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WHENMICHAELBECAMEMICHAELIn the late 1970s, the pop prince was a fading teen icon. But that’s when he fi gured out how to make the world dance. By Rob She� eld

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DISCO KING Jackson surrounded

by dancers at Studio 54, in 1977

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ber of the band, still living at home behind the iron gates of his father’s compound.

By 1973, the hits had dried up for the Jackson 5, and the boys were given up for dead. Who wants yes-terday’s bubblegum? The comeback hit “Dancing Machine” – it reached Number Two in 1974 – must have seemed like a novelty fl uke to the old guard at Motown, but it proved to be a prophetic hit. Disco was a new sound in 1974, and it was rare for a name R&B group to give up its major-artist prestige and go all out to reach the discothèque die-hards. “Dancing Machine” introduced the world to the Robot, which the Jack-sons took all over the TV talk-show circuit, doing the dance with Cher and on The Merv Gri� n Show.

The Jacksons left Motown for CBS Records in 1975, leaving their “5” behind, as Berry Gordy claimed it was his corporate property. The newly renamed Jacksons also left behind Jermaine, who’d married Gordy’s daughter and stuck with Motown to start his solo career.

With “Dancing M achine” as their exit strategy, the Jacksons seemed primed to become a fl u� y pop family act like the Syl-vers, the DeFranco Family or the Captain and Tennille. They went on The Carol Burnett Show to introduce their newest full-fl edged member, Randy, the youngest Jackson brother and a burgeoning musical talent.

They made a pair of fl ops with the Philly-soul producers Gamble and Hu� , who fed the brothers material while allowing Michael to write a couple of songs per album. The Jacksons has some moments – the Top 10 hit “Enjoy Yourself,” the funk-rock “Think Happy,” with its proto- “Beat It” guitar eruption, and Mi-chael’s solo songwriting debut, “Blues Away.” But even the letter

The jacksons’ 1979 hit “shake your body (down to the ground)” begins

with a piano rumble, a cymbal glide, bass zooming from speaker to speaker. Tito

Jackson tries out a staccato guitar lick. And then Michael Jackson lets loose the

fi rst whoops and gasps of his brand-new adult voice. See that girl over there?

Michael can’t tell if she notices him, if she recognizes him, if she even remembers

he used to be in a big-deal kiddie group called the Jackson 5. All he knows is he needs to get close,

so he slithers up to her on the dance fl oor with one of the all-time great disco opening lines: “I don’t

know what’s gonna happen to you, baby, but I do! Know! That! I! Love ya!” ★ This song hit Num-

ber Seven in the spring of 1979, and it was more than the pivot point of MJ’s career – in many ways,

it’s the pivot point of pop music in the past 40 years. If there was a moment where Michael grew up and turned into Michael Jackson, this is it. On “Shake Your Body,” he sounds totally confi dent – even though he was a very scared, emotionally rav-aged, washed-up child star whose last big hit was years behind him – writing and producing his own ma-terial for the fi rst time. He didn’t know it, but he was just a year away from O� the Wall, the solo joint that made him the most beloved and de-sired creature in the pop universe.

The disco years are the only time Michael Jackson had anything close to a low profi le – for the last time in his life, he was just another celebri-ty. By any standard, he was living a lush life of Hollywood fantasy: pall-ing around with stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli, playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz with Diana Ross, dating Tatum O’Neal, dancing at Studio 54. He was a strangely in-nocent boy-child in the era of Boogie Nights fl eshpots, untouched by sex or drugs despite the manic indul-gence all around him, a Jehovah’s Witness lost in the pleasure dome. His private zoo grew like his collection of famous friends; he had to be the only virgin in Freddie Mercury’s Rolodex. Everybody liked having this kid around. But nobody had any way of knowing that for him, this was just a warm-up.

The two Jacksons records that came out of this period, 1978’s Destiny and 1980’s Triumph, are disco classics that give a fasci-nating glimpse into MJ experimenting with his ideas in a fam-ily setting, inventing the sound that would explode in O� the Wall and Thriller. But they’re also a document of his uneasy identity as a Jackson brother trapped in the family business, a megastar forced to keep pretending he’s just another mem-

DRESS FOR SUCCESS In 1977, Michael shows o� a drum-major-like outfi t that would presage his mid-1980s look. At right: Tito, Jackie, Michael, Jermaine and

Marlon (from left) in Jamaica in 1975, the year they left Motown and went out on their own.

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S on the cover could be mistaken for a 5, dropping fans a hint of who these guys used to be.

The pressure to save the family empire was crush-ing for Michael, now a tall, gawky teen with a chang-ing voice. New visitors to the Jackson mansion would ask him if he knew where that “cute little Michael” was. The brothers had a short-lived variety series on CBS where Mi-chael boogied with Dom DeLuise and shadowboxed with Muhammad Ali. In early 1977, Michael talked to Andy Warhol for Interview magazine. “He’s really tall now, but he has a really high voice,” Warhol wrote in his diary. “He didn’t know a thing about me – he thought I was a poet or something like that.”

The Jacksons fi nally took creative control on Destiny, writ-ing and producing the whole album except for the fi rst single, “Blame It on the Boogie,” written by an obscure English disco singer named (of all things) Mick Jackson. “Boogie” was a sizable R&B hit, but the album re ally caught fi re the following spring, when Michael and Randy’s “Shake Your Body” started shaking millions of bodies down to the ground. Destiny was a fantastic rec ord, combining the relentless forward motion of disco with the romantic heat of Michael’s voice. Even before he’d started working with key collaborators like Quincy Jones or Rod Tem-perton, Michael had nailed the Michael Jackson sound on vinyl. And the ballads – did anyone notice them as a cry for help? In “That’s What You Get (For Being Polite)” and “Bless His Soul,” he keeps singing about nice guys who get exploited by everyone around them. In the title song, he longs to escape (“I’ve tasted the city life, and it’s not for me/Now I do dream of distant plac-es”), poignant from a kid just turned 20.

The mood of the album is cartoonishly upbeat. The back cover has a painting of a peacock, with a poem written by Michael and Jackie for Peacock Productions: “Of all the bird family, the pea-cock is the only bird that integrates all colors into one, and dis-plays this radio of fi re only when in love. We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one through the love of music.” It’s a family a� air – still co-managed by their father, they dedicate the record to their mother, and on the picture in the inner sleeve, the brothers pose by the studio mixing board. All smile confi -dently for the camera – all but Michael, who hangs in the back and turns away nervously.

Less than a year later, O� the Wall made Michael the big-gest star in pop music, but he was still stuck with a group he couldn’t quit – they were blood and more than that. So, imme-diately after O� the Wall, he headed back into the studio for Tri-umph, back into the increasingly strange role of team player, pretending he’s just another one of the brothers. You can hear his confi dence surge on Triumph – it’s like watching how di� er-ent Pacino is in the fi rst two Godfather movies, knowing that he had a solo smash in between with Serpico.

The Jacksons went back to the discos for this record – the sin-gles were huge R&B hits but never reached the pop Top 20, as if paying back the hardcore black audience that had kept listen-ing when the pop masses had given up on them. “Can You Feel It” suggests they were listening to a lot of prog rock; it’s like they threw some Electric Light Orchestra albums into a blender with

some Earth, Wind and Fire. “Heartbreak Hotel” (an original, not an Elvis cover) is a fi rst taste of the groupie- paranoia vibe that Michael would soon make one of his songwriting trade-marks. Sometime after “Heartbreak Hotel” had already become a smash, CBS mysteriously changed the song’s title to the totally nonsensical “This Place Hotel.”

After Thriller, the family naturally came calling again, for the debacle of the Victory tour. In 1984, any whi� of plastic with a hint of the Jackson magic was guaranteed to hit the charts: The newly returned Jermaine got Michael to sing on “Tell Me I’m Not Dreamin’,” sister Rebbie had a glorious one-shot hit called “Centipede,” and old family friend Kennedy Wil-liam Gordy, calling himself Rockwell, enlisted Michael’s star power for the grand goof “Somebody’s Watching Me.” But fans resented the Victory tour and album as soon as they were an-nounced – it looked like Michael was getting bullied into a family project, and it also looked like the brothers were crowd-ing his action. You could see their swagger in the omnipres-ent Pepsi ad: The other Jacksons believed they were just as cool as Michael.

Victory turned out to be an overblown mess, a laughingstock the day it was released. Michael barely appeared on the album beyond the hilarious Mick Jagger duet, “State of Shock.” He also sang a nice duet with Jermaine on Jackie’s “Torture” and con-tributed a wretched hymn called “Be Not Always” that must have been designed to make Marlon’s and Tito’s songs look good. Michael had been working on tracks for Victory with Queen’s Mercury – it was Michael who encouraged Freddie to release “Another One Bites the Dust” as a single – and there’s an early demo where they sing “State of Shock,” with Freddie taking the part that went to Jagger.

The Jacksons didn’t play a single Victory song on their mas-sively hyped summer tour, but they made headlines for sky-high ticket prices (30 bucks – those were the days), and the whole project became a legendary symbol of superstar arrogance. The sad part was that the only superstar in the group was the one who wasn’t arrogant enough to say no.

As far as the American public was concerned, Victory was the end of the line for the Jacksons. Their only other album was 1989’s universally ignored 2300 Jackson Street (if you listen through a microscope, you can hear Michael in the title track). Destiny and Triumph were so overshadowed by the Michael-solo juggernaut, they’re buried treasures that most Michael fans haven’t even heard. But in many ways, they’re the sound of Michael struggling to rip himself free of his past. You could hear in his voice that he knew what it felt like to be rejected and abandoned by the music world. You could also hear his deter-mination that it would never happen again.

BOOGIE NIGHTS Clockwise from above: With Steve Rubell, Steven Tyler and Cherie Currie of the Runaways; with the Village People and Valerie Perrine (bottom left) and Jane Fonda (bottom right),

1979; with Andy Warhol, 1981; with Diana Ross at the premiere for “The Wiz” in October 1978.

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