The Farm Report

We watched the news reports of Michael Jackson’s death and I had Elvis flashbacks.

I so clearly remember the day Elvis died. My first wife and I walked into a Wendy’s restaurant in our new hometown, Bowling Green, Ky., and the clerk behind the counter was crying. “Elvis died,” she said. “May I take your order?”

And that night, as I painted the bathroom in our new home (peach, if you want to know), I listened to hours of Elvis on the radio.

So when Michael died, I again felt the passing of a musical icon, but with mixed emotions. Elvis abused his body. Michael abused the bodies of others – of innocents.

But then I got a text message from my eldest son. And that’s when it hit me.

“Daddy! Daddy!” it began. “Fwilla!”

My son is a 27-year-old man now, a public-health professional, a responsible and dedicated citizen. But in that message, he took me back to the time when he was 2 years old and infatuated with Michael Jackson. I’d be in my study, working on my dissertation, and he would leap into the room to announce that the new Michael Jackson video, “Thriller” (Fwilla!) was on MTV. Then I’d go sit and watch it with him. He loved it and was scared by it at the same time and he needed his daddy with him. He’d stand spread-eagled in front of the television – like Tony Olivia at the plate – and begin those instinctive, involuntary dance moves. How could you listen to Michael Jackson and not dance?

When I got that message, I realized that my son’s generation has lost its Elvis.

Elvis’s death was heartbreaking. A revolutionary figure in American music and culture died at 42, in the bathroom of his mansion, reading “The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.” Shakespeare could not improve upon that tragedy.

Michael’s death, at 50, has other complications. As with my son watching “Thriller,” all of us felt  with Michael that we loved him and were scared by him at the same time.

I was reminded of a famous quote from American poet and physician William Carlos Williams: “The pure products of America go crazy.” Peter Guralnick, to my mind the greatest writer on popular music, often used that quote when he wrote (eloquently) about Elvis Presley.

It’s appropriate for Elvis’s son-in-law as well.

None of our friends in the press seem worried about libel and present as fact that Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, brutalized his children, setting into motion a cycle of abuse. If, as charged, Michael was a serial child molester who somehow beat the rap, then his crimes are unforgivable. There is a special place in hell for people who hurt children.

There’s much more baggage with Michael than with Elvis. Elvis was his own victim. His sloth and addictions killed him. Michael’s addictions cost his victims their innocence and their childhoods. Perhaps he used these third parties to exact revenge on his father for his own lost childhood. Forced onstage at an early age, a professional entertainer while still in single digits, it was no surprise when “adult” Michael built a fairyland in which to live. No surprise, but pathetic all the same.

Another quote comes to mind. It was said about musical savant Brian Wilson, the tortured soul behind the joyful music of the Beach Boys: “He was a genius musician, but an amateur human being.”

That, too, applies to Michael.

So I get the text message from my son, that dancing 2-year-old who is now a grown man, and I recognize this as another generational shock wave, a reminder of our mortality. If Michael, that Peter Pan of popular music, can die, then none of us is safe.

When we first saw him as a child, he sang songs that were at once nursery rhymes and  love songs. Though he obviously sang with the voice of a child, his phrasing and delivery were those of a mature singer. That was a gift.

I will remember him for “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” one of the great one-two punches in popular music history. I will remember the charming child singing “I Want You Back.” I will remember the joy of watching him dance, of marveling that a human being could move like that. I’ll remember my little boy, standing mesmerized in front of the television, trying to emulate those moves.

And there are other things that I also can’t forget.