Transition
At the end of 1978, Joseph Jackson severed his ties with Richard Arons. In Richard's wake, Joseph recruited Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann as managers. Both were experienced in the entertainment field, Weisner as a business manager and DeMann as a promoter. Joseph felt that he needed the assistance of these men, both white, in order to insure that CBS would promote The Jacksons as the company did its white artists. He believed that the company considered his sons a ‘black act’ and was, therefore, restricting the way it promoted and marketed them. Joseph's concern is a common, and often justified, complaint of black acts signed to record companies, like CBS, which are manned predominantly by white executives. Like Joseph, many black managers maintain that white executives don't know how to market black entertainment ‘across the board’, meaning to white record buyers, as well as to black. Of course, Richard Arons is also white, so it was clear that Joseph felt the new managers were more experienced as well, and had more clout in the music business.
Joseph's strategy worked in America.
Destiny
sold over a million copies and reached number eleven on
Billboard's
album chart, not bad for a group that hadn't had a major record in some time.
Destiny
didn't do as well in the UK, however. It took six months for it to be released there, and the highest it hit was number thirty-three. But it was now accepted that the Jacksons had sporadic sales in the UK; there was little anyone could do about it. They simply weren't as hot in England as in the States. That was fine with Joseph; the focus at this time was on US sales anyway, not European.
However, Michael was still unhappy. Despite what his brothers tried to promote, he knew in his heart that he and they were not fully responsible for the success of
Destiny.
CBS had whipped up quite a publicity frenzy about how terrific the brothers were as producers, yet it was not true. They hadn't actually produced that album on their own; Michael hated living the lie. He was too old for such nonsense, he felt. Gone were the days when it was acceptable to promote such untruths.
Michael had never been dismayed about his life and career as he was when he finished the 1979 Destiny tour. While on the road, he had lost his voice making it necessary for Marlon to sing his higher-register parts while Michael just moved his mouth. He found the process humiliating. Eventually, two weeks of performances had to just be cancelled because of Michael's throat problems.
Throughout the tour, Michael was tired and discouraged and couldn't seem to find the unlimited supply of energy he had always relied upon in the past. As enthusiastic as the audiences were to the show, Michael felt that something was missing from it. Barely twenty-one, he felt he'd stopped growing professionally; he was frustrated by being in a group. ‘It was the same thing over and over,’ he told me in an interview after the tour. ‘It was all for one and one for all, but I was starting to think that maybeI should be doing some things on my own. I was getting antsy.’
To make matters worse, Michael loathed having to answer to Joseph and was getting to the point where he didn't even want to be around him.
Though many industry observers believed that, based on the success of
Destiny,
Joseph Jackson had become a brilliant entertainment manager, Michael was not one of them. In Michael's view, his father used a shotgun approach to his work: ‘If you shoot enough bullets, one will hit the target, eventually,’ Michael explained. ‘But you can also waste a lot of ammunition and maybe hit some targets you would rather not,’ Michael explained. ‘Look at the way Joseph alienated Berry and everyone else at Motown.’ Some people, Michael argued, determine their target, stalk it as long as necessary, and then get it cleanly with one shot. ‘That's the way to go,’ Michael reasoned.
In truth, Joseph would never be able to win with Michael, no matter how many bull's-eyes he scored. Getting the group away from Motown was the best thing he'd ever done, but Michael could not see it that way. His perception of Joseph was understandably clouded by his personal views about him, and his judgement of his father as a child abuser and philanderer. There was no way Michael would be able to credit Joseph Jackson… with anything… ever.
Michael didn't feel that the group had made an impact after leaving Motown and signing with CBS, even though they had a hit with ‘Shake Your Body’. It wasn't enough. He was tired of The Jackson 5 image. He knew what he wanted to do: record another solo album, one for CBS that would fulfil his ambition, expand his artistry and ease the restlessness that had plagued him since the Destiny tour ended. Day after day, Michael stayed alone in his bedroom pondering, as Marlon would later say, ‘who knows what, he's very secretive.’
His brothers soon realized that something was different about Michael, and it scared them. ‘Mike was acting strangely,’ Tito would remember. ‘It was as if something had snapped in him. He stopped showing up at family meetings, and when we discussed our future plans, he had nothing to offer. Maybe he was plotting to go out on his own, I don't know. He never did say much. You never really knew what he was thinking.’
‘I just didn't think it was fair that I had stopped recording solo albums,’ Michael would say years later when looking back on this time. ‘Part of our contract with CBS was that I would get to record on my own. When that wasn't happening because we hadn't been able to find the time, I started getting nervous and upset.’
When Michael told his father that he wanted to record a solo album, Joseph's reaction was predictable – supportive but with qualification. ‘Why not?’ he remarked. ‘You know how I feel about it, Michael. Do what you want as long as it doesn't interfere with group business.’
‘What does that mean?’ Michael wanted to know.
‘You know what it means,’ his father warned him. ‘Family is the most important thing.’
Perhaps Joseph wasn't overly concerned about Michael doing a solo album because, in truth, his albums never amounted to much: his first two for Motown,
Got to Be There
and
Ben
(1971 and 1972 respectively), each sold a little over 350,000 copies, which wasn't bad. However, his third album,
Music and Me
(1973), sold only 80,286 copies, a dismal showing. His last solo album for the company,
Forever Michael
(1975), did a little better (99,311 copies). Albums featuring all of the Jacksons always sold better than solo albums; let's not even get into the statistics for sales of Jackie's solo album which, incidentally, was terrific. Joseph always felt it was in everybody's best interest to keep the act together.
Therefore, if Michael felt the need to record a solo album in order to ‘get it out of his system’, it was fine with Joseph – as long as the Boy Wonder remembered that his first allegiance was to his family and to the group, not to himself.