news-record.com

Michael Jackson and Greensboro

Here’s another reason to appreciate the Greensboro Coliseum:

As we paid tribute to the late pop icon Michael Jackson last week, we couldn’t help noticing that he appeared with his brothers at the coliseum no less than six times, beginning on Dec. 28, 1970.

They also performed in Greensboro on Aug. 6, 1971; July 9, 1972; Aug. 7, 1973; March 26, 1977; and June 10, 1979.

If you were lucky enough to get a ticket, you had a chance, right here, to see Jackson mature as a performer before your eyes.

At age 13, Jackson even granted an interview to the Greensboro Daily News, in which he expressed his fondness for a pet boa constrictor named “Crusher.”

Incidentally, the Jacksons set a coliseum attendance record (12,500) in 1970 and tied it in 1971.

Until some guy named Elvis broke it in April 1972.

Jackson and Elvis are related in other ways.

Jackson briefly was married to Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie.

And both created distinct, eccentric personas and struggled under the weight of their stardom.

“I think people are rightly calling him the black Elvis,” Greensboro resident Parke Puterbaugh, former senior editor for the rock music bible, Rolling Stone, said Friday.

As Puterbaugh sees it, the iconic performer’s death is one of the three most significant losses in contemporary music, ranking with those of Presley and John Lennon.

And Puterbaugh says he suspects the cause of Jackson’s death will turn out to be the same, a heart attack induced by prescription drug misuse – just as it was with Elvis.

Puterbaugh says some of the blame also needs to go to our obsession with celebrity.

“Celebrity is often a kind of an illness visited upon people,” he said.

“It’s like the way metamorphic rock is created – by heat and pressure.”