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People really wanna think Michael would be that conniving. Wake up! He ain't coming back! 
5:38PM BST 05 Oct 2011
Guitarist Tommy Organ knows exactly where he was when he heard news of Michael Jackson’s death: on his way to rehearse with Jackson. “I didn’t believe it,” says Organ. “I kept saying, 'The media is just picking at him again.’ I kept getting phone calls, and I was saying, 'Let me go down to rehearsal because no one’s called me to say it’s cancelled.’ Then I walked into the Staples Centre, my amp was off, and the lights were half-way turned down on stage, and I knew…”
And Organ, a big, muscular black man, starts sobbing, tears running down beneath his sunglasses.
“The day before he was on stage, dancing and singing. Next day, he was gone.”
This week, in a vast rehearsal space in west London, a tightly drilled band of LA session musicians have been running through Jackson’s hits. Organ is on guitar, snaking out the riff to Thriller, sound booming from huge speakers suspended from the roof of a room of aircraft-hanger proportions, while spotlights criss-cross the floor.
Deep into preparations for Saturday’s Michael Forever tribute concert at the Cardiff Millennium Stadium, the band shift into a shimmering, supple Human Nature, while musical director Kevin Dorsey listens intently. On an area marked out in front of the raised stage platform, a spotlight comes to rest on a microphone set up in front of a chrome-and-leather bar stool. No one sits at it.
“It’s the strangest feeling being on this stage,” says Dorsey, who worked as a backing vocalist for Jackson for more than 20 years, becoming a close musical collaborator and friend. “I’ve done hundreds of shows over the years with Mike, and I’m so used to looking to my left and there he is. When I hear the music, I always hear him. It’s a little ghostly.”
Of the nine-piece band Dorsey has assembled, six have history playing for Jackson. “This is our last hoorah with Mike.”
As is usually the case with Jackson, however, the event has been mired in controversy from the outset, creating a very public split in the Jackson family. It hasn’t helped that this weekend’s celebrations conflict with the ongoing trial in LA of Jackson’s doctor,
Conrad Murray, accused of his involuntary manslaughter. Jermaine, Randy and Janet Jackson have all been publicly critical of the event, although 13 members of the family will be attending, including Michael’s 81-year-old mother Katherine and three children (Prince, 14, Paris, 13, and Blanket, nine). Brothers Marlon, Tito and Jackie, sister La Toya and nephews 3T will all perform.
“I think in a large family where there have been disagreements all played out in the public eye, it would be a miracle to get every single member on board,” argues Chris Hunt, the urbane British CEO of Global Live, whiich is staging the event. “I don’t claim to be completely altruistic, but it is really the family’s tribute to their own.”
The closer you look, however, the more complicated things appear.
Beneficiaries of the concert include a trust fund for Jackson’s children (seeded with $100,000 and administered by
his mother, the event’s most enthusiastic cheerleader) and two of Jackson’s favoured charities (Aids Project Los Angeles and the Prince’s Trust), but it will also profit private investors and Global Live itself, one of whose directors, Paul Ring, is also an employee of LaToya Jackson’s Ja-Tail company. When you consider the conflicts the concert has inspired, it doesn’t seem so surprising that it has taken two years (and at least three failed attempts by others, including Jermaine) to get a tribute off the ground at all.
More damaging even than virulent criticism by the Michael Jackson Fan Club has been a public exchange of frosty letters with lawyers for the executors of the estate of Michael Jackson. It is the latter who, in fact, control Jackson’s name, likeness and intellectual property, at least until his children come of age, and evidently do not always see eye to eye with the Jackson family. Indeed, the Cardiff venue appears to have been chosen because, under UK intellectual property law, specific “rights of name, life story and likeness do not apply” (to quote Hunt’s written response to the estate’s criticism).
Look closely and you will notice that Michael Jackson’s name and likeness are not used on any official concert promotion, which might go some way to explaining sluggish ticket sales. This is a tribute concert that has a gaping hole where the object of its admiration ought to be.
Despite initial expectations of excess demand, the 74,000 capacity stadium has not sold out (organisers are reluctant to reveal ticket sale numbers). It will be the first global pay-per-view live broadcast on Facebook, with a potential audience of 800 million, but it currently boasts only 10,000 “likes” on its own Facebook page.
The timing has certainly been unfortunate, although Hunt argues that the concert date was set before the trial of Dr Conrad Murray was postponed to last
month. A perceived insensitivity and generally poisonous atmosphere, however, clearly hasn’t helped attract the kind of stellar line-up you might expect at a tribute to the King of Pop.
A somewhat eccentric bill features US stars Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Christina Aguilera, Usher, Ne-Yo, Cee Lo Green, obscure Nineties indie rockers Alien Ant Farm and a UK contingent of former X Factor contestants, including Leona Lewis, JLS and Alexandra Burke. It’s more like a radio roadshow than a superstar extravaganza.
An invitation to pantomime heavy rockers Kiss was quickly rescinded when estate lawyer Howard Weitzman pointed out that band leader Gene Simmons had previously referred to Jackson as “a child molester”.
In the rehearsal room, Dorsey tries to shrug off controversy as irrelevant to the musicians. “The hardest part of this job has not been the music; it’s the politics,” he admits in a deep, dark voice (that fans of cult classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might recognise for his periodic declamations of “Oh yeah!”).
“It was always like that with Slim (his nickname for Jackson). You never knew what was true or what was gossip, and for me I didn’t care. I used to ask him, 'Doesn’t it hurt?’ and he said, 'If they’re talking about you, that means they’re thinking about you.’ So I approach it the way my friend would have wanted me to, which is no matter what happens, his music will be right.”
There won’t be any video footage or musical excerpts featuring Jackson himself at the Cardiff concert, for copyright reasons. Dorsey suggests this is no bad thing. “In our opening, we thought about having different people say 'Michael’, 'Michael’, 'Michael’, but I put a stop to it because I felt it was such downer to do all that and then him not appear. Usually when you hear that, what you see popping out of a toaster or space shuttle is Mike. But this time you’d see Ne-Yo or Leona Lewis. No disrespect to all the artists, but in my personal opinion there was no one better, and I don’t see anyone being better than Slim.
“This show is gonna be happy as hell, but it’s gonna be sad also, because the person we know for the music won’t be out front, performing.”
The empty stool in the rehearsal room seems an apt symbol for the whole Michael Forever event.
