MJ by Steve Knopper Read Free Book Online

Jackson.“How in the world—’cause this little boy, and he was a kid— be so talented? That’s what everybody went away talking about,” singer Brenda Holloway said. It was at this party that Michael, wide-eyed, met Ross for the first time. Michael reacted with typical subtlety:“DIANA ROSS!” he shouted to his brothers. “I’VE JUST SEEN DIANA ROSS!” Jackie, the oldest, the leader, got them to concentrate.“We was quite nervous,” Tito acknowledged.
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    When Motown signed the Jackson 5, the small record label had been tied to Detroit as intimately as the Ford Motor Company or Al Kaline of the Tigers. It was in Detroit that Berry Gordy had started out as a boxer. He wasn’t bad, but he had an epiphany upon seeingboxing and big-band handbills plastered on the same wall: the twenty-three-year-old boxers looked like they were fifty, while the fifty-year-old bandleaders looked like they were twenty-three. Joseph Jackson had been a failed boxer, too, but while he channeled his ambitions into fiercely driving his sons, Berry channeled his into building a factory-style assembly line in Detroit for hit records.
    Motown songs, according to Gordy, had to be short, catchy, and fun. They had to avoid politics, even when race riots were threatening to destroy Detroit (although, beyond his control, songs like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” became unofficial civil rights anthems). With Gordy’s hands-on guidance at all levels, from songwriting to quality control to charm school, the company released immortal sixties hits such as “Baby Love,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and “I Heard It through the Grapevine.”
    By the time the Jackson 5 signed with Motown in 1968, Gordy and Motown were going through a transition. The Supremes (who hated each other) and theTemptations (whose front men had drug problems and hated each other) were not the reliable superstars they had been for much of the sixties. The company’s famous songwriting team, brothers Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, had left the company, then sued Gordy over money. Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were beginning to envision a world beyond two-and-a-half-minute singles, plotting albums that would change music for decades. And, fairly or not, Gordy didn’t see much of a future on Motown’s bench, as stars such as Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Contours, and Jr. Walker and the All Stars represented the previous decade rather than the new one. He knew the real clout was in Hollywood. He bought his first Los Angeles home in fall 1968 and began to contemplate a company-wide move. The idea was to make movies with his muse, Diana Ross, but first he needed to consolidate his base. For this, he required fresh music stars who’d play by his rules, stars who would roll off a new Motown assembly line that was strict and streamlined even by Gordy’s standards. Gordy saw in theJackson 5 a new franchise player, crucial to Motown’s LA future. A group he could fully control.
    The new Motown sound, based in LA, would have hints of Motown’s familiar “Sound of Young America”—catchy, sophisticated pop melodies set to a steel-beam rhythmic mixture of jazz, R&B, and gospel music. But it would be more scripted, less improvisational, and fully dictated by Gordy and his producers—which is to say, less vulnerable to mutiny by self-determined studio musicians such as the Funk Brothers, Motown’s storied in-house backup band throughout the sixties.“Their music was not the R&B that we were typically known for,” Martha Reeves says. “When we recorded with the Funk Brothers, the Funks initiated the sound. Jackson 5 were closer to disco than to R&B.”
    “They thought the West Coast was going to generate a new sound that would perpetuate the company and make it go on and on,” adds Clay McMurray, a longtime Motown arranger and quality-control staffer who worked as a Jackson 5 songwriter and producer. “It just