In the blink of an eye

In the Blink of an Eye

Isn’t it funny how history repeats itself? The death of Michael Jackson, on June 25, 2009, will have, if what I fear took place actually did take place, many parallels with the death of his hero and one-time father-in-law, Elvis Presley. Firstly, it was a shock but not a surprise. It came out of the blue all right, as Presley’s death did in 1977, but, if we’re honest, how many of us didn’t actually see it coming? Second, the singer’s family tried to go into immediate damage limitation, with a press announcement stating that he ‘probably’ died from ‘cardiac arrest.’ Third, there is the involvement of a ‘dodgy’ doctor, who, after Jackson’s death at which he was allegedly present, went on the run, and it took the LAPD over 24 hours to track him down. Fourth, it seems that the police seized bagfuls of prescription medication from Jackson’s rented mansion. Sound familiar, Elvis fans? Granted, in Presley’s case, it wasn’t the police; his friends and family got to Graceland and cleared the place from top to bottom before the police even got there. But you get the picture. Fifth, you have the concept that Jackson was so much larger than life that even his own family couldn’t believe that he could die. Family members were heard to shout at the hospital ‘You’ve got to save him!’

Here’s basically what I think happened, and we need to back-track a little here. Michael Jackson, showing prodigious talent from the age of five, was groomed for stardom by a bullying and greedy father, who forgot to instil in him the value of money or the consequences of one’s own actions. Cue many years of profligate and irresponsible spending, coupled with lawsuits filed by parents of children that he slept with, and Jackson finds himself some four hundred million dollars (!) in dept with no hope of repaying it, because of the wasteful dogshit that passes for a recorded output over the last fourteen years – a grand total, by the way, of just two studio albums that cost an estimated fifty million dollars to make. Enter some dodgy fly-by-night concert promoter who convinces him to perform 50 shows in London having been out of the limelight for almost eight years. Jackson, being the sort of guy that he was, must have jumped at the chance to reclaim some of the love that he craved from his fans; and will no doubt have worked his can off to try and get himself in mental and physical shape for this extraordinary run of concerts.

Allow me to digress a little here, but it is at least partially relevant. Much has been made of the possible mental and physical strain that Jackson may have endured as a result of the upcoming concerts. I don’t believe a word of it. Indeed, since I am inviting comparisons between the death of Elvis Presley to that of Jackson, allow me to throw in a few contrasts between the careers of the two men. Jackson’s run of 50 shows was to take place over a massive eight-month period, and yet Elvis Presley, between 1969 and 1973, performed 57 shows in four weeks in Las Vegas, twice a year. That’s 104 shows in two months. In fact, in 1972 that total went up to 110 shows and, on September 2, 1973, Presley performed 3 1-hour shows on the same night. At the time, Presley was 38 years old, and nowhere near as fit as Michael Jackson. He [Presley] was one month away from his first two-week hospital stay in a series of ultimately futile attempts by those close to him to detox his system of drugs. So, despite Jackson having hit the half-century last August, I don’t believe he was physically incapable of completing the run. Just ask Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Mick Jagger about the pains of performing in one’s advanced years.

But it is all too easy to come to rely on medication to see oneself through even the slightest of pain and stiffness. It is a reliance upon which I can speak from personal experience. If I take my painkillers even an hour late, the pain throughout my whole body is intolerable. For someone like Michael Jackson, who was surrounded by people whose sole purpose is to grant his every whim, the temptation to get hold of the most serious painkillers known to man must have been to hard to resist. Enter the unscrupulous doctor with the BMW, and you have a recipe for disaster. Give me that shot of Demerol or I’ll find someone who will. ‘OK,’ says the doctor, ‘but…’ and before you can say ‘Bubbles!’ Michael Joseph Jackson has been blasted into the middle of next week. The doctor panics, does a runner and that brings us right up to where we are now. Sadly, nothing about Michael Jackson’s life was ever simple, and his sad and tawdry death will have been no different.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is the fact that, between approximately 1970 and 1988, Michael Jackson, as an artist, was unstoppable, with every single thing that he did, except The Wiz, a lesson from a master on how it should be done. What a gut-wrenching shame that he spent the next twenty years pissing all of that up the wall. You’re a long time dead, someone so rightly said, and now that Jackson is himself in that state of eternal nothingness, he might as well have lived for five seconds as fifty years because it has all passed by in the blink of an eye.