Bringing Back the Magic

By JAY COCKS

The Jacksons, led by Michael, launch a controversial tour

They pulled it off. And a good thing too. For a while there it was looking a little close.

The Jacksons' Victory Tour, undertaken by Michael and his brothers as a fond and hugely remunerative farewell to familial musicmaking, was one of the most eagerly awaited and certainly the most ballyhooed pop-concert series of the year. It had also started to become the most controversial, in part because the tour organizers seemed at odds with one another and with the ideals that Michael, especially, has tried to embody. Tickets were too pricey; lots of fans were getting cut out. Disorganization and ill will were rampant. Greed was keeping pace with showmanship and good p.r. manners, and seemed to be gaining on both. So when Michael and four of his brothers took the stage last Friday night at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., for the first show of a tour that will wind on into autumn, a lot was hanging in the balance.

The boys tipped the scales decidedly in their favor. No doubt about it: the Jacksons' tour is a real show-business extravaganza, a four-star eye-glazer and ear-bender replete with laser effects, magic tricks, assorted marvelous machines, sundry intermittent detonations, a finale full of fireworks... and, oh yes, a healthy portion of good solid funk. Soul Train meets Star Wars on the outskirts of Las Vegas. A lot of--quite literal--bang for the buck.

This is not the usual rock show. Certainly it is not the usual rock-show audience. Perhaps no major entertainer has ever attracted as many preadolescent children as Michael Jackson has. At Arrowhead the audience of approximately 45,000 was filled with them, staring enraptured at all the whiz-bang effects. The older ones danced on their seats. The younger ones bopped around in the arms of their equally delighted parents. The night of music became a sort of day at Disneyland, and knowing Michael's much publicized doting on the works of Old Uncle Walt, this surely was part of the plan.

By consensus of rumor, backstage gossip and onstage evidence, this is Michael's show all the way. The opening dispels any doubts on that point. In a blitzkrieg of light, sound, lasers and smoke, shambling creatures that resemble Big Bird's pal Mr. Snuffle-Upagus re-enact a short, skewered version of The Sword in the Stone. The young man who yanks the steel out of the rock turns out, of course, to be our Michael, and the lasers reflecting off the blade into the far reaches of the stadium make him look for a moment like a dashboard saint from a head shop. This prologue is dramatic, funny and, at the end, nicely self-mocking. Spoilsports might argue that it does not have a great deal to do with the music, but then--along with cameras, alcoholic beverages and recording devices--spoilsports are not welcome at the Victory Tour. All those congenial security guards will see to it.

When the brothers get down to music and launch into Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Michael, in good voice and fine form, steps forward again. The brothers blaze their way through a set of 16 tunes, and except for three compositions by his older brother Jermaine, Michael sings lead on them all. He spins, prances, glides, soars and generally gives a vivid illustration of why, after the Victory Tour ends, he will resume flying solo. Michael is the clear star of the show--a Thoroughbred running with pacers--but he always was, even in the Jackson 5 days. No readjustments have been made to accommodate him. It is, simply, that the audience's perception of him is different now, and a good deal larger. He remains what he always was: the animating force, the major muscle, the man-child with all the magic.

The tour has both needed and suffered from Michael's heft all along. Besides freighting an amount of equipment unprecedented even for a rock extravaganza--375 tons of it in 22 semitrailers, including two outdoor stages and one indoor stage, 64,000 lbs. of sound-and-light equipment, and eleven hydraulic elevators--the Jacksons had to shoulder the weight of Michael's colossal celebrity. That might not, at first, seem like such a burden. It was the monster success of Michael's Thriller album, which seems to have turned into a kind of long-playing Guinness statistic (35 million copies sold to date: seven Top Ten singles off the album, of which two became No. 1), that made the brothers into a superstar attraction and moved promoters to promise astronomical advances to book the tour. If Michael had decided to stay home and play with the animals in his private zoo, it is doubtful that his brothers could have pulled down an advance of almost $41 million for a tour or driven such tough bargains on profit participation in everything from T-shirt sales to stadium parking fees. Or got so much rotten publicity, either.

According to one of Michael's closest advisers, when it comes to matters of professional strategy or decision making, one of the world's biggest stars just says, "I'm one of six," and casts his vote with Jermaine, Tito, Marlon, Randy and Jackie. This is not a soul-brother Partridge Family: the Jacksons are generously gifted all round. But it is clear to everyone, especially the fans, that Michael is the main attraction. As a result, Michael inevitably took the brunt of the considerable grievances being voiced about the tour.

There was great and justifiable griping about the ticket sales: under a single-price policy, $30 was the going rate for the best seat in the house as well as the worst (seat location was to be assigned by computer), and fans could buy no fewer and no more than four tickets. At $120 a pop, that is a fair hunk out of anybody's allowance. "He must think that we're as rich as he is," said 21-year-old Jackie Colson, a lifeguard in Florida. "This is Jacksonville. This ain't Hollywood." The promoter tried to get local papers to run ads containing mail-order ticket coupons gratis, as if the dailies would be performing a public service, but some journalists balked. "It absolutely reeks of arrogance," said David Easterly, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. "I wonder how much the guy and the people around him think of his fans." One eleven-year-old fan, Ladonna Jones of Dallas, dashed off a letter to Michael that she passed along to the Dallas Morning News: "How could you, of all people, be so selfish?"How could you of all people, be so selfish?"

"He." "The guy." "You." No one thought to call out Tito, or dress down Marlon, never mind get heavy with the promoters. Michael, for all his fans and for most of the public at large, is the centerpiece of the tour, so last week he took center stage at a brief press conference in Kansas City. Dressed in spangled glove, dark shades, sequined band jacket and one of the red ceremonial sashes that make him look like a cultural ambassador from Sesame Street, he announced in a voice frayed by nerves that he had seen Ladonna Jones' letter. Therefore, he was asking the promoters to figure out another, fairer way to sell tickets, and he was donating his tour earnings to charity. He took no questions from the floor, just hotfooted it out of the place and back, properly, to where he belonged, waiting for the sheltering security of performing onstage.

Michael seemed very much discomfited by the necessity of making such an appearance and such a statement: a funkified Ariel flushed for a moment from the enchanted woods to say a few words that might bring the magic back again. There was a basic misunderstanding here that Michael must have appreciated but that got past most of the others assembled. If it is to be found anywhere, the magic is in the music. The opening concert was a reminder of that. All its panoply and pizazz suggested that the debates, the controversy, the heat and the misunderstandings were side issues that could be blown away by solid showmanship, no matter the price of the ticket.

Michael's brothers have a lot on the line as well. Jermaine--often Michael's ally when family business comes up for a vote--has carved out a solid solo career for himself, but for all the others, this tour probably represents their best shot at the big glory. Each of the six brothers stands to make millions by the time the tour is scheduled to end in November. (Jackie, suffering from a knee injury and sidelined from the tour, will nevertheless have a share of the revenues.)

There is also Victory, the Jacksons' spanking-new album, a stereophonic silver lining in search of and, indeed, in need of, a few stray clouds. Earnest, upbeat and insistently optimistic, Victory was shipped out by Epic Records in almost unprecedented numbers (2 million copies hit American record retail outlets last week). The first single, State of Shock, a politely raunchy dance number in which Michael can be heard ducting with Jackson-for-aday Mick Jagger, is doing nicely. But this is very much an album in need of what the record business calls tour support. The most interesting song--or the most curious, at any rate--is Be Not Always, a ballad written and performed by Michael with injections of mournful strings. A sort of nonspecific cry of pain against both personal cruelty and international aggression, the song seems intended as a rejoinder to those who think Michael makes mostly good-time make-out music. As such, it stands in marked contrast to the rest of Victory, whose final cut, Body (written and performed by Marlon), is the ideal anthem for horny aerobicizers, with its chorus of "I want your body, I love your body, I need your body" repeated like a liturgy for ligaments.

The concert features not a single song from Victory. One might deduce from this that even the Jacksons recognize the flimsiness of much of the new material. Such an assumption is arguable--many bands like to wait until records are more familiar to an audience before performing songs from them live--but it would also reflect the sort of narrow spirit that got the tour into such hot water with the public in the first place. Yes, $30 was too much for a rafter seat so high in the stadium that you could be buzzed by low-flying aircraft; and yes, the four-ticket minimum-maximum and the computer-sorted coupons were painfully unwieldy. But they were a plausible means of attempting to cut out scalpers. "We were trying to protect our fans," insists Marlon. Says Randy: "We wanted to have everybody have a fair chance -- to see the show without paying hundreds of dollars a ticket to scalpers."

There were other charges in the press: that the promoters will make big bucks on interest from unfilled ticket orders before the money is finally returned (Tour Promoter Chuck Sullivan, chairman of the Manhattan-based Stadium Management Corp., insists the interest will not even cover the cost of processing them); that Sullivan is trying to get stadiums rent-free (in fact he is paying for some, and in any case local promoters stand to profit from a cut of concessions and parking).

The media yelping seemed pretty tame, at times, compared with the back biting among some Jackson advisers. One even suggested last week that it was Paterfamilias Joe Jackson's "black-music-business voodoo" that made a large advance from the promoter such a stumbling block and could even have kept his sons from earning still more on box-office percentages. Says the source: "Joe's philosophy is, 'My boys are the biggest, and they get their money up front.' " As a result of all this, in two of the first three cities on the tour, the money has been a little slow in coming. Ticket sales were sluggish in Dallas until the shows finally sold out July 3; as of the past Friday there were lots of ticket coupons at the Spec's Music stores in Miami waiting to be filled out and sent in. (The new system for buying tickets will be determined by local stadium owners. It will go into effect, at the latest, by the time tickets for the early-August New York City engagement go on sale.) Sullivan also confirmed concert dates in ten additional cities, including Detroit, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Ticket sales there, as well as the commercial longevity of Victory, will determine whether the public has turned its back on the Jacksons or whether Michael, with the help of some fast business footwork and some dazzling family showmanship, has managed to turn them around again.

There is still a lot of money on the ta ble, but after Kansas City all bets have been settled. That was not summer thunder in the air-- over Arrowhead Stadium. It was the unmistakable sound of the Jacksons hitting the jackpot, all to the strains -- yes, Michael sings them both --of Billie Jean and Beat It.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Denise Worrell/Kansas City

With reporting by Denise Worrell