You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

IN TODAY’S LIGHT, I THINK IT apt that our first true public performance as the Jackson 5 was on 29 August 1965: Michael’s seventh birthday. No one noticed it at the time. Birthdays were like Christmas: non-events that were not marked in the house of Jehovah. But at least Michael’s seventh birthday was different in that it wasn’t another ordinary, unremarkable day.

Evelyn Lahaie, the lady who first suggested our group name, invited us to take part in a child’s fashion event she had organised at the Big Top shopping centre on Broadway and 53rd. She was the commentator on a ‘Tiny Tots Jamboree’ and we were billed as ‘The Jackson Five Musical Group: Another Spectacular Little Folks Band’. All I remember is seeing a decent-sized crowd of young girls and Joseph telling us after the show to ‘get down there and start selling your photos.’

In our eyes, the jamboree was just a warm-up for the proper stage at Jackie and Rebbie’s school, Theodore Roosevelt High, a few months later in 1966. Mother had said at the mall that we’d get to perform at ‘nicer places’. The school held an annual talent contest, featuring a variety of acts from around the city – Gary’s equivalent to The Ed Sullivan Show. We were the youngest act by far and couldn’t wait to get out there.

Backstage, Michael tapped the bongos he still played. Jackie rattled his Maracas and two band members joined us: local boys Earl Gault, our first drummer, and Raynard Jones, who played bass on a couple of occasions. The school hall was packed. It was a paying crowd, too – 25 cents a ticket. We also knew it would include some familiar faces, such as those who had been mushed-up against the living-room window, waiting to laugh at us.

When Tito went for our guitars – left leaning against a wall in the wings – he discovered someone had attempted sabotage by messing with the tuning pegs. Joseph’s advice – ‘Always check your tuning before going on’ – came good in plenty of time. ‘Someone doesn’t want you to win,’ he said, ‘so go out there and show ’em!’

He stood with us in the wings, looking nowhere near as confident as we felt. He was always tense before a show, whether it was the talent-show days or record-label years. For the duration of a set, he had no input and no control. But we couldn’t have been more ready. When we walked on, met by polite applause, we just switched to the auto-pilot of rehearsals. ‘My Girl’ by the Temptations was our opener. As everyone’s quiet curiosity sat in that gap between applause ending and music starting, I looked across to Tito and behind him, in the shadows, to Joseph. Still pensive. Raynard, on bass, gave the song’s intro that opening bounce … and in came Tito on guitar with the melody lick … and Jackie with his Maracas … and Michael poised with his bongos … and then I started to sing.

Our momentum built as I led the vocals into another Temptations number: the more up-tempo ‘Get Ready’. And Jackie, Marlon and Michael killed it front of stage, revving them up for Michael’s lead vocal finale – James Brown’s ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’. By his first verse, the crowd was on its feet. I looked to my right, for Joseph’s approval. Still pensive, arms by his sides. Only his lips were moving as he mouthed the lyrics, fixated on Michael. ‘Eeeeeooowwww!’ Michael screamed. ‘I FEEEEL good …’ With his high-pitched, hyena-like screech, the crowd’s jaws opened as one and they screamed. Then, during our closer, ‘I Got The Feeling’, he made them feel it. He jumped out front of stage and started to dance; a choreographed whirling dervish. Aged seven.

We were not supposed to be this good, but Michael tore up the place. It didn’t matter that this was only our local school. When you’re kids, a screaming crowd is a screaming crowd.

Backstage, post-show, we jumped around, reliving it all. I guess it was like hitting a home-run or scoring a great goal. Joseph was … content. ‘Overall, you did good,’ he told us, ‘but we’ve got some work to do.’

Next thing I remember is the MC announcing us as winners. We bounded on stage. More screaming. Funnily enough, one of the acts we beat was Deniece Williams. A few years later, she released her chart topper ‘Let’s Hear It For The Boy’. We didn’t need Joseph’s approval that night: we were winners first time out and that was good by anyone’s standards.

We went home and celebrated with ice-cream all round. Joseph pointed to a proud corner of the living room – home to a small collection of baseball trophies, speaking to our other obsession in life. Those trophies stood as unintended props to support the one point he always made: being rewarded is about becoming the best.

FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW, WE HAD an open view of the baseball field where we played, next to Theodore Roosevelt High. Had you asked us back then to choose between the musical dream or the sporting dream, I think we’d have opted for baseball. Especially Jackie, the jock of the family. Whenever he was in trouble with Joseph and wanted to run, we always knew where to find him: the dug-out across the way, in front of the bleachers, tossing a ball between hand and glove.

We’d have opted for the baseball dream for the simple reason that it seemed more realistic and three of us were already decent juniors. The miniature gold players swinging a bat on the podium of our trophies were testament to the glory and championships won with the Katz Kittens – the team we played for in Gary’s Little League baseball. We grew up watching the Chicago Cubs, aspiring to follow its stars: Ernie Banks, their first black player, and Ron Santo.

Jackie was so good he had people scouting him and he felt sure a contract was imminent. He was a great pitcher and batsman, hitting home run after home run. Baseball was where his heart was, more than any of us. At games, Michael was like our mini-mascot, sitting with Marlon and Joseph in the bleachers, wearing his mini green-and-white jersey, which came down to the knees of his jeans, chewing his red shoestring candy and cheering whenever one of us got the ball. One weekday evening, there was a ‘big game’ – a playoff or something – with some local rival. I was playing outfield, Tito was on second and Jackie was pitcher. We had started to earn a bit of a reputation as ‘The Jackson Boys’ and Jackie’s pitching was key to that hard-earned kudos.

During the warm-up, the coach hit balls into the air as catch practice and he hit one fly-ball that bounced off the clouds before it came back down. We were always taught to call it, so I ran and kept my eye on the ball, yelling, ‘MINE! I got it …’ Wesley, our catcher who had torn off his mask, was running for the same ball, but he didn’t call it and didn’t hear me. He just kept his eye on the falling ball. Then BOOM! We collided. For the first time, I saw stars without feeling Joseph’s belt on my behind. Wesley’s forehead hit me across the right eye and split me wide open. He was out cold and blood was everywhere. I remember seeing concerned faces peering down but then they parted as Joseph’s face came into full focus. His pained expression didn’t leave me all the way to the hospital or even as a doctor sewed me up with 14 butterfly stitches. I was bruised, swollen and messed up – my ‘image’ as an entertainer had been put at risk. As Mother thanked God that my sight was not impaired, Joseph cursed himself for allowing such an injury to take place. Then he made the swiftest decision. ‘No more baseball for you, Jermaine,’ he announced. ‘None of you. No more baseball! It’s too dangerous.’

I don’t remember much else about that night except Jackie’s grief for the dream that had ended all because one boy didn’t call the ball. ‘One day you’ll thank me,’ Joseph told him unsympathetically. ‘You’re too young to understand.’

AS ROOSEVELT HIGH’S TALENT CONTEST CHAMPIONS, we entered another competition that pitched us against the winning finalists from other schools in the area. We won that, too, and the Gary Post-Tribune’s flashbulb captured our triumph and trophy for posterity in black-and-white. I remember that grainy photo because of the giant bandage still plastered over my right eyebrow. The importance of first place – that prestige and that trophy – became obvious on the one occasion we didn’t win. It was at Horace Mann High and the reason it sticks in my mind is because of the prize we received for coming second: a brand new colour television.

The problem was that Joseph didn’t take losing very well, so none of us knew how to behave in defeat. We knew there was nothing to gloat about, but there didn’t seem any great reason to be disappointed either. It was Marlon who broke the ice as we packed our stuff and headed out. ‘Least we won a colour TV!’ he said, speaking for everyone as we sensed the end of watching programmes through the coloured hues of a plastic sheet.

But Joseph didn’t see any consolation in the prize. ‘There is only one winner, and winning is about being number one, not number two!’ he said, sharing his stare equally among us. We didn’t collect our colour TV that day: Joseph said we didn’t deserve it. There is no reward for second place.

I WISH I HAD ARCHIVED THOSE precious times and kept a diary or maintained a scrapbook, especially now that Michael has gone. A deep loss makes you grasp at nostalgia, wanting to recall every last detail of every experience you once took for granted. Things happened and moved so fast that performances and years have merged into one. In my mind, those early years of the Jackson 5 are a bit like a high-speed rail journey: the places en route whizzed by, and it’s only the departure, the destination, and certain memorable stations that remain vivid. Between 1966 and 1968, most weekends were spent on the road building our reputation. We played before a mix of audiences: the friendly, the enthusiastic, the drunken and the indifferent. Usually, just the sight of five kids walking on stage got people’s attention and the ‘cute’ factor was on our side, especially with Michael and Marlon up front. It was the best feeling when our performances animated a reserved crowd.

Mr Lucky’s, the main tavern in Gary, was where we spent many week-nights and where we earned our first performance fee: $11, split between us. Michael spent his on candy, which he shared with other kids in the neighbourhood. ‘He earns his first wage and spends it on candy to give to other kids?’ said Joseph, bemused. But when it came to ‘share and share alike’, Michael wore the shiniest halo; we were always encouraged by Mother to think of others and do the good deed.

Meanwhile, our parents backed our progress by investing in a ‘wardrobe’. Our customary uniform was either a white shirt, black bell-bottomed pants and red cummerbund, or a forest-green shiny suit with crisp white shirt. Mother had made all the alterations to our suits on her sewing-machine and a lady named Mrs Roach sewed ‘J5’ into the jacket breast pockets. I remember that detail because she sewed them on crooked and something felt imperfect but, for once, uncorrectable.

If we weren’t performing at Mr Lucky’s, we were at the supper club Guys and Gals, or the High Chaparral on the south side of Chicago. Often, we didn’t go on stage until 11.30pm on school nights and didn’t arrive home until 2am with school the next day: five brothers always asleep as we pulled into the driveway of 2300 Jackson Street.

One show night, we arrived outside some hotel in Gary and soon understood our city’s reputation as a rough place, infamous for crime. Folklore had it that if you dug deep enough you’d find the roots of the OGs – the original gangsters – before gang culture spread east to New York. I don’t know about that. All I know is that we discovered being ‘local’ offered no immunity from violence. It was dusk and we were carrying our equipment inside via the back entrance when Joseph was stopped by five thuggish 20-something men. ‘Do you want some help with that?’ asked one, grabbing a mic stand.

Joseph thought he was being robbed so he refused to let go of the stand and pushed away the man. The next two or three minutes happened quickly as all of them turned on him and he hit the ground under a windmill of punches. Michael and Marlon screamed, ‘JOSEPH! JOSEPH! No! No! No!’ The gang started using our drumsticks and mic stands as weapons. Joseph curled into a ball, covered his face with his forearms and took the beating.

Meanwhile, Michael had sprinted to the nearest phone booth at the bottom of the street and called the police. ‘I couldn’t reach, so I had to jump up to drop the coin into the slot!’ he said afterwards. By the time he ran back, the gang had fled and Joseph was being helped to his feet by hotel management. He got hurt real bad: his face was mashed up and had already started to swell. Someone ran inside to grab some ice and he used it to wrap the hand he had fractured. He had also suffered a broken jaw. Sitting on the bumper at the back of the van, he steadied himself. Then, through one-and-a-half eyes, he looked at us: ‘I’m okay.’ He told Michael and Marlon to wipe their tears. ‘You can’t perform in that state,’ he said.

‘You want us to go on?’ asked Jackie, incredulous.

‘People are here to see you – people are expecting to see you,’ he said, gingerly getting to his feet. ‘I’ll go to the doctor in the morning.’ That night, we had to pull ourselves together and focus on our performance. Joseph was ever-present, nursing his hand, with Band Aids on his face. He had taught us another hard, if unintentional lesson: whatever happens, the show must go on.

I DON’T REMEMBER DOING HOMEWORK ON school nights. We ate dinner and got ready to perform. Homework assignments were something we crammed in at weekends or scribbled in bed in the mornings. That was when our childhood started to become eclipsed by adult duties. There was always a new show to prepare for, a new routine to rehearse, or a new town to conquer.

Aged nine, Michael had to grow up fast. As we all did. We now had a profession where other kids had nothing to do but play all the time. But had it been any other way, we might never have broken through as the Jackson 5, and the world would never have known Michael’s music. Things were as they were meant to be. We found real joy on stage: we looked forward to it in the same way that other kids looked forward to whatever pastime brought them enjoyment.

With Mr Lucky’s and Guys and Gals offering us regular work, Joseph quit his canned-food-factory job and reduced his hours at The Mill to part-time day shifts. Our fees can’t have been all that good, but he maintained his gamble on the great future he banked on. Mother fretted, obviously, but Joseph reassured her that the momentum was building. She nodded silently in agreement and then, knowing Mother, she probably worried herself to sleep and said countless prayers to Jehovah.

What she didn’t immediately know was that some of the late-night acts that followed us included strippers. That was the variety of bar acts back then and we often came offstage to find half-naked ladies in fishnets and suspenders waiting in the wings. If Christmas and birthdays were a sin in the eyes of Jehovah, then sharing a venue with erotic strippers was tantamount to hanging with the Devil, so you can’t blame Joseph for not detailing our exact itinerary to Mother. But the game was up one night when a stray lacy accessory found its way into one of our bags. Mother marched out of our bedroom holding an elaborate nipple tassel between her fingers. ‘WHERE did THIS come from?’ For once in his life, Joseph was speechless. ‘You have our children up all night when they have school in the morning and you have them peeking at NAKED women? WHAT kind of people do you have our sons mixing with? This is QUITE the life you are showing them, Joseph!’

We brothers viewed such incidents differently. In my mind, a woman’s body is hypnotic and beautiful, but Michael saw these women as degrading themselves to tease men, and men treating them like sex objects. Yes, he gawped and giggled like the rest of us, but his lasting impression formed differently. He always remembered one regular stripper – her name was Rosie – tossing her panties into the crowd and jiggling her bits as men tried to touch her. Michael always hid his eyes. ‘Awww, man! That’s awful. Why she do that?’

Mother has said that she didn’t realise there were strippers until she read Michael’s autobiography. I think that’s the ‘official’ line for the sake of the Kingdom Hall. Not that her objections had anything to do with being a Jehovah’s Witness. As she says, what mother of any faith would want her young sons mixing in such an environment so late at night? I think that was where the crucial difference lay between Mother and Joseph. She viewed us as her sons and often worried about the impact of all the performing and travelling, and to Joseph, perhaps, we were performers first and sons second; he regarded anything and everything as a necessary step in the right direction.

PERFORMING MIDWEEK WASN’T ENOUGH FOR JOSEPH. Every weekend, he booked us anywhere he could find an opening, helped by two Chicago DJs, Pervis Spann and E. Rodney Jones. They acted as our club promoters and were also bookers for B.B. King and Curtis Mayfield, but their main job was on-air at Chicago-based WVON Radio, the most listened-to station in Gary. With Purvis working the graveyard shift and E. Rodney on days, they pushed soul music heavily, so our promotion was in good hands: black radio was the route-one approach to getting noticed back then. If you were ‘in’ with WVON, you were on the local recording industry’s radar.

Pervis, who always wore a grey-and-black fedora-type hat, had an Otis Redding look about him and he hyped us up by telling people, ‘Just wait till you see these kids perform!’ Joseph cursed about Pervis’s cheques occasionally bouncing, but what Pervis lacked in financial reliability, he compensated for by spreading the word. He and E. Rodney Jones waved our flag like no one else.

As a result, we five piled ourselves – and our instruments – into Joseph’s VW camper van while Mother and Rebbie stayed at home with La Toya, Randy and baby Janet. For a while we saw more of school and the insides of clubs and theatres than we did of the four walls of our own home. Our VW ‘tour bus’ had two seats up front, with the middle seats removed to make room for the amps, guitars, drum-kit and other equipment. There was a bench seat at the rear but we would sit and sleep wherever we could prop our bodies, using the drum as a head rest. We couldn’t have been more tightly packed, but the journeys were full of jokes, laughter and song. As Joseph drove, we brothers went over the whole show in our heads, unprompted.

‘On this part, don’t forget we turn on this word …’ Jackie would say.

Or Tito: ‘At the beginning of the bridge, remember, throw your hands in the air.’

Or Michael: ‘Jackie, you’ll go one end of the stage, I’ll be in the middle. Marlon, you go the other side …’

This was how we prepared en route: verbally walking through every routine. It didn’t matter that we were aged between seven and 17: there was no superiority in rank.

We each chipped in as equals and Michael, the youngest, was probably the most vociferous and creative. It wasn’t just the way he walked the walk that made him seem older than his years, it was the way he talked the talk, too. Due to Joseph’s conditioning, our focus was intense, but even as a boy Michael had something extra. He added dynamics that gave our choreography that extra punch and then, mid-performance, threw in his own freestyle section that took things to another level before falling seamlessly back into line. I knew when he was about to bring it because just as the music started, he’d turn to me and wink.

Michael also emerged as a prankster. If one of us fell asleep with our mouth open, he tore off a piece of paper, wrote something silly like ‘My breath smells’, dabbed it with a wet finger and affixed it to the sleeper’s bottom lip. He found this stunt endlessly hilarious. If it wasn’t notes on lips, it was itching powder down the pants or a whoopie cushion placed on a seat. Michael was carving out his role as the principal jester of the pack.

In the summer of 1966, we drove the 1,500 miles to Arizona – stopping only for gas – to perform a set at the Old Arcadia Hall in Winslow, near Phoenix, because Papa Samuel lived nearby and wanted to show us off to his home crowd. It meant driving through Friday night and into Saturday, performing that night, then heading back to arrive home beyond midnight on Sunday for school the next day. Michael didn’t laugh much on that torturously long journey. What I vividly remember is sitting upfront with Joseph and at one point, he pulled over, put his hands over his face and started vigorously rubbing his cheeks. His eyes were watering. He caught me staring. ‘Just tired,’ he said. He took five minutes and we hit the road again.

By this time, we had a newly installed drummer named Johnny Jackson and despite what the marketing hype would later claim, he was no cousin and no distant relation. His surname was just a happy coincidence that future publicists would exploit. We found him because he attended Theodore Roosevelt High with Jackie and a local music teacher recommended him. Aged about 14, he was a bubbly, animated little guy with a cheeky smile. He was the best young drummer around for miles, as confident with his skill as Michael was with his dance. Johnny had a great back-beat and a strong-foot, and his timing was exquisite. He used to hit the drums so hard that we could feel the rhythm coming through our feet from the stage. Johnny Jackson helped make our sound.

Another addition to the ‘family’ was the nicest man – Jack Richardson, a friend of Joseph’s. He arrived as designated driver because the endless miles became too much for our father. Jack would stick with us for years and become an integral part of the team. His hours behind the wheel without complaint told us how much he also believed in us. Wherever we were booked – Kansas City, Missouri, Ohio – Jack jumped up with enthusiasm.

Our marathon road trips were important, said Joseph, because ‘You need to appeal to white audiences as well as black audiences.’ He was determined to build for us an interracial fan base at a time when the civil rights movement was at its height. As kids, the racial nuances went over our heads. It didn’t matter to us if the faces in the crowd were black or white and it didn’t affect how we performed. The audience reaction was always the same – they loved us.

ALL BUSINESS TALK WENT OVER OUR heads, too: we just jumped into the van, showed up and performed. That was all we were interested in. As we hung around post-show in different venues and hotels, Joseph was busy hustling on our behalf, shaking hands and making connections. All we wanted was to go home but then he’d bring over some new ‘contact’ and we’d have to stop kicking our heels, reapply our show faces and smile. During our struggle for recognition, Joseph forever seemed to battle other people’s anxiety that a bunch of ‘minors’ could cut it. Typically, he was undeterred. He said that if Stevie Wonder could make it, then so could his kids.

And then came hope, in the face of a guitarist named Phil Upchurch, whom we met after some show in Chicago. Joseph told us enthusiastically how this artist had already worked with the likes of Woody Herman, Curtis Mayfield and Dee Clark. In 1961, he had released a single, ‘You Can’t Sit Down’, that sold more than one million copies. ‘Now, he’s going to work with you on a demo tape,’ announced Joseph. This was a big deal because Phil was an influential player on the scene in Detroit and we jumped around as if Jackie had just hit a forbidden home run.

Michael broke free from our elated huddle and hugged Phil around his legs. ‘Can I please have your autograph?’ Phil, no more than a fresh-faced 25-year-old, took out a scrap of paper from his jacket and scrawled a quick signature. Michael clutched it like a prize all the way home. What I love about this story is its postscript: decades later, Phil wrote to Michael and asked for his autograph. But he got more than that – he was invited to play guitar on ‘Working Day & Night’ from Michael’s first solo album, Off the Wall.