The King of Pop, Kaput

by Jim Washburn

Michael Jackson died today. Well over 60,000 other people in the world did too. (I cite as my source “Don’t Fear the Reaper”: “40,000 men and women everyday.” That was in 1976 and the world is a ton more populated today, so more people = more dead people. As Hud said, “No one gets out of life alive.”)

People died in Iran. People died in Antelope Valley, where a friend of mine’s brother exited today. Each death is incalculably sad to the people close to them. In Jackson’s case, though, thousands of “devastated” fans are presently milling about the UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson is still dead.

I don’t get it, but I suppose if I’d been in New York City when John Lennon was shot, I’d have been milling about the Dakota. As it was, I was in Costa Mesa, so broke up crying that the next day I was unable to open the record store I ran. We just closed up for the day. A customer got my home number and called to demand I come sell him some Lennon collectible. I offered to come punch him in his stupid face. Probably not the right way to eulogize a man who sang about peace and love, but it felt right at the time.

I’d found out about Lennon’s death from a friend who called sobbing. He kept repeating, “You can’t shoot a Beatle!” But an idiot did.

Late on the night Lennon was shot I was listening to the news on the radio—KFWB I think—and they announced a special interview about Lennon. They’d caught up with Sammy Davis Jr. coming out of a nightclub and asked his feelings on Lennon’s murder. Being a fellow show business personality, he said, Lennon’s death hit him harder than it did most people. That and he thought “Michelle” and “Yesterday” were beautiful songs. You could practically hear the crocodile tears falling through the radio speaker. I think Lennon would have enjoyed hearing that.

He was making better interviews than records at the end there, and one point he kept driving home to interviewers was that people shouldn’t look to a Beatle or a president or any other daddy figure to live their lives or change the world for them. Most of the interviews were published after Lennon’s death. Too bad; Mark David Chapman might have learned something from them.

I liked Jackson just fine, but pretty much the same way I liked Sammy Davis Jr.: as an entertainer, not an artist. I wasted too many decades as a prissy rock critic to care to make much distinction between the two now. (Speaking of Juniors, I always enjoyed Harry Connick Jr.’s response to L.A. Times critic Leonard Feather’s assertion that Connick needed to choose whether he was going to be an artist or an entertainer. “Like Louis Armstrong had to make that choice?” Connick asked, as rhetorically as one could.) But there is this distinction: When you’re having that dark night of the soul, some music fills the darkness and some doesn’t.

Fine, we need our Lucille Balls and our Katharine Hepburns. I saw Jackson perform a couple of times, and it was entertaining, as bloated, formulaic spectacles go. Who knows how thrilling he might have been in a real, pared-down live environment. I was far more moved and entertained by James Brown, who for decades in his prime was nightly creating some of the greatest art of the last century. Listen to any of Brown’s live recordings from 1963 til about 1980, and on every damn one he’s reinventing his music right there, in the moment, willing some ever-funkier thing into being.

Jackson had problems. No real childhood; isolation as an adult; whatever grievous malady it was that turned him into a white person. Something was always going wrong with him. Remember when he was filming a Pepsi commercial at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium in 1984 and he was burned by sparks from the pyrotechnics on the set? I do.

Later that year I was covering my first Grammy Awards for the Orange County Register. It was also my first time writing on a tight news deadline. In those pre-everything days, we had to drive up to the Shrine, cover the event with our notepads—from a dank, echoey hall, where we’d watch a live TV feed from the auditorium next door—then race back to Santa Ana to write our pieces on our bulky newsroom word processors.

And so we did. Around 11:30 pm I was at the paper pecking along, doing a fine job, I thought, of establishing how inconsequential and out of touch the Grammys had been since their inception, how lame it was even compared to filmdom’s Academy Awards when it came to recognizing artistry and innovation. Then my editor said, “I need the story.”

“Fine, it’ll be done in about 20 minutes.”

“No, now! We’re going to press!”

I looked at what I’d written, and marvelous though it was, I hadn’t yet mentioned Jackson a single time, and this was entirely his night, the one when he’d won a then-historic eight Grammy awards. What to do? Then I remembered his Pepsi commercial, and wrote a final sentence: “All things considered, Michael Jackson had a good night, considering that the last time he stood on the Shrine’s stage his head was on fire.”

I don’t envy Jackson one bit, except for his chimp. I know it’s wrong, but I’ve always wanted a chimpanzee around the house, if only to answer the door when the Jehovah’s Witnesses call. Even though Jackson seemed at times to bask in his King of Popdom, it seemed especially lonely at his top. Over time, he came to look like a creature out of a fairy tale of his own making, a pancake boy everyone was trying to gobble up, or a real world Edward Scissorhands.

 Tonight, the Channel 9 news had a crew at Amoeba Music showing the sold-out bins from which Jackson product had been scarfed, because, Christ knows, that 60,000,0001th copy of Thriller might be collectable someday. Since 9/11 it seems like shopping is the new grieving. Rest in peace, little pancake boy.

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