Joe Jackson, father of famous musical clan, dead at 89.
Joseph Jackson was a steelworker from Gary, Indiana, who forged a musical dynasty by launching the careers of the Jackson 5, his son Michael and daughter Janet. But his legacy was tarnished when some of his children accused him of exploitation and abusive behaviour.
He died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 89.
Jackson demanded nothing less than perfection as he drove his children toward stardom. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded: All nine of his children would have a hand in producing major hit records, and Michael Jackson would become the most popular recording artist of the 1980s.
Collectively, the Jacksons may have been the most prominent family in popmusic history, but their fame came at the cost of family feuds, lurid accusations and an unending stream of tabloid headlines. Over time, nearly all the children rebelled against the brutal manner of their father.
Jackson first aspired to be a boxer, then in the early 1950s played guitar in a rhythm-and-blues band that never tasted success.
He found work in a steel mill and shifted his show business dreams toward his children.
Jackson recognized that his sons had talent, and he soon began to groom them into a musical act. By 1962, Jackie, Tito and Jermaine were appearing at talent shows as the Jackson Brothers.
The Jackson Brothers became the Jackson 5, and it soon became obvious that eight-year-old Michael, with his buoyant voice and polished stage presence, was unusually talented.
Jackson watched over his boys’ progress with a mixture of pride and discipline.
“We’d perform for him, and he’d critique us,” Michael Jackson wrote in Moonwalk, his 1988 autobiography. “If you messed up, you got hit, sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a switch.”
Jackson was hardest on Michael, giving him the demeaning nickname of “Big Nose.” The father-son relationship became more and more volatile.
“I’d take a shoe and throw it at him, or I’d just fight back, swinging my fists,” Michael Jackson wrote. “That’s why I got it more than all my brothers combined. I would fight back, and my father would kill me, just tear me up.”
In 1967, Jackson drove his sons to New York in a Volkswagen van to compete in amateur night at the Apollo, the Harlem theatre long known as a springboard for emerging talent.
After his sons cut a record on a small local label in 1968, Jackson signed a contract with Motown, the hitmaking record company from Detroit. Motown founder Berry Gordy put his top songwriters and musicians to work, producing a kind of music dubbed “bubble gum soul.”
In 1969 and 1970, the Jackson 5 scored four straight No. 1 hits, with I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save and I’ll Be There. As manager, Jackson guided their every move. He resettled the family in California and put his other children on stage, with daughters Maureen (“Rebbie”), La Toya and Janet performing in Las Vegas in the 1970s, along with the youngest son, Randy.
When Michael Jackson turned 21 in 1979, his contract with his father expired. He promptly fired his father as manager and began to work with Quincy Jones, a one-time jazz arranger and bandleader, who produced Michael’s hit albums of the 1980s, Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad. They sold hundreds of millions of copies and made him a superstar.
Michael’s brothers and sisters began to break away, as well, chafing under their father’s harsh style. In her 1991 memoir, La Toya Jackson, the middle daughter, wrote that all the children were physically and emotionally abused by their father and that the girls may have been molested. (She later backed away from some of those claims, which were denied by Jackson.)
In his memoir, Michael Jackson recalled how, after school each day throughout his childhood, he went directly into rehearsals or recording sessions that lasted deep into the night.
He would longingly look out a window at other children playing in a park, imagining a life he never got to have.
“I’d just stare at them in wonder,” he wrote. “I couldn’t imagine such freedom, such a carefree life — and wish more than anything that I had that kind of freedom, that I could walk away and be like them.”
In 2014, a reporter asked Joseph Jackson whether he had any regrets about his life or about how hard he had driven his family.
“Not at all,” he said. “I don’t live that way.”