The Jackson 5 were given the support of all Motown's creative resources. Motown's opportunities would also be theirs. It later would become their problems too.
From father Hoe through to Michael, the Jackson family had sweated through the sixties. On the final Christmas of the decade, they celebrated their reward. Released in late '69, "I Want You Back" shot to the top of the American charts by the second week of December.
Produced and written by "The Corporation", Berry Gordy's specially chosen brains-trust of Motown producers, "I Want You Back" deserved its eminence. In the stuttering tension of its dynamics, even the strings were syncopated. Further, it was a real vocal group record as his brothers punctuated Michael's novel exuberance.
Adults who heard it on the radio and didn't know Michael's age could be as impressed as the target teenybop audience. For them, Michael Jackson might just have been another quirky falsetto.
The hits kept coming in the same style as both "ABC" and "The Love You Save" gave the Jackson 5 a streak of three consecutive American number ones. Later in '70, their first ballad "I'll Be There" also topped the US charts.
Commercial success and artistic quality had been successfully married. Motown had both honoured the group and respected its own company traditions by not exploiting them to shovel out kiddie-pop. "I Want You Back" definitely matches the label's greatest records.
But a blot on Motown's honour-roll remains. In their remaining years with the label, the Jackson 5 never matched and rarely came near those first singles of dynamite.
The Jackson 5 would have been an unusually delicate proposition for any label since Michael could hardly graduate to more adult material. But the loss of quality in their output also reveals Motown's own decline in creative confidence. Through the success of the Temptations, Gaye, Wonder and the Jacksons themselves, Motown probably was more financially profitable in the expanding markets of the seventies than the previous decade but the prospering balance-sheet masked a change in the nature of the company. The old assembly-line had run down.
Through those years, Motown lost many artists like the Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Gladys Knight and the Pips. More crucially, the label also lost indispensable producers and song-writers like the Ashford and Simpson and the Holland-Dozier-Holland team. Their replacements were obviously inferior.
With the exception of the Whitfield-backed Temptations and Diana Ross, always Berry Gordy's class favourite, Motown's most effective acts were those like Gaye, Wonder and Smokey Robinson who generated their own material. Even the Commodores, Motown's first funkateers, wrote their own tracks. The rule of the house producers was over.
Whitfield's work with the Tempts' and The Corporations' hits with the Jackson 5 were the swan-songs of that tradition. Unable to write their own material Joe Jackson's boy wonders were in an exposed position.
They still racked up hits. In their remaining years on Motown, they had 12US and 7 UK Top 20 entries either as a group or through Michael's solo work. But all these records could be stamped "product". There were two obvious defects. The Jackson 5's first fame was identified with the dance-floor but Motown didn't let them return to it 'til their last album "Dancing Machine" in '74. Secondly, they rarely used the black vocal group tradition from which they sprang. Call-and-response patterns were neglected as the brothers laid down straight, undemanding harmonies behind Michael's singing.
Most records were salvaged only by Jackon's instincts as an interpreter. Somehow he was able to communicate sincerity in the most saccharine ballad. But the nador came in '72 with "Ben", Michael Jackson's first American solo number one. "Ben" was that sort of transparent camp that Americans often unblushingly excuse with dollar signs. Anyone believe a love song to a rat?
And a most rabid rodent at that. "Ben" was the theme tune to an exploitation flick so grossly forgettable that even Michael Dwyer only half-remembers its plot. Sort of Man meets Rat, "Ben" was the inspirational tale of an emotionally crippled lad who trained his pet rat to lead an army to wreak vengeance on his enemies. And for his Animal Lib version of "Carrie", Michael sang the theme with plaintive conviction. Obviously he was a trouper.
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Bill Graham 
