Please Don’t Stop The Music: R.I.P. Michael Jackson

It was the summer of 1985. Ever since school had let out I’d been driving my parents nuts with my taped radio recordings of anything MJ. Thriller had been out for a few years already but I’d never even owned a record, more or less a Michael Jackson record before. Plus, my father’s turntable was OFF LIMITS. So it was me, my GPX radio and whatever blank tapes I could find.

Maybe it was the bedroom wall plastered with any and every clipping of Michael I could find, or the three or four buttons I rocked on my French Toast jacket (we didn’t have Members Only money) but somehow my Dad got the hint.

So on my 10th birthday I got the gift of my first album ever-Thriller. He must have just bought it because the price tag was still on it (of course I didn’t care). I peeled off the plastic and slid the record from the sleeve. I took a second to read the lyrics that came inside and this crazy monster illustration next the the “Thriller” text. I snapped out of it just long enough to remember there was music to be played! The first time I was allowed to put the needle on a record was to fill our Brooklyn apartment with the classic and funky  “You Wanna Be Startin Somethin”…

And MJ definitely started something that day…R.I.P.

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