Farrah, Sky, and Michael
I know people often bring up how the deaths of famous people seem to come up in threes, but today was ridiculous. And all three of the people who passed today were pop culture mile markers in my own lifetime.
Farrah Fawcett’s passing at 62 after battling cancer – and a mere day or two after it was announced that her and longtime partner Ryan McNeal were going to marry (they’d been a common-law couple for a couple of decades) – is a sad but not surprising passing. Her cancer battle had been public for some time; a network TV special on her cancer battle also served in part to cast more light on America’s desperately-overdue-for-an-overhaul health care system when part of that special depicted her seeing treatment in Europe for her cancer.
When I was younger, I used to watch Charlie’s Angels during its first-run status on ABC. If I recall correctly, Farrah only remained on Charlie’s Angels for their first season (her character did recur in a later season, but I’d stopped watching by then). Her famous poster from that period (said to have sold 12 million copies) has long become iconic, as is the hairstyle she popularized in the series. She also managed to strengthen her acting cred in her post-Angels career by appearing in roles that were a far cry from her TV character: most notably, the off-Broadway play Extremities (1982) and the anti-domestic abuse TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). Extremities in particular is cited as the role that gave Farrah serious credibility as a dramatic actress, making the choice to have her reprise the role for a 1986 motion picture a no-brainer.
The second passing of today was that of early garage-punk icon Sky Saxon, leader of the legendary 60’s rock group The Seeds, of “Pushing Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” fame. Both songs were minor Top 40 hits in their day, but both songs have gone on to be considered garage-punk classics, a designation that began when “Pushing Too Hard” was tapped to be one of the songs included on the now-classic compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, and both songs have been covered by many punk groups, including the Ramones and early California hardcore punks The Klan, in the 80’s and beyond.
Saxon himself, after being aligned for much of the 70’s with a religious sect/commune called the Source Family (their leader, Father Yod, is said to have given Sky the moniker Sunlight, which stuck almost permanently for the rest of his life), spent the rest of his career working both with various reformations of The Seeds and with other pickup groups. More recently, Saxon had collaborated with Billy Corgan on some new material and would later appear in the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Superchrist”. Saxon had recently moved to Austin, TX, initially after only intending to stay briefly for some performances. He had checked into an Austin hospital with a suspected infection of his internal organs, but succumbed to whatever was ailing him not long after being admitted. He was 63.
And then, there is the most shocking death of the three.
Earlier this evening, I had met up with my fiancée at her place of work on the pretense of going to dinner out of town when my BlackBerry went off with a text alert, specifically an SMS port of CNN’s breaking news Twitter feed: “Entertainer Michael Jackson was taken to UCLA Medical Center , a Los Angeles Fire Department official said.” Tara and I immediately hit the web via our smartphones, looking for more details than a 140-character post could give. Most sites at the time said he had suffered cardiac arrest. The initial site to announce that Jackson had died was the gossip site TMZ.com, which had me somewhat suspicious given the lack of faith I put in such sites’ accuracy. It wasn’t until MSNBC and the LA Times gave initial mainstream media confirmation of the story that the shock sunk in. (Ironically, CNN was one of the last to confirm the sad news.)
And then, the internet, apparently, slowed to a crawl. Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and AIM – the former two in particular already taxed with discussion of Farrah’s death and the continuing post-election chaos in Iran – all slowed down as people started to discuss the sudden death of the man that had been dubbed the “King of Pop”.
For all the eccentricities he has displayed over the years, all of the derogatory things that have been written about him by credibility-free periodicals like the National Enquirer and New York Post, and all the accusations that were hurled in his direction in the last decade and a half of his life, the impact of his music still remains strong. Growing up in the early 80’s, who didn’t own a copy of Thriller during that time? Who around that time didn’t sit down with their guitar and try to figure out the riff to “Beat It”?
And speaking of that song, how much of the divide between “white” hard rock and “black” R&B and funk started to crumble after Michael Jackson (and his right hand man at the time, Quincy Jones) tapped Eddie Van Halen to provide the guitar solo? Could the legendary collaborations between Aerosmith & Run-DMC (“Walk This Way”, 1986) and Anthrax & Public Enemy (“Bring The Noise”, 1992) have been possible without it? Could the Beastie Boys have gotten away with going from punk to rap to funk, and then to all three at once, without such a move as MJ and EVH on the same record? And what could have MTV have been without Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” videos breaking the color barrier? On a more personal note, given that I can personally recall the days when Michael was still the 11-year-old whiz kid fronting the Jackson 5, could that one night in the early 70’s when my parents woke me up around 11:30 at night so that I could watch the Jackson 5 on the Midnight Special, be the seed for my tendency to pull late nights of writing, music-making, and general just staying up late for much of my life?
Since I’m sure some people are going to ask, I don’t think Michael Jackson committed the acts of child sexual abuse he was accused of. I think Michael’s preference for hanging out with kids who were around the age he was when he first became famous, was his way of making up for the normal childhood that he never got to have. As far as I’m concerned, the two court cases that were brought against him were the result of greedy “parents” who figured they could make a quick buck off of turning Michael’s innocent hangouts into something more sinister, and a glory-hungry California district attorney’s desire to make an “example” out of MJ for his own political gain. If there is a hell, it awaits those people – not Michael Jackson.
And if there’s a heaven, Farrah Fawcett and Sky Saxon are probably looking at each other and wondering that the hell Michael Jackson is doing up there so soon.
“Weird Al” Yankovic, of all people (well, almost – he did have one of his first major hits by parodying Michael’s “Beat It” with “Eat It”) put it best in his own Twitter post: “Oh man. Can’t believe it. RIP Michael Jackson.”
