card games, and more grown-up diversions as well.“It’s just like rock ’n’ roll—there’s groupies everywhere,” Rancifer recalls. The older Jacksons, particularly budding sex symbols Jackie and Jermaine, began to indulge, sometimes in front of tiny Michael, who would say the way his brothers treated women on the road turned him off from sexual activity for years. Bored, Michael pounded on doors of his grown-up entourage, including Motown’s Weldon McDougal III. “Man,” McDougal told Michael,“why don’t you go and hang out with Jackie and them guys?” Michael said, “Hey, man, they got somebody in their room.” McDougal: “Well, how do you know?” Michael: “Because I was listening at the door for about an hour.”
When the brothers grew old enough, women threw hotel-room keys onto the stage, which the boys dodged. During one late-period Motown tour, a beautiful blond woman approached manager Samm Brown with a come-hither look. (“She’s not here for you ,” Brown had to keep tellinghimself as he spoke with her.) She asked to be introduced to one of the Jackson boys. Brown interrupted the brother in question—he won’t name names—while he was dressing in his room. “Well, what does she look like?” this Jackson asked. “Stunning,” responded Brown. The brother instructed Brown to crack open the door so he could check her out, through a mirror on a side wall. Finally he motioned with his hands: “Come in!” Years later, Brown realized the woman had been a Playboy Playmate.
“Suffice it to say, it wasn’t Michael,” Brown recalls. “She was not there to see Michael.”
Joe Jackson’s presence as tour manager didn’t make anybody feel more comfortable. The Commodores, including front man Lionel Richie, used Traffic’s rock hit “Feelin’ Alright” as an onstage jam, until Joe, one day, inexplicably forbade the opening act from playing it. The Jackson 5 put the song in their own set the same night. Another time, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, tour roadies“forgot” to bring the Commodores’ equipment, including their stage clothes, from the previous show in another city. Joe refused help, so the band improvised, borrowing equipment from nearby friends, forgoing boots and even pants and replacing “Feelin’ Alright” with Buddy Miles’s hot new blues anthem “Them Changes.” The impromptu fashion statement, as Orange recalls, led to rave newspaper reviews the next day. “Nobody really liked Joe Jackson,” Orange says.
* * *
“Stand still,” the studio men kept telling eleven-year-old Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson couldn’t stand still.
When he sang, he danced. When he danced, he jerked his head around. When his head moved forward, he sang too close to the microphone. When his head moved backward, he sang too far from the microphone. He was knocking the vocal sound off track.
Suzee Ikeda walked into the sound booth and gently pushedMichael’s head and neck closer to the mike during the soft part, and pulled it away during the loud part. “It started out like that,” she says, “and it became a whole other thing.”
Ikeda, twenty-two, had arrived at Motown’s Los Angeles offices three years earlier, in 1967. As a girl, she had been an aspiring actress, but she became frustrated with the cattle-call auditions and geisha-girl roles the producers lined up for her. Instead, through her junior high school orchestra teacher, she wound up sitting in on professional recording sessions with Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, and others, sometimes singing a bit herself. She worked on a Supremes Christmas album and, over time, she impressed influential in-house songwriter Brian Holland, who signed her to a solo Motown contract.
Suzee’s talent turned out to be not in her singing ability but in her personality. In her shiny, Diana Ross–like voice, she would record a few singles for Motown, including the desperate “I Can’t Give Back the Love I Feel for
When the brothers grew old enough, women threw hotel-room keys onto the stage, which the boys dodged. During one late-period Motown tour, a beautiful blond woman approached manager Samm Brown with a come-hither look. (“She’s not here for you ,” Brown had to keep tellinghimself as he spoke with her.) She asked to be introduced to one of the Jackson boys. Brown interrupted the brother in question—he won’t name names—while he was dressing in his room. “Well, what does she look like?” this Jackson asked. “Stunning,” responded Brown. The brother instructed Brown to crack open the door so he could check her out, through a mirror on a side wall. Finally he motioned with his hands: “Come in!” Years later, Brown realized the woman had been a Playboy Playmate.
“Suffice it to say, it wasn’t Michael,” Brown recalls. “She was not there to see Michael.”
Joe Jackson’s presence as tour manager didn’t make anybody feel more comfortable. The Commodores, including front man Lionel Richie, used Traffic’s rock hit “Feelin’ Alright” as an onstage jam, until Joe, one day, inexplicably forbade the opening act from playing it. The Jackson 5 put the song in their own set the same night. Another time, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, tour roadies“forgot” to bring the Commodores’ equipment, including their stage clothes, from the previous show in another city. Joe refused help, so the band improvised, borrowing equipment from nearby friends, forgoing boots and even pants and replacing “Feelin’ Alright” with Buddy Miles’s hot new blues anthem “Them Changes.” The impromptu fashion statement, as Orange recalls, led to rave newspaper reviews the next day. “Nobody really liked Joe Jackson,” Orange says.
* * *
“Stand still,” the studio men kept telling eleven-year-old Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson couldn’t stand still.
When he sang, he danced. When he danced, he jerked his head around. When his head moved forward, he sang too close to the microphone. When his head moved backward, he sang too far from the microphone. He was knocking the vocal sound off track.
Suzee Ikeda walked into the sound booth and gently pushedMichael’s head and neck closer to the mike during the soft part, and pulled it away during the loud part. “It started out like that,” she says, “and it became a whole other thing.”
Ikeda, twenty-two, had arrived at Motown’s Los Angeles offices three years earlier, in 1967. As a girl, she had been an aspiring actress, but she became frustrated with the cattle-call auditions and geisha-girl roles the producers lined up for her. Instead, through her junior high school orchestra teacher, she wound up sitting in on professional recording sessions with Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, and others, sometimes singing a bit herself. She worked on a Supremes Christmas album and, over time, she impressed influential in-house songwriter Brian Holland, who signed her to a solo Motown contract.
Suzee’s talent turned out to be not in her singing ability but in her personality. In her shiny, Diana Ross–like voice, she would record a few singles for Motown, including the desperate “I Can’t Give Back the Love I Feel for
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