration with the empathetic Mars Bonfire of Steppenwolf. (Their
Starry Ride
(1984) - a comeback album on the UK label Psycho - was followed two years later by
A Groovy Thing,
under the group name Firewall.) Saxon then retreated to Hawaii, emerging only in 2002 to tour Europe with a new line-up of The Seeds: the success of this venture persuaded him to record once more in London, the result of which was the impressive
Transparency
(2006).

Sky Saxon’s death on 25 June 2009 was unexpected: the musician - though resembling an acid casualty in appearance - seemed perky and reinvigorated as he performed a series of dates in Austin, Texas. It is believed that Saxon had developed an infection of the major organs that had somehow gone undetected. Sadly, his death was overshadowed by that of Michael Jackson’s, arriving as it did on the same day …

*
This is the earliest, though most likely, of a variety of years given for Saxon’s birthdate.

Thursday 25

Michael Jackson

(Gary, Indiana, 29 August 1958)

The Jackson 5/The Jacksons

The words of ‘Billie Jean’ – perhaps the singer’s finest recorded moment – appear to hold a series of microcosmic clues as to how Michael Jackson’s future life was to be played out: a personal intrusion; a denied sexual liaison; a son apparently deprived of a father figure. Yet, in 1982 (when the song was first released via Jackson’s monumental
Thriller
album), nothing could have seemed further out of character, and few would have interpreted the lyrics as anything other than their perpetrator’s own fantasy.

While ‘fantasy’ was one aspect to play out more and more in the singer’s world, it was the hyperreality of his early fame that set Jackson on course for his strange later existence: from the very start of his career as the hyperactive front kid of the great Jackson 5, Michael’s world was never going to resemble that of anyone else. Like his brothers – Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon (Randy was to join later) – the diminutive singer was rigorously drilled by an uncompromising father to whom their success was deemed more important than his own family’s happiness. Joseph Jackson was a working-class man who hadn’t known achievement in his own musical endeavours (The Falcons) but was damned sure he was going to earn it through his sons. Young Michael was rehearsing from the age of just five – his graduation from back-up singer/conga-player to co-lead and dancer carefully marshalled by the belt and the whip.

At first, the near-military discipline appeared effective, as The Jackson 5 – who’d built their reputation playing the chitlin circuit, often opening for ‘adult’ acts – signed with Motown. Here, the group racked off a then-record four straight charttopping singles – ‘I Want You Back’, ‘ABC’, ‘The Love You Save’ and ‘I’ll Be There’ – in under a year (1969–70). The latter was, however, the song that exposed Michael’s true abilities beneath the camp, entertaining stagecraft so instilled in him. After a run of terrific bubblegum pop moments, this tender ballad displayed a remarkable vocal maturity that set Jackson apart not only from his brothers but from all of his contemporaries. Thus, the ‘fantasy’ had begun: Berry Gordy placed Michael in the caring hands of his star Diana Ross (the second of several maternal figures in Jackson’s life, after his own beloved mother), thereby also creating the useful illusion that she had in fact ‘discovered’ him.

Black or white-Michael didn’t mind how his tea came

‘If you enter this world knowing that you’re loved and leave it the same way, then everything in between can be dealt with.’

Michael Jackson

As the brothers’ success levelled-off, it became apparent that Michael was already ‘too big’ for The Jackson 5. He did, of course, record with his family well into the eighties, leading the group as they morphed into ‘The Jacksons’: the group – in particular its increasingly precocious lead – wished for greater artistic control, including the freedom to write their own songs, which was never going to happen at Motown. So, having survived a potentially damaging separation from Gordy’s empire, The Jacksons notched some enjoyable dance-flavoured hits for Epic, including Gamble & Huff’s ‘Show You the Way to Go’ (1977, the group’s only UK number one) and Michael and Randy’s ‘Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)’ (1979, US/UK Top Ten). The main singer, meanwhile, had plans of his own …

Michael had already issued significant solo material while at Motown, the Oscarnominated ‘Ben’, for example, giving him his first independent number one as early as 1972.
Off the Wall
(1979), however, was something else entirely. Chastened by the recent failure of his and Ross’s
The Wi%
movie project, the maturing Jackson converted all of his ‘negative’ energy into making what is generally regarded as his debut proper and a fine album to boot. Setting more records, the (eventual) twenty-million-selling
Off the Wall
was the first solo album to generate four Top Ten singles, the extraordinary ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough’ (UK Top Three) and the breezy ‘Rock With You’ (UK Top Ten) making it all the way to the top of Billboard’s listings. There were also requests for Jackson songs from others, including the loyal Ross who recorded his ‘Muscles’ (1982). But still this wasn’t sufficient for an increasingly driven young man.

For
Thriller
(1982), Jackson locked himself away for months, writing, re-writing, recording, trashing, re-recording – the relationship with mercurial co-creator Quincy Jones was as volatile as the resultant record was spectacularly realised.
Thriller
sat proudly at Billboard number one for
thirty-seven
weeks as it became the biggest-selling pop recording of all time (depending upon one’s source, anywhere between sixty and one-hundred-million copies) – the accomplishment cast Jackson’s legacy in stone. Earning him a bounty of awards,
Thriller
was a moment Jackson would not – could not – repeat: this collection of immediate pop gems offered the rocky ‘Beat It’ (1983, US number one/UK Top Three), the hypnotic ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ (1983, US/UK Top Ten) and, of course, the timeless ‘Billie Jean’ (1982, US/UK number one). This song surprised many in its open brandishing of a sexual relationship – something seen as ‘alien’ to the supposed-virgin Michael Jackson, a man brought up by strict Jehovah’s Witness parents.

But beyond its tale, the words of ‘Billie Jean’ betrayed genuine frustration, subtle, yet heartfelt indications as to how this damaged talent might be feeling inside. Michael had yet to admit his upset to the world over his later-documented ‘lost’ childhood, the assumption in 1983 being that he was a man who apparently had ‘everything’ – talent, popularity, success and, now, power. Michael was, after all, now bigger than his label and certainly bigger than his brothers – a fact that clearly rankled with them, and most of all with their father, whose attempts to control his most successful son continued, though to lesser and lesser effect. The tipping point was probably
Motown 25,
a television celebration in which Michael not only stole the show with a mesmerising performance that unveiled the ‘moonwalk’, but also proved that he had eclipsed Gordy – his former boss was forced to allow the singer to perform ‘Billie Jean’ (a post-Motown song, of course) in order for him to agree to appear.

But with power and fame came the ‘eccentricities’ that were to dominate Jackson’s press throughout the eighties. Despite the embittered protestations within later hits like ‘Leave Me Alone’ (1989), Jackson did much himself to promote his perception as pop’s leading oddball. Bubbles the chimp certainly existed, however tales of hyperbaric chambers and Elephant Man skeletons were conjured up by Michael and his manager Frank DiLeo. More disturbing, however, was the obsession with plastic surgery that the singer was starting to develop. Michael’s family (in particular his father) had teased the boy about his broad nose during childhood: with money now no object, this was the first of many features to become re-sculpted. Over the next two decades, the looks of the singer – who clearly suffered from some level of body-dysmorphia – were altered beyond the level of caricature, some suggesting he was attempting to resemble Ross, others, a Disney character. Whichever, Jackson’s constant denial of any surgery only served to help transform a vastly gifted individual into a figure of ridicule. And an additional downside was that few were inclined to believe him when Jackson spoke of genuine conditions, such as the disfiguring skin vitiligo and the lupus that required his constant protection from sunlight, both of which were proven following his post-mortem. (His accidental burning during the recording of a 1984 Pepsi commercial also triggered more humour than it did sympathy.)

Although – to Jackson’s naive frustration – he couldn’t replicate the success of
Thriller
(either commercially or artistically), the singer still continued to outsell pretty much everyone else on the planet.
Bad
(1987) shifted another thirty-million units (and stuck it once more to the record books by birthing
five
US charttopping singles), while
Dangerous
(1991) sold even more. Jackson was hereby dubbed ‘The King of Pop’ by his new close friend – and latest maternal figure – actress Elizabeth Taylor. From here on, however, it was to be his private life that was to claim the real headlines.