Michael Jackson was in love with childhood. It's been said everywhere, by him, by others, that he was deprived of one, so he made his whole adult world a child's paradise.

Every weekend, children were brought to Neverland for the weekend, mostly from charitable organizations. Most of the time, Jackson wasn't home. When he was home, one of his favorite things to do was to read to children, and bedtime stories were a big deal to him.

Some of you are immediately thinking he did this so he could diddle around with them. And you think that because the court case and the settlement is enough for you to have convicted him of child abuse. Oh well.

But everything I've been reading lately from people who knew him, and his amazing speech at Oxford (HERE), leads me to a very different conclusion.

Isn't there anyone else here who absolutely loves children? Or the simple pleasure of playing with them and reading to them at bedtime? Here's a guy who didn't swear, and wasn't even known for raising his voice...a guy who wanted a chimp to play with, and a snake, and an elephant, and a Ferris wheel. The guy loved childhood, not abusing children. Here's a firsthand example from someone who KNEW the pedophile angle was untrue:

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Once, while we were taking a break, I think we were actually watching the OJ chase on TV, there was a news program talking about him [Jackson] being in Europe with some little boy. I was sitting next to the guy while the news is making this crap up. He just looked at me and said this is what I have to deal with.


Source

I've also been reading accounts of how he was able to write and arrange so many songs without playing an instrument: he would hum every note of the chords, and sing all the parts.

From the same account:

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One morning MJ came in with a new song he had written overnight. We called in a guitar player, and Michael sang every note of every chord to him. "here's the first chord first note, second note, third note. Here's the second chord first note, second note, third note", etc., etc. We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance, live in the control room through an SM57.

He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills.


I was never a crazy fan of Michael Jackson...until lately, when I've been reading so many accounts from engineers and studio people recalling what they knew of him, what an incredible talent he was, and what a gentle person he was. I think his efforts to become someone else, resulting in that botched face, is pretty sad. But a lot of people prefer to point the finger and say freak...much like they do to Susan Boyle.

Was he weird? Yeah! But why is that offensive?

In my mind, he was a songwriter and a performer, one of the best ever. He was one of us.

http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman