I don't think Michael Jackson was meant to get old. He was the megastar who was deprived of his own childhood. He was the Peter Pan who said he identified with kids long before he was accused of doing more than identifying with kids. So his death at 50 seems less a shock than an inevitability.
Can you picture Michael Jackson as an old man? I couldn't.
But I guess we should have seen this coming. If you think of it, Jackson's life was a mess pretty much from the start. He worked as a kid, and said much later that he suffered abuse at the hands of his father.
And in a lot of ways, the unprecedented success of 1982's "Thriller" album, which has sold 28 million copies in the U.S. and up to 100 million worldwide (and that's bound to shoot up as a result of his death June 25) was the beginning of his downfall.
Flash back to March 1983. I'm sitting on the couch at my friends Bill and Donna's house on the Northeast side of town, near Beaumont, when Bill puts in a videotape he'd made of the "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever" TV special. He says I've got to see this. I do. I don't believe what I saw. How'd he do that, I asked of the moonwalk, his signature move, where Jackson glided backward across the stage, making it look as if he's walking on air.
It was a career-defining moment, as historic as Elvis' shakey pelvis or the Beatles' moptop flopping on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was Michael at a creative pinnacle, riding high on an album, "Thriller," that built upon his impressive melding of pop, rock, disco and R&B that was 1979's "Off the Wall," the first album that ever made me take Michael Jackson seriously at an artist.
Anything he did before that as a teenaged solo artist and as a member of the Jackson 5 was so much piffle to a rocker like I was.
The moonwalk and "Thriller," with its seven Top 10 hits (including, of course, "Billie Jean" and "Beat It"), eight Grammys and barrier busting videos, especially the mini-movie "Thriller" video not only propelled him into a cultural stratosphere that barely diminished long after his creative juices dried up and his eccentricities and possibly criminal behavior had made him a sick joke.
But it created impossible expectations, especially his own. I remember the Rolling Stone interview he did to promote "Bad," his 1987 followup, and all Jackson seemed concerned about was topping "Thriller's" unprecedented sales figures.
I had the good fortune to see Michael Jackson in concert on three occasions — the 1984 "Victory" tour with the Jacksons, the 1987-89 "Bad" tour and the 1992 "Dangerous" tour. I say good fortune because he was Michael Jackson, the Elvis and Beatles of his generation, of my generation really (I'm a year older than he was), and I got to see him perform.
His moves? Electric, even if the choreography was exactly as it was in the videos. His singing? Well, he sang less and less as time went on, relying more and more on a cadre of backup singers that included an unknown, shock-haired Sheryl Crow on one of those tours.
His interaction with the audience? Almost nil, especially on the "Dangerous" tour. By then, he'd become so safe, so calculated that even when he plucked a young girl out of the audience to come up on stage with him, as he did every night, he barely even looked at her, at least not during the show I saw in Detroit.
Those performances left me cold. Jackson seemed more like a robot than the Fred Astaire of the disco generation. There were flashes of brilliance, of course, but he seemed so emotionally paralyzed, so mentally remote from everyone — the band, the dancers, the audience, maybe even himself — that he might as well have been a robot up there.
The "Victory" tour had plenty of bells and whistles, but it wasn't the tour everyone wanted to see. He never properly toured the "Thriller" album, so this was as close as it got. That was disappointing in itself. Plus, he was having to share the spotlight with his brothers, which if you remember anything about the other Jacksons back then, was more miss than hit.
I don't remember the "Bad" tour that much, though I did see the show in Chicago (at the old Rosemont Horizon) and but sheer dumb luck booked a room at the same hotel where the Jackson entourage was staying. I didn't know that until the next morning, if I remember correctly, when I heard chants of "Michael! Michael! Michael!" coming from several stories below my room. I remember looking out the window, seeing maybe 100-200 people, mostly girls, looking up chanting his name.
Turns out Jackson had rented out the top floor of the hotel (I don't remember which one it was anymore). For the heck of it, I tried to slip on to his floor, but the big, beefy security guards who were posted outside the locked stairway doors politely suggested I keep my carcass on my own floor. I believe the elevator was programmed not to go to his floor.
An artist of that stature needs to be buffered from the hordes who collect outside their hotel rooms. But to me it was a lasting image of the kind of personal isolation that not only started as a boy robbed of his childhood, it grew worse the older he got as he struggled to relate to people his age, preferring instead the company of children, chimps and older, mentor figures like Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor.
By the time he toured the middling "Dangerous" album in 1992, his last major U.S. tour, the thrill was gone. He'd become a mechanical performer who showed only flashes of the thriller that rocked the world.
The guy had become a bad joke after "Thriller" raised the creative bar to a level no one, not even Michael Jackson could attain. If this had happened when that album came out, when Jackson was an innovative artist and somewhat normal, if you can put it that way (well, we didn't know just how unusual he was yet), I think it would have affected me much more deeply than it has.
It bothers me that I really don't feel much of anything about his unexpected death at age 50. He'd become such a mind-numbing freak show that I think I forgot his was a living, breathing human being.
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