It was August 18, 1981, and Madison Square Garden was full.
On stage were five brothers from Gary, Indiana — Michael, Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy Jackson — playing the final American date of their Triumph Tour. The show opened with “Can You Feel It,” the horns blasting, the lights flashing, and Michael Jackson, twenty-two years old, moving like nobody else on earth.
Nobody in the room knew it yet. But the tour they were watching was the end of something. Within a year, Michael would record Thriller, the best-selling album of all time, and the Jacksons would never tour together the same way again.
The tour was recorded. The best nights were pressed onto a double live album and released on November 11, 1981, as The Jacksons Live!. Forty-five years later, it remains the sound of a family group at the very top of its powers — captured just before everything changed.
This is the story of that album, and of that tour.
The Triumph Tour
The Jacksons’ Triumph Tour was a North American concert tour in the fall of 1981, supporting their 1980 album Triumph. It was the group’s first tour in several years, and it was built to be a spectacle: a full band, a horn section, lights, costume changes, and Michael Jackson at the center of it all.
The Jacksons Live! was culled from recordings made at five stops on the tour: July 8, 1981, at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis; July 22 at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta; August 13 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh; August 16 at the Providence Civic Center; and August 18 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
The album was produced by the Jacksons themselves and released by Epic Records on November 11, 1981. It ran 66 minutes and 33 seconds across two records — fourteen songs, from the opening fanfare of “Can You Feel It” to the eight-and-a-half-minute closer, “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).”
It sold more than two million copies worldwide. In the United States it was certified Gold, for more than a million copies shipped. It reached No. 30 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, No. 10 on the Top Black Albums chart, and No. 2 in Australia.
The Setlist: Three Eras in One Night
What makes The Jacksons Live! so fascinating is that its setlist tells the whole story of the group in a single evening.
The show opened with songs from Triumph (1980), the album the tour was named for: “Can You Feel It,” “Things I Do for You,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Lovely One,” and “Workin’ Day and Night.” These were the songs the brothers had written themselves, with full creative control for the first time — slick, funky, modern, and built for the stage.
Then came the songs from Destiny (1978), the album that had relaunched them at Epic: the title track’s spirit was there in the grooves, and the show reached back further still, into the Motown years.
The middle of the show was a medley of the hits that had made them famous as children: “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” “Got to Be There,” and “I’ll Be There.” Michael, who had sung those songs as an eleven-year-old, sang them now as a twenty-two-year-old man — with the same voice, and a completely different understanding of what they meant.
And then came five songs from Michael’s 1979 solo album Off the Wall: “Off the Wall,” “Rock with You,” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “She’s Out of My Life,” and “Ben.” It was the first sign, for anyone paying attention, that the center of gravity in the group had shifted. Michael’s solo career was no longer a side project. It was the future.
The album’s singles told the same story. “Things I Do for You” was released in the United Kingdom in November 1981. “Off the Wall” was released in Japan. “Workin’ Day and Night” followed in the United States in February 1982.
The Sound of a Family at Its Peak
The Jacksons Live! works because it captures what the Jacksons were best at: precision.
The brothers sang in harmonies they had been practicing since childhood, in a house in Gary, Indiana, under the direction of their father, Joe Jackson. Michael sang lead. Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy sang behind him, played their instruments, and moved in step.
The band behind them was superb. Jonathan Moffett played drums. David Williams played guitar. Bill Wolfer played keyboards. Mike McKinney played bass. The East Coast Horns — Alan “Funt” Prater, Broderick “Mac” McMorris, Cloris Grimes, and Wesley Phillips — gave the show its punch. Bill Schnee recorded and mixed the album. Lynn Goldsmith and Todd Gray took the photographs.
The critic Bruce Eder, writing for AllMusic, called the album “a reminder of how great an act they were, and captures what was just about the end of Michael’s work with the family group, all of it very much on a high-note.” He added that it was “worth tracking down as an artifact of a simpler, more unabashedly joyous time in music, as well as the family’s history.”
He was right. Listen to “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” as it closes the album — eight and a half minutes of funk, with the crowd shouting along — and you can hear a group that knows exactly who it is, and exactly what it can do.
Destiny and Triumph: The Albums Behind the Tour
The Triumph Tour was named for Triumph (1980), the Jacksons’ fourth Epic album and their second with full creative control. It sold a million copies and gave them the hits “Lovely One,” “This Place Hotel,” and “Can You Feel It” — all of which appear on the live album. It was the sound of a group that had finally learned to write and produce for itself.
The album before it, Destiny, released in December 1978, had done the same job first. Featuring “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” — written by Michael and Randy, and the group’s best-selling Epic single — it also sold more than a million copies and proved that the Jacksons, without Motown and without Jermaine, could still make hits.
The brothers were stars of television as well as records. In 1976 and 1977, they starred in their own CBS variety series, The Jacksons — the show that produced the publicity photographs used in this story. It was one of the first variety shows built around a Black family on American television.
In 1983, Jermaine reunited with the band for the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special. The following year, all six brothers recorded the Victory album and set out on the Victory Tour — the group’s final tour, and the last time Michael would ever tour with his brothers. Jackie Jackson, injured with a knee injury, only joined the tour for its second and final leg, after recovering.
The Triumph Tour, by contrast, had all five brothers, all night, every night. That is part of why the live album matters: it is the only full-length live record of the five-man Jacksons at their peak.
The End of an Era
The Triumph Tour would be the group’s last tour together for three years. While the brothers rested, Michael recorded and released Thriller in 1982 — and its singles dominated 1983 in a way no album ever had before, or has since.
The group reunited for one final tour, the Victory Tour, in 1984 — this time with Jermaine back in the fold, and with songs from Michael’s solo albums sharing the stage with the Jacksons’ own hits. It was their last tour ever. After it ended, Michael and Marlon left the group.
In 1988, Rolling Stone magazine named the Triumph Tour one of the best 25 tours between 1967 and 1987. It was a remarkable honor for a tour that lasted only a few months — and a sign of how good those nights in the summer of 1981 had been.
The Jacksons Live! is the record of those nights. It is not the group’s most famous album. It is not their best-selling. But it is the sound of five brothers, on stage together, at the moment just before the world changed around them — and just before the youngest of them became the most famous person on the planet.
The Jacksons: Five Brothers from Gary, Indiana
To understand the album, you have to understand the family — because no group in popular music ever sounded more like a family than this one.
The Jackson Brothers
The Jackson 5 was formed in Gary, Indiana, in 1964, and originally consisted of brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael. Their father, Joe Jackson, was their manager.
They performed in talent shows and clubs on the Chitlin’ Circuit and signed with Steeltown Records in 1967, releasing their first two singles there. In July 1968, they auditioned for Motown at the label’s headquarters in Detroit. Berry Gordy, who had at first refused to sign any more “kid acts” after Stevie Wonder, changed his mind when he saw them. On July 26, 1968, the boys signed their first contract. On March 11, 1969, they signed an exclusive seven-year deal.
Their debut album, Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5, was released in December 1969. Then came the run that made them famous: “I Want You Back” (1969), “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” and “I’ll Be There” (all 1970) — the first four singles by any group in history to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in a row. They scored seventeen Top 40 singles in five years, including six No. 1 hits on the rhythm and blues chart.
From Motown to Epic
By 1975, the Jackson 5 had sold more than 60 million records — and they wanted out of Motown. They were earning, they had learned, only 2.8 percent of royalties. They wanted creative control, and they wanted to be paid.
They left Motown for Epic Records in early 1976 — all except Jermaine, who stayed with Motown after marrying Hazel Gordy, Berry Gordy’s daughter. The youngest brother, Randy, replaced him. Because Motown owned the name “Jackson 5,” the group renamed itself the Jacksons.
They released four studio albums and one live album for Epic between 1976 and 1981. The Jacksons (1976), produced by Gamble & Huff, went gold. Goin’ Places followed. Then, with full creative control, they made Destiny in December 1978 — featuring “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” their best-selling Epic single — and Triumph in 1980, with “Lovely One,” “This Place Hotel,” and “Can You Feel It.” By 1979, the brothers had sold 90 million records.
The Peak — and What Came After
The Jackson 5 have sold more than 150 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling artists of all time. In 1980, the brothers were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the Jacksons. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Two of their recordings, “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” are among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, and alongside “I’ll Be There,” were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
After the Victory Tour in 1984, Michael and Marlon left the group. The four remaining members released the poorly received 2300 Jackson Street in 1989 before being dropped from Epic. In 2001, the Jacksons reunited for Michael’s 30th Anniversary Celebration television special. After Michael’s death in 2009, the four eldest brothers embarked on the Unity Tour in 2012.
The Album That Caught the Last Good Night
The Jacksons Live! sits at a strange place in the family’s story. It is the last document of the Jacksons as a working, touring band before Michael became something else entirely — before Thriller, before the glove, before the moonwalk became the most famous dance move on earth.
That is what makes it worth hearing, forty-five years later. Not because it is the best Jacksons album, but because it is the last one that sounds like a family.
Five brothers. Fourteen songs. One summer. And then the world changed.
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