Let’s see… My earliest memories: one of the first records my father ever bought for me was the Jacksons’ Victory. That world tour they did, with screaming fans passing out and needing to be hospitalized, so very much like when the Beatles first came to America – not that I could appreciate the comparison at the time, me being only about 9 or 10. Of course, I begged my parents to get tickets, but tickets were impossible to get. You’d have to have a persistence that my parents did not have.

It was okay, though, because my sister Lynne had all his records. Lynne was always super-protective of her record collection – how could she not be, with a little brother around? I remember she had a boxful of 45s she kept in her wardrobe, in addition to her 12-inches, and when she wasn’t around I’d sift through them and play the ones I liked on her stereo. She was first to get Thriller when it came out, of course, and I believe I eventually bought a copy on cassette a few years later, when I started to get an allowance and began building a music collection of my own.

I remember watching the Motown 25th Anniversary Special with the family, and seeing him moonwalk made me want to do it too. In fact, I’ve always had a secret desire to want to dance like him. In my sixth grade language arts class (do they still call it that these days?), I had a remarkable teacher named Stacey Brooks; I still miss her dearly. Anyway, she loved to do unusual, outside-the-box type projects that encouraged us to not only read, but to enjoy reading and to comprehend the things we read. One such project was to write a new set of lyrics to “Beat It” and make a new song called “Read It.” This would be accompanied by a “video,” of course (although I’m fairly sure she didn’t film anything). The class was divided into three groups, so we’d get three different versions of the song. In my group this one girl tried to teach me how to moonwalk, and I tried so hard to get it right. I practiced constantly! I wanted so bad to do it because MJ was the biggest thing on earth and if you were a kid in the early 80s, you knew all his songs, you saw all his videos, and you wanted to dance like him (or at least attempt to).

Oh, did someone say videos? I remember watching the world premiere of “Thriller” on Friday Night Videos (please tell me someone else remembers this show) and just marveling at it. Videos were still such a new thing back then; kids today don’t realize how popular the idea of music videos was back then – and to think that someone could turn a three-minute video into a fifteen-minute mini-film was a radical idea. And what a video! I don’t think I had seen John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London at that point; if I had, I probably would’ve made comparisons between the two. “Thriller” is more than a little dated in places now, but it still holds up. Indeed, the imagery in most of his videos has done much to solidify his iconic status. I remember not liking the song “Smooth Criminal” (at first; I like it now) but liking the video. Anyone remember the MJ arcade game which was directly inspired by that video? I played it, but in my mind it wasn’t quite the same.

As I got older, my musical tastes changed pretty drastically. I discovered classic rock and heavy metal, and moved away from Top 40 music (including hip hop, which was just beginning to take off), but I kept my MJ records and cassettes. Why wouldn’t I? That music was part of my childhood, and always would be.

Me being a kid, I never completely understood why MJ changed his looks so drastically from Off The Wall to Thriller. I’d hear disc jockeys make fun of him for his plastic surgery, but I suppose I must’ve chalked it up at the time to weird celebrity antics. It never mattered; the music was what always mattered. Of course, later on, it grew impossible to ignore, but I could still brush it off, especially since I had new music to listen to. The peculiar reports of his lifestyle habits became, like those of many celebrities, something to laugh at, but little more.

I’m not gonna go into the stuff about whether he molested kids or not. That’s all been bashed about to death in the media. I will say that if the kids in question had their say in public, it is entirely possible we’d get a very different side of the story.

No matter what you thought of him – and there’s no doubt that he was an immensely controversial figure; I wonder if anyone really understood the “real” him – the man was a legend.

And we will never see his like again.

(Let the record show that I was in the Cup O’ Joe cafe at the Lennox Mall in Columbus, Ohio, when I heard the news.)