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From the category archives:
Articles
Remember when we blogged about the unreleased portraits of Michael Jackson by Arno Bani, well one of our readers tipped us off and now we get to see some more of these portraits along with an amazing article of Arno’s memories.
She wrote us a lovely message that we just have to share…
Thank you for a fantastically consistent positive website on MJ! I found your site over a year ago and have to check in daily. Great photos, great news, great stories, great memories. Keep up the L.O.V.E.!
Here’s a link to an interesting article I found from ArtInfo.com regarding the upcoming December auction of photographs taken by Arno Bani. The photos were commissioned by Jackson as artwork for the Invincible album, which were later nixed by Epic. The photos look stunning, and Bani’s dialogue from the sessions is bittersweet.
Cheers from SoCal USA!
A few experts from Arno Bani…
The project came about by chance. Michael Jackson had spotted a fashion shot by Bani on the cover of the Sunday Times style section and immediately decided that he wanted to work with the young photographer. At first, Bani thought someone was prank calling him, before his lawyer friend confirmed that the King of Pop was inviting him for an audience. Bani would make six return trips to New York ahead of the three-day shoot.
One image, “The Golden Cape,” was originally intended for the cover of Michael Jackson’s final studio album “Invincible,” but it was nixed by Jackson’s label Epic Records. “It was a great disappointment,” said Bani, sitting between his eight-month-old son and a stack of Michael Jackson prints, discarded among the more than 8000 he has signed and dated during the past three months for the collector’s box that will accompany the sale.
Bani and Jackson had developed an intimate but simple collaboration, where the photographer was given carte blanche to assemble his team and create his vision of the singer. Bani brought along star hairstylist Seb Bascle, makeup innovatorTopolino, and fashion trendsetters Frédérique Lorca and Maïda. It was summertime in Paris and everyone was in T-shirts and Bermuda shorts.
Topolino became the eccentric troublemaker of the bunch, Bani said. In an almost “diplomatic incident,” the makeup artist and his assistants spread vaseline around Jackson’s eye and softly blew the shiny blue glitter onto the singer’s face. “Jackson’s staff was shocked,” Bani remembered. “‘You can’t blow on Michael Jackson’s face,’ they protested.”
The makeup artist also snuck into Jackson’s purpose-built shower that was always carefully sanitized and supplied with ultra-clean, plastic-wrapped towels. In the end, Jackson “didn’t care about any of that,” Bani remembered. There were no eccentric celebrity demands, no complaints about the food or the room temperature.
Click here to read the full article
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We can’t even put a picture to this post.
DEEEEEEEEEEP!
The day after “Living With Michael Jackson” aired, Oprahs original plan was to discuss something else, but she couldnt resist talking about Michael. She started the show by saying something like “This show is not going to be about Michael Jackson but OMG, did you all see the documentary yesterday?” Of course, then she and her audience talked about Michael the entire show. She turned straight to the camera and directed a personal message to MJ and said “Michael, if you were my brother I would say to you that it’s not appropriate to have kids sleep in your bed.”
She then invited guests on her show to get them to malign Michael & she’d laugh heartily at their disrespect during the trial. She asked several people about their opinions about the trial and MJ, when Michael was not even the topic of the show.(continued in comment-field below)
1) As Randy Jackson has stated, during jury deliberations, she had a show about pedophilia. This is kinda interesting because the old woman, the one juror who said she was huge Oprah fan was the one who slowed down the “jurydeliberation process”.
2) She had a show about unrelated men who share intimate relationships with one another (a deep closeness, no sex) yet continued to insist they were heterosexual. Something like that anyway. One of the men said that he often shared a bed with his friends (again, no sex) and Winfrey laughed and said “You’re sounding like Michael Jackson.”
3) When she had Jay Leno on her show, she asked him “What kind of jokes do you tell on your show.” He said, “of course, Michael Jackson jokes”. She went on to ask about his trial experience. When he talked about “wanting to crack a few jokes” during his testimony, she ended the conversation.
4) Larry King once asked her if she felt sorry for Jackson. She smiled slightly before saying no.
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Designed by movie palace architect John Eberson and built by Maximillian Dubois in 1924, Gary’s Palace Theater was the place to see vaudeville acts and motion pictures in the City of the Century in the roaring twenties.
John Eberson (1875-1954) was born in Cernauti, Bukovina, part of Romania in 1875 and immigrated to the United States in 1901. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Vienna. He settled in St. Louis, MO. and began working for Johnston Realty and Construction Company and in 1904 set up his own practice which he moved to Chicago in 1910.
The theater, an anchor in downtown, was shuttered in 1972. In 1987, three Gary doctors tried to bring the Palace Theater back to life, buying the building at a tax sale for $30,000. They planned to invest between $500,000 and one million dollars to renovate the theater, the adjoining restaurants and storefronts and 27 apartments. They eventually abandoned the deal after the first restaurant opened was unsuccessful.
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Famed designer Mike Salisbury, the man behind the imprint on a multitude of diverse products from HALO, the world’s most popular video game, Rolling Stone, Surfer and Playboy magazines to O’Neill and Gotcha surfwear and Levi’s 501 jeans (a brand Salisbury created), is also the genius behind Michael Jackson’s iconic image in black pants, glittery socks, and loafers wearing a single white glove.
More About Mike Salisbury…
Look around anywhere in the United States – and you can find examples of creativity that have literally become American icons. The name Mike Salisbury may not appear on the work, but the brains and hands behind much of it are his.
As the man who created the highest earning re-branding in American business history, Mike Salisbury is recognized by his peers as one of the leading talents in American brand design. He is the man behind the imprint on a multitude of diverse products from Halo-the world’s most popular video game, Michael Jackson’s white glove, Rolling Stone, Surfer and Playboy magazines, O’Neill and Gotcha surfwear, Levi’s 501 jeans (a brand that Salisbury created), along with some of the world’s most recognized corporate branding and product design for companies like Volkswagen, Suzuki, Honda and Hasbro–the biggest toy company in the world.
His work is everywhere in the motion picture industry. Mike helped created marketing campaigns for over 300 movies including Aliens, Jurassic Park, Romancing The Stone, Raiders of The Lost Ark and Moulin Rouge. In the film The People vs. Larry Flynt, Flynt defends the First Amendment based on a concept Mike Salisbury created for Hustler magazine.
Click Here to Read More www.mikesalisbury.net
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Michael Jackson’s three children and mother, Katherine, are suing concert promoter AEG Live for allegedly strong-arming the singer into poor medical care and imposing a grueling rehearsal schedule that led to his death. By Jackson’s final rehearsal in June 2009 for a big comeback concert series, the entertainer was shivering and disoriented in the warm Staples Center, the lawsuit alleges, and would soon be dead from an acute level of the powerful anesthesia Propofol.
AEG had legal duties to Michael Jackson to treat him safely and to not put him in harm’s way,” says the lawsuit. “But AEG, despite its knowledge of Michael Jackson’s physical condition, breached those duties by putting its desire for massive profits from the tour over the health and safety of Michael Jackson.”
The lawsuit adds: “Due AEG’s actions and inactions, three loving children lost their father, a loving mother and father lost their son, the Jackson siblings lost their brother, and the world lost its most celebrated entertainer.”
The Jackson family alleges AEG Live breached their agreement to provide physical care for the King of Pop and that the concert promoters were negligent in hiring Dr. Conrad Murray as Jackson’s physician. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Murray allegedly gave the singer lethal levels of an anesthetic while treating Jackson, whose death was ruled a homicide, for insomnia. He has since been charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Director Kenny Ortega, who produced Jackson’s “This Is It” tour, is also named as a defendant in the suit.
AEG had no comment and said company officials had not yet seen the complaint.
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Stevie Wonder, singer, songwriter, producer:
Because Berry Gordy owned the company, it was not “tore up from the floor up.” It was something he built. It was not something that somebody else had and passed on to him; it was his and his family’s and all the people who were part of it who built this thing. That alone gives us a sense of pride.
Smokey Robinson:
Way before we started Motown, Berry said, “I’m going to work with you and your group,” and he just turned my whole life around. I played him about 20 of my songs, and he critiqued every song. He told me the songs made no sense because I was talking about five different things in one song; the first verse had nothing to do with the second verse, and the second verse had nothing to do with the bridge. He told me a song has got to be a short book, a small movie, or a short story. He taught me how to structure my songs.
Berry Gordy:
At Motown, I hired a white salesman to go to the South. I didn’t have pictures of black artists on the record covers until they became big hits. The Isleys had a cover with two white people on the cover. Smokey’s Mickey’s Monkey had a monkey on the cover. No one knew or cared; they thought it was brilliant.
Stevie Wonder:
The competition at Motown was not the competition that said, “I don’t like you.” It was more like the Brill Building: it was a challenge to come up with great music, great songs, and to me that was cool. I love Berry to pieces—Berry Gordy was, for my life, a blessing.
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Having worked as an engineer on the Jacksons’ 1984 Victory album and then on Michael’s Bad three years later as part of the second-tier team working at his Encino home, Bottrell received a call in 1988 to commence work on the follow-up. The fact that he was already a producer by then was quite timely, as the Gloved One was parting company with Quincy Jones and looking to create a more hard-edged, streetwise image with the help of some new writing/production/arrangement collaborators — most notably Teddy Riley, as well as Glen Ballard and Bruce Swedien. So it was that Bottrell ended up as a co-composer on ‘Dangerous’, ‘Give In To Me’ and ‘Black Or White’, while also co-producing the latter two in addition to the Jackson-penned ‘Who Is It’.
“As a co-producer, Michael was always prepared to listen and put his trust in me, but he was also a sort of guide all the time. He knew why I was there and, among all the songs he was recording, what he needed from me. I was an influence that he didn’t otherwise have. I was the rock guy and also the country guy, which nobody else was. He has precise musical instincts. He has an entire record in his head and he tries to make people deliver it to him. Sometimes those people surprise him and augment what he hears, but really his job is to extract from musicians and producers and engineers what he hears when he wakes up in the morning.
“After the first couple of days working on ‘Black Or White’, I put down this big, slamming, old sort of rock & roll acoustic guitar part using my all-mahogany 1940s Gibson LG2. It’s very rare and pretty battered, and it’s actually a deeper acoustic than most other Gibsons — you can hit it hard and it doesn’t cave in. The part I played was in the style of some of my own musical influences, like Gene Vincent, where you just hit the guitar hard and play a big open ‘E’ and an ‘A’ chord. I was quite pleased with it and wondered if Michael was going to like it, but he didn’t say a thing. He just accepted it when he first heard it, and I was really happy to get that type of classic sound on a Michael Jackson album.”
Read the FULL ARTICLE Click Here
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Marvin Gaye & Anna Gordy Gaye
with Gwen Gordy Fuqua & Harvey Fuqua
Anna Gordy Gaye
Though she is often remembered more for her volatile marriage to Motown legend Marvin Gaye, Anna Gordy was one of Motown’s earliest songwriters penning several hits mainly for her first and only husband. Anna was also part-founder of a self-named music label that would first nationally established Motown’s records including Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)”. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Anna co-wrote The Originals’ biggest hits, “Baby I’m For Real” and “The Bells” alongside Marvin and also co-wrote “God Is Love” and “Flying High (In the Friendly Sky)” on Marvin’s famed What’s Going On album. Despite an acrimonious divorce in 1977, Gordy remained friends and lovers with Gaye until his 1984 death, in which afterwards, Anna retreated into seclusion only coming out briefly to celebrate Marvin’s music career attending ceremonies including Marvin’s 1987 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The couple’s only child, Marvin Gaye III, had a brief career as a music producer.
Gwen Gordy Fuqua
Another important member of Motown’s growing success was Gwen Gordy, who partnered with her brother Berry and then-boyfriend Billy Davis to co-pen several hits for Jackie Wilson in the mid-1950s. In 1959, Gwen, Billy and sister Anna formed Anna Records in Detroit. Anna would be the site where the hit song, “Money (That’s What I Want)”, then a regional single for Berry’s Tamla Records, would get its first national distribution. Two years later, Anna was absorbed by Motown. In 1961, Gwen married The Moonglows’ Harvey Fuqua and the two presided over the labels Harvey Records and Tri-Phi Records, the latter label included acts like The Spinners. By 1964, Gwen would join Motown’s staff songwriting team later writing “Distant Lover” for her brother-in-law, Marvin Gaye, and later discovering the disco group High Inergy in 1976. Gwen died of cancer in 1999.
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Smokey Robinson: One of the reasons Berry started Motown was because [the distributors] didn’t pay you [for record sales] in those days, especially if you were fledgling. We started Motown so everybody could get paid. And everybody was paid. The beautiful, wonderful, magnificent, incredible thing about Motown was that we began to bombard them with hits. The same distributors who hadn’t paid at first would pay us in advance just to get our records. The disc jockeys would call us and say, “Could we please have the record first?”
Lionel Richie, lead singer of the Motown group the Commodores and multi-platinum solo recording artist: In the creative world there were a lot of [black] singers. There weren’t a lot of [black] owners. This guy owned the company. Imagine, this is not happening in the 90s. This is happening during the civil-rights movement, during the 1960s—not exactly the greatest land of opportunity for a black businessman. To be a [black] businessman in America then, here’s political correctness: “Yes, sir, no, sir. Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am.” So here’s somebody who’s saying, “Go to hell.” This man took no shit.
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Springing from his work on Return to Oz, Vinton was hired by the Disney studio to produce animation effects for their Michael Jackson multi-media Disneyland-Disney World extravaganza, Captain EO in 1986 (September 12, 1986) and the Speed Demon sequence for Michael Jackson musical anthology feature-length film, Moonwalker (1987).
“Michael called up and I’m sitting there, having small talk with Michael on the phone,” says Will Vinton, Claymation and California Raisins creator. “And I’m going, ‘What is this about? Why am I having this conversation?’ I realized he was talking about the California Raisins.
“I said, ‘Michael, we should make you a raisin!’ I realized he was heading that way, anyway. And as soon as I said it, he said, ‘Yeah!’ “
And so he was. Mr. Jackson said he would do the spot without charge, as long as he was involved in the creative end of it and choreography, says Mr. Vinton. The Academy Award-winning artist, director and animated film producer lives in Portland, Ore., where he runs his company, Freewill Entertainment Inc.
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News: Will.i.AM does not appear to be happy about the new Michael Jackson album – Will is this true?
DO YOU THINK WILL.I. AM REALLY SAID
‘They are freaking parasites’?
A new report just came in from www.app.com that states he did, but I don’t know…
A new Michael Jackson album is expected by the end of the year, culled from unreleased material in his vaults. But Jackson collaborator and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am is vehemently opposed to the idea.
“I don’t think that should ever come out. That’s bad,” he said. “He was a perfectionist and he wouldn’t have wanted it that way. How you gonna release Michael Jackson when Michael Jackson ain’t here to bless it?”
Will.i.am collaborated with Jackson on the rerelease of “Thriller” in 2008 with remixed versions of some of the album’s classic songs. He said Jackson was very particular about all aspects of his musical productions, from his vocals to arrangements to instrumentation.
“Now that he is not part of the process, what are they doing? Why would you put a record out like that? Because he was a friend of mine, I just think that’s disrespectful,” he said. “What’s wrong with what he already contributed to the world?”
The Jackson estate did not respond to a request for comment.
When asked about the high demand for any new Jackson music, will.i.am replied: “So what? You don’t disrespect someone when they’re gone. … How much can you suck from his energy? … Freaking parasites!”
Not much is known about what will be on the album, but Michael’s brother Jackie has said he and brother Marlon were working on the record with John McClain, Jackson’s former manager and executor of his estate.
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Michael Jackson greatly admired Fred Asterie
Fred’s Story in brief
Born on May 10, 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska, Fred Astaire is highly regarded as one of the earliest and most influential celebrity entertainers of the 20th century. His career, spanning Broadway, Hollywood and even the popular charts as a recording artist, is one of the most celebrated in American history.
Astaire was born Frederick Austerlitz to second-generation German and Jewish immigrants. The family had moved to Nebraska due to Astaire’s father landing a job with a brewing company. Fred’s mother prompted her children to perform as a way to escape the drab surroundings, and Fred and his sister Adele soon started performing their act.
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