Music Journalist Nelson George Discusses Michael Jackson

The following excerpt is from an unpublished interview(12 manuscript pages long) originally intended for publication in the now -defunct New York Native, a gay weekly newspaper I wrote for from 1983 to 1988. I don't recall why the Native didn't run it.

In a telephone interview, Nelson George, the Black Music Editor of Billboard magazine and author of The Michael Jackson Story (Dell Books) explains the enormous attention being paid to Michael Jackson: "The reason we're interested in this guy is because of his music. That's the bottom line to me. Michael's most interesting work is about his psyche, more than about politics. Things like 'Billie Jean,' 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin',' and even 'Heartbreak Hotel,' [from the Triumph album] say a lot more about his own insecurities and his feelings about his relationship to the world. That's what I was interested in. How his personality is reflected in his artistic statements and how his business or economics has affected his career in terms of why he left Motown. I don't think normally most of the fan books that I've been reading since I was a child deals with those aspects of the career. So that was in there," he continues," plus the typical things: 'Is he gay?,' 'What kind of makeup does he use?' I tried to get a balance of all those [questions]."
George wrote the book in two and a half months without "any direct input" from Jackson. "I tried to get Michael's official cooperation in this book. I could not get that. I tried his father. His father said the best thing to do was to reach Michael directly. I tried through a number of sources, I got nowhere." So then George " did what every biographer does when he can't get [cooperation from] the source person, you talk to everyone you can who knows Michael." That included record producer Quincy Jones, Michael's parents ("I had a chance to talk with his mother on two occasions") ,the musicians who performed on the Thriller album, and Michael's sister LaToya with whom Nelson George did a long interview. "That turned out to be very valuable," he says. "She's the one who more or less told me the whole background. I didn't realize that the Jacksons had made records before they joined Motown. They're not good records by any means. They're interesting more or less as historical documents. They were made one or a year and a half before they joined Motown. That really gives you an insight into what Motown did for those guys in terms of production quality and song quality."
The book, says George, has received "real good response from the teen crowd" because of its straightforward approach as well as from rock critics "who basically felt more or less that while it was written straightforwardly and very acceptably, it also did touch on a lot of the things in terms of his musical development."
George initially set out to do a Village Voice-style book, one in which there was "a little more delving in, from my point of view as a writer, into the whole context of Michael; his music in more detail. A lot of things would have been more detailed, and more intellectually rigorous in that way." But the people at Dell Publications wanted "more of a fan book. They wanted more of a People magazine book. The resulting manuscript is a compromise between [those] two points of view. It seems like it's working well."