“I thought Michael was superhuman when I first met him.”
That’s Gordon Keith talking. He was a record man in Gary, Indiana, the steel-mill town where the Jackson family lived in a tiny house. In the mid-1960s he and a few friends started their own small label there and called it Steeltown Records.
Keith kept seeing posters around Gary for a family band. He tracked down their phone number and called their dad, Joe. Soon he was at the house, watching the boys play. He couldn’t get over the littlest singer. “Besides being able to sing like a grown-up at that time, he really was superhuman,” he later told Chicago public radio.
On November 21, 1967, Joe Jackson signed the deal for his sons. Michael was 9 years old.
The boys made the trip to a small recording studio in South Chicago. Michael sang lead. His older brothers sang with him, and they had a teenage drummer named Johnny Jackson, who wasn’t related to them at all.
The song was called “Big Boy.” It came out on Steeltown on January 31, 1968, more than a year before Motown signed the group.
It was a small, homemade start. Legend has it the boys were paid about 3 cents for every copy sold, split six ways between the five brothers and their drummer. That story has never been fully confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Here’s what that first record actually looked like.
The original orange Steeltown record
Then it went on the radio. A station in Gary was reportedly the first to play it, and the family is said to have gathered around the radio to listen.
Chicago stations picked it up too, and “Big Boy” turned into a local hit around Chicago and Gary. By March 1968, a big New York company, Atlantic Records, had signed on to send it out across the country. It sold more than 10,000 copies.
So what did a 9-year-old Michael Jackson sound like on his very first record? Here it is.
The song 9-year-old Michael sang
“Big Boy” never made the national charts. But the boys kept playing shows wherever they could. In 1969 Motown signed them, and a few months later “I Want You Back” went all the way to No. 1.
The story of that little label didn’t end there. The master tapes of “Big Boy” were thought to be lost for years. In the 1990s, one of Steeltown’s old owners reportedly found them sitting in his kitchen pantry, and the song came out again.
Gordon Keith is still remembered as the first man ever to sign the Jackson 5 to a record deal.