My Family, The Jacksons
 
 
     While Michael was working behind the scenes in 1986, another Jackson -- Janet -- was enjoying success as a recording artist with her third album, Control.

     I first encouraged my daughters to pursue a show business career in the early seventies. Frankly, I didn’t like the idea of some of my kids’ making a lot of money while the others weren’t making anything. While I never detected any jealousy on any of the girls’ parts toward their brothers, I thought it would only be natural for them to feel someday a wee bit of envy, and I didn’t want to see them hurt.

     I also wanted my girls to be known and liked for who they were, rather than for who their brothers were. After we moved to California I was upset to see thirteen-year-old LaToya having a painful time dealing with "friends" who, in fact, were just using her to get close to one of the boys.

     “Mother, I found a friend in school today, and she’s really my friend,” LaToya would often tell me.

     “Why do you say that?” I would reply.

     “Because she doesn’t even know that I’m Michael’s sister.”

     As I’ve mentioned, Janet and LaToya made their professional debut during the family’s 1974 Las Vegas engagement. We later took the same show to Lake Tahoe and New York, giving Rebbie, her sprained ankle healed, the opportunity to make her debut.

     Joe and I also saw to it that the girls were included in the Jacksons’ 1976 summer-replacement TV series.

     Janet was the first of the girls to get a break, and she received it thanks to her exposure on that highly rated show. Norman Lear, creator of “All in the Family,” invited her to audition for the role of Penny in another series of his, “Good Times.”

     I drove Janet to the audition at Mr. Lear’s production company, where he auditioned her personally. Janet told me later that the first question he asked her was, “Can you cry?” He then had her perform am improvisation with him in which Janet gave him a tie as a present, which he didn’t like. He must have tested her by saying something mean, because she did start to cry. Mr. Lear hugged her and said, “You’ve got the part.”

     JANET: On the ride home it still hadn’t sunk in what had happened. “Mother,” I said matter-of-factly, “I just got the part in ‘Good Times’ -- do you think we could stop by the toy store and buy me a Barbie dollhouse?”

     My mother laughed so hard. “Sure, honey!” she said. That was my present.

     During Janet’s three-year stint with Good Times," Joe and I kept thinking about how we could also help launch entertainment careers for LaToya and Rebbie. One idea we had was for the two girls to form a group with Janet.

     REBBIE: Initially, it was going to be a quarter; Randy was going to be included, as well. I didn’t understand how that was going to work because Randy was already a member of the Jacksons. And it didn’t. Finally, we decided it should be just the girls.

     We did a few things in the studio, but the group never got off the ground. There was some debate between us over who should be the lead singer. Also, my personality and LaToya’s didn’t click. I’m a very down-to-earth person, and LaToya can be very opinionated and stubborn. Although I really tried to make things work, I got tired of bending.

     In 1980, the same year that Janet began playing the role of Charlene in the series “Diff’rent Strokes,” LaToya had the distinction of being the first Jackson girl to record an album. LaToya Jackson was released at the end of that year.

     It was Joe’s idea that she make the record. At the time LaToya was going through a period of soul-searching. She had dropped out of college, where she had begun to work toward a degree in business law, and she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. When Joe first encouraged her to get back on the entertainment track and make an album, she was hesitant. But Joe was persistent and LaToya finally agreed.

     The album was painstakingly recorded. Stevie Wonder and Ray Parker, Jr., played on it, and Michael contributed one of the songs, “Night Time Lover,” which he also arranged and produced. But neither “Night Time Lover” nor the second single, “If You Feel the Funk,” did well. LaToya Jackson spent only a brief time on the charts.

     LaToya wasn’t discouraged. In 1981, she began working on a new batch of songs at our home studio for her follow-up LP.

     As a favor, Janet agreed to sing background vocals on a couple of tracks. She also recorded her own version of one of the tunes, so that she could share her ideas with LaToya on how the lead vocal should be handled.

     When I heard the recording, I was impressed.

     “Janet has a nice voice,” I told Joe. “You should take a listen to her.”

     Joe did, and he liked what he heard, too.

     JANET: My father asked if I would like to start singing again. I never saw myself as a solo artist like my brothers and sisters. “Do you think I’m ready?” I asked him. “What if people don’t like my voice?”

     “Believe me,” my father said, “you’re ready.”

     A&M Records quickly signed Janet, and in 1982 she leased.

     None of her brothers and sisters was involved in the recording of Janet Jackson, which was Janet’s decision. “It shows me I can do something on my own,” she said at the time. “People didn’t buy it because Michael sang background or wrote or produced it.

     Janet Jackson did well for a first album, selling more than a quarter of a million copies. But neither of her singles, “Young Love” or “Say You Do,” was a pop hit.

     On Dream Street, her second album, released in 1984, she did employ the writing/producing talents of Michael and Marlon, but the album didn’t fare as well as her first album.

     Suddenly, Janet found herself at crossroads in her young recording career, and at the same time that she was going through changes in her personal life.

     REBBIE: The brothers were in the midst of the Victory tour, and my mom was on the road with them. And there was Janet alone at home, having recently graduated from high school. Into the void stepped a childhood friend, James DeBarge, of the singing DeBarge family.

     The next thing I knew, Janet had eloped with James in Michigan, where he hails from. I heard it on the radio.

     Joe called me on the road and broke the news to me: I was stunned. Knowing how close Michael was to her at the time, I didn’t tell him, fearing he’d become upset. But he heard, anyway, and was shocked.

     While the family was concerned that eighteen-year-old Janet had married too young, that worry paled next to a concern that we had about James -- that he was rumored to be a drug-user.

     Janet had refused to believe that rumor before she married James. But before long it became obvious to everyone in the family, including Janet, that James did, indeed, have a serious problem in that regard.

     I offered to enroll James into a treatment program, and Janet tried to help him, but the problem wouldn’t go away. I felt badly for both of them, but I also worried for our family. None of the Jacksons takes drugs, and we don’t permit any of our employees to take them.

     REBBIE: The turning point came one day when Janet and James were out walking, and James suddenly passed out and had to be rushed to the hospital. She had gone through so much by that time trying to rescue James that she now was endangering her own health, risking a nervous breakdown.

     Janet agreed to file for an annulment of their marriage in 1985, but it wasn’t easy for her; she still loved James. I shared her pain.

     JANET: My mother was always there for me when I was feeling lonely and depressed. “Don’t hold it inside,” she’d tell me. “Let it out. Then let it go. Life is going to be like this at times. You just have to know how to deal with it.” Just to hear her say those soothing words, and hold me, meant so much to me.

     Janet also had the support at the time of an old family friend, a friend who happened to be in the perfect position to help her keep busy and get her mind off James.

     His name was John McClain, A&M Records’ new senior vice-president for A&R. He had gone to school with my older sons, and had spent many a night at the house. Janet was like a little sister to him.

     From his first day on the job, Janet became John's number-one priority. Like Joe and myself, he felt that it had been a mistake for A&M to package her as a pop act. For her third album, he wanted to see her take more of an R&B direction.

     Being a take-charge kind of guy, John also decreed that Janet have a new look to complement her new sound. That meant going on a diet.

     Janet had been on the plump side for years. Michael, who can be a merciless teaser, had nicknamed her “Dunk” -- for donkey. “You look like a donkey, you’re so big!” he’d razz her.

     Janet’s so easygoing that she actually enjoyed the nickname. “You could be calling me Dunk at the age of seventy and I wouldn’t care,” she says.

     When she was growing up, Janet had a special fondness for steaks. One day during our Las Vegas engagement, I caught her and her cousin Stacee eating steaks that nine-year-old Janet had managed to order all by herself from room service. If I wasn’t at home, the first thing she’d do after returning from school was pop a T-bone steak on the grill.

     Under John’s watchful eye, Janet managed to trim down considerably. A dance regimen helped. John had also requested that she takes dance lessons, so when it came time to shoot her videos she’d be ready to shake a leg, and look good doing it.

     While Janet prepared for her recording work by taking voice lessons -- yet another of John’s ideas -- John went about the task of finding just the right producer. He made a bold choice: the team of Jimmy (Jam) Harris and Terry Lewis.

     As members of the Minneapolis-based group the Time, Harris and Lewis had been proteges of Prince. After leaving the group, they began writing/producing full-time for the black artists. By 1985, they’d earned themselves a name in the black music and dance market. However, outside that circle, they still weren’t well known, so their selection amounted to a gamble for John McClain.

     Making Joe, in particular, all the more nervous about Harris and Lewis was the producers’ insistence that Janet record in their Flyte Tyme studio in Minneapolis, instead of Los Angeles, where Joe could keep an eye on the project. For a time, Joe resisted.

     John resolved the impasse by imposing on Joe to let Jimmy Jam and Terry have their way, arguing that the change in environment would do Janet good, creatively speaking. John later recalled: “Joe said fine, but if it didn’t work he would backhand me.”

     So in August 1985, accompanied by her friend Melanie Andrews, nineteen-year-old Janet left to record the album that would become Control. She left not knowing what songs she would be recording. Jimmy Jam and Terry didn’t know, either. That was the plan. In their conversations, Janet made it clear that she was tired of having no say in the selection of the songs she recorded or the way that they were recorded. “This time I’m gonna do it my way,” she said.

     If those words sound familiar, it’s because they were fated to become a line in the song “Control,” which Janet co-wrote with Jimmy Jam and Terry. The line set the self-assured, even sassy, tone for the entire album, which contained six more of their collaborations, including “Nasty,” “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” and “When I Think of You.”

     In addition to co-writing most of the album’s tunes, Janet co-produced every one of them. She also played digital keyboards, synthesizers, digital piano, and digital bells. Being involved in every musical decision on Control was in keeping with her more assertive stance.

     The best news about the “new” Janet, however, was the fact that she’d managed by late 1985 to put her marriage largely behind her and return to her old, jolly self.

     JANET: What did my friend Melanie and I do together in our spring time? Laugh. About anything and everything. It didn’t take much to get us going. We could be eating in a restaurant, look at each other with our mouths full, and just bust up!

     Usually we hung around the hotel. Our one drive around Minneapolis almost turned into a disaster. Melanie was behind the wheel, and she wound up driving the wrong way on a one-way downtown street. Both of us were yelling as she tried to turn the car around before the approaching cars got to us. It was scary.

     Control was released in January 1986.

     “People will be shocked when they hear it,” Janet said at the time, “because it’s so different from what I’ve done before.”

     But I wasn’t shocked at all; I loved the album. I think it captured her spunky side.

     One song, I’ll admit, did give me pause.

     JANET: What Mother objected to was the moaning at the end of “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun).” One time I watched her run to the stereo and lift the tone arm before the moaning came on. “You’re my baby and I’m not used to hearing you do stuff like this!” she said.

     “What Have You Done for Me Lately” was the album’s first single; it became a Top Ten hit. So, too, did the second single, “Nasty,” the third single, “Control,” and the forth single, “When I Think of You.”

     Control eventually reached the number-one spot on Billboard’s album chart. The album, in the end, sold seven million copies around the world.

     Janet, of course, was very pleased as she watched her success story unfold. But unlike Michael, who would literally jump for joy at good news about one of his records, Janet wasn’t demonstrative. “My single’s moving up the charts. It made it to number so-and-so this week,” was just about all she’d tell me in a matter-of-fact voice. Michael showed more excitement about her album than she did.

     JANET: After my brothers started getting married and moving out, Michael and I became very close. Even as a teen-ager he was crazy about younger children. We did everything together, everything under the sun.

     You could say we “split up” around the time Michael’s Thriller came out. It was like, “See you later, Michael.” He was so busy. But we continued to care as much as ever about each other.

     Michael was present the night Janet premiered her video for “Nasty” at the house. I feel safe in saying that those few minutes with Michael were the most special time for Janet during her entire Control experience.

     JANET: Michael started crying in the middle of the screening; he loved it that much. “Janet,” he said, “I’m so proud of you. This is a hit.

     “And it’s only the beginning for you,” he added. “You haven’t reached your peek yet. You haven’t climbed to the top of your mountain.”