More Quotes about Michael from his family:(warning joe would make you mad)
5.
The Jackson Five passed the audition at Roosevelt with flying colors. They must have made a big impression on the competition, too.
The boys opened with “My Girl,” with Jermaine singing lead. The applause was loud and sustained. Then the boys launched into their original tune.
JACKIE: When we had the crowd exactly where we wanted them, Michael laid down his bongos, took centre stage, and proceeded to do James Brown. He tore the house down.
That night we were thrilled to return home with the first-place trophy. We didn’t have the money for an all-out celebration, but we happily made due with an ice cream feast
A few months after their triumph at Roosevelt High, the Jackson Five won the Annual Talent Search. Once again Michael stole the show.
His moment of glory came during the boys’ rendition of the Robert Parker hit, “Barefootin’,” on which Michael sang lead. During the instrumental break, he suddenly kicked off his shoes and did the darnedest barefoot dance around the stage.
JACKIE: To come up with an idea on the spot like that, at his age .... I just couldn’t believe it.
REBBIE: Besides his obvious talent, the thing that struck me about Michael at the time was the fact that he didn’t have any inhibitions. In a setting like that, most seven-year-olds would get shy. But Michael’s attitude was: “I’m gonna go out there and do it!”
6.
Joe put the boys on a formal rehearsal schedule. The rehearsed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If they had a show coming up, Joe adjusted the schedule accordingly.
On a rehearsal day, the boys would have their instruments set up in the living room by four-thirty P.M .... , when Joe returned from work. I’d have dinner on the table, we’d eat, and then Joe and the boys would rehearse for the next two hours. If Joe had to work late, I’d run the rehearsal in his place.
Sometimes things didn’t go smoothly.
REBBIE: Occasionally Joe would try to get Michael to sing, or do something he didn’t feel like doing, and Michael wouldn’t cooperate. He had a little bit of an attitude sometimes; by then he knew that he was very important to the group as its lead singer.
In the beginning, Joe would grow furious with Michael, even spank him. But a spanking would always backfire. Michael would then be too upset to continue, and the rehearsal would have to be called off. So Joe would try a different approach.
REBBIE: What he and the older brothers would do is try to laud him on, play to his little ego. Sometimes that would work!
It was one thing for Michael to dream of someday living in a castle. It was another thing for him and his brothers to understand that it took discipline and sacrifice to achieve a dream. They were still so young.
JACKIE: Dad would tell us “Just keep up the good work. You’re going to make it. Keep going.” But sometimes as we rehearsed we’d see the neighbor kids pass by outside on the way to the park carrying their bats and gloves, and I’d want nothing more than to be outside with them, ins
Michael continued to astound the family with his dancing talent, and especially his ability to invent sensational new moves in mid-solo onstage. Many times the first words out of Joe’s mouth when he returned from a weekend gig would be, “Guess what Michael did this time?”
8.
The children still had to share bedrooms: Jackie roomed with keyboards player Ronny Rancifer; Tito with drummer Johnny Jackson; Jermaine with Marlon; Michael with Randy; and LaToya with Janet.
On Jermaine’s seventeenth birthday, a thirteen resident “moved in” -- Rosie, the boa constrictor. She was a gift from Jermaine’s girlfriend, Hazel Gordy, Berry Gordy’s daughter.
This was one more adjustment I had to make in L.A.: the boys’ exotic new taste in pets. Although we’d had a couple of dogs, they weren’t content with dogs any more. They wanted snakes.
Rosie became a favourite playmate of theirs. They’d walk around the house with her curled around their necks. They also liked to tease their friends by pretending to sic Rosie on them.
I recall Johnny Jackson’s waking up in a start one night, screaming, “Mother, there’s something crawling on my stomach!” Sure enough, it was Rosie. A couple of the boys had taken her out of Jermaine’s aquarium that afternoon and had forgotten to return her. She’d been on the loose downstairs.
Rosie lived but a couple of years. After she died, the boys bought a second boa constrictor. Like Rosie, he liked to sun himself in the trees in our backyard.
“You don’t turn a snake loose like that!” I’d exclaim.
“But he needs to get some exercise," they’d argue.
Well, one day he got more exercise than the boys bargained for. When they went outside to look for him, he was gone
I didn’t dare tell the neighbors.
Considering my boys’ fascination with exotic creatures, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that one of them scored a number-one hit in 1972 with a song about a rat. The song was “Ben,” from the movie of the same title. The singer was Michael.
“Ben” was Michael’s third hit as a solo artist, following on the heels of “Got To Be There” and his cover of the old Bobby Day tune, “Rockin’ Robin.” It was Berry Gordy’s idea that he and a couple of the other boys also record on their own. (Jermaine had a Top Ten hit himself in 1973 with his version of Shep and the Limelites’ 1961 hit, “Daddy’s Home.”)
I know that being given the opportunity to record “Ben” was a dream come true for Michael. Not only was it a beautiful ballad -- if you didn’t know that Ben was a rat, you never would have guessed -- but, also, Michael just happened to adore rats.
I recall having dinner with the family in a restaurant one night and watching Michael as he picked up crumbs from his plate and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “Michael, what are you doing?” I finally asked him.
At that moment a rat poked its head out of Michael’s pocket, and I had my answer.
Michael bred rats while we lived in Beverly Hills. We lived in an area where there was a great deal of vegetation, and I’d see big brown rats scurrying through the ivy and bushes from time to time. After a while, I was surprised to see the rats seemingly change color; some were partially white, a few totally white. Then it dawned on me that Michael was letting his white rats out into the yard, and they were mating with the wild rats.
I never confronted Michael about his breeding project, but when we moved to our Encino house I informed him, “Your rats are not coming with you.”
In addition to liking rats, Michael loved magic. At the age of twelve he would blow his entire three-dollar weekly allowance on magic tricks.
He also loved to draw and paint. Two of his favourite “subjects” were Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse; his sketches of them adorned a wall of his bedroom in our Encino home.
Like a typical kid, Michael also had his fears, the worst of which was flying during a thunderstorm or lightning.
REBBIE: After my brothers’ concert in Memphis, they were supposed to catch a flight to Atlanta. Everybody was ready to leave the hotel, but they couldn’t locate Michael. They looked everywhere. Finally they found him -- hiding in a closet. He had heard that a thunderstorm was in the offing.
The next time Rebbie saw her brothers was some months later, in Nashville. Rebbie brought along her six-month-old daughter, Stacee, whom Joe and the boys hadn’t met yet. Michael was so delighted to see his niece that he climbed into her crib to play with her .... after which they both promptly fell asleep.
And yet while Michael acted like your average kid in many ways, when I watched him sing “Ben” on the 1973 Academy Awards show I was once again reminded of the fact that, professionally speaking, he was savvy beyond his years.
I can’t imagine a more nerve-wracking situation in show business than performing on the Oscars show. Yet fourteen-year-old Michael appeared to be no more nervous singing “Ben” that night than he had been singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” at Garnett Elementary School in the first grade.
Even the comment he made to me after the show -- “Ben” was fated to win the Oscar for Best Song -- smacked of a seasoned pro: “Mother, did you notice that in his acceptance speech the writer of “Ben” didn’t thank me for singing the song and helped to make it a success? That he didn’t even mention my name?”
9.
Fourteen was a rough age for Michael. In 1972 he watched with mixed feelings as Tito started a trend among the older brothers by getting married. By 1975, Jermaine, Jackie, and Marlon had also tied the knot.
“A part of me,” Michael confessed in Moonwalk, "wanted us to stay as we were -- brothers who were also best friends .... “
REBBIE: Actually, I think Michael resented his brothers’ getting married and moving out of the house -- on both a personal and professional level. Professionally speaking, Michael didn’t see how he and his brothers could build effectively on the strong musical foundation that they had established if the brothers didn’t remain one hundred percent focused on the Jackson Five, like him.
He didn’t say this in so many words. Even as a young teenager, Michael found it difficult to express the way he felt, especially if his opinions would cause unpleasantness or pain. But he did make statements from time to time that clued me in to his true feelings -- i.e., how he was losing another writing partner when one of the brothers moved out.
At the same time that Michael was fretting about his brothers and the future of the Jackson Five, he was suffering through the usual teen traumas: a growth spurt, a voice change, and a bad case of acne. But with Michael’s being in show business, these traumas were magnified.
Regarding his clear falsetto, people had been telling us for years, “What are you going to do when Michael’s voice changes?” It was as if the success of the Jackson Five had been totally dependent on his falsetto.
As it turned out, Michael’s voice wasn’t affected too much -- high voices run in our family -- but at first he didn't even want to accept the fact that it had changed at all. “You know, Michael doesn’t want to give up his voice,” LaToya said to me one day. “He has to, but he’s still trying to sing high.”
But whatever worry he had about his voice paled next to the shame he felt about his acne. In contrast to Jermaine and Marlon, who took their acne in stride, Michael was so embarrassed by the bumps on his face that he didn’t want to leave the house. When he did, he kept his head down. Even when he talked to me, he couldn’t look at me in the face.
I was worried sick for him. I took him to a specialist, but there wasn’t much that the doctor could do to help.
Michael’s acne disappeared eventually, but the changes that it seemed to have wrought in him became permanent. He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. While he would still occasionally join his brothers for a basketball game in the backyard (“How can you be this good when you hardly ever play?” the brothers would always ask Michael in amazement), he was now quieter, more serious, and more of a loner.
I could see the new Michael in the photographs he was taking. While LaToya and I enjoyed going to Lion Country Safari to shoot the animals, Michael preferred to stay around the house photographing flowers and dewdrops .... delving into his own world.
10.
On their variety show:
For Randy’s segment, Joe and the boys decided to team him with Janet and have them perform a medley of songs made popular by duos: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe,” Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Call,” and Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.”
Michael made an inspired suggestion: “Janet’s always clowning around, doing funny impressions. Let’s work in her impression of Mae West somewhere.”
11.
Michael had talked about becoming an actor ever since the early seventies. He’d performed in a number of skits during the Jacksons’ summer-replacement TV series in 1976, but found that work unfulfilling. The Wiz was much more to his liking.
Michael had seen the Tony Award-winning Broadway version of The Wiz. He had followed with interest Motown’s purchase of the film rights, even as the Jacksons were leaving the label.
When Diana Ross was named to play Dorothy, Michael had further incentive to land a role in the movie; he’d been in love with her ever since he and his brothers had been her houseguests. “You’re not pretty until you start looking like Diana!” he would tease LaToya and Janet.
The Jackson Five passed the audition at Roosevelt with flying colors. They must have made a big impression on the competition, too.
The boys opened with “My Girl,” with Jermaine singing lead. The applause was loud and sustained. Then the boys launched into their original tune.
JACKIE: When we had the crowd exactly where we wanted them, Michael laid down his bongos, took centre stage, and proceeded to do James Brown. He tore the house down.
That night we were thrilled to return home with the first-place trophy. We didn’t have the money for an all-out celebration, but we happily made due with an ice cream feast
A few months after their triumph at Roosevelt High, the Jackson Five won the Annual Talent Search. Once again Michael stole the show.
His moment of glory came during the boys’ rendition of the Robert Parker hit, “Barefootin’,” on which Michael sang lead. During the instrumental break, he suddenly kicked off his shoes and did the darnedest barefoot dance around the stage.
JACKIE: To come up with an idea on the spot like that, at his age .... I just couldn’t believe it.
REBBIE: Besides his obvious talent, the thing that struck me about Michael at the time was the fact that he didn’t have any inhibitions. In a setting like that, most seven-year-olds would get shy. But Michael’s attitude was: “I’m gonna go out there and do it!”
6.
Joe put the boys on a formal rehearsal schedule. The rehearsed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If they had a show coming up, Joe adjusted the schedule accordingly.
On a rehearsal day, the boys would have their instruments set up in the living room by four-thirty P.M .... , when Joe returned from work. I’d have dinner on the table, we’d eat, and then Joe and the boys would rehearse for the next two hours. If Joe had to work late, I’d run the rehearsal in his place.
Sometimes things didn’t go smoothly.
REBBIE: Occasionally Joe would try to get Michael to sing, or do something he didn’t feel like doing, and Michael wouldn’t cooperate. He had a little bit of an attitude sometimes; by then he knew that he was very important to the group as its lead singer.
In the beginning, Joe would grow furious with Michael, even spank him. But a spanking would always backfire. Michael would then be too upset to continue, and the rehearsal would have to be called off. So Joe would try a different approach.
REBBIE: What he and the older brothers would do is try to laud him on, play to his little ego. Sometimes that would work!
It was one thing for Michael to dream of someday living in a castle. It was another thing for him and his brothers to understand that it took discipline and sacrifice to achieve a dream. They were still so young.
JACKIE: Dad would tell us “Just keep up the good work. You’re going to make it. Keep going.” But sometimes as we rehearsed we’d see the neighbor kids pass by outside on the way to the park carrying their bats and gloves, and I’d want nothing more than to be outside with them, ins
Michael continued to astound the family with his dancing talent, and especially his ability to invent sensational new moves in mid-solo onstage. Many times the first words out of Joe’s mouth when he returned from a weekend gig would be, “Guess what Michael did this time?”
8.
The children still had to share bedrooms: Jackie roomed with keyboards player Ronny Rancifer; Tito with drummer Johnny Jackson; Jermaine with Marlon; Michael with Randy; and LaToya with Janet.
On Jermaine’s seventeenth birthday, a thirteen resident “moved in” -- Rosie, the boa constrictor. She was a gift from Jermaine’s girlfriend, Hazel Gordy, Berry Gordy’s daughter.
This was one more adjustment I had to make in L.A.: the boys’ exotic new taste in pets. Although we’d had a couple of dogs, they weren’t content with dogs any more. They wanted snakes.
Rosie became a favourite playmate of theirs. They’d walk around the house with her curled around their necks. They also liked to tease their friends by pretending to sic Rosie on them.
I recall Johnny Jackson’s waking up in a start one night, screaming, “Mother, there’s something crawling on my stomach!” Sure enough, it was Rosie. A couple of the boys had taken her out of Jermaine’s aquarium that afternoon and had forgotten to return her. She’d been on the loose downstairs.
Rosie lived but a couple of years. After she died, the boys bought a second boa constrictor. Like Rosie, he liked to sun himself in the trees in our backyard.
“You don’t turn a snake loose like that!” I’d exclaim.
“But he needs to get some exercise," they’d argue.
Well, one day he got more exercise than the boys bargained for. When they went outside to look for him, he was gone
I didn’t dare tell the neighbors.
Considering my boys’ fascination with exotic creatures, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that one of them scored a number-one hit in 1972 with a song about a rat. The song was “Ben,” from the movie of the same title. The singer was Michael.
“Ben” was Michael’s third hit as a solo artist, following on the heels of “Got To Be There” and his cover of the old Bobby Day tune, “Rockin’ Robin.” It was Berry Gordy’s idea that he and a couple of the other boys also record on their own. (Jermaine had a Top Ten hit himself in 1973 with his version of Shep and the Limelites’ 1961 hit, “Daddy’s Home.”)
I know that being given the opportunity to record “Ben” was a dream come true for Michael. Not only was it a beautiful ballad -- if you didn’t know that Ben was a rat, you never would have guessed -- but, also, Michael just happened to adore rats.
I recall having dinner with the family in a restaurant one night and watching Michael as he picked up crumbs from his plate and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “Michael, what are you doing?” I finally asked him.
At that moment a rat poked its head out of Michael’s pocket, and I had my answer.
Michael bred rats while we lived in Beverly Hills. We lived in an area where there was a great deal of vegetation, and I’d see big brown rats scurrying through the ivy and bushes from time to time. After a while, I was surprised to see the rats seemingly change color; some were partially white, a few totally white. Then it dawned on me that Michael was letting his white rats out into the yard, and they were mating with the wild rats.
I never confronted Michael about his breeding project, but when we moved to our Encino house I informed him, “Your rats are not coming with you.”
In addition to liking rats, Michael loved magic. At the age of twelve he would blow his entire three-dollar weekly allowance on magic tricks.
He also loved to draw and paint. Two of his favourite “subjects” were Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse; his sketches of them adorned a wall of his bedroom in our Encino home.
Like a typical kid, Michael also had his fears, the worst of which was flying during a thunderstorm or lightning.
REBBIE: After my brothers’ concert in Memphis, they were supposed to catch a flight to Atlanta. Everybody was ready to leave the hotel, but they couldn’t locate Michael. They looked everywhere. Finally they found him -- hiding in a closet. He had heard that a thunderstorm was in the offing.
The next time Rebbie saw her brothers was some months later, in Nashville. Rebbie brought along her six-month-old daughter, Stacee, whom Joe and the boys hadn’t met yet. Michael was so delighted to see his niece that he climbed into her crib to play with her .... after which they both promptly fell asleep.
And yet while Michael acted like your average kid in many ways, when I watched him sing “Ben” on the 1973 Academy Awards show I was once again reminded of the fact that, professionally speaking, he was savvy beyond his years.
I can’t imagine a more nerve-wracking situation in show business than performing on the Oscars show. Yet fourteen-year-old Michael appeared to be no more nervous singing “Ben” that night than he had been singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” at Garnett Elementary School in the first grade.
Even the comment he made to me after the show -- “Ben” was fated to win the Oscar for Best Song -- smacked of a seasoned pro: “Mother, did you notice that in his acceptance speech the writer of “Ben” didn’t thank me for singing the song and helped to make it a success? That he didn’t even mention my name?”
9.
Fourteen was a rough age for Michael. In 1972 he watched with mixed feelings as Tito started a trend among the older brothers by getting married. By 1975, Jermaine, Jackie, and Marlon had also tied the knot.
“A part of me,” Michael confessed in Moonwalk, "wanted us to stay as we were -- brothers who were also best friends .... “
REBBIE: Actually, I think Michael resented his brothers’ getting married and moving out of the house -- on both a personal and professional level. Professionally speaking, Michael didn’t see how he and his brothers could build effectively on the strong musical foundation that they had established if the brothers didn’t remain one hundred percent focused on the Jackson Five, like him.
He didn’t say this in so many words. Even as a young teenager, Michael found it difficult to express the way he felt, especially if his opinions would cause unpleasantness or pain. But he did make statements from time to time that clued me in to his true feelings -- i.e., how he was losing another writing partner when one of the brothers moved out.
At the same time that Michael was fretting about his brothers and the future of the Jackson Five, he was suffering through the usual teen traumas: a growth spurt, a voice change, and a bad case of acne. But with Michael’s being in show business, these traumas were magnified.
Regarding his clear falsetto, people had been telling us for years, “What are you going to do when Michael’s voice changes?” It was as if the success of the Jackson Five had been totally dependent on his falsetto.
As it turned out, Michael’s voice wasn’t affected too much -- high voices run in our family -- but at first he didn't even want to accept the fact that it had changed at all. “You know, Michael doesn’t want to give up his voice,” LaToya said to me one day. “He has to, but he’s still trying to sing high.”
But whatever worry he had about his voice paled next to the shame he felt about his acne. In contrast to Jermaine and Marlon, who took their acne in stride, Michael was so embarrassed by the bumps on his face that he didn’t want to leave the house. When he did, he kept his head down. Even when he talked to me, he couldn’t look at me in the face.
I was worried sick for him. I took him to a specialist, but there wasn’t much that the doctor could do to help.
Michael’s acne disappeared eventually, but the changes that it seemed to have wrought in him became permanent. He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. While he would still occasionally join his brothers for a basketball game in the backyard (“How can you be this good when you hardly ever play?” the brothers would always ask Michael in amazement), he was now quieter, more serious, and more of a loner.
I could see the new Michael in the photographs he was taking. While LaToya and I enjoyed going to Lion Country Safari to shoot the animals, Michael preferred to stay around the house photographing flowers and dewdrops .... delving into his own world.
10.
On their variety show:
For Randy’s segment, Joe and the boys decided to team him with Janet and have them perform a medley of songs made popular by duos: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe,” Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Call,” and Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.”
Michael made an inspired suggestion: “Janet’s always clowning around, doing funny impressions. Let’s work in her impression of Mae West somewhere.”
11.
Michael had talked about becoming an actor ever since the early seventies. He’d performed in a number of skits during the Jacksons’ summer-replacement TV series in 1976, but found that work unfulfilling. The Wiz was much more to his liking.
Michael had seen the Tony Award-winning Broadway version of The Wiz. He had followed with interest Motown’s purchase of the film rights, even as the Jacksons were leaving the label.
When Diana Ross was named to play Dorothy, Michael had further incentive to land a role in the movie; he’d been in love with her ever since he and his brothers had been her houseguests. “You’re not pretty until you start looking like Diana!” he would tease LaToya and Janet.