JOSEPH ENTERED US IN A TALENT contest at the Regal Theatre, Chicago, and we won hands down. We kept returning and kept winning, taking the honours for three consecutive Sundays. In those days, the reward for such a hat-trick was to be invited back for a paid evening performance and that was how we found ourselves sharing a bill with Gladys Knight & the Pips, newly signed by Motown Records.
At rehearsals, we were midway through our routine when I looked to the wings to find the usual sight of Joseph accompanied by the unusual sight of Gladys Knight. As she tells it, she ‘heard some performance, jumped up and said, “Who is that?”’ When we came offstage, Joseph told us that she wanted to meet us in her dressing room. It was a big deal because she and the Pips were all the rage, having broken into the charts the previous year with their No. 2 hit ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’.
We shuffled into her room, led by Joseph. I don’t know what she must have thought when five shy brothers walked in, considering the performance that had grabbed her attention. Michael was so small that when he sat down on the sofa, his legs dangled off the end.
‘Your father tells me that you boys have big futures ahead of you,’ she said.
We nodded.
Gladys looked at Michael. ‘You enjoy singing?’
‘Yeah,’ said Michael.
She glanced at the other four of us. We all nodded. ‘You boys should be at Motown!’
That was the night Joseph asked Gladys if she could get someone from Motown to watch one of our performances. She promised she’d make that call, and she couldn’t have been more sincere.
Back home, Joseph told Mother that it was only a matter of time before the phone rang. But it never did.
As it turned out, Gladys was as good as her word because we later learned she had called Taylor Cox, an executive at Motown, but there was no interest higher up the ladder. Berry Gordy, the founder of the label, wasn’t looking for a kid group. He’d been there, done that with Stevie Wonder, and he didn’t want the headache of hiring tutors or the Board of Education’s restrictions on working hours.
Meanwhile, Joseph kept us on the road and we kept plugging away at the Regal and places like the Uptown Theater, Philadelphia, and the Howard Theater, Washington DC. Our road led towards ‘The Chitlin’ Circuit’ – the collective name given to a host of venues in the south and east of the country, showcasing predominantly new African-American acts. These were our ‘roughing-it years’, when the professional stage educated us in the dos and don’ts of live performance. And all the time, we just kept performing and pushing our Steeltown 45s.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cry Freedom
‘IF THEY LIKE YOU HERE, THEY’LL like you anywhere,’ Joseph said, in the van en route to New York City. Destination: the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem – a place ‘where stars are made’.
All the way from Indiana, he talked up a storm about what this venue meant and the singers who had triumphed here: Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, tap-dancer Bill ‘Bo Jangles’ Robinson … and James Brown. In an era when black faces on television were still relatively rare, the Apollo was the platform for African-American acts. ‘But if you get it wrong, make a mistake, this audience will turn on you. Tonight, you have to be on your game,’ he continued.
We honestly weren’t intimidated: we knew that winning over the crowd meant we’d be walking through a door towards bigger things, so what greater motivation could there be for young boys with a dream? Sometimes there were benefits to being lambs in the entertainment industry – our innocence made us blind to the enormity of certain occasions. We pulled up beneath the Apollo sign, which hung vertically, lit sunset orange at night.
When we first went in, the walls were lined with the photographs of legends. We walked the corridors and then noticed the shabby carpet. Joseph asked us to imagine the feet that had worn it away; to imagine the kind of shoes we were walking in. We had our own dressing room with a mirror surrounded by light-bulbs and a chrome clothes rack on wheels. And the microphones popped up electronically from beneath the stage, all space age.
Inside our dressing room, Michael stepped up on a seat with Jackie and pushed up the window to look out. ‘There’s a basketball court!’ shouted Jackie. That brought a new burst of excitement. We wanted to get outside and shoot some baskets, but then Joseph walked in. Everyone jumped into line and pretended to be focused again. Time to get serious. I don’t know if Joseph ever realised how nonchalant we were on the inside about performing, but he knew Harlem wasn’t Chicago. The Apollo crowd was well versed in entertainment: it knew its music. If things went badly, disgruntled murmurs grew into boos, followed by missiles of tin cans, fruit and popcorn. When things went well, they were up on their feet, singing, clapping and dancing. No one walked off the Apollo stage and asked, ‘How did I do?’
Before going on, we sensed the buzz of a full house. Michael and Marlon stood in front of Tito, Jackie, Johnny and me in the shadows and whoever was on before us wasn’t getting the greatest reaction. The boos were loud and unforgiving. Then a can landed onstage, followed by an apple core. Marlon, startled, turned to us. ‘They’re throwin’ stuff!’
Joseph looked at us as if to say, ‘I’m telling you …’
Between the curtains, backstage and hidden from public view, there was a section of tree trunk. It was the Apollo’s ‘Tree of Hope’ chopped from a felled tree that had once stood in the Boulevard of Dreams, otherwise known as Seventh Avenue, between the old Lafayette Theater and Connie’s Inn. In an ancient superstition, black performers touched that tree, or basked beneath its branches, for good luck. It had come to symbolise hope for African-American acts in the same way that the tree outside our home symbolised unity. Michael and Marlon duly stroked the ‘Tree of Hope’, but I don’t think Lady Luck had anything to do with the performance we gave that night.
We rocked the Apollo and the crowd was soon on its feet. I don’t think we brought a finer performance to any venue in our pre-Motown days and we ended up winning the Superdog Amateur Finals Night. We must have impressed management because we were invited back … this time as paid performers. That May of 1968, we were on the same bill for an Apollo night with Etta James, the Coasters and the Vibrations. We knew we’d done good at the highest level. What we didn’t know was that a television producer had been sitting in the audience, taking notes and developing a keen interest.
A SHORT JEWISH LAWYER WHO ALWAYS wore suits arrived on the scene. Apparently Richard Aarons had knocked on Joseph’s hotel-room door in New York and sold his services. We were introduced to the debonair and playful Richard as the man ‘who is helping us get to where you need to be.’ As the son of the chairman of a musicians’ union in New York, Richard had useful connections.
Straightaway, Richard put together a professional pitch-package that contained our Steeltown hits, newspaper cuttings of rave reviews, promotional material and a letter explaining why the Jackson 5 should be given a chance. It was dispatched to labels such as Atlantic, CBS, Warner and Capitol. In addition, Joseph personally mailed a package to Motown Records in Detroit, addressed to Mr Berry Gordy, hoping to follow up on Gladys Knight’s recommendation. Apparently he used to tell Mother: ‘I’m going to take the boys to Motown if it’s the last thing I do!’
Many weeks later, and with us still technically attached to Steeltown Records, Joseph brought in an envelope, opened it and our demo tape slid out on to the table … Returned and rejected by Motown.
THE BEST THING ABOUT JOURNEYING THE Chitlin’ Circuit was the feeling that we were always tiptoeing in the shadows of the greats. We had already found ourselves in the dressing room of Gladys Knight and on the same stage as the Delfonics, the