You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes by Jermaine Jackson Page A
Authors: Jermaine Jackson
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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
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
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