Most uncles show up for the big moments. Michael Jackson showed up for the small ones too.
His nephews Taj, Taryll and TJ are the three sons of Tito Jackson, Michael’s older brother. Taj was born in 1973, Taryll in 1975 and TJ, the baby of the group, in 1978. Together they’re the trio 3T, and in the mid-’90s their famous uncle was right there in their corner.
Here are the three brothers in December 1995, talking about Uncle Michael just a month after their first album came out.
Taj, Taryll and TJ talk about their uncle Michael in 1995
That album was “Brotherhood.” It came out on Nov. 7, 1995, on Michael’s own label, MJJ Music. Michael also served as an executive producer. A Virginia newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot, wrote in 1996 that “Michael Jackson has been involved with 3T’s musicmaking from the very start.”
TJ agrees. Years later, in a June 2022 interview with French author Brice Najar, he said Michael “helped pick a lot of the stuff from the visuals to the music.”
And he remembered one small thing that says a lot.
After the photo shoot for the album cover, there was a big pile of pictures of the three brothers in all kinds of different poses. Somebody had to choose. Michael picked up a pen.
“More specifically to the 3T time when we came out, there are images of all of our pictures from the album cover with different poses, and he would circle some of them meaning ‘This is the one’ or ‘This is great’,” TJ said.
That was it. A circle on a photo, and the decision was made.
“That’s how we chose our cover because whenever our uncle Michael said ‘This is the one’, we listened,” TJ said.
You can see the cover Michael’s circles helped choose right here, along with the music inside.
The “Brotherhood” album, with the cover the brothers picked
TJ admits he didn’t think much of it back then. “I didn’t even realize at the time that he was doing that but today, it shows you how involved he was in our career,” he said.
It sold well, too. “Brotherhood” reached No. 2 in France and No. 11 in Britain, and it sold about three million copies worldwide.
France is where it climbed highest, and this promo for their first single, “Anything,” shows the brothers launching the album there.
3T promoting “Anything” and “Brotherhood” in France
None of this was new for the boys. TJ says Michael had been letting them watch him work since they were kids, because “he would always bring us into sessions or video shoots.”
One of those trips started on an ordinary school day. “I remember going to the ‘Smooth Criminal’ video from a day of school. A car picked us up and we went to some place in L.A. like a bar,” TJ said.
He didn’t realize what he was watching. “I just thought I was seeing Uncle Michael work,” he said.
TJ has kept talking about those years as a grown man, and in this longer interview he looks back on his uncle, the “Brotherhood” era and life on tour with his brothers.
TJ Jackson looks back on Michael and the 3T years
When you think of the King of Pop, you probably think of the stage. TJ remembers a proud uncle with a pen and a stack of his nephews’ photos, and three boys who knew to listen when he circled one.