“You were hungry,” says Walter Yetnikoff, eyeing the empty plate in front of me, which had until recently been occupied by an omelet.1
The former chief of CBS Records had wanted to have lunch on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at the Second Avenue Deli (which is actually on First Avenue), but it was closed for Passover. Upon arriving at its replacement, the unambitiously named 3 Star Diner, he had unsuccessfully attempted to squeeze his ample frame into a booth, prompting a waitress to usher us over to a roomier table. Decades ago, Yetnikoff was renowned for other appetites—women, booze, and cocaine, in particular—but he’s been sober for years.
He’s still loquacious as ever, and no topic is off-limits. For the past half hour, he’s been sprinkling anecdotes about Michael Jackson between thoughts on my place of work (“Forbes has some clout—maybe it shouldn’t, maybe it should, but it does”), my relationship status (“Are you thinking of getting married? Do you have a prenup?”), and his thoughts on matzoh toppings.
“I put schmaltz,” he says. “You know what schmaltz is? Rendered chicken fat.”
“Yeah,” I reply, trying to steer us back to the topic at hand. “You said that you felt Michael had a good head for business.”
“Always.”
The first time Walter Yetnikoff saw the Jacksons perform, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to sign them. The year was 1976, he’d just taken over as chief of CBS Records, and when he schlepped out to Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair to see the boys in concert, he found Michael Jackson onstage singing “Ben,” a song about a rat.
Two of his top lieutenants—Ron Alexenburg, head of CBS’s Epic Records, and Steve Popovich, an A&R executive—were prepared to shell out $3.5 million to lure the Jacksons over from Motown. Perplexingly for Yetnikoff, nobody seemed to be able to confirm how many records the group had actually sold. Back then, there was no central authority keeping track of music sales as Nielsen SoundScan does today. Only individual labels knew their artists’ numbers, and Berry Gordy wasn’t about to offer up any clues.
“For $3.5 million, I don’t know if we should do that,” Yetnikoff told his colleagues. “We don’t know that they’re selling any records.”
“You haven’t been in this job long enough to turn down a deal like that,” they replied.
He thought for a moment.
“You’re probably right.”
That same year, the Jacksons officially joined CBS’s Epic Records. In addition to a lofty guarantee, Joe pushed for a high royalty rate and got 14 percent of retail (about 28 percent of wholesale)—much more than they were getting at Motown.2
One major downside of the deal: they’d have to ditch the Jackson 5 name, to which Motown retained rights, and instead call themselves the Jacksons. But they would finally gain the opportunity to write their own songs, a caveat that would unleash Michael’s considerable capabilities as a composer.
“I don’t think [Motown] had the idea that Michael would be as big as he was,” says Joe Jackson. “I wanted to try other avenues and other better things.”3
Berry Gordy, however, saw the move as less of a push for creative control and more as a power play by a patriarch eager to refresh his grip on his children’s careers: “He was constantly trying to come in and dictate things. . . . I would imagine that Joe having absolutely no control at Motown, and having all the control at CBS [was the reason].”4 Adds Smokey Robinson: “Joe never got used to Berry calling the shots on his boys. He figured because his sons came from his seed, he’d be their boss forever.”5
Joe may not have been able to control Gordy, but he continued to hold sway over his boys, especially the younger ones. Michael and Marlon were still minors, limiting their say as to which label they worked for. Besides, Joe figured that after years of harsh punishment, all his children—even the ones who’d grown and started families of their own—had gotten used to obeying orders. But he underestimated twenty-one-year-old Jermaine, who refused to sign the CBS contract.
Jermaine couldn’t believe his father was trying to force the group to jump from Berry Gordy’s Motown, the label that had turned the Jackson 5 into America’s answer to the Beatles, to a company run by what he saw as a bunch of suits “with no attachment to what we’d built.” That included Walter Yetnikoff, who “made our father look like a pussycat,” he later wrote.6
Joe was plenty tough, particularly when it came to dealing with Jermaine’s defection. He cut off his son’s weekly living allowance, and Jermaine no longer felt welcome with his family. He didn’t talk to his brothers for the first months of 1976, and it wasn’t until he had a heart-to-heart with Barry White that Jermaine started to see the end of the standoff. “Your brothers will come around,” the older singer predicted. “There is family and there is business—don’t confuse the two.”7
By the end of the year Jermaine had been invited back to his family’s inner circle, though he didn’t officially rejoin the group. Michael would later recall feeling “totally naked onstage for the first time” without his brother performing next to him. But Joe was already busy making plans for the Jacksons, replacing Jermaine with fourteen-year-old Randy, and dreaming of future business ventures.8
One of those projects was a television show. The brothers had already been immortalized in a Saturday morning cartoon; this time, Joe had landed them a live-action variety show. For each episode, the Jacksons would don outrageous outfits, perform dance numbers, and spout witticisms accompanied by canned laughter while cameras rolled. Michael hated the idea. Now seventeen years old and becoming increasingly confident in his intuitions on marketing and promotion, he told his father and brothers that the production would overexpose them, hurting record sales.
“You lose your identity in the business,” he later wrote. “The rocker image you had is gone. I’m not a comedian. I’m not a show host. I’m a musician. . . . Is it really entertaining for me to get up there and crack a few weak jokes and force people to laugh because I’m Michael Jackson, when I know in my heart I’m not funny?”
But they went ahead with the show. Sure enough, the group’s next album, The Jacksons, never rose higher than number 36 on the US charts. Perhaps trying to make sense of the disappointing results, Michael quite literally took business matters into his own hands. Yetnikoff remembers visiting the family compound in Encino and seeing the young singer poring over contracts for performances and records, making notes in the margins of the pages.
“He’d read them like a lawyer would,” Yetnikoff recalls. “Peering, peering, make a note on the side. . . . I’m sure he had a lawyer reading it also, but he wanted to read it and make notes on it [himself]. So it appeared that he knew what he was doing.”9
Meanwhile, the Jacksons’ music continued to produce lackluster results. Their 1977 release, Goin’ Places, fared even worse than its predecessor. Though Michael learned a great deal from the album’s primary songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the inventors of the Philadelphia soul sound, he felt their compositions didn’t really fit with the Jacksons’ ethos.
“We knew that the message to promote peace and let music take over was a good one,” he wrote. “But again it was more like the old O’Jays’ ‘Love Train’ and not really our style.”10
Though the Jacksons had been lured to the label with the promise of a chance to write much of their own music, CBS wasn’t contractually bound to give the brothers that opportunity, and they were able to land just two of their creations on each of their first two albums. So, along with his father, Michael decided to confront Epic’s Ron Alexenburg in an effort to secure his creative freedom.
“We told Mr. Alexenburg that Epic had done its best, and it wasn’t good enough,” Jackson recalled. “We felt we could do better, that our reputation was worth putting on the line.”
Alexenburg heeded Jackson’s words, and the brothers—led by Michael—wrote all but one song on their next album. With greater creative control over their music, Destiny soared to number 3 on the US charts shortly after its 1978 release, eventually selling 4 million copies worldwide. The album featured “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” a funky disco hit written by Michael and Randy; the song served as further validation of the Jacksons’ musical talents beyond performing.
As Michael continued to record music and tour with his brothers, he found himself more and more interested in an expanded solo career. And he recognized a potential ally in Yetnikoff; the association would go on to help both men greatly.
“By the quirk of fate, I became associated with Michael Jackson, and it sort of made my career,” says Yetnikoff. “I became sort of his good daddy. One of few people he could run to when things were not good at home.”11
Two years after the Jacksons’ arrival at CBS, Michael was ready to start thinking about the album that would eventually become Off the Wall. He had already released four solo albums for Motown, with all the songs penned by others. This time, he wanted to write and produce the bulk of the tracks himself, but wasn’t sure if his new boss would like the end result.
So Jackson, just eighteen years old, arranged a meeting with the president of CBS Records to explain his plans. Yetnikoff liked what the young singer had to say, and encouraged him to stretch his creative muscles. If it didn’t work out, he figured, CBS could always try to sell Jackson’s contract back to Motown.
“He’s this skinny kid in a T-shirt, he addressed me with great respect,” Yetnikoff recalls. “And . . . it wasn’t much of a dialogue. He said, ‘You know, I think I ought to step out and perform on my own, I’m ready for it,’ and such and such. And I said, ‘I think you should try it.’ It was sort of an easy call for me.”
One of the many ideas about the music business that Michael Jackson learned from Berry Gordy—for better or worse—was the notion that budgets shouldn’t constrain art. That was Gordy’s stance when it came to filming The Wiz, an adaptation of the Tony-winning musical The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Harlem replacing Kansas as a backdrop.
The production quickly became the most expensive musical film to date, with a budget estimated at $24 million.12 Gordy brought in director Sidney Lumet, fresh off the success of the Oscar-winning film Network. To write the screenplay, he hired Joel Schumacher, who’d just penned the cult classic Car Wash. For the role of the Scarecrow, he reached out to his favorite protégé.
“It was Berry Gordy who said he hoped I’d audition for The Wiz,” Jackson wrote. “I was very fortunate that way, because I was bitten by the acting bug during that experience. . . . The people, the performances, the story become a thing that can be shared by people all over the world for generations and generations.”13
Gordy had also signed Stephanie Mills, a twenty-year-old singer and stage performer who’d played Dorothy in his film’s Broadway precursor, and planned to have her reprise that role in The Wiz. But despite being thirty-three years old, Diana Ross wanted the role of Dorothy for herself, and eventually Gordy gave in. He wouldn’t offer specifics when pressed in person, saying simply: “The question came up as to whether Diana should be the right person or not. But Diana wanted to do it.”14
Ross joined Jackson, who’d impressed Lumet enough in his audition to win the part of the Scarecrow, along with a cast of legendary entertainers that included Lena Horne, Richard Pryor, and Nipsey Russell. When filming began in New York in mid-1977, the future King of Pop stood out on set both in terms of performance and professionalism.
“Michael was a great perfectionist, and it always showed,” says Schumacher. “I mean, there never seemed to be a misstep. . . . Michael was very, very, very shy, and very, very, very soft-spoken, beautiful manners and obviously a great talent.”15
His work ethic was particularly impressive for a teenager. Living in a high-rise apartment in Manhattan’s ritzy Sutton Place with sister La Toya, he’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. most days to get to the set in Queens by 5:30 a.m. so that makeup artists could spend hours applying his elaborate costume: saggy neck folds, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup–wrapper nose, and a massive wig that seemed to be made of big, floppy Brillo pads.16
Jackson’s work regimen—and his father—had prevented him from having much of a social life outside the family since he was young. Despite his long hours on The Wiz, though, Jackson found time to explore New York on his own. In “Human Nature,” he sings of his time there: “If this town is just an apple, then let me take a bite.” Jackson took at least a nibble, mingling with glamorous residents like Jackie Kennedy Onassis (who would later acquire the rights to publish his autobiography at Doubleday).
At this point in his life, Jackson still considered himself a Jehovah’s Witness like his mother. Though he sampled the nightlife at dance clubs like Studio 54, he didn’t indulge in chemical or carnal diversions, as many patrons did. He nevertheless found himself intoxicated by the opportunity to be treated like a normal reveler.
“Everybody thought they were a star at Studio 54,” says Susan Blond, the brothers’ CBS/Epic publicist who’d go on to work with Michael during the Thriller years. “There were such interesting characters, and Michael wouldn’t have been totally as much appreciated there as anywhere else because everyone was fabulous.”
At the same time, Jackson had an air of childlike mischievousness, as evidenced by his habit of picking up Blond’s purse and turning it upside down, spilling the contents. He was always serious, though, when it came to his followers. One day while Jackson was signing autographs, Blond suggested that he ought to simply write his initials rather than his whole name, a timesaving tactic often employed by Andy Warhol. “Oh, no,” said Jackson. “These are my fans, they have made me, and I could never do something like that.”
Dedicated as he was to his admirers, Jackson remained a bit of a mystery to his colleagues working on The Wiz. “I don’t know how much life experience he had had by 1977 at the age of nineteen, I don’t know how much outside of the family he’d lived,” says Schumacher. “And he remained a very reclusive person, except when the spotlight hit him. . . . When the spotlight hit Michael, he gave you everything.”17
Jackson was a natural performer, and he augmented his obvious talents with careful preparation. He’d study videotapes of gazelles and cheetahs, hoping to incorporate their grace into his dance routines in The Wiz. And on the set, he displayed an ability to learn a dance step simply by watching someone do it once. Recalls Schumacher: “Of the cast, Michael was really the true dancer.”
His talents were so remarkable that they caused a bit of tension with his costars. One day on the set, Ross pulled him aside. “[She] told me that I was embarrassing her,” Jackson remembered. “I just stared at her. Embarrassing Diana Ross? Me? She said she knew I wasn’t aware of it, but I was learning the dances much too quickly.”18
Jackson had a few embarrassing moments of his own. He read a quote from Socrates in an early run-through, mispronouncing the philosopher’s name as “Soh-crates.” Then he heard a whisper nearby: “Soc-ruh-tease.” He recalls looking over to see a friendly face. “Quincy Jones,” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m doing the score.” Jackson had first met the producer in Los Angeles at age twelve, introduced by Sammy Davis Jr. as “the next biggest thing since sliced bread.”
According to Jackson, he asked Jones on the set of The Wiz for advice on the best producers and sound engineers to hire for his upcoming solo album. “Why don’t you let me do it?” replied Jones, much to the surprise of Jackson (“I just didn’t think he would be that interested in my music,” the singer would explain in his autobiography). “Oh, sure, great idea,” Jackson stammered. “I never thought about that.”
Jones remembers the interaction differently, tracing it back to a meeting at his home in Los Angeles. Jackson asked him for help finding a producer, which Jones interpreted as an invitation to work on the project—and said he’d think about it. Only after spending time with Jackson on the set of The Wiz and seeing his work ethic and talent on display did Jones come around. It was the Socrates incident that sealed the deal. When the producer corrected the youngster’s pronunciation, Jackson simply said, “Really?”
“What a reaction!” Jones later wrote. “He was so sweet about it. Those big eyes opened wide, and right then and there I committed.”19
Both men seem to agree that when Jackson approached the executives at CBS, there wasn’t much support for the idea of bringing on Jones, a producer they thought was too jazzy. Jackson’s response to his record label: “I don’t care what you think, Quincy is doing my record.”
Jackson and Jones assembled a bevy of talented musicians to help them in the studio, including Rod Temperton, the British master songwriter responsible for hits by Aretha Franklin and Donna Summer; bass guitarist Louis “Thunder-Thumbs” Johnson, of the Brothers Johnson; Greg Phillinganes, a keyboard prodigy who’d left school to start working for Jones five years earlier; and Tom Bähler, a vocal arranger known in part for his collaborations with Cher.
Another valuable addition was sound engineer Bruce Swedien. With his thick white mustache and burly physique, he was a pair of rosy cheeks short of winning a Santa Claus look-alike contest. An electrical engineering major at the University of Minnesota with a minor in music, he worked for the Minneapolis Symphony before leaping across genres to work with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Even against that backdrop, Jackson seemed remarkable.
“Michael was a joy to be with in the studio, absolutely the best,” says Swedien. “It doesn’t get any better. For instance, there’s two vocalists that I have worked with in my career—Michael Jackson is one, Siedah Garrett is the other—that I have never used pitch correction on. . . . He never wasted a take.”20
Swedien would go on to work on every one of Jackson’s solo studio albums (and Garrett would join forces with the singer on Bad for the duet “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”). Swedien and his wife, Bea, eventually became close friends with Jackson, and the singer would make frequent visits to the couple’s ranch in California. (“Michael used to love our chickens,” Swedien recalls.)
The first product of this extraordinary team was Off the Wall. Recording began in December 1978 at Hollywood’s Allen Zentz Studios, where Jones and his crew (collectively known as the A-Team) began experimenting with some unfamiliar recording techniques. These ranged from relatively mundane (using a wide range of microphones plucked from Swedien’s collection of more than a hundred) to bizarre (Jackson joined the engineer in the attic one day to record the sounds created by banging on assorted objects).
Jackson was a sound engineer’s dream. When Swedien suggested recording in the dark, the singer happily obliged. Sometimes he’d stay up all night memorizing his lyrics so that he could deliver them with the lights off in the studio the next day; it allowed him to feel uninhibited, particularly on romantic songs. He grew to love Swedien’s idea so much that he employed it on future albums as well.21
And though his Motown days were long behind him, Jackson never forgot the ethos that Berry Gordy had instilled in him at a young age. “He was a perfectionist,” says his cousin Keith Jackson. “No matter what he did, if it was business or music, or just being in the studio or just writing . . . he always believed if you were going to do it, do it right.”22
Off the Wall was no exception. From the album’s opening track (the swirling, emphatic disco-funky “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough”) to its other hits (the silky, mellow “Rock with You” and the tender, tremulous “She’s Out of My Life”), the songs of Jackson’s adult solo debut rocketed him to a musical place far beyond his Jackson 5 days.
“It was such a joy to work with Michael, so natural,” says Swedien. “Music just came out of every pore of his body.”23
The Wiz debuted in October of 1978, nearly a year before Off the Wall’s release. Roger Ebert was one of the critics who praised Jackson’s performance. “It’s good that the Scarecrow is the first traveling companion [Diana Ross’s Dorothy] meets,” he wrote. “Michael Jackson fills the role with humor and warmth.”24
When it came to the rest of the film, they weren’t so thrilled. “The Wiz had everything going for it—it could have been a musical Star Wars,” lamented the Globe and Mail. “Now, it’s suitable for children of all ages under twelve.”25 TimeOut would later name it one of the biggest flops in the history of cinema.26
The film bombed at the box office, too, grossing just $13 million—about $11 million less than its budget.27 Even some of the people involved in making the film thought it was terrible; Jackson stood out as one of the lone bright spots.
“What’s amazing is how he sparkles, and his dancing is just fabulous,” says Schumacher. “It’s a very saccharine film, because that’s what we were expected to make . . . but those quick turns and some of the things he went on to embroider upon and make even more brilliant, you can see the seeds of some of the great Michael Jackson moves in The Wiz.”28 Adds Berry Gordy: “I frankly liked his performance in The Wiz. . . . Michael just kind of wanted to do everything.”29
Jackson’s talent and ambitions couldn’t rescue The Wiz, but they powered the success of Off the Wall, which debuted the following summer. The album would sell 7 million copies in the US by 1982, and more than 30 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling effort by any black artist at the time; Rolling Stone labeled it “a slick, sophisticated R&B-Pop showcase.”30 Adds Yetnikoff: “[Off the Wall] was really, I think, his breakout record as Michael.”31
There was no doubt that Jackson had arrived as a legitimate solo act and was much more than just a member of the Jacksons—both the group and the family. Buoyed by a fresh sense of independence, Michael started to contemplate going his own way on a number of fronts, including business. Though his father had orchestrated the early success of the Jackson 5, he was a flawed manager in many respects. His aggressive approach came in handy during the chitlin circuit days when he bargained with small-time promoters to earn cash for modest gigs. But it wasn’t so helpful as his sons’ careers grew to superstar status.
“Joe wasn’t a businessman,” wrote Smokey Robinson. “In the end he was more of a hindrance than a help; business people didn’t want to deal with him. Sadly, when they were old enough, his kids found managers of their own, with Michael leading the way.”32
Jackson knew that taking the next step as a solo artist meant breaking off from his father. He turned twenty-one less than three weeks after Off the Wall’s debut and didn’t waste any time asserting himself as an adult. He informed his father he wouldn’t be retaining his services as manager.
“Trying to fire your dad isn’t easy,” he explained in his autobiography. “But I just didn’t like the way certain things were being handled.”33
Joe didn’t take the move as seriously as he might have, perhaps because Michael retained Freddy DeMann and Ron Weisner—who also handled some of the Jackson 5’s affairs—as his new managerial team. But Michael saw the move as a major step toward independence.
“All I wanted was control over my life,” he wrote. “And I took it.”
“We’re running overtime,” says Yetnikoff, after about an hour and a half at the diner. “I’ll start billing you.”34
“Okay, last one.”
“You keep saying last.”
Yetnikoff touches on one more topic before we wrap up: the multiple sides of Jackson’s personality, sometimes at odds with each other, that he witnessed as the singer’s career progressed.
“To me, it’s very simple,” says the former CBS chief. “They coexist. . . . He had the childlike, emotional kind of thing and he had the astute one . . . the astute businessman.”
He continues.
“I don’t see that as impossible, to have different sides to a personality. I may be the only one who says, ‘Sounds all right to me.’ Not sounds all right, but sounds almost normal.”