Trivia / The Jackson 5

• Breakthrough Hit: This band of brothers from Gary, Indiana were originally a local hit performing in local talent shows, and eventually signed onto the legendary Motown label in 1969. They eventually released their hit single, "I Want You Back", launching a string of three other singles topping the Hot 100 ("ABC", "The Love You Save", "I'll Be There"), becoming the first artist to top the chart with their first four singles.
• Breakup Breakout: Michael went on to become the third most successful musician of all time, beaten only by The Beatles and Elvis Presley, and maintains a devoted following to this day. Jermaine additionally had a moderately successful solo career throughout the 1970s, although unlike Michael, he had more success on the R&B charts than on the Hot 100. Jackie, Marlon and Randy put out solo albums in the 80s, but those weren't quite as successful, and are now quite obscure. Tito eventually released a solo album many years later.
• Chart Displacement: "Blame It on the Boogie" is considered one of the signature songs of the Jacksons era, but it only peaked at #54 on the pop charts. Compare this to "Lovely One", or "Show You the Way to Go," which peaked at #11 and #28, respectively, but aren't as well remembered as Boogie.
• Creator Killer: They made out quite well financially from their troubled Victory tour, but to the unpleasant surprise of everyone but him, Michael announced after the last show that the brothers would never tour together again. They and their father had been planning to do another leg of shows in Europe. But Michael was right, as he had a massively successful solo career.
• He Also Did: Jazz saxophone great Wilton Felder, leader of The Crusaders, was also a bass guitarist and played bass on all the early classic Jackson 5 hits.
• Hostility on the Set: The Victory Tour was rife with this. Michael had been roped into doing the tour by his mother to help his brothers out and greatly resented it; his disgust with the soon-abandoned lottery ticket system didn't help. The brothers attempted to get some sort of unity with a rule that only they could ride in the vans to shows, but Michael soon broke it; by the time he let Julian Lennon fly with them on the helicopter to Giants Stadium, they were all glaring at him silently. Eventually it led to all of them taking separate limos to shows, Michael staying in a separate hotel, and Michael and Jermaine letting their lawyers stand in for them at the increasingly frequent meetings between the band, Don King, and promoter Chuck Sullivan later in the tour when things really began to go sour. Michael saved the coldest dish for last, telling the crowd at the rain-soaked tour finale in Dodger Stadium that this was to be the brothers' last performance together, stunning not only them, but King and Joe Jackson, who had been all set to take the tour to Europe.
• Troubled Production: The 1984 Victory Tour was infamously anything but, as recounted in J. Randy Taraborelli's The Magic and the Madness. Michael Jackson was riding the wave of Thriller's major popularity when his brothers, who were financially struggling, approached him in 1983 to record and tour with them again. Having established himself as a solo act who no longer had to answer to his abusive father Joe, he only agreed to it when his mom pressured him to do so. From there...
  • The original tour promoter had apparently just backed out when Chuck Sullivan, son of New England Patriots' then-owner Billy Sullivan, met with an executive at Epic Records. His goal was to get a date at Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, where the Pats were not just the home team, but the owners. He'd earned a lot of respect in the NFL for his role in helping his father regain control of the team after a mid-'70s boardroom coup (which led to a class-action suit the elder Sullivan ultimately lost). Since he'd promoted concerts in college and Bob Hope USO tours in the Army, he knew a little about the business and had started promoting shows at Sullivan to make extra money. When he learned the Jacksons were seeking a tour promoter, he put together a bid.
  • His original partner, 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., backed out. He won the gig by promising the Jacksons 83.4% of the grosses — way over the usual rate for touring artists at the time. Not only that, but it was for "gross potential ticket sales", i.e. the Jacksons would be paid as if every show sold out regardless of whether or not it actually did. He promised them a $36 million advance, and paid for the first installment by borrowing $12 million against the team and stadium. But while he was able to get some of the other NFL owners' stadiums to agree to sweetheart deals (notice how twenty-six of the fifty five the dates were in stadiums that were the home venues of NFL teams at the time), and got a lot of freebies from other stadiums because, after all, this was the Jacksons, the overhead was way more than he anticipated. He had to renegotiate the deal two weeks into the tour because he couldn't deliver the balance of the advance.
  • The stage Michael had designed was so large that it took 30 trucks to move it between stadia. It was inevitable that some of the seats had to be sacrificed. At some venues, as many as a quarter of the available seats were lost this way.
  • Given how Sullivan had gotten involved, it's ironic that the town selectmen in Foxboro refused to allow a Jacksons concert there for reasons that remain unclear. (They cited "the unknown element", which everyone took to mean the rowdiness that constantly plagued both games and concerts at the stadium but had never been cited to stop any of those events.)
  • Sullivan was clearly out of his league with a tour of this magnitude. Those more familiar with the business laughed at his requests for discounts on hotel rooms and free advertising. He fought with the Jacksons regularly and renegotiated the contract several times, leaving his bed at one point near the end of the tour after a mild heart attack. At Washington's RFK Stadium, he forgot his pass and was not allowed in. The Jacksons were so embarrassed that they rehired Don King as their primary promoter. King knew little about promoting concerts, but a great deal about promoting himself. At the press conference announcing the tour, he hogged the spotlight, so the brothers allowed Michael to bring in his own people to help announce the tour!
  • King inked a deal with Pepsi to sponsor the tour, forcing the Jacksons to pass on an even more lucrative offer from Quaker Oats. As a condition of the former deal, Michael had to participate in two TV ads for a product he didn't use. This led to the on-set disaster in which Michael suffered third-degree burns to his scalp when a pyrotechnic effect went awry. He negotiated a huge financial settlement with Pepsi and they enjoyed a professional relationship for years afterward.
    
    The sponsorship created other problems: Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, where the tour opened, serves Coke drinks at its concession stands by contract. The contract was interpreted to forbid the Jacksons from having the Pepsi logo flash on the screen behind them during the show, so Pepsi had to have helicopters fly over the stadium towing banners. It was a good thing the sponsorship worked out, since Roger Enrico, then the company's director of North American operations (later its CEO), signed the deal without even letting upper management know.
  • Initially, would-be concertgoers had to mail in a newspaper coupon and money order for tickets that cost $30 — significantly more than what rival superstars (i.e., David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen) were charging at the time. Worse, the tickets were only sold in lots of four in a lottery system. (The money would be deposited in a bank account, where it would immediately start accumulating heavy interest. When the price of the tickets was refunded to those who didn't win, The Jacksons would pocket the interest.) The public outcry over the Jacksons shutting out their lower-class black fanbase moved Michael, who hated the idea anyway, to protect his image by implementing a conventional ticket-selling system as soon as possible and making sure that free tickets were set aside for poor children at each stop.
  • Then there were health issues. Jackie hurt his leg in rehearsals ^note  supposedly — his second wife says what really happened was his first wife caught him with another woman and tried to run him over with her car! and missed the first half of the tour. Michael, stressed out by family tension, was put under a doctor's care at one point. Jermaine's flu resulted in the cancellation of the Phoenix-area shows (the second-to-last stop), although that may have been a convenient excuse to cancel them because of slow ticket sales.
  • Michael kept away from the rest of his family as often as he could offstage. James Brown turned down his offer to perform with them in New York City, as he too objected to the ticket lottery. And an offer to have one of the shows filmed for TV/video release was one the brothers were willing to take, but Michael nixed it...and then had his own crew film a show with the same intent. It was never released.
  • The brothers all stayed on separate floors of their hotels, while Michael usually stayed in a separate hotel entirely. Meetings often broke down into side meetings among the factions: two lawyers representing Michael, one representing Jermaine, and the other four with or without lawyers. Travel arrangements? The brothers agreed among themselves that only they would ride in the van to shows, but early on Michael started letting Emmanuel Lewis ride along. The others didn't show their annoyance, as they didn't want to spoil the boy's experience; none of them were talking to each other anyway. However, when Michael let Julian Lennon ride along with them in their helicopter to Giants Stadium despite having made a similar agreement at the time, they all glared at him silently for the entire flight. Before the tour was even halfway over, they were all getting their own rides, further increasing expenses.
  • Despite Michael's fame, ticket sales got worse as the tour approached its end. By the Toronto shows in September, 50,000 tickets had gone unsold. Pittsburgh shows were canceled in favor of more dates in Chicago. After the Vancouver shows two months later, Sullivan had to stop his $1.9 million check to the Jacksons before it bounced. Finally, too many dates were pencilled in for the final stop in Los Angeles. Knowing how bad half-empty houses would look for Michael, his handlers arranged for free tickets to be given to everyone they could think of. Even then, at the rain-soaked final show at Dodger Stadium large blocks of empty seats were evident.
    
    The brothers and Joe intended to take the tour overseas, but Michael hated the idea — so he announced at the end that this was their very last show. It's been estimated that Chuck Sullivan lost $13–22 million on the tour, though Joe and his sons, particularly Michael, made what they expected to. Sullivan and his father had to sell the Patriots and the stadium as a result. Supposedly he wrote several letters to Michael begging him to bail the team out. Eventually, the team was bought by Bob Kraft, under whose management it finally won multiple Super Bowls. Kraft keeps a Victory Tour poster in his office as a reminder of the start of the chain of events that put him in charge of the Patriots.
  • Funnily, Victory album, released in the summer of 1984 just as the tour launched, was only able to reach #4 on the Billboard charts and scored only one Top 10 single (the Michael Jackson/Mick Jagger duet "State of Shock").
• What Could Have Been:
  • Michael had plans to go on his first solo tour to promote Thriller, but got roped into doing the Victory Tour with his brothers. He wouldn't embark on a solo tour until 1987, to promote Bad.
  • Before Michael's sudden death, all of the brothers made a promise to their mother to perform together one last time before she passed away. Whether or not this would've taken place before, during, or after Michael's planned This Is It residency in London is unknown.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: When they first got famous, random kids would show up at the house to play with Michael. After a while, Katherine Jackson stopped letting them in because there were too many of them.

---