generalspeaking

Friday, June 29, 2018

A Pop Musical Dynasty

"We'd perform for him, and he'd critique us. If you messed up, you got hit, sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a switch."
"I'd take a shoe and throw it at him, or I'd just fight back, swinging my fists. That's why I got it more than all my brothers combined. I would fight back, and my father would kill me, just tear me up."
"I'd just stare at them [children playing in parks, while he had to constantly rehearse] in wonder. I couldn't imagine such freedom, such a carefree life -- and wish more than anything that I had that kind of freedom, that I could walk away and be like them."
Michael Jackson, 1988 autobiography Moonwalk

Pop star Michael Jackson and his father Joe Jackson gestures to his fans

Joe Jackson, seen here with his son Michael, had been in hospital for terminal cancer Reuters

A steelworker from Gary Indiana, Joe Jackson found his calling in breeding children, nine in all, with the talent he himself lacked, though he played in a band with high hopes to get somewhere in show business -- but it was only through his children that he did, as their manager. This man was a perfectionist, demanding nothing less than the ultimate from his children, depriving them of childhood and steeping them in never-ending practise sessions, grooming them beyond the amateur into the professional heights of musical accomplishment.

Of his nine children, all would eventually be involved in producing major hit records, while his son Michael evolved into the most popular recording artist of his time. Throughout all of these struggles to achieve celebrity and musical prominence in a competitive world of pop music, a stream of tabloid headlines screeched of parental over-reach, and hinted at lurid episodes in the lives of those children growing to an adulthood of fame and instant name recognition leading to acclaim as they reached the heights of their professional careers.

The Jackson 5 performing on BBC's Top of the Pop in 1972 - photographed in black and white

The Jackson 5 played BBC's Top of the Pops at Christmas in 1972

From playing guitar in a band in the 1950s to training his talented children, Joe Jackson succeeded in introducing the appreciative public to the Jackson 5, where eight-year-old Michael's transcendent voice and cosmopolitan stage presence enraptured the audiences he appeared before as an unusually talented and driven child. Joe signed a contract for his sons with Motown in Detroit where "bubble gum soul" became the label's imprint to fame.

Michael Jackson's contract with his father expired in 1979 when he turned 21. Firing his father as manager, Michael began work with Quincy Jones, jazz arranger and bandleader, who went on to produce Michael's 1980s hit albums selling hundreds of millions of copies as Michael Jackson became an unrivalled superstar. Following his example, Joe's other children began to leave their father's controlling, brutal management style.

In a 1991 memoir, middle daughter La Toya Jackson revealed that all of Joe's children had been physically and emotionally abused by him. The girls, she hinted, may have been molested, a charge she backed away from later and which her father vehemently denied. Four years ago, a reporter enquired of Joseph Jackson if in retrospect he nursed any regrets about how difficult and demanding he had been with his children. "Not at all. I don't live that way", he responded.

Joseph Jackson, dead at age 89, in a Los Angeles hospital, of cancer.