A Bus Driver Watched Michael Jackson for Three Hours. He Never Forgot What He Saw. D
Somewhere in the American Midwest, in the early 1970s, a bus was moving between cities. The Jackson 5 were inside. They had been on the road for days. The specific grinding forward motion of a touring act in its commercial peak, moving from venue to venue across a country that had, within the previous 2 years, come to know their name and their sound and the specific energy of the youngest of the brothers in a way that had not been anticipated by anyone, including the people who had signed them to Motown. A man named Earl was driving. Earl was not a musician. He was not a journalist or a documentary filmmaker or a biographer. He was the man who drove the bus. He had driven buses for acts before. The specific professional world of tour drivers who move through the entertainment industry carrying other
people’s fame from one city to the next, largely invisible to the people whose names are on the marquees. On this particular stretch of road, a 3-hour drive between cities, the late afternoon sun coming through the windows at the low angle that late afternoon sun in the Midwest comes through windows.
Earl was watching the road and watching in his mirror the seat directly behind the driver’s partition. Michael Jackson was in that seat. He was 12 or 13 years old. He was not performing. He was not speaking. He was looking out the window at the landscape moving past. What touring looked like for Michael Jackson at 12 years old was not what people who watched his performances understood it to look like from the audience.
From the audience, the experience of the Jackson 5 was the experience of five brothers performing together on a large stage with full production values with a set list that delivered the songs the audience had come to hear with Michael at the center in the specific configuration of energy and precision that had made him the focal point of a group in which every member was a skilled performer.
From inside the touring life, the experience was different. The ratio of performance time to travel time on any extended the tour is heavily weighted toward travel. The hours on the bus, the hours in hotel rooms, the hours in airport terminals and backstage holding areas and venue load-ins, these are the hours that constitute the majority of a touring musician’s life.
The performance is what the audience sees. The travel is where the performer actually lives. Michael Jackson had been living in that ratio since he was 5 years old. He had been on buses and in hotel rooms and in the waiting spaces of the touring life for most of his conscious experience of the world.
He had been performing in front of audiences for 7 years. He had in that time developed the specific quality that long-term touring produces in some performers and not in others. The ability to exist in the travel, to be fully present in the moving vehicle or the hotel corridor or the holding room without the travel consuming whatever exists in the person when they are not performing.
Some performers cannot make that distinction. The performance is the only real thing and the travel is the interval of unreality between performances. Michael Jackson was, by all accounts, not that kind of performer. He was a person, a full, present, observing person when he was not on a stage. The Jackson 5 in 1971 were not simply a successful pop act.
They were a phenomenon. The specific kind of phenomenon that the early 1970s American music industry had not fully prepared itself for. A group of children, the youngest barely in his teens, who performed at a level that professional entertainers spent years trying to reach. And that the Jackson brothers had been doing since before most of them were old enough to have a full understanding of what they were doing.
I Want You Back had gone to number one in January of 1970. ABC had followed it to number one. The Love You Save, I’ll Be There. Four number one singles in 14 months. The touring schedule that Motown and the family had built around that commercial success was demanding in the way that touring schedules for acts at that level are always demanding.
The arithmetic of enough cities, enough venues, enough hotel rooms, enough miles to convert the music’s commercial presence into the specific kind of physical presence that audiences paid to experience. For Michael Jackson, who was 12 years old in 1971, the touring schedule was the context of his life.
He had been performing since before he was old enough to have a full account of what performing meant. The road was not a departure from something else. The road, the bus, the venues, the hotels, the cities that looked similar to each other through the windows of moving vehicles, this was what his daily life consisted of.
He was 12 years old. He was the most famous 12-year-old in America. He was sitting in a bus seat looking out a window at the state of Ohio or Indiana or Illinois. And the landscape was moving past at highway speed, and Earl was watching him in the mirror. What Earl described in the years after the drive was not the observation of a child who was simply looking out the window because there was nothing else to do.
He was specific about this. He had seen children on buses who were looking out windows because there was nothing else to do. This was different. He said, “There was something going on in that boy that didn’t need to be anywhere else.” The specific quality Earl was describing is one that people who knew Michael Jackson well also described across the years and in different contexts.
The quality of being completely present in whatever environment he was in. Not performing his presence, but simply occupying it. Off stage, in private contexts, Michael Jackson was described by people who knew him as someone who paid attention to the world around him with a quality of attention that most people do not bring to the ordinary experience of being somewhere.
He noticed things. He was interested in things. He was not, in the off stage context, the phenomenon that the stage made visible. He was a person who found the world consistently interesting and who engaged with it as a person rather than as a performer. Earl had not known Michael Jackson before that drive.
He would not know him after it. The nature of tour driving being the nature of tour driving, the driver comes and goes with the route, and the routes change. He spent 3 hours in the same vehicle with one of the most talented performers of the 20th century, and what he observed in that time was not the performance.
It was the person inside the performance, sitting in a bus seat, looking out a window at the American landscape, finding in the passing fields and farmhouses something that was worth the kind of attention he was giving it. Earl described what he saw in the mirror across the course of that 3-hour drive in terms that are not complicated.
Michael was not sleeping. He was not reading. He was not talking to his brothers, who were in other parts of the bus, some of them sleeping, some of them playing cards in the back, some of them doing the specific nothing that long drives on tour buses produce. Michael was watching the landscape. What Earl described was not the watchfulness of a child looking for something to see.
It was something he could not fully name at the time, and that he returned to in the years afterward when he tried to describe it to people who asked. He said it was more like the landscape was being received than watched, as though the fields and the towns and the farmhouses and the highway signs and the light changing across the flat land as the afternoon moved toward evening were going into him somehow, were being taken in rather than observed.
Earl had driven many buses. He had driven many performers. He had seen people who were famous when they were not performing, and what he had generally seen was what famous people look like when they are not performing, either exhausted and absent or performing for the smaller audience of the people around them.
He had not often seen what he was seeing in the mirror, a person who was, in a full sense, present to the world outside the window, attending to it without using it for anything. He kept driving. Michael kept watching. The 3 hours passed. The stage showed one version of Michael Jackson. The bus showed another.
Both were real. Both were entirely him. The performer who could fill an arena, who had been filling arenas since he was 9 years old, who had developed in those years an ability to hold a crowd’s attention that most professional performers never achieve, was the same person who sat in a bus seat and looked at the Ohio or Indiana landscape as though it were worth looking at with full attention.
This is the part of the story about extraordinary performers that ordinary accounts of their careers tend to miss. The specific quality of their ordinary moments, the hours between performances, the spaces between the public self and the private self, the person who exists when nobody is watching and nothing is required.
What Earl saw in the mirror on that 3-hour drive was Michael Jackson not performing. Not performing for him. Not performing for the other passengers in the bus. Not performing for the memory of being watched. Simply sitting in a seat and looking at the world outside the window with the quality of attention that when it appeared in front of an audience produced in those audiences the specific experience of watching someone who was completely present in what they were doing.
The same quality that made his stage presence what it was was also what was happening in the bus seat. The quality of attention was the same. The direction was different. On the stage it was directed at the performance. On the bus it was directed at the Ohio farmland moving past at highway speed. The stage required Michael Jackson to be present in a specific and managed way.
To be the center of the performance. To carry the group’s energy in the direction that the audience had come to see it carried. To do with his body and his voice the things that the years of practice and Joe Jackson’s discipline and his own natural ability had made him capable of doing at a level that people who watched him could not fully account for.
The bus did not require any of that. The bus required him to be nowhere except where he was. In a seat. In a vehicle moving between two cities with the American landscape outside the window. There was no audience. There was no performance. There was no older brother to compete with or younger sibling to protect or manager to satisfy or crowd to earn.
There was the window and outside the window was the world. And Michael Jackson was looking at it. Earl said 30 years later that he thought about that drive whenever he heard that boy’s name. He said he thought about it because in 30 years of driving buses he had not seen a person look at the world from a bus window the way Michael Jackson had looked at it on that afternoon drive through the Midwest.
He could not explain what the difference was, exactly. He said it was something about the quality of the looking. Something about the way the outside world was being received by the person watching it. He said, “You could tell that boy felt everything. He felt the world coming in through that window.
You could see it happening.” Earl drove the bus. He watched in the mirror. Three hours passed, and the bus arrived at the next city, and the Jackson brothers gathered their things and got off, and the preparation for the evening’s show began. The sound check, the wardrobe, the warm-up, all the professional machinery that converted the touring musicians back into the performance that the audience was paying to see.
Michael Jackson, 12 or 13 years old, got off the bus and went through that machinery, and walked onto the stage that night, and performed in the way that the audiences who were there described for the rest of their lives, with complete presence, with the specific quality of someone who was entirely inside what they were doing.
The three hours in the bus were not visible in the performance. They were not meant to be visible. The performance was the performance. What the bus contained was something else. Earl told the story decades later to someone who wrote it down. He said he had never told it to many people because it was hard to explain what the story was about.
It was not about anything that happened. It was about someone looking out a window. That was not the kind of story that most people found interesting. He told it anyway because he had not forgotten it. He had seen a lot in 30 years of driving buses. He had carried a lot of famous people between cities.
He had watched many of them in his mirror during the quiet stretches of the long drives. Only once, he said, had he seen someone look out a window the way that boy had looked out the window. Only once. The bus kept moving. The fields kept passing. And Michael Jackson sat in his seat and felt the world coming in through the glass.
