The disc begins with the album’s lone cover, Mick Jackson’s (no relation) “Blame It on the Boogie,” a sunny slice of disco featuring a breathtakingly pretty near-acapella breakdown. It’s not quite Off the Wall, but hearing Michael get to indulge himself for the first time is quite magical indeed. The brothers had long wished for this kind of creative control, and, boy, do they ever make the most of it, turning in what has easily got to be their most electrifying full-length since ABC. Not only does this album have the distinction of being the very first album from the brothers to feature almost nothing but self-penned material, but it’s also the very first to be produced by the boys as well.
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It’s telling that the most electrifying moments here are where the brothers are given free rein to write and produce: the toe-tapping “Do What You Wanna” and, even better, the gritty, guitar-heavy, talkbox-laden disco of “Different Kind of Girl” have a real energy and freshness to them that’s missing on the other sides here, and the latter song in particular really could have been a massive hit and dancefloor classic if Epic had been smart enough to choose it as the lead-off single over the inferior title cut instead, the song got relegated to the B-side of “Find Me a Girl.” Fortunately, Epic would let the boys call all the shots next time out. Even the best Gamble-Huff tunes here, like the title cut, “Even Though You’re Gone,” or the slow Philly soul of “Find Me a Girl,” aren’t nearly as memorable as “Enjoy Yourself” or “Show You the Way to Go,” and the only tune here that even so much as reached the Hot 100 was the distinctly-Sylvers-like title cut, which understandably stopped at #52 – it’s just not an especially good song. Goin’ Places (1977, Epic/Philadelphia International)įollowing the format of the previous album almost to a tee – once again, Gamble and Huff write most of the material, while Dexter Wansel and the team of McFadden and Whitehead each pen a song and the brothers get to do two originals of their own – you can’t help but feel like this is a bunch of leftovers from the last album. Still, the boys at least sound more enthusiastic than they have in quite some time, and their performances on such sides as “Good Times,” the jittery rhythms of the Top Ten hit “Enjoy Yourself” or the lushly-orchestrated Top 40 hit “Show You the Way to Go” are endearing. The Gamble and Huff tunes are perfectly fine, but most of them don’t sound as if they were really written with the boys in mind and could have just as easily been written for Philadelphia International acts like the O’Jays, Lou Rawls, or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. But, if only for two tracks, Michael is allowed to record his own compositions for the first time, and “Blues Away” and “Style of Life” show that he clearly has potential, even if they’re far from classics. Philly-soul legends Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff both write and produce most of the material here, while Philadelphia International staff writers Dexter Wansel, Gene McFadden, and John Whitehead all contribute to the writing and production as well. Ironically, the boys don’t get all that much more input here than they did on their Motown albums. The Jacksons (1976, Epic/Philadelphia International)
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It’s not a dreadful album, but most of this was unreleased for a reason: it just doesn’t have nearly the same spark as the band’s singles of old (though “Through Thick and Thin” is a minor standout) and feels more like a full disc’s worth of tracks that were meant to be nothing more than album padding.
Motown immediately responded by rounding up a bunch of songs that were recorded for – but ultimately left off of – the albums from Skywriter through Moving Violation and trying to pass it off as a new album (nothing on the front or back cover indicates that this music dates back several years), so if this music doesn’t seem like it was all meant to be on the same album … well, it wasn’t. One of the great “what if” questions of the rock’n’roll era is “what if Berry Gordy had relented to the wishes of the Jackson 5 and let them record their own songs?” Would their latter albums for the label have fared better artistically or commercially? Would the boys have ever left Motown? Might such blockbusters as Off the Wall and Thriller and Bad come out on Gordy’s label instead? Fed up with having only minimal creative input on their own records, the brothers – sans Jermaine, who had married Gordy’s daughter Hazel and, in a show of loyalty to his father-in-law, stayed with Motown as a solo artist – bolted their longtime home, added brother Randy to the fold, and signed a new deal with Epic.
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