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Funk Brothers, the label’s famed house band, had already laid down the instrumental tracks, and like any discerning singer, Michael Jackson—at ten years old—was self-critical. He didn’t like the way he sounded on a few lines, and he wanted to overdub some things onto the tape over an extra hour or two.“He wouldn’t let himself get away with anything unless it was right,” recalls one of the freelance Motown engineers, Ed Wolfrum.
    But Michael’s perfectionism was too much for his father. The Jacksons had to pay expenses for every recording session. “Michael, this is advanced against royalties!” Joe hollered as he hit him. “This is costingus a fortune!” Wolfrum had worked with difficult artists, but he had never seen anything like this. He and his fellow engineers intervened.“If you’re going to deal with it like that,” they told Joe, “then we’re stopping the session until you cool down.” Wolfrum happened to be studying for the priesthood at the time. “I certainly morally couldn’t leave it alone,” he recalls, years later. “It really struck me.” Bobby Taylor of the Vancouvers, the producer, knew what to do in situations like these. “I wouldn’t let Joe Jackson interfere,” he said.“I once pulled a gun on him in thestudio and told him not to come back while we were working.”
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    The Jacksons told reporters Diana Ross discovered them and brought them to Motown—their debut album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 . Over more than four decades, Bobby Taylor has meticulously corrected the record. Upon spotting the Jackson 5 at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, Taylor called Motown executive Ralph Seltzer. Seltzer had reservations. Stevie Wonder, who’d begun his Motown career at age twelve in 1962, was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but issues with child-labor laws and chaperones had been almost too much.“I had a reluctance to sign really young people,” recalls Seltzer, in his late eighties, by phone from a senior living center in Grants Pass, Oregon. “I felt that I’d rather sign a twenty-two-year-old adult who lives around the corner from our studios and was in high school or Wayne [State] University or whatever. This was five minors—with a father who supervised their career and had to be dealt with.”
    Seltzer trusted Bobby Taylor, but he needed another opinion. He turned to Suzanne Celeste de Passe. At just twenty-one, she was a rising creative executive at Motown and a confidant of Berry Gordy Jr., the label’s founder; in 1968, she listened to the Jackson 5, dubbed them “terrific,” and recommended Motown sign them. Gordy responded obstinately. “I don’t want kid acts! Do you know how much troubleStevie Wonder is?” De Passe snapped back:“Oh, no you don’t. Not if they’re great.”
    Days later, Gordy, de Passe, and a few others were in an eighth-floor office. I Dick Scott, Gordy’s assistant, had set up a new video camera, a piece of technology rare for 1968. The footage Scott made of the Jackson boys was grainy and black-and-white and eventually leaked to the public. In the foreground, a short-haired ten-year-old Michael Jackson, wearing long pants and a tight long-sleeved shirt, claps his hands and glides from side to side, keeping his upper body still while moving his legs in perfect rhythm, like a tap dancer, to James Brown’s “I Got the Feeling.” In the background, his brothers provide the music—Tito on guitar, Jermaine on bass, Jackie ontambourine, and Johnny Jackson steady as usual on the drum kit. In the video, the brothers’ heads are out of the frame, so you can see only their long, skinny legs stepping in well-rehearsed choreography. Only Marlon, because he’s almost as short as Michael, appears in full, albeit briefly. Toward the end, Michael spins with fantastical grace, drops to his knees like Jackie Wilson, snaps back up, grabs his belt, then goes into a long, James Brown–style side-stepping routine.
    Gordy