Growing up in show business is hard to do, especially if your last name is Jackson. For most of their childhood and teenage years, the song-and-dance prodigies Jackie, Tito, Marlon, Jermaine, Michael and Randy Jackson had been manipulated in the studio, groomed for the stage and chaperoned on the road. By 1981, despite more than ten years' worth of hits, worldwide acclaim for their precocious vocal and hoofing abilities and the two successful albums that they produced for the Epic label, the Jacksons were still widely perceived as Daddy Joe's little boys—products of Berry Gordy's Motown charm school. So when pop's hottest musical family embarked on a thirty-six-city tour of America that summer, they went with a mission: to show that the Jacksons, now ranging in age from nineteen to thirty, had grown up and taken control of their own destinies.
"There had been a point where people were saying the brothers were finished—we had left Motown, and we were finished," admits Marlon Jackson. "But when we heard that, it acted more like a motivation, to show them. We had a lot to prove. And after those people saw the show, it was a different story."
The Jacksons—minus Jermaine, who had remained loyal to Motown—stated their case with style and conviction. After showing the video for "Can You Feel It"—a grandiose fantasy in which they portrayed themselves as Olympian figures giving life to the world through their music—the Jacksons hit the boards, led by youngest brother Randy dressed in a shiny suit of medieval armor. With spectacular lighting, sensational pyrotechnics and flashy ensemble footwork, the Jacksons danced and dazzled their way through a tight hour and twenty minutes' worth of snappy boogie numbers and cool ballads, many of which they had written and produced themselves. In fact, the whole presentation was a family affair: Michael designed the space-age stage; Michael, Marlon and Jackie handled the choreography; Jackie, Tito and Randy directed the crack band. It was a "primo black arena rock" show, according to Michael Jackson's biographer and Billboard's black-music editor, Nelson George.
"They were hot," George raves. "They were challenging Earth, Wind and Fire and the Commodores for ascendancy as the best black band around. The Jacksons really had their shit together, and they had that cultural cachet going back ten years, which Earth, Wind and Fire didn't have."
Michael, who had just turned twenty-three, was unquestionably the star of the Jacksons' '81 shows. Prenose-job, pre-Thriller, he was already riding high with his 1979 multiplatinum solo album Off the Wall. His matured, soulful tenor heightened the passionate fealty in the old Jackson Five hit "I'll Be There." For disco dynamite like his Off the Wall smash "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," Michael literally turned into a dancing machine, executing split-second kicks and dizzying spins with smooth precision. He also indulged his boyish love of magic with a disappearing act after "Don't Stop."
"Michael would walk up a set of stairs into this cylinder," explains Steve Kirsner, the vice-president of Doug Henning's Illusion Team, who worked on the trick. "The cylinder was covered either with flash paper or with cloth, depending on what the fire laws were where they were. The cylinder would get hoisted in the air, and at the appropriate moment, the flash paper would burn or the cloth would get pulled away. And he'd be gone." Suddenly, on the other side of the stage, Michael would reappear in a big aluminum dish amid six-foot-high flames, wearing his Off the Wall tuxedo, as the group stepped into its funky finale, "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)."
But the '81 production was very much a team effort, with a guitar-solo spotlight for Tito in "Heartbreak Hotel" and a frenzied conga break by Randy. "The biggest screams of the night would be for Michael, Marlon and Jackie doing steps," says Nelson George. "I'll never forget—my date kept telling me how sexy Marlon was. He danced as good or better than Michael. My date was just slobbering all over this guy."
The slobbering intensified when the Jacksons regrouped for the '84 Victory tour. The audiences were bigger, and the media interest was positively rabid. With Jackie out of commission with an injury, Jermaine was recruited at the last minute. The show bore a suspicious resemblance to the old revue—from Randy's suit of armor to the "Shake Your Body" finale. And Michael's increasing reclusiveness and the mega-platinum sales of his Thriller LP eroded the familial cohesion of the '81 shows.
"That was the tour everyone should have seen," George says of the '81 tour. "By the time the Jacksons rolled around with Victory, whatever chemistry they had onstage was gone."
[From RS Issue 501 — June 4, 1987]
