‘I never smile when I dance’
By February 1984, Michael Jackson's accident had been the subject of news reports for weeks. The publicity had only served to heighten the suspense about the forthcoming Pepsi commercials, which were to be aired for the first time during the upcoming Grammy Awards programme. Some people began talking about their ‘debut’, as if they were among the most newsworthy events of the century. Before the Grammys, the commercials would be ‘unveiled’ at a black-tie event for one thousand bottlers at New York's Lincoln Center; the commercials would also be screened for the press in New York, have their world premiere on MTV at no cost to the sponsor, and then, finally, appear as consecrated commercials during the Grammy telecast.
Down to the very last minute, though, Michael gave the Pepsi-Cola Company a difficult time. When he saw the finished product (actually two commercials: the concert scene and a ‘street’ scene featuring Michael with dancer, Alfonso Riberio), Michael adamantly insisted that they were not good enough; Michael hated them. There was too much of his face in the concert spot, he said. The bigger problem was that Michael wouldn't talk directly to the Pepsi executives about his concerns. Either he was acting spoiled or he was shy. No one was sure.
Roger Enrico then telephoned Joseph to complain that they couldn't make the commercials ‘better’ if Michael refused to talk about them. No matter what people may have thought about Joseph personally, they respected the fact that he was usually willing at least to listen to them. If he thought an idea had merit, he would do his best to convince Michael to consider the proposal favourably.
‘Look, it's not easy for Michael,’ Joseph Jackson told one Pepsi executive. ‘He's got great ideas, but he can't always express them. Let me help. I can act as a go-between and make it easier on everybody. I know the kid. I know how he thinks.’
A few hours later, Joseph called Roger. ‘I have Michael here,’ he said, ‘and I'm sure you guys can work things out.’
There was a pause.
‘Go ahead. Talk to the man?’ Joseph urgently whispered. ‘Get on the phone, Michael.’
Michael got on the line. He then complained to Roger that he was made to take off his sunglasses during the taping, and that he really hadn't wanted to do that. He had been promised, he said, that there would be only
one
close-up without the shades, ‘and now I see lots of close-ups of me with my glasses off.’ Moreover, he fretted that there was too much of him in the commercials, ‘
way
over four seconds of my face.’ The film was too dark. He spins
twice
during the routine. ‘And I only agreed to one spin,’ Michael reminded Roger. Also, in the commercial with Alfonso Riberio, which he liked and said was ‘magic, just magic’, he wanted bells to sound when Alfonso bumped into him as they danced, ‘like the sound of a wind chime.’
‘Bells?’ Enrico asked, dazed.
‘Yes, bells.’
Both commercials were quickly re-edited with Michael's changes in place. Michael then took a look at the new product and telephoned Roger Enrico with the verdict. ‘Hello, Mr Enrico. This is Michael Jackson,’ he said. ‘You know, the person you spoke to the other day about the commercials.’
Roger remembered.
The commercial with Alfonso Riberio was fine, he said. However, there was still too much of him in the concert endorsement. He was seen for a total of five seconds. There should only be four seconds of his image, he said. Also, he was seen smiling in one dance moment.
‘So?’
‘So, I never smile when I dance,’ Michael explained.
‘Oh.’
On 7 February Michael was inducted into the
Guinness Book of Records
during a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, in recognition of
Thriller
having broken all records for album sales at twenty-five million copies. CBS Records held a black-tie party for fifteen hundred guests at the Museum of Natural History. Michael was accompanied to the event by actress Brooke Shields.
Her
‘people’ had gotten in touch with
his
‘people’ and suggested that she would be the perfect date. ‘Why not?’ Michael decided.
When Michael got back to Los Angeles, he met with Joseph, Katherine, his brothers and Don King to tell them what he had decided about the tour. ‘I want to rename it,’ he said. ‘I don't like “Victory Tour” I want to call it “The Final Curtain”.’
Michael wanted to make it clear that the upcoming tour would be the end of the road for him and his brothers. Once they finished, he would not work with the Jacksons again, thus ‘The Final Curtain’.
‘None of the brothers liked that name at all,’ Marlon recalled. ‘Our parents didn't like it either. Michael was making it sound like a funeral, like someone had died. But we weren't dying.’
Michael wasn't happy with the name ‘Victory tour’ because of the obvious implication that the tour was, somehow, a victorious occasion. Actually, he felt that he'd been defeated by being coaxed by his mother into participating in the event. As far as the new name was concerned, however, he was, not surprisingly, outvoted.
‘How many Grammys do you think I'll win?’ Michael asked Quincy Jones.
Quincy shrugged. Smart man. He knew better, after the
Thriller
outburst, than to make any predictions.
‘Well, all I can say is I hopeI win a lot of 'em,’ Michael said with a smile.
A review of the history of the Grammys – the awards programme that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences established in the late 1950s as a pop music equivalent of the Oscars – reveals that Grammy winners are not always the true pre-eminent artists and recordings of their time. For example, Elvis Presley never won a Grammy for any of his major pop vocal performances, even though he was the most influential pop artist of the last forty years. Chuck Berry was also routinely omitted. The Beatles only received four Grammys, which is amazing considering their impact on popular music and our culture. Bob Dylan's ground-breaking
Highway 61 Revisited
album won no Grammys in 1965. David Bowie's important
Ziggy Stardust
collection didn't even win a nomination in 1972. James Brown, The Rolling Stones, Sly Stone and Diana Ross have never received Grammy Awards. Quite simply, the six thousand notoriously conservative people who vote for those awards are not apt to quickly recognize the importance and significance of new artists.
There are also other, political considerations. It has long been rumoured that both the nominating process and the final electoral process of the Grammy Awards are dominated by major record companies that have turned the award into a self-congratulatory sham. By 1983, this contest had come down to a struggle between two large superpowers – the Warner Brothers/Elektra-Asylum/ Atlantic-Atco faction (WEA) and the Columbia/Epic faction (CBS). As a result, it was very difficult for non-WEA and non-CBS recording artists to win Grammys. Motown artists, with the exception of Stevie Wonder, were usually not even in the running. In fact, in 1982, CBS won twenty-one of a possible sixty-two awards, including all the major citations.
Michael wasn't interested in the politics of the Grammy Awards. ‘Who cares?’ he once told a friend. ‘All I want is as many of 'em as I can get.’
He needn't have worried. Michael Jackson was, quite simply, too popular for the Academy to ignore. He was so popular, in fact, that everyone agreed on his importance; he had become rock music's most commonly celebrated hero, and he was a CBS artist, to boot. When the Grammy nominations were announced, he received an unprecedented twelve nominations – the highest number of mentions for any single performer in Grammy history – including Record of the Year (‘Beat It’), Album of the Year (
Thriller
), and Song of the Year (‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’); a nomination for Best Children's Recording for his narration of E.T.; nominations for the engineers who remixed the instrumental track of ‘Billie Jean’ for the B-side of a single, and for the songwriters who wrote ‘PYT’ for his album; nominations for his producer, Quincy Jones; and an additional Best Producer nomination jointly shared by Michael and Quincy. In fact, Jackson's closest competitor was his producer and occasional arranger, Quincy Jones, who received six nominations.
Along with
Thriller
, the Police's
Synchronicity
and the Flashdance soundtrack also received nominations for Album of the Year, as did Billy Joel's
An Innocent Man
and David Bowie's
Let's Dance
.