by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was one I’d had
sitting in the backlog for a while but which I dug out because it seemed like a
logical choice after we’d seen the recent Lifetime TV-movie Michael Jackson:
Searching for Neverland. It was Michael
Jackson: This Is It, the release basically
thrown together after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and consisting of
rehearsal footage for the 50 comeback concerts he was scheduled to do at
London’s O2 arena — and blessedly, Kenny Ortega, who was the
credited director for both the concerts and the film, decided to go with a cinema
verité presentation: no voice-over
narration, a minimum of interview footage, mostly just straight documentary of
Jackson’s rehearsals for the concerts he tragically didn’t live long enough
actually to give. As I’ve commented about Michael Jackson in previous posts
about him and his products, the poor man seems to have been a bundle of
contradictions: “the child-man who had a great gift for communication and,
because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an
egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna
star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who
professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It seemed odd that
Quincy Jones, the veteran jazz, pop and rock producer who worked with Jackson on his three greatest albums — Off
the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987) — would describe him as a “workaholic” when he didn’t make a
releasable album after Invincible
(2001), eight years before his death. (About the only music he had out after Invincible was a duet single called “Hold My Hand” with someone
named Akon, which was the lead-off track on the first posthumous release of
“new” Michael Jackson material, Michael from 2010.) Instead Jackson spent the last eight years of his life
being prosecuted for child sexual abuse and, though he was acquitted, deciding
never to go back to his fabled Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara because — at
least according to the script of Michael Jackson: Searching for
Neverland, based on a book written by two
of his bodyguards — he felt it had become “contaminated by evil.” Instead he
lived a peripatetic existence, staying in Bahrain for a while and then
returning to the U.S. in rented “digs” and spending so much money he ultimately
had to sell half of his 50 percent stake in Sony-ATV Music (the current holder
of the Beatles’ copyrights) to Sony just to pay off his debts.
Apparently the
message got through to him from someone in his often-shifting entourage that he couldn’t keep spending like there was no tomorrow without
bringing in some income, and rather than follow a course a more normal pop star
plotting a comeback would have — recording a new CD and then doing live shows in support of it — Jackson finally
(reluctantly, if the portrayal of it in Searching for Neverland is correct) accepted the offer of the giant AEG
Entertainment company to do a series of live shows at the newly constructed O2
Arena in London. According to the Searching for Neverland script, Jackson originally just wanted to sign for
10 shows but got talked into doing a 50-show stand, and called the concerts
“This Is It” — which he announced at a press conference that made it seem like
these were going to be the last live shows he would ever give. This
Is It (the movie) begins with dancers from
all over the world flying to Los Angeles, where Jackson was going to live and
rehearse until the concerts were ready and he would fly to London for the
performances, for an open audition to be part of Michael Jackson’s chorus line,
and as someone who was never particularly a fan of Michael Jackson (when Thriller was at its peak I was probably one of the few
regular record buyers in the U.S. who didn’t purchase it — my taste in current music in the early
1980’s ran more towards my late-1970’s British punk heroes like Elvis Costello,
The Clash, Graham Parker and Nick Lowe, along with the great Australian rock
bands Big Country and Men at Work that put out their first albums around then),
I was astonished that these people would describe hearing his music and
(especially) seeing his videos as literally life-changing experiences, so much
so they were willing to fly halfway around the world for a chance to work with
The Man Himself. Much of This Is It
hovers in this netherworld between Michael Jackson the almost godlike
apparition and Michael Jackson the lifelong (well, what else can you say about a man who made his showbiz debut at
age 5 and had his first record — and first hit — at 10?) working entertainer
who was making a comeback under uncertain circumstances and working with
professionals who knew going in that it would be a challenge to get a great
performance out of him. Indeed, on the imdb.com page for This Is It there’s a “Trivia” item that speculates that after
Jackson’s death Sony had his footage digitally manipulated to cover for him —
to make it look like he was in better physical shape than he actually was.
One
of the big pressure points on Michael Jackson — and part, I suspect, of what
ultimately did him in — was that between them, he and Madonna had so totally
changed the audience expectation of what a big pop concert would be he couldn’t
just show up and sing his songs the way an older singer like Frank Sinatra
could. Sinatra could go on performing until nearly his 80th birthday
because all his audiences
expected was to hear him sing: as long as he could stand up, remember (or be
telepromptered on) his songs’ lyrics and croak out a decent approximation of
their melodies, they’d be satisfied and go home glowing that they’d been in the
presence of a living legend. Michael Jackson’s audience would not have been
happy if he’d just shown up, put a great band together and run through his old
songs; they wanted to see him dance, and to see him in his late 40’s execute
perfectly in one go steps he’d first done in his 20’s in music videos with the
benefit of being able to retake if he screwed up. (No wonder Fred Astaire never
again performed “live” as a dancer after he started making movies, though in
his later years he did do a few
concerts just as a singer.) And they wanted to see him dance as part of
elaborate production numbers that at least reproduced the original videos and
hopefully went beyond them. One of the reasons there were professional-quality cameras filming Michael
Jackson’s rehearsals for This Is It,
aside from documenting them for Michael’s production company and giving Ortega
and his production staff a way to see what was working and what wasn’t, was
that the concert was going to be studded with filmed inserts — including a
bizarre pastiche of 1940’s film
noir clips that was supposed to introduce
Jackson’s song “Smooth Criminal” from Bad and give us the experience of watching a live Michael Jackson have an
on-stage shootout with a filmed Humphrey Bogart. (I joked, “Michael Jackson in Dead
Men Don’t Wear Plaid — who knew?” Dead
Men Don’t Wear Plaid was Carl Reiner’s 1982
tribute/spoof to film noir in
which Steve Martin and other then-modern actors were filmed in scenes to
resemble film noir and their
images were combined with clips from the actual 1940’s noirs.) Part of the reason the film crew was there was to
make the inserts, including an elaborate graveyard montage sequence for the
attempt to reproduce John Landis’s famous 14-minute video for the song
“Thriller” with various performers costumed as monsters — though it’s
impossible to tell from what we see, which looks about as convincing as the
monsters that popped out of the wall in the old “Haunted Mansion” attraction at
Disneyland, whether the final stage effect would have worked.
Indeed, the
biggest single frustration about This Is It is it offers surprisingly little evidence to answer
the question we have watching it, which is, “If Michael Jackson had lived long enough to give these concerts, would they
have been any good?” Part of that is we’re obviously seeing just bits and
pieces of what were planned as quite elaborate on-stage productions, and not
only is it hard to tell just what the final numbers would have looked like, it’s
also unclear how they would have related to each other in the context of a
complete performance. Would these elaborate productions, many of which used
digital and film technology to reproduce music videos “live,” have been
genuinely entertaining, or would they — especially coming one after the other
with few if any less “produced” segments to give the audience a break — have
become as oppressive, overloaded and pretentious as Beyoncé’s ridiculous
performances at the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards? (Beyoncé is one performer
who’s really been trapped in the changed expectations of pop performers since
Michael Jackson and Madonna: a singer who should be presented as a straightforward soul diva in the manner of Aretha Franklin has instead been
shoehorned into these gargantuan productions both Busby Berkeley and Leni
Riefenstahl would probably have thought were overdone.) Another reason we can’t
tell from This Is It the movie
what “This Is It” the concerts would have been like is that Michael Jackson was
singing at half-voice throughout most of the rehearsals. Singers call this
“marking” — using half-voice during rehearsals to save their full vocal volume
and power for the actual performances — and at two points in the film Michael
is very adamant that this is what he’s doing: “I’m conserving my voice,” he
tells his technicians, who are getting frustrated with him because they can’t
get a good idea of vocal balance and blend with him singing so deliberately
softly and putting almost no emotion into the songs. (At the end of “The Way
You Make Me Feel” — possibly inspired by the power and majesty of the voice of
the Black woman he’s duetting with — we hear Michael Jackson sing with his full
vocal and emotional power — and then he chews out his staff for having let him
do that!)
Still, for all his occasional bouts with “attitude,” Michael Jackson
in rehearsal for “This Is It” emerges as a consummate professional: his
comments to his musicians (and he did assemble a great band, especially guitarist Orianthi Paraganis, whom
he hired because she could perfectly duplicate Eddie Van Halen’s solo on the
original record of “Beat It” and
she was a drop-dead gorgeous woman who could play the solo while strolling
across the stage in rhythm — whatever happened to her? She deserved a shot at stardom!) about the groove he
wants for his song, and to the dancers and technicians about what he wants from
them, are logical, sensible and workmanlike. There’s none of the out-of-it
weirdness we hear from Elvis Presley on the outtakes from his last recording
sessions recently issued as part of a two-CD set called Way Down in
the Jungle Room; the Michael Jackson we
watch and hear in This Is It is a
consummate professional, clear and open about what he needs from the people
he’s working with and at the same time fully recognizing their importance to
him in creating a show that will make him look good. It’s hard to square this
Michael Jackson with the one the media — the mainstream outlets as well as the
tabloids — told us about when he died in the final stages of the This
Is It rehearsals, knocked off by Propofol,
the powerful anesthetic his controversial doctor, Conrad Murray, gave him so he
could get some sleep during the ordeal of preparing for the concerts. That Michael Jackson — the drugged-out wreck, barely
aware of his surroundings or in control of his perceptions — doesn’t seem to be
anywhere in evidence in This Is It;
instead we see a committed entertainer, determined to give the audience what it
wants from him and still surprisingly in command of himself, his voice and his
body. About his only professional slip-up is when he forgets the words to his
first hit, “I Want You Back,” during a run-through of a segment paying tribute
to his origins as part of the Jackson 5. At the same time we see the other side
of “This Is It,” the Michael Jackson who was disgusted by the whole idea of
performing again, and clearly hoping these would be his final concerts — that he’d make a ton of
money doing this a few more times so his debts would be paid and he’d never
have even to think about doing it
again after that.
Michael Jackson remains one of the most enigmatic of major
celebrities, a charismatic performer who had done it so long he’d never had a chance at a “normal” life (as I’ve written
about him before, one can read the last eight years of his life as the Curious
Case of Benjamin Button-style attempt of a
middle-aged man at last to have the childhood he’d been denied when he actually
was a child biologically, and
even Jackson’s song “Childhood” — the one he said would explain him to anyone
who wanted to understand him — was, not surprisingly, a lament that he’d never
really had a childhood) and who’d
achieved fabulous success with a series of the sorts of fantasies one would
come up with if one’s whole idea of how other people lived came from movies and
TV shows. As I wrote when Charles and I re-watched the original “Thriller”
video on the HIStory collection
just after Jackson’s death, “It also is yet more evidence that Michael Jackson
lived his whole life separated from the reality of the rest of humanity — that
virtually his entire understanding of human emotions of any kind came from movies, TV shows and songs — and how
he never really outgrew his adolescence … the ‘Thriller’ segment is a mad mélange
of images from cheesy horror films, and whereas a more sensitive, grounded
artist might have created something like this as a tongue-in-cheek camp homage, for Jackson these images seem to have been a serious
metaphor for terror.” A lot of Michael Jackson’s songs portray him as a normal
man carrying on (or attempting to carry on) normal romantic and/or sexual
relations with women, yet when we see him enact these scenarios as part of the
“This Is It” rehearsals, he comes off like an outer-space alien from a planet
where reproduction is asexual and he really doesn’t know how these strange
human beings do it. (The debates among Michael Jackson’s biographers about
whether he even had a sex life —
Lisa Marie Presley says during their marriage he was perfectly normal in that
department, but at least one biographer has argued Jackson never actually had sex in his life, and I remember joking
during his Thriller heyday that
he might in fact be a modern-day castrato, which would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a sex life and
he could still sing the Jackson 5 songs in the original keys — just add to the
enigma.)
Had he lived to perform them, the “This Is It” concerts would likely
have been a tribute to Michael Jackson’s professionalism and determination to give
his audiences his all, though it’s also possible they would have “typed” him as
yet another nostalgia act, trading on past glories and not pushing himself the
way he had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when he managed to mesh soul,
R&B, rock and other pop-music styles like disco and funk into a sound that still dominates much of what we hear at the top of the
charts today. As I’ve been writing the above I’ve broken open the back end of
the Michael Jackson Collection
boxed set of five of his six adult solo albums for Epic Records and listened to
the last two in the box, Dangerous
(1992) and Invincible (2001) —
and it’s clear that the reason these aren’t as good as Off the Wall,
Thriller or Bad isn’t a deficiency in the production (Michael
Jackson had learned his lessons from Quincy Jones on how he should be produced
and the basics of his musical style hadn’t changed — though Invincible, his final full album, had a lot more slower songs
and featured his voice a lot more than some of his previous productions had,
and I like it because he wasn’t
ramping up the tempo and cranking out the disco beats on every song) as much as
a falling-off of quality in the songs themselves. Invincible supposedly ran way over budget (the final cost was
$30 million) and sold poorly (though not that poorly; Wikipedia lists its worldwide sales at 10
million and that just seemed like
a major comedown because Thriller
sold 65 million and Bad sold 32
million!) because by that time Michael Jackson the tabloid joke had taken over
almost totally from Michael Jackson the committed artist. Michael Jackson
remains, in the words Winston Churchill famously used to describe Russia, “a
riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” and This Is It is just another part of the riddle-mystery-enigma,
though it shows that at the end Jackson, unlike quite a few other prematurely
dead entertainers, was able to
approach his career dispassionately, professionally and with awareness of what
his job was and what he needed to do to do it.
