MJ by Steve Knopper Read Free Book Online Page B

comes in with “Oh-oh-oh-oh, lemme tell ya now.” Jermaine’s yearning style is a great foil, especially in the dueling “baby!” bursts at the end. Jermaine was useful to Richards. They sang in the same register, allowing Jermaine to pick up Richards’s vocal parts and communicate them easily to the rest of the group. TheJacksons worked long hours on vocals. Due to time and labor, the session for “I Want You Back” cost $10,000, which was $7,000 more than Motown had ever spent on any single. They often were in the studio ten to twelve hours a day, five to seven days a week. “I had to stop it,” Richards recalls. “They brought in the labor force and it seemed like it was Nurse Ratched that came in with her crochet needles and sat there in the corner and the kids came in and sang for a certain point and they got their ten-minute breaks and they had to leave at a certain time for their schooling.” Actually, it was Rose Fine, a tutor and welfare worker, who formed a lifelong bond with Michael. He would later praise Fine as“more than a tutor” and credit her for providing soothing and tenderness when his father, Joe, was incapable of doing so. The sessions became so strict that Richards, who had a habit of listening to playbacks with his eyes closed, once looked up at 3:02 P.M. and found the room was empty.
    Joe stayed away, for the most part. Richards kept a sign near thestudio phone that said CALL PAPA JOE , and whenever the boys became too wiggly, he merely pointed to it.He never called. Thanks to Jackie’s stern hand as the older brother, the boys’ mischief rarely went out of control, even when Marlon and Michael couldn’t seem to stop poking and hitting each other, Three Stooges style. “When you’ve got one [song] you have to do over and over again, the monotony brings out the little one-liners and the joking around and silly stuff,” Richards says. “They have no idea how close you are to capturing the last part of it. You’ve found the one spot that you need so badly, and they’ve picked [that] particular time to go [into] their Disneyland joke arena. It’s like, ‘Jesus! No, not now!’ But you have to be careful. You couldn’t talk to them too rough, because then you’re going to turn around and the kids are going to rebel—and they get enough of telling them what to do from their dad.”
    Motown in Los Angeles, from the company’s offices near Sunset and Vine in Hollywood to its various studios, including one across the street from a huge park on Romaine Street, became a sanctuary for Michael Jackson. He could, for the most part, escape his father. And inside Motown, the Jackson 5 didn’t have to flee from screaming fans or worry about image.“They just felt comfortable away from the public,” recalls Russ Terrana, Motown’s chief recording engineer. “They could be kids again.” But Motown was not a true sanctuary—even top artists complained of exploitation. The Jackson 5 received a minuscule two cents for every album they sold. That was not far from the same low rate that established Motown stars such as Marvin Gaye and the Supremes received—6 percent of 90 percent of the wholesale cost of an album for every sale, only it was divided five ways among the Jackson brothers.“Just about everyone got ripped off at Motown,” said Clarence Paul, the late songwriter and producer. “Tunes were stolen all the time, and often credit wasn’t properly arranged.” In person Berry Gordy seemed like a benevolent father figure, but as fond as he was of Michael, the singer was just another racehorse in his stable.
    *  *  *
    Back home in Gary, life was getting worse. Richard Hatcher had become a national phenomenon as the first African-American mayor of a major US city, but his aggressive social programs such asOperation Crime Alert and Operation Safe Gary were no match for the decline of the steel mills and white flight. In 1968, the city’s crime rate increased by 11 percent. One