The Day the Moonwalk Landed
Behind the scenes at “Motown 25," where Michael’s legendary dance almost didn’t happen
By Michael A. Gonzales
On May 16th, 1983, in a rare moment of cross-generational and cross-racial solidarity, folks gathered together to watch the NBC broadcast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. The landmark label—launched in Detroit in 1959 and relocated to the West Coast in 1972 (a move many R&B aficionados cite as the end of the company’s golden years and captivating sound)—was celebrating its quarter-century anniversary, and people were elated.
The following day, strangers talked about the exciting show on the streets, in subway stations and at their jobs—whether raving about the coolness of Marvin Gaye, ranting about the suaveness of Smokey Robinson, squealing about the flair of Diana Ross or the flashy outfits of the Four Tops. And, of course, everyone was screaming about the scene-stealing moonwalk moves of Michael Jackson.
The former boy star, now on his sixth solo project, Jackson stood on the verge of ruling the pop kingdom. With his hit solo album Thriller, which wasn’t even a Motown production, already on top of the Billboard charts, Jackson performed a hyper-as-a-heart-attack version of the album’s second single “Billie Jean” and simultaneously made television history.
Dressed entirely in black—with the exception of his glittering white socks and a single soon-to-be-iconic glove—Michael propped his stylish fedora on his head, struck a pose like a character from a MGM musical, waited for the funky bassline opening to work its mojo, threw his arms behind him and took flight like some kind of exotic bird. Singing a song supposedly inspired by groupies, MJ’s moves were pure sexual electricity as he gyrated wickedly, threw kung-fu kicks and then, for two seconds during the song’s bridge, soulfully strutted backwards. On that night, the moonwalk was born.
“I was standing on the side of the stage just watching the show and when Michael did ‘Billie Jean’ he blew us away,” Four Tops singer Duke Fakir recalls from his home in Detroit. Rivaling “the one step” that Neil Armstrong did in 1969 on the real moon, which happened the same year the Jackson 5 signed to Motown, the moonwalk became instantly iconic. With his swaying, swinging, singing, screeching and sliding, MJ seared an image onto our brains.
Indeed, the perfection of his every move would later help redefine pop music and choreography. Every singer who dances today is a reflection of Michael Jackson. Future stars, some who weren’t even born the night Jackson first performed his the famous routine—Aaliyah, Beyoncé, Timothy Zachery Mosley (Timbaland), Missy Elliott, Will.i.am, Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, Bruno Mars and countless others—have used that clip to inspire and propel their own pop life sensibilities.
Singer/Producer Bernadette Cooper, founder of the fem-funk group Klymaxx (“The Men All Pause,” “I Miss You”), who recorded for Solar Records, often called “the Motown of the 80s,” remembers rushing home to see Motown 25. “Michael was no longer that little boy we had grown to love,” Cooper, currently finishing her project Last Diva on Earth, says. “He was now a sexy man, and he was magical. As I always do when I see good things happen on television, I began to cry. My tears were moonwalk tears. I was crying for those white socks and boohooing for those fierce rhinestone gloves.”
Ron Worthy of soulhead.com, a music lifestyle website, says, “At the time I was 13, and people in my class were split in allegiance between MJ and Prince. I remember when the Jacksons performed it was sentimental and memorable, but, when MJ said he loved the old songs, but he liked the new songs too, man, he had this look in his eye that was unforgettable.
“When the beat to ‘Billie Jean’ dropped, we all screamed loudly and just watched. When he did the moonwalk, it was like he was floating on water backwards. At the time, I had never seen the move before and was just mesmerized. The next day at school, it was like everyone wanted to be MJ more than ever before.”
Jackson stunned the world when he changed the tempo of the show, as though he was forcing every viewer to dance with him into the future, as though he was placing those “old songs” back on the shelf with the musical museum pieces.
For Motown 25 executive producer Suzanne De Passe, who had worked for Motown since 1968, that was the crowning achievement to what she and Berry Gordy had set out to do when their jet landed in the land of dreams and sunshine the decade before: to conquer film and television. On the Motown movie side it was win or lose—Lady Sings the Blues, for which de Passe co-wrote the screenplay, being a winner and The Wiz being a loser. However on the TV side of the street, de Passe and Motown were quite successful in moving the talents of their roster from the jukebox to television.
Although de Passe worked on the sidelines of Motown’s first television venture in 1968, the NBC special T.C.B.-Taking Care of Business which featured Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations, it wasn’t until the Jackson 5’s first ABC special Going Back to Indiana in 1971 that she was in a decision making position. “That was the first Motown special I had a direct role in,” de Passe says, “one where I was in a position of responsibility. I found that I like it better than the music. I was excited by the visual nature of interrupting the music. It was a given that Motown had great music, but to create an environment for that music to be celebrated.” That same year Motown partnered with Rankin/Bass Productions for The Jackson 5 cartoon that ran for two-seasons on ABC.
Pop stars from the time they signed to the company, the Jackson 5 got more television exposure than most, with appearances on the many variety shows of the period including Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, Flip Wilson, Andy Williams and Carol Burnett. Even after the Jackson brothers fled Motown for Philadelphia International/Epic Records—with the exception of Jermaine, who’d married Berry Gordy’s daughter Hazel—MJ was still cast in the Motown-produced cinematic disaster that was The Wiz.
Nevertheless, as MJ showed the world on Motown 25, he was now a grown man who could play by the rules, but he wanted to make a few of his own. Still, it’s almost scary to think that the “Billie Jean” moment that became such a monumental telegenic statement, that dance of fierce independence and new music world order, almost didn’t happen.
De Passe laughs. “Yes, a letter came to me from Jackson’s attorney during rehearsals saying we were forbidden to tape the ‘Billie Jean’ part, because Michael wanted to do it for the people in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, but he didn’t want it broadcast. I went to him and asked, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, I tell you what, we’ll tape it and you come see it in the editing room. If you don’t like it then, we won’t use it. Luckily, he not only liked it, he loved it.”
According to Marvin Gaye’s ex-wife Janis Gaye, not everyone was happy with watching Michael Jackson steal the spotlight. “Marvin was not pleased,” Janis remembers. “Marvin and I talked about it later, and Marvin felt as though Michael overshadowed the other performances. Marvin was aware of his importance, but when Michael blew the roof off, it made him feel less than. It was a changing of the guard, and he was feeling that. For Marvin, it wasn’t a joyful night.”
These days, Motown music has been relegated to the nostalgia corner of American Idol, Glee, crate-digging wedding DJs, and a million karaoke machines. However, for those of us breathing air during the 60s, 70s and 80s, it’s a common fact that we were also inhaling the thick black fumes of Motown. “It was the soundtrack of our lives,” people say, and they aren’t lying.
It doesn’t matter if you grew-up listening to Smokey Robinson’s sad falsetto on “Tears of a Clown,” learned to drive as Norman Whitfield’s wah-wah driven production on “Psychedelic Shack” (The Temptations) or “War” (Edwin Starr) played in your daddy’s ride, got your first kiss as Michael Jackson’s mature innocence on “I Want You Back” played in the background or smoked your first joint as Marvin Gaye wondered “What’s Going On.”
Back in the day when the label reigned supreme, Motown was a movement that competed on the pop charts with The Beatles and the Beach Boys. In the years after leaving Detroit in 1972, Motown still managed to sign excellent acts including Switch, Rick James, High Inergy, Dazz Band, Tenna Marie and DeBarge, but none seemed to generate the same level of crossover fan furor and historic hysteria as the old school. Yet, in the early 80s, like so many other soul labels that were being left behind with the advent of hip-hop and the Minneapolis sound, Motown began to lose its luster.
While some might have been saddened by this, for longtime Motown honcho and executive producer Suzanne de Passe, it was the perfect opportunity to have a party and celebrate. In fact, the only person who wasn’t feeling the idea of a twenty-fifth birthday bash was Berry Gordy himself. Says de Passe, “Many of the old artists were gone. Diana Ross was gone, Marvin was gone, the Jacksons were gone, and so, it’s understandable why Mr. Gordy would have mixed emotions about the whole thing.” However, once relenting his own doubt, Gordy gave his former protégé de Passe permission to move forward, the phones of his old crew began ringing and everyone answered.
Shot on March 25th, 1983 at the Los Angeles Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Motown artists old (Gaye, Ross, Jackson) and new (DeBarge, High Ingery) rehearsed for two days before unveiling the big show. Thirty-one years later, de Passe recalls, “I felt like a ringmaster with a whip and chair, but, like when Quincy Jones did ‘We Are the World’ two years later, people checked their egos at the door. When they walked in and saw so many of their old friends, it just turned into a party. We taped on a Friday, and come Monday, we were in the editing room preparing the show for its broadcast.” As with everything that had been done under the stylish Motown umbrella since its launch, the ultimate goal was to make Berry Gordy smile.
Yet no matter what might have happened with Motown artists years back, when the calls went out, not a single performer said no. Even Gordy’s former brother-in-law Marvin Gaye, who’d fought with Berry over creative control and had a very public divorce from Anna Gordy, came back for the festivities.
Having left in 1981 after the release of In Our Lifetime, Gaye had recently won a Grammy for his CBS-released single “Sexual Healing.” Dressed in a cream colored suit, Gaye somberly strutted onstage to much applause and sat down at the piano, played with the keys and gave a soul soliloquy before standing-up to sing his classic, “What’s Going On.” However, while de Passe says that Gaye was “one of the happiest people on the planet Earth to be there,” his ex-wife Janis Gaye believes otherwise.
“Marvin didn’t really want to be there, but he had a sense of appreciation for Berry,” Janis says via telephone from her home in Massachusetts; this spring her memoir, After the Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye, will be released. Although Marvin and Janis were divorced, they were still in a relationship. “Marvin wasn’t in a good place and was hesitant about attending. He didn’t think he looked good, he didn’t think he had the chops, and he felt pushed into the whole thing. There was some nostalgia, but there was also a lot of anger with what he’d been through at Motown. He maintained his class and self respect by doing what he did best—be himself.”
Not everyone approached the Motown reunion with apprehension. “Whenever Berry called, we were there,” Duke Fakir says. “No matter what other label you were on, Motown was home. Once you’re Motown, you’re always Motown.” As the one of the Detroit dandies whose stylish custom suits (before boys in the ‘hood ever heard of GQ, the men of Motown were our style barometers) were as much a part of their personas as their perfect harmonies and sweet dance steps, Fakir is the last surviving member of the fantastic Four Tops.
Unlike a few of his friends and label-mates, Fakir stayed in Detroit when Motown moved to Los Angeles. “I liked to visit L.A., but I didn’t want to raise my family there.” Signing with the label in 1963, the Four Tops made a worldwide name for themselves recording the exquisite Holland-Dozier-Holland compositions “Sugar Pie (Honey Bunch),” “Bernadette,” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows.”
With Levi Stubbs laying down his country boy baritone on lead vocals that writer Dave Marsh described as “stentorian, half-chanting, half-groaning,” Lawrence Payton, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Fakir, who often sported elegant eyeglasses (he and the original troubled man Temps member David Ruffin made it cool to be a bespectacled black guy), the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
“At Motown, we were friends with everybody,” Fakir says. “The sound guys, the session musicians. We used to come to the studio at two in the morning sometimes, after a night of hanging-out, just to go listen to the Funk Brothers play. Those guys made some great music.” The Funk Brothers consisted of thirteen players, including bassist James Jamerson, drummer Benny Benjamin (who Stevie Wonder calls “one of the major forces of the Motown sound”), pianist Earl Van Dyke and percussionist Eddie “Bongo” Brown and others. Many of the musicians were recruited from local jazz haunts Twenty Grand and the Chit Chat Club, because Gordy felt the jazz cats were the better musicians.
Unfortunately, the Funk Brothers were never given any credits on their work nor were they invited to participate in Motown 25. One oft told story involves James Jamerson buying his own ticket and watching the show from the balcony. “I don’t know if that’s true,” de Passe says. “Truthfully, I never thought to fly the Funk Brothers in and put them up. We were trying to do a television show about Motown, not recreate the sessions.” A few months after the broadcast, Jamerson was dead. In 2002 director Paul Justman borrowed the title of a Four Tops hit for his award-winning Funk Brothers documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
On Motown 25, the Four Tops revisited their early Motown days and nights when the choreography of Cholly Atkins, the arrangements of Paul Riser and the songwriting/production skills of HDH was all they needed to be one of the hottest acts on the label. Unlike other Motown acts (Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Lionel Richie and El DeBarge) lead singer Stubbs never opted to go solo. The group continued as a unit through thick, thin and back again.
While the Four Tops themselves were between labels, having been dismissed by Motown in 1972 after participating in the special, they re-signed that same year. “With Marvin Gaye on one side and Diana Ross on the other, it was like a family reunion,” Fakir says. “We had as much fun in the dressing rooms hanging-out as we did on stage.” Onscreen, the Tops and the Temptations battled one another as they had done together for years. “There was always plenty of competition between us and the Temptations, onstage and in the studio.”
Dressed in silver hued suit jackets, sharp black slacks and bow ties, the Four Tops looked slick as a can of oil, as did the Supremes, Marvin Gaye (less than year later, he would be killed by his daddy), Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson (singing a duet with Linda Ronstadt) and obviously the sequined Michael Jackson.
Thirty-two years after Motown 25 first aired, one realizes that the special was damn near a memorial service commemorating the death of a dear friend. While Motown 25 would win a Emmy, as my friend Gary Harris, who worked at the pioneering rap label Sugar Hill Records (“the Motown of Hip-Hop”) in 1983 says, “Motown 25 came on television the same month that Run-DMC’s ‘Sucker MCs’ was released, and the lifestyle that the label represented was over.”
Five years later, Berry Gordy sold his ownership in Motown to MCA Records and Boston Ventures in for $61 million; the following year, he sold the Motown Productions TV/film operations to Suzanne de Passe, who renamed the company de Passe Entertainment. Whether intentional or not, Motown 25 was the final curtain, the swan song, the closing credits to what had been a remarkable pop music legacy.
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Michael A. Gonzales is a columnist at soulhead.com
Follow him on Twitter @gonzomike
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