When the world paused this summer to look back on Michael Jackson’s extraordinary career, one chapter was missing from all the retrospectives, which skipped straight from the Jackson Five’s formation in Gary, Indiana, to their explosive rise to stardom on Motown Records. Though every last recording by Elvis and the Beatles—the only other pop stars of Jackson’s magnitude—has been meticulously documented, not even the most obsessive collectors have the whole story behind “Big Boy,” the Jackson Five’s first single.
Many have made and lost millions on the backs of the Jacksons, but Keith’s fortunes have remained largely unchanged since the mid-60s, when he founded Steeltown with four partners: Ben Brown, Ludie Washington, Maurice Rodgers, and Willie Spencer. The former steel-mill worker still lives at the Gary address that’s printed on the first pressing of “Big Boy.” These days most conversations he has about the Jacksons turn toward bitter reflections on the “double cross” he says took them from him—Joseph Jackson and Berry Gordy are the worst of many antagonists in these stories—yet he still sees their appearance on his doorstep as divine intervention. God, he says, gave him the gift of a group that was ready.
So after school one afternoon in November 1967, Michael, 9, Marlon, 10, Jermaine, 12, Tito, 14, and Jackie, 16, piled into the family Volkswagen with Joseph and rode across the state line to Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood, parking in front of Sunny Sawyer’s recording studio on West 69th. Today that address is a vacant lot overrun by six-foot weeds, neighbored by the last surviving commercial buildings on the block—a tavern called Mitchell’s that’s attached to Rainbow Food and Liquor and a boarded-up pharmacy. But in the late 60s it was at the heart of a busy business district.
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By 1967 Sawyer had bought Morrison out. Early on he did some work as a vanity press—south-side gospel artists would pay to record, then take home 500 copies to sell or distribute at church. A good engineer with a good ear who’d worked at Universal, the top studio in the city, Sawyer also released rock ‘n’ roll, R & B, and blues records by artists like Mighty Joe Young, Fenton Robinson, and Josephine Taylor on his own labels, Palos, New Breed, and Betty—the last named after his wife, who along with another woman operated the machinery at the pressing plant while he ran the studio. Business was decent, but neighbors complained about booming bass leaking into their laundromat and grocery store. “Sometimes, knocking out the jams, you get up there in the dBs,” Mundo says. “To get your hot sound, you’re gonna have some bleed out the door.” According to Mundo, business owners in the neighborhood—which was then predominantly white—were also intimidated by the steady stream of black bluesmen coming in for late-night sessions. By 1969 Sawyer’s landlord had terminated the lease, forcing him to relocate to 72nd and Racine.
Bridgeman had been a member of a 50s doo-wop group called the Senators, who recorded for Vee-Jay subsidiary Abner, and Sawyer’s place was quite modest compared to studios he’d used in his heyday. “You could probably put the studio we were in into one of Universal’s office spaces,” he says. While many operations on Michigan Avenue’s Record Row had offices, rehearsal rooms, and places for musicians to lounge, Sawyer’s studio consisted of nothing more than the live room (where a piano and drum kit took up a fair amount of the space), a small control room, and a bathroom.
“Big Boy” is by far the best song from the session. Its author, Silvers, had toured with Fats Domino (he contends he wrote the bridge to “I’m Walking,” for which he was compensated one used pink Cadillac), Bill Doggett, and Ike & Tina, a job he says he quit because he was tired of refereeing the couple’s brawls. An East Saint Louis native, he’d settled in Chicago around 1965, where his relationship with Saint Louis harmony act the Sharpees helped him move up the ranks at One-derful Records, from writer and arranger to the label’s music director.
The Jackson Five’s first Motown release wouldn’t come out till fall 1969. Motown’s story is that they were unsatisfied with the initial recordings and developed the group for a year; Keith says Atlantic kept Motown in court, waiting out the Steeltown contract. To this day he can’t say exactly what happened during all this legal wrangling—Atlantic and Motown clearly considered him a small fish and didn’t invite him to the table—but he’s certain he got played like a fiddle. In the end Keith was left with nothing but the Sawyer tracks he hadn’t yet released.
