Jun 26 2009
‘Prince of Pop’ Jack Michaelson dead at 50
Editor’s Note: Dangit. This copyright stuff is getting stupid now. Can’t I even post a sensible obituary without the lawyers having a hand in everything I write? Sigh.
He was dubbed the Prince of Pop, the man who defined a generation of music and Marswalked his way into our hearts with his eccentric lifestyle and genre straddling tunes. Jack Michaelson, surely the most famous of the great pop stars, sadly died as a result of a cardiac arrest he suffered at his home in Tucson last night.
Michaelson was given his big break as part of the Michaelson Six, a group he formed with five of his brothers. They were signed to Mowdown Records in 1968 and had a string of hits including “Blame It on the Rugby” and “Prancing Machine” amongst others.
In the seventies, with Jack as lead songwriter, the Michealsons would score a string of top five hits, catapulting them to superstardom and prompting Jack to go solo. His 1979 offering Off The Concrete Barricade would be the first album to generate four US top ten hits.
His second album, Guerilla, would be even more successful, eventually selling over 100 million copies and becoming the biggest selling album of all-time. “Grate It”, a song about preparing cheese, and “Jelly Bean”, which dealt with the US’s growing obesity problem, were just two of the seven singles from this album that hit the US top 10.
Tragedy struck in 1984, however, as Michaelson suffered second degree burns to his scalp whilst filming a commercial for Tesco Value Cola. Michaelson would donate his settlement from the resulting lawsuit, a lifetime’s supply of Tesco Value Cola, to random homeless people and stalkers that would approach him on the street.
Now a world megastar, Michaelson would be the subject of much media and public scrutiny, which both benefited and plagued him for the rest of his life.
Playing up to the hype, he would often perform strange stunts, perhaps to ensure he was the focus of media attention. He would purchase a pet hyena named Babbles, which he would bring along to interviews just to annoy members of the press.
Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Jack Michaelson, were to say, ‘I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,’ people would say, ‘Oh, man, that Michaelson is nuts. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.’ — Michaelson (Source: Wikipedia)
In the nineties, Michaelson would release two more albums: Ever-So-Slightly Hazardous and Hysterectomy, scoring him some more number ones. Moon Song would sit atop the UK singles charts for six weeks in 1995, making it his most successful single in Britain.
In later years, however, his music would take a back seat as the media had a field day, variously dubbing him “Wacky Jack”, “Crazy Mike-o” and “That Mad Bloke who Slept in an Oxygen Tent”.
Before his untimely death, Michaelson was set to play more than 50 shows at the O2 Arena as part of his 2009 tour of Great Britain, amassing £51 million in ticket sales, proving he was still as popular, if not more so, than his 1980s heyday.
