A Journey with the Jackson 5

DOZENS OF MAILBAGS, HUNDREDS OF POLICEMEN, THOUSANDS OF FANS

“Jermaine can’t hear you,” said Michael Jackson. “He’s got earphones in his ears, you know.” Then he pulled them out of his brother’s ears. “This lady wants to talk to you, Jermaine.” “But didn’t I answer all your questions yesterday?” asked Jermaine. “You may have answered hers,” replied Michael, “but you didn’t answer mine. Now, tell me, Jermaine, where did you get that hat?”

      The date was November 11, 1972, and the Jackson 5 were on the road in England, leaving Manchester for Liverpool and the next show on their first-ever U.K. tour. The brothers’ tutor, Rose Fine, had been chatting to Michael; Jackie was reading the newspaper; and Jermaine had plugged himself into his tape recorder. “How am I going to get this lot to do a serious interview for Record Mirror?” Robin Katz asked herself.

Robin (and Tito) on the road

      It was an improbable enough scenario for this 20-year-old budding journalist from New Jersey, anyway. Katz had arrived in London on a summer break just a few months earlier, ahead of starting her third year at New York’s Hofstra University. “I was set for a great autumn ’72,” she told me recently. Not only was she the arts editor for The Hofstra Chronicle with her own column, but she “had a single dorm room to myself, a second-hand car, and a hot boyfriend who was taking his law exams that summer.”

      Motown changed all that.

      “First I did some touristy things in London,” Katz recalled. “Then I decided to see if I could get some [music] interviews for my college paper via local record company offices.” Nearest to where she was staying was EMI Records, “which I’d never heard of. I would have figured that, as a result of the Beatles, it would have been swarming with visiting Americans like me. But no. Alfie the doorman calmly sent me upstairs to see Jennie Halsall in PR.”

      Soon enough, she stopped by the Tamla Motown office at EMI, meeting Gordon Frewin, a former accountant who had just been appointed “repertoire selector” for the label, and press officer Phil Symes. The latter had joined EMI from music paper Disc and, before that, was involved in running the Jimmy Ruffin fan club in Britain. “Phil asked me if I could write up about 1,000 words about what was happening in the U.S. soul scene,” said Katz. She did, and it was published in Disc.

      Then came the brothers from Gary, Indiana. “There was,” remembers Katz, “a row of several tall, grey post bags stacked up in Gordon Frewin’s office, full of mail for the Jackson 5.” The problems were twofold. “There was a respected Tamla Motown appreciation society [known as Motown Ad Astra] but they viewed the J5 as different from the older, established acts.” Secondly, the flood of fan mail for the group was simply overwhelming.

A Groucho Marx moment for Michael on the bus

      “So I saw this as a chance to be an intern at EMI for the summer and secure a letter of recommendation, a year before I’d need to do it in New York. I offered to be a ‘go-for,’ to start a J5 fan club using a pseudonym [Ronnie Summers] so they could bring in someone else once I returned to the U.S. in September.” Katz began sorting Jackson 5 mail on the floor outside Symes’ office – although the volume of letters meant it was considered a fire hazard, so the American was soon given a desk to work from.

      Motown was having another prosperous year with the Jacksons in the U.K. – or, more specifically, with Michael. By September, three of his solo singles had been Top 10 hits: “Got To Be There,” “Rockin’ Robin” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Plans were in hand for the group’s first U.K. tour that autumn, promoted by Danny O’Donovan.

      Meanwhile, Katz was given “office” clothing at Tamla Motown (“no jeans at EMI then”) and acquired another, part-time gig, filing photographs at music weekly Record Mirror and trade paper Music Week in Carnaby Street. By August, Record Mirror had decided to start a regular Jackson 5 mailbag and a column penned by Katz. Plus, she gained the “exclusive” to join their upcoming British tour.

      “I heard a scream,” Katz wrote in Record Mirror as the brothers touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport on October 29, 1972, “and the next thing I knew, hundreds of us were being pushed up against the customs wall. Out of nowhere hundreds of policemen came swarming in, trying to push the crowd away, with little success. It took another 20 minutes to space off an area. And then out they came…five good-looking but very frightened boys.”

      The chaos continued. “Their promoter was thrown to the ground and trampled in an effort to protect little Michael,” noted Katz in her column. “Two of the boys had their hair pulled so hard that they were almost in tears. I’m surprised they didn’t use tear gas to get the fans off the car.”

Between gigs, catching up on sleep

      Eventually transported to central London’s Churchill Hotel, the brothers settled in and, the following day, took part in a press conference. Each of them was arranged around the room, one to a table, answering questions to several journalists at a time. “They didn’t miss anything,” Katz later recalled in Geoff Brown’s book, Michael Jackson: Body and Soul. “That’s what made them so much fun.

      “What struck me was that there were all these barriers put up by American Motown, but once you set foot in the hotel door, they were friendly, they would listen, co-operate, they were smart, they were never prima donnas, they were modest, soft-spoken, they picked up on little details. At that time, when Michael was very young, it was wonderful.”

      Today, Katz reaffirms that she enjoyed the entire experience. “Remember that serious rock journalism looks to expose anything false beneath the image. But that’s not the case when writing for teens. They are unhappy and powerless enough. They want to feel they are ‘in the room’ and are ‘accepted.’ So revelations that the J5 had homework, were concerned about their hair or acne got a thumbs up from fans.”

      Katz also mentions Bess Coleman’s well-regarded chronicle of the Beatles’ 1966 American tour, published there in a top teen magazine, and how it inspired her to become a music journalist. When she joined the Jackson 5 roadshow, “I was in the same position as Bess. I had the ‘exclusive’ to accompany the tour because I was working – albeit for free – at Motown. My accounts of the tour were written in the spirit of her Beatles coverage. I loved writing for young teens because I was writing to myself at that age.”

      “Did somebody just ask me if I had a girlfriend?” said Jermaine. “No,” said Michael, “they want to know what your hat size is. They’re not interested in whether you have a girlfriend. Isn’t that right? You want his hat size, right?”

Career notes: Robin Katz dropped out of college to stay in Britain and continue in journalism. Her Jackson 5 corner in Record Mirror later evolved into a broader “Soul Mirror” column, and she went on to write for many other publications, including Sounds, NME, Street Life, Let It Rock, Girl About Town, Jackie, Mirabelle and Smash Hits. She also worked in broadcasting for the BBC and London’s Capital Radio. In 2000, Katz returned to the U.S. for family reasons, and retired. Much of her music writing can be found today in Rock’s Back Pages.

Royal notes: the most important commitment for the Jackson 5 on that 1972 tour was the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, in front of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. (Both Michael and Jermaine in their memoirs mistakenly refer to Queen Elizabeth II, not to her mother.) Their short set included “Rockin’ Robin” and their fan song, “Thank You For The Joy You Have Given Us.” Naturally enough, J5 followers were on site, en masse. Motown’s London-based international chief, John Marshall, remembers scores of aggressive fans at the Palladium stage door as the group tried to get into the venue: “I had never experienced anything like that before.”