Posts Tagged ‘Latoya Jackson’

By Joe Klein

There has been a whole lot of hoopla over the last couple months about the existence of so-called “lost” Michael Jackson songs or recordings. One of the biggest and widely-circulated rumors was that Michael’s sister Latoya Jackson had “smuggled out” a hundred or more recordings contained on hard drives, CD’s or cassettes from the mansion rented by the King Of Pop in the hours following his sudden and unexpected death. LaToya denied this allegation in an interview with Barbara Walters that aired last week on ABC’s 20/20 telecast.

Almost immediately following Michael’s passing in June, the lust for songs and anything and everything recorded by Michael Jackson has been building, almost to a frenzy not seen since the glory years of MJ in the late eighties and early nineties. A frantic search has been on for new, undiscovered or otherwise “lost” material.

Besides all the gossip surrounding Latoya, rumors have also been circulating of the existence of a library of unreleased material at Epic Records, the label that Michael Jackson and The Jacksons recorded for following their departure from Motown Records in the mid-eighties. However, until now, there has been little buzz about the existence of “lost tracks” of Michael or the Jackson 5 in the most obvious “lost and found” department of all, the vaults of Motown, Berry Gordy’s storied Detroit label where their fabled and historic careers began.

The day after the MTV Video Music Awards played homage to MJ, we posted a story online that broke the news about a cache of early recordings of Michael and the his brothers had been found! We released a second story the following day.

Apparently the old multi-track analog master tapes, which are early recordings of the Jackson 5 with a pre-teen Michael Jackson singing lead vocals, were uncovered at some point over the summer and converted to digital audio data. At the end of August, Harry Weinger, a senior executive at Universal Music Enterprises (who markets the old Motown catalog product) contacted my old friend Russ Terrana, the highly respected and gifted engineer who mixed and recorded most the early Jackson 5 and Micahel Jackson Motown hits. Weinger asked Terrana if he would be interested in digitally mixing several newly-discovered Jackson 5 songs, and Russ jumped at the chance.

I posted the story here on our company’s blog just after the second breaking news story appeared online. I was thrilled for Russ when I first learned of the project back at the end of August and asked if I could blog about it. I was even more excited to break the story to the world and help get Russ some newly found attention and much-deserved recognition for the mountain of success and accomplishments he’s achieved over the years, plus his unquestionable contribution to the history of recorded pop music.

Terrana is currently mixing down eleven songs never before released in a small facility in Scots Valley, California called ROCKER STUDIOS, owned by a good friend of Russ’ named Rick Vierra. Russ hopes to have the mixes done at some point over the next week or two. Meanwhile, Weinger told Russ that UME is planning to release the tracks as a “new” Jackson 5 album in November, just in time for the holiday buying season, and this seems consistent with another story that appeared online just after our first story broke. This item reports that the new collection will be called “I Want You Back” (a pretty good, an appropriate title for the package) and that UME has scheduled a release date of November 10 for the new album! This seems consistent with what Weinger told Russ a couple weeks ago.

As far as the existence of more “hidden gems,” nothing further has been confirmed at this point. But there’s little doubt the rumors, speculation and reports of more discoveries of MJ and J5 material will continue for some time, and the story of “lost tracks” of Michael Jackson will go on for months, if not years, to come.

The story about the first confirmed “find” of “lost tracks” featuring Michael Jackson is sure to build excitement to fans the world over and is already starting to create a stir among fans of the King Of Pop and his storied family as it starts circulating around the net. The first story we published online is here and our follow up story, released a day later, can be found here.