When John Lennon died in December of 1980, my father came into my room to let me know. He was in shock, and he stayed home from the office the next day. My brother and I stayed home from school with him, glued to the television trying to makes sense of this senseless tragedy. It had happened before, in August of 1977, when Elvis suddenly died, and yesterday we suddenly lost another music icon with little warning. In each case, we lost not one thing, but two. We lost the person, and that’s tragic, but we also lost the promise, the potential. Most of us are not going to miss Michael because we can no longer talk to him on the phone or hang with him. What we miss is sharing the earth with him. We miss the chance to be affected by his art. We miss the chance of something new from him. That’s what is truly devastating. The real loss for his millions of fans is the promise of what could have been.
When Michael Jackson broke away from his big brothers to make Off The Wall in 1979 no one suspected the earthquake that would arrive three years later. He was certainly beloved by millions. The angelic and sonorous timbre of his voice when he sang with his brothers was addictive and mesmerizing. To this day, it is hard to turn off “ABC” when it comes on the radio because, aside from the fact that is just makes us feel good, it is a showcase of such stunning natural ability and musical maturity showing up at such an early age. Off The Wall was a huge success and let the world know that Michael could stand on his own. It set the stage.
I was a freshman at college, sitting in my dorm room, playing my guitar, when I heard “Beat It” blasting out of the hallway, with its chunky macho Steve Stevens guitar riff and in-your-face production. At the time, it was like nothing I had ever heard. I was a music student, and I was no pop music fan, but I was deeply affected by its brilliance. Thriller went on to become one of the most successful and important records of all time because Michael and his team were able to combine soulful singing, brilliantly sparse production, dancing and choreography, and storytelling in a way that no one had before. They didn’t just have great songs: they had Michael’s time-tested voice, they had his nearly superhuman dance moves, they had MTV for which they created the Thriller mini-movie that flooded the airwaves. In an era before multimedia, Michael was the first multimedia star. Just as Hugh Grant was responsible, with his Divine Brown confessions, for catapulting Leno past Letterman permanently, Thriller was the catalyst, the mountain that the little pea-sized snowball of MTV was able to ride - and the world never looked back. The landscape was permanently changed. Thriller crossed over to everyone and no one was untouched by it. My passion at the time was the late-sixties acid rock that my high school band played at gigs every weekend. Just as it took Tori Amos’ crooning rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to turn me onto Nirvana, it was Eddie Van Halen’s uncredited guitar solo on "Beat It" that sent me to a Van Halen concert. Michael created a template for the decade. Like the Beatles twenty years earlier, he completely changed the perception of what was possible. Thriller was sui-generis. Uncategorizable. It was an era unto itself and it turned Michael Jackson from another Stevie Wonder into the biggest pop star in the world. Thriller had no filler on it - every song grabbed you hard and pulled you in, and when it was over, you picked up the needle and pivoted back to the first cut and started again just in case you missed something, which you usually did.
After the Beatles stunned the world with "Love Me Do", unlike almost any other musical act before or since, they embarked on an eight-year journey that never let off the accelerator. After that first album, Rubber Soul and Revolver stunned everyone. As if powered by some mystical force, they brought their newest album, in 1966, fresh from the recording studio, to a Rolling Stones record-opening party and snuck it onto the stereo system. The room stopped cold as the first group of people on this planet to hear Sergeant Pepper froze in their tracks. And it continued, in those short eight years they wrote one great hit song after another, continually reinventing themselves and shocking their audiences with not just more music, but better and better music. They grew, and we grew with them. When they faltered from infighting, it showed on Let It Be, and then it was over. They stopped but everyone in the world wanted more.
When Michael Jackson broke away from his brothers it took him three years to create his ultimate masterpiece. Arguably the album of the decade, Thriller was supposed to be the beginning. Surely if he could manage to create something so remarkable that Vincent Price’s ghoulish narration would work alongside tales of illegitimate children and heavy metal guitar solos, that person had more ground to break. But it was not long after Thriller’s release that stories began to emerge about Michael’s bizarre behavior. Elizabeth Taylor. Diana Ross. Chimpanzees. Plastic surgery. The world waited with baited breath for Bad to come out, and when it did, it was surely a good album. But, it was hard to watch the videos and put aside what Michael had done to himself, and that visual cue brought all the other eccentricities into relief. If someone was willing to mutilate themselves to that extent - particularly someone whose looks had graced cereal boxes - then maybe the stories about hyperbaric chambers and giraffes are true. After Bad, the waiting began. Just as the waiting began in 1970. We waited for the artist the we loved so much to get back to work, and stop messing around. Just as we all wanted John Lennon to stop making records with his screeching wife, and call up Paul, we wanted Michael to get off the operating table, and get in the studio, and on the stage, in earnest. Not to make a cobbled together retread of past glories like Dangerous or Invincible but another ground breaker. Another album that showed he loved his work, and could throw himself into it and had more to say. Another masterpiece that would allow even the most jaded tabloid hater to step back and say, “ahh, there it is, now THAT’S why we all really love Michael Jackson.” To anyone really listening, Michael’s work since Thriller did not have the same passion and seemed to be guided not by muse, but by obligation and contract. What we lost yesterday was the hope, the chance, the possibility, that Michael would come back to us, with a fresh approach, a fresh look, a fresh outlook, and another trailblazing album to wow us one more time. To make us feel young. To show our kids that our stars, our idols, are lasting and magical, and this is what they have been missing all these years. But, John Lennon never did call up Paul and say, hey, let’s get together. Michael, sadly, was never able to escape his demons long enough to remind us, with another blockbuster, why he was really Michael Jackson, and that is why we feel such sadness and sorrow today.
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