Sparks from the Fire

If you’re interested in talent, fascinated by greatness, love Pop music and even if you don’t, run, don’t walk, play hooky from school, skip work and go see Michael Jackson’s movie, “This Is It”.  I did last night and I’m going to go back and see it again tomorrow night.

I’m going to take a night off from my presentation of the Ira Awards because I’m just so filled up with the incredible experience of seeing that movie. I must have broken out in tears and sobs of joy and wonder about 15 times during the movie – no exaggeration. For me, it was a completely overwhelming experience.

You can say what you want about his personal life, but Michael Jackson is the great talent of our time. He wrote tremendous Pop songs, he sang so purely, so sweet, so funky and so incredibly rhythmic that it makes me laugh out loud at the wonder of it, and the man is right up there with Gene and Fred, and Mikhail and Rudolf for that matter, as a dancer. This man’s talent doesn’t ooze out of him, it pours. He is, for me, the consummate performer of our time.

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God stands at his conveyor belt.  The unborn babies come down the belt one by one as God stands with his hypodermic needle injecting life into the babys’ butts.  He knows he has to push the plunger each time only down to the red line, but even God gets tired of this routine, loses concentration and consequently sometimes his thumb slips and He mistakenly pushes the plunger all the way down past the red line.  “Oops”, He says, “there’s another performer!” And he tosses that baby over into another bin.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was one of these. In fact, you might say that with Michael you had the one where God’s thumb slipped the most.  For about a decade he was arguably the most talented man on the planet and definitely the world’s greatest performer.

In my lifetime I would place Michael right up there in the top 5 with The Beatles, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra.  We watched Thriller until many of us knew all the steps.  We totally rocked out to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, I’m Bad, and Billie Jean, and my favorite will always be Man In The Mirror.  That music stop into the big key change will ever be the epitome of great pop music.  Michael was a great rocker, but the King Of Pop.

On top of it all he was a great innovative dancer, right up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  It wasn’t just Thriller that thrilled.  Every time I ever saw Michael dance, my jaw would drop at this wondrous human being.  The rhythm that poured from his body and his music was way beyond the rest of us mere mortals.

I was a fan.  I was in awe of his talent.  I loved him for being a super human performer and then I came crashing down just like the rest of you as he went over some mad crazy edge in his life and lost his balance.  I laughed at him and dissed him and pitied him and finally shook my head and walked away from him as he became more and more confused with his own identity.

He never really had a boyhood — he was always out there entertaining us – and so in his adulthood he turned to playing with boys, hanging out with them and God knows what else.

He was a consummate performer, always trying to make the song, the step, the move new, better, best and he often succeeded.  So it was only natural that he try to remake himself and his look new, better, best.  For a minute there, when he had his long hair and his glove and his white socks, he succeeded again.  But he couldn’t stop tinkering and for some reason thought he might try to make his make-up permanent.  He was great, but he wasn’t God, and he found that out the hard way – losing his nose in the process.

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We continue the adventure of our Top 3 Inspirational pieces of music by category.  Yesterday we covered Classical, Rock and Folk; today we’ll try to cover Pop (Nearly impossible to pick the top 3), tomorrow on to R&B and Broadway and who knows what else.

The Beatles

Please remember that these are my personal most Inspirational songs – not necessarily my favorites, but the ones that have had the most Inspirational impact on my life as a composer and music listener.

Here goes.

POP
1. Hey Jude – The Beatles / John Lennon and Paul McCartney

In 1968, John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon separated due to his affair with Yoko Ono. Soon afterwards, Paul McCartney drove out to visit Cynthia and Julian, her son with Lennon. “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life,” McCartney said. Later, Cynthia Lennon recalled, “I was truly surprised when, one afternoon, Paul arrived on his own. I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare… On the journey down he composed ‘Hey Jude’ in the car. I will never forget Paul’s gesture of care and concern in coming to see us.”

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