Remembering Michael Jackson

I know, I know there's probably a thousand other people blogging about the loss on June 25 of Michael Jackson. There are those that think him an evil monster even though he was found not guilty of child molestation charges or enjoyed ridiculing him for his seeming obsession for plastic surgery. Then there were those that regaled him as "The King of Pop". Me, I always just thought of him as one hell of an entertainer, that had the same human frailties as the rest of us, they were just magnified because he was in the public eye. I must admit however that when he went to live in Dubai, I began to think of him as something of a 21st century Howard Hughes, despite that I still love listening to his music.

I still remember the first time I heard Michael belt out a song, I had a pocket sized transistor radio that ran off a 9 volt battery and had an ear bud with KYNO filling my head with sound that winter of 1969-1970. I had no idea when I heard "I Want You Back" for the first time that Michael was just a tad under 4 months older then I am. What he and his brothers had managed to do in that 3 minutes and 3 seconds was to turn me on to "The Motown Sound", I dug the rhythms, bass lines and harmonies, from that would grow my love of Do Wop and Blues. "Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5" would be my first album with the Motown label on it.

I will not remember Michael for his eccentricities, his legal or financial problems. I will remember him for his contributions to music, for being a trailblazer and most of all for the joy his songs would bring to myself and the world.

I will not normally give bandwidth in my blog to celebrities but this has been a truly sad week for those whose faces are as familiar to our cultural identity as our own family is to us. Ed McMahon, whose booming laugh filled our ears every night at 11:30 Eastern and Pacific 10:30 Central and Mountain and could stop Johnny Carson in his tracks and make him do a double take. Farrah Fawcet whose image adorned not just my bedroom wall but the walls of tens of thousands of males of my generation as the Betty Grable of the 1970's and of coarse Michael Jackson. My deepest sympathies go out to all of their families and I know in my heart that when I look up in the sky tonight three stars that shone here on earth will continue to shine in the heavens above. May you all rest in peace.