Last year I broke Larry Blasingaine’s heart. For more than 40 years he believed he’d played guitar on the Jackson Five’s first single, “Big Boy,” a local hit released in January 1968 on Steeltown Records out of Gary, Indiana. I was the one who had to tell him he hadn’t. But my research into the group’s early history also led to the discovery of a tape no one knew existed—the Jackson Five’s earliest professional recording. It predated the sessions for that first single by four months, and Blasingaine’s guitar was almost certainly on it. An engineer restored the track this September, and since then its owners have been considering how and when to release it.
One-derful’s assets had been inherited by Eric and Tony Leaner and their sister Phyllis Newkirk—all children of Ernie Leaner, who founded the label with his brother, George. They spent a full year searching for a capable, trustworthy studio to restore the tape and digitally transfer its contents. In September 2010, when that work was done, the tape became more than just potentially valuable: it’s now confirmed to be the first known studio recording by Michael Jackson, lost for 42 years. Soon I was finally able to make proper amends for the distress I had caused Blasingaine. Earlier this month, I arranged for him to be one of the very first people to hear it.
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Their paths would soon sharply diverge, but in 1967 and ’68 Larry Blasingaine and the Jacksons were on parallel courses. The Jackson Five and Blasingaine’s group the Young Folks (they’d later record as Larry & the Hippies) shared a manager, gigged at the same Chicago nightclubs, like the Green Bunny and the High Chaparral, and sometimes shared equipment and rehearsal space when they had to prepare for one of Spann’s showcases. But Blasingaine’s interests and aptitudes destined him for a career behind the scenes.
And for more than four decades, that was that. For reasons they took to their graves, George and Ernie Leaner decided not to release their Jackson Five record. They sold whatever contract they’d signed with the group to Gordon Keith of Steeltown, who had the Jacksons recut “Big Boy” in November 1967—and that version would go on to sell 60,000 copies, by Keith’s estimate. Meanwhile the One-derful recording was clipped from its reel, put on a hub, left on a shelf, and overlooked in every inventory of the label’s stock—the most recent accounting, in July 2007, was conducted with Hayes, the engineer on the Jacksons’ 1967 session.
On Wednesday, December 1, I took Blasingaine and photographer Jim Newberry to meet Eric Leaner in a conference room on the 20th floor of Riverside Plaza, aka the old Chicago Daily News building on Madison. Leaner, who came of age after his family had left the record business, has had a job in this building for 23 years, working his way up from the mailroom, eventually becoming Sam Zell’s personal driver and then a tax director for Zell’s firm Equity Office (which was bought out by the Blackstone Group in 2007). Before we arrived he’d moved a box of pastries off the conference table, replacing it with a small iPod dock. As we waited, he scrolled through his iTunes library to find the long-lost track.
“Remember I always said the quality [of the Steeltown record] was weak compared to how One-derful sounded?” Blasingaine reminded me. “What I notice about this session—I can’t tell until I hear it on bigger speakers, but this seems more professional. The balance, the engineering, it sounds like it was produced . . . they took time to work with them, especially the voices . . . the backgrounds are stronger, Michael is clearer; it jells. It’s what made them the Jackson Five—people were amazed by hearing them so young and being able to do that. And that’s why I didn’t understand when they said they had to go get some other musicians to play and sing.”
Blasingaine requested yet another digital spin, and his recollections became more general. “It just brings back the memory of how it used to be,” he said. “I remember the Hammond B-3 organ sitting in the back—we always wanted [Hayes] to bring up the volume on it so we could get a Jimmy Smith sound on it, but he never would do that for us. L.V. Johnson, Mighty Joe Young, Cash McCall, it was like an everyday thing to see these cats coming in. We was like a family. George [Leaner] treated us like he was our uncle or something. He let us take equipment out of the studio to use at shows. It was nice. Every now and then I have dreams about that situation. In fact, I just dreamed that One-derful Records had opened back up—Otis and everybody came back together, Jimmy had came back. . . . “
