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Michael Jackson rarely granted interviews but over his career he had sat down frequently enough with ABC News for anchor Charles Gibson to introduce an In the 1st Person montage of soundbites. "Being around, you know, everyday people and stuff I feel strange. They see me differently. They will not talk to me like they will the next door neighbor," was one clip. A later quote: "The thing I like most about being on stage is making people happy." As for his musical training, he recalled that his father "practiced us with a belt in his hand and if you missed a step…"
Quincy Jones, the producer of such hits as Off the Wall and Thriller, was interviewed by both CBS anchor Katie Couric and NBC anchor Brian Williams. To Williams, Jones called Jackson "a young man with an old soul…a victim, a very brilliant, genius, talented victim." The abiding mystery of Jackson for Jones was to "go to his house and I would always see pictures of blond blue-eyed kids, paintings all over the house. I never understood that." Talking to CBS' Couric, Jones recalled finding a Tommy Bailey song, She's Out of My Life, about a man's difficult relationship with his ex-wife. "I was saving it for Sinatra but I gave it to Michael. And every time Michael sang it he cried."
CBS' Couric also interviewed Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, who signed The Jackson 5. He remembered the audition where he saw a child "doing everything, James Brown steps, the splits, the movements and all of that. It was just so captivating--and when I heard his voice I thought the voice did not go so well with all the dances he was doing." So The Jackson 5 was given bubble gum to sing. Yet "he was a man beyond his years. When he did that song Who's Loving You? the Smokey Robinson song, he sounded like he had been living that song for fifty years."
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