Michael Jackson was not only my boyhood idol, he was at the center of my first experience with petty pop elitism and musical rivalry.
It was the summer of 1971 and the girls who lived across the street on Brintell Street in Stanton Heights were gripped in Osmondmania. The Osmonds were adorable white kids from Utah, a straight-laced answer to Motown's groovier Jackson 5, charting hits like "One Bad Apple," "Yo-Yo" and of course Donny's swoony ballad "Go Away Little Girl." The Beatles had run their course and so had the Monkees, so the schoolgirl crush on the Mormons was entirely understandable.
But Stevie Glick knew better. He was 12, two years older than I, and my best friend (a talent agent now in Los Angeles). I did what he did. He made it clear that the Osmonds weren't cool, you had to like the Jackson 5.
So, the girls stood on one side of the street yelling "Osmonds!" We stood on the other yelling "Jackson 5!" They yelled "Donny!" We yelled "Michael!" And it went on like that, neither side giving any ground.
There were no iPods, Walkmans or boomboxes. We were holding little Panasonic transistor radios up to our ear, listening to Three Dog Night, The Temptations, The Guess Who, the Rolling Stones, Carole King, the Partridge Family, War. It was all beautifully married together on the AM dial at KQV and KDKA. Pop songs that still sound fantastic today.
When we weren't outside, we were playing the 45s on our parents' big console stereos or on our Close 'N Plays.
There were few voices that broke through the din more exuberantly than Michael Jackson's. In the early days of 1970, he and his brothers gave us joyous and funky pop hits like "ABC," "The Love You Save" and "I Want You Back" and the cooing ballad "I'll Be There."
We could relate to it as kids singing to kids. Think about it. Right now, 10-year-old girls love the Jonas Brothers, right? Nick and Joe are 16 and 19. Michael was 11 when they were scoring those hits in 1970.
We were five or so years into the Motown explosion, coinciding with the height of racial turmoil in this country. In the days after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, on summer nights we would watch with horror the fires on the hill near the Garfield housing projects that no one in Stanton Heights wanted. We had all of two black kids in our elementary school class.
But from a safe distance, we could love and admire Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Roberto Clemente, etc.
That distance evaporated when my mom took me to my first concert for my birthday: the Jackson 5 at the Civic Arena with my girlfriend Renee in 1974.
For a kid, the concert was as scary as it was thrilling. It was a sold-out show, with a largely black audience, and there were people outside trying to break the doors down to get in. Inside, there was so much hysteria, they had to stop the show after the first song, get the Jacksons off the stage and move everyone back from the barricades. Fifteen minutes later it resumed and the Jackson 5 delivered 45 minutes of boy-band bliss with all the hits.
A year or two later, the Jacksons and Hitsville were both fading, and my friends and I were moving on to heavier fare like Elton John, KISS and Led Zeppelin. An 18-year-old Michael Jackson (releasing "Forever, Michael") was of very little interest to anyone, and it seemed like he'd ride into the sunset with so many other pop idols.
But then came Act II. Michael tapped into the disco craze on his 1979 comeback record, "Off the Wall," and scored a few hits. No one was saying genius, but he was a player again.
Three years later, disco was dead, and the buzz was that Jackson was in an unlikely alliance with the premier heavy metal guitarist of the day -- Eddie Van Halen, who seemed to have nothing to gain from it. Now, I'm not sure what else was on television on May 16, 1983, but everyone was watching the Motown 25th Anniversary special on NBC.
"Thriller" had been released the previous November, but people weren't that into the first single, "The Girl is Mine."
Jackson hit the stage wearing that black sequined jacket, flood pants, top hat, white socks, black loafers and one white glove -- why?! -- and proceeded to execute moves during "Billie Jean" that defied the laws of physics. Like Elvis on "Ed Sullivan," Michael's moonwalk was a turning point in the pop culture that ushered in a new era of rock/R&B crossover, set new standards for album sales and revolutionized MTV with the extended "Thriller" video.
I liked "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" well enough, but was into The Clash, Elvis Costello and Gang of Four at that point, and was not among the 28 million people buying a copy of "Thriller" (it's now up to 109 million worldwide).
The Jacksons' Victory Tour skipped Pittsburgh because of a union dispute, but Jackson came back for three sold-out Arena shows in 1988. I was freelancing for the Post-Gazette and wrote after the first show, "Beg, borrow or whatever you have to do to get in." There would be a '92-93 tour for "Dangerous" (with only a few U.S. dates) and a European-Asian tour for "HIStory," but Sept. 28, 1988 was the last time he set foot in Pittsburgh.
We don't need to chronicle the freak show that followed. I'd like to think the old fans took pity and tried at every turn to give him the benefit of the doubt. And we waited in full expectation of the day when he would rise and reinvent himself once again.
It may have been at these O2 shows in London. Or he may have fallen flat on his face. Now we'll never know. The sense that we have though is that the narrative wasn't supposed to end this way. A sudden cardiac arrest for the King of Pop? In the midst of rehearsals for his comeback? No, no, send that back to re-write. That's a terrible ending! No one wants to see that movie ...
The morning after I'm asked to expound upon his legacy. Was he bigger than Elvis? Bigger than the Beatles? How will we remember Michael Jackson?
I don't know. I'd say on par with Elvis artistically, though not the Beatles, and that his fame exceeded both worldwide.
As for our memories, when was the last time you saw a picture of the Fat Elvis? It's probably been a while and in the meantime, you've seen the Black Velvet paintings and the beach movies and the Sullivan clip and the "Jailhouse Rock" video over and over.
As the years go by we probably won't see much footage of the wrecked Michael shuffling into the courtroom in his pajamas.
We'll see the miracle of the moonwalk and the fury of the "Thriller" video and we'll remember that sweet-faced little boy with the bright eyes and otherworldly voice that made us yell "Michael! Michael!" across Brintell Street.
First Published: June 27, 2009, 8:00 a.m.