Michael Act III

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

--William Shakespeare’s

“Henry IV, Part II”

*

Michael Jackson will be inducted tonight into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but to many eyes he has been a museum piece for years. That unkind view, however, only adds intrigue to the biggest pop music question of 2001: Can the onetime King of Pop possibly reclaim his throne?

The gala tonight in New York City and a series of odd public appearances in recent weeks are the unofficial kickoff of Jackson’s return from his reclusive life. The Jackson camp is confident that his first album of new material since 1995, due this summer, is so striking that the pop icon will have a blockbuster on his hands.

But a louder chorus of naysayers maintains that the biggest star of the 1980s is “too old-school and too freaky now,” as one Los Angeles radio programmer puts it.

Handicappers on both sides do share one view--the biggest challenge facing the 42-year-old Jackson is connecting with today’s audience and overcoming a towering pile of tabloids that have portrayed him as a distant, strange and fragile artifact far removed from his “Thriller” glory days.

“He knows what the people are saying,” said Rodney Jerkins, the young star producer who worked on much of the new Jackson album. “That will make all this greater. He wants to shock people. When his music comes out, it will shut everyone down. You think Michael has forgotten how to sing? How to dance? It hasn’t been that long.”

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of “Thriller,” which retains a magical spot in pop culture but can no longer claim to be the best-selling album of all time in the U.S. (The Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975,” with 27 million copies sold, has that title.) There are other signs of the times: The Jackson-starring Captain Eo attraction at Disneyland has been scrapped, and on Jackson’s official Web site, the pages devoted to news and tour information are blank and dated 1997.

More telling, on U.S. radio and video stations, Janet is now the only Jackson family member who matters.

Still, many in the music industry can see all that changing with the wave of a gloved hand.

“Michael Jackson is such a personality that people will always be intrigued to find out what he’s doing next, musically,” said Tom Calderone, MTV senior vice president of music and talent. “But that first single and that first video have to be huge.”

Thomas D. Mottola, chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, said the new, still-untitled Jackson disc from Sony’s Epic label surpasses his “Thriller” performances. “I’ve heard most of it and I think it’s his best work and best singing since [1979’s] ‘Off the Wall.’ It’s really like Michael singing like Michael again.”

But it’s Jackson’s idiosyncratic ways--not his music or videos--that have shaped his public persona in recent years. Emmanuel “eMan” Coquia, the music director for Los Angeles radio station Power 106, is among those who think the singer has simply slipped too far away.

“All this stuff you read about, it’s crazy,” Coquia said. “Michael Jackson is stamped now. People think he’s just too strange. Michael Jackson will always get respect, but I don’t think the younger people see him as hip, and the older fans think he’s too weird. He’s not the Michael they knew.”

How, then, can Jackson prove he is the same singer who gave the world “Billie Jean” and “Beat It”? Bob Merlis, a top publicity executive for Sony rival Warner Bros. Records, said veteran artists who have made big comebacks after fallow periods have often done so by working the promotional trail to reconnect with fans.

That’s a daunting task for Jackson.

“It’s a crapshoot, but you can’t write anybody off,” Merlis said. “Cher is proof of that. . . . But to do it, he can’t hide behind a mask, talk in a little tiny voice and answer every controversial question, ‘I love you all.’ That isn’t going to fly. . . . He needs to emphasize a more human side. But can he approximate the persona of a grounded person when he’s never been that?”

Back in the ‘80s, He Was Larger Than Life

One way is to scale down the trademark Jackson pyrotechnics. The moonwalking hero became so much larger than life in the 1980s that his every project had the scope of a huge science-fiction film. Jeff Ayeroff, the chief architect of the hugely successful Beatles retrospective album “1,” said Jackson can tap into his own legacy in similar fashion by shedding the special effects.

“I think his worst enemy has been all of this ‘King of Pop’ stuff,” Ayeroff said. “The goal shouldn’t be ‘bigger,’ it should be ‘better.’ . . . The first thing I think of is the 1968 Elvis TV concert, the sit-down, black-leather show where he presented himself in a new way. Michael needs that. He needs something intimate--intimate emotionally--that will connect him to the audience. Simplify. No bombast. Just show people that he’s as talented as he is successful.”

MTV’s Calderone said his music channel has a long-standing interest in putting Jackson in the spare setting of “MTV Unplugged”--an acoustic forum that has given commercial juice to veteran performers as varied as Eric Clapton and Tony Bennett. Today’s pop fan is accustomed to the breezy access to stars on the audience-interactive “Total Request Live,” and Jackson should take that into account, he said.

“The more human he can be to our audience, the better. . . . It’s OK to have a mystique,” he said. “But the fans now want an opportunity to touch their stars.”

Jackson’s manager, Jeff Kwatinetz (who also handles the Backstreet Boys, Korn and Limp Bizkit), declined to comment for this story, but Mottola said that putting Jackson more at the audience’s eye level is a guiding principle for the new album’s marketing.

“I think you’re going to look at a much more accessible Michael Jackson, a Michael Jackson that the people will be able to touch and feel a lot more than in the past,” Mottola said. With a chuckle he added, “At least those are our goals.”

Jackson faces not only “the competition of today, but his own success,” Calderone said, and there is no argument or novelty to that point. The Recording Industry Assn. of America reports that 8 million copies of 1987’s “Bad” and 7 million copies of 1991’s “Dangerous” have been shipped to U.S. record stores, totals that would be deemed a flop only for an artist coming off the once-in-a-lifetime success of “Thriller.” The new disc faces the same standard.

All of this image craft will be made academic if Jackson delivers music that jumps out of the speakers and moves fans, said Frankie Blue, program manager for New York City radio station WKTU. “A hit song heals everything,” Blue said.

Blue, a friend of Jackson’s, performed an experiment in November to gauge fan interest in the singer: WKTU began playing “Ghost,” a Jackson rarity that became a hit in England in the 1990s but went unreleased in the U.S. “We didn’t tell people who was singing it, we would just play it,” Blue said. The song quickly became a listener favorite, and rival stations even protested to Epic that Blue was apparently playing a track off the upcoming album.

“That’s why I wouldn’t even call it a comeback,” Blue said. “Michael’s core fans are thirsting for fresh material. There are millions of them. With Michael, it’s about the dance, the vocals. He’s a supreme showman. Give him a microphone and a stage and there’s magic. If he has a problem, it isn’t his talent.”

While Blue would not discuss what kind of “problem” his friend might face, that topic dominates every conversation about the singer. After plastic surgery, a child molestation accusation involving a 13-year-old boy (a lawsuit involving the matter was settled by Jackson in 1994, and no criminal charges were filed) and a string of quirky moments, the reclusive resident of a ranch he calls Neverland is the butt of jokes and the object of head-shaking sadness. “He went from ‘Off the Wall’ to off the wall,” one veteran record industry executive said last week. “It’s like he was raised in a very strange petri jar.”

The experiment that is Michael Jackson yields some odd and bewildering moments.

Jackson visited the hallowed debate chambers of Oxford University earlier this month to introduce his new charity, Heal the Kids. The British tabloids had savaged him for days with such headlines as “Jacko the Wacko,” and even students complained that the singer’s philanthropy was an exercise in hypocrisy after the molestation lawsuit. To make matters more disconcerting, Jackson arrived more than three hours late, was introduced by spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller and spoke of his affinity for Kermit the Frog before weepily describing his upbringing.

The British visit seemed like a capsule of Jackson’s recent history--all strangeness and no music. But if the singer was looking for a sign of optimism, the event ended with a sustained, robust standing ovation from the crowd--the exact kind you would expect for a returning royal.

The Tour Looks to Be a Success

Everyone interviewed for this story agreed that no matter what happens with the new album, the tour presumed to accompany it will be a major success, if only for the strength of Jackson’s catalog of hits and his performance zeal. Producer Jerkins said the energy of the tour cannot be underestimated in Jackson’s return to form.

“For me to see someone like Cher make a comeback--someone who can’t come close to Michael as a performer--or to see Madonna still doing it or Janet still doing it, that gives me more hope,” Jerkins said.

“What people fail to realize or maybe somehow forgot is there is no one--no one--who can entertain like Michael. No one would follow Michael Jackson on stage. Look, Michael wants to be loved. He feels like he’s been hated by his critics, but he knows the fans still love him. And that’s why he wants this album to be perfect, so they love him more. And they will, they will.”