In the late 1970s, a 19-year-old Michael Jackson was hard at work at a small recording studio in San Fernando, California, where the Barron family worked. On a break he made friends with the studio family, asked a question nobody would expect from a star and then made their visiting grandmother’s day.
Sean Barron, the family’s son, never forgot it.
Years later Sean became a staff writer for The Vindicator, the newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio. On July 8, 2009, he wrote a column looking back on the day his family met Michael. Everything here comes from Sean’s own memory of that day.
The Barrons hadn’t been in California long. The family moved to San Fernando in March 1978, when Sean was 16, because his parents worked in the music business with the singer Maureen McGovern. You might remember her hit “The Morning After.”
His parents worked at a place called Dawnbreaker Studio. Several months after the move, Michael came in to work there.
He was mixing a song that would end up on “Off the Wall,” the 1979 album that became his first big grown-up record. Sean’s column doesn’t say which song it was, so we won’t guess. That’s a lot riding on one record for a 19-year-old. You’d forgive him for keeping his head down between sessions.
To hear what Michael sounded like in those days, here he is in a 1980 interview talking about “Off the Wall,” the album he was working on when he met the Barrons.
Michael talks about “Off the Wall” in a 1980 interview
At some point Michael took a break from mixing and came out of the studio. Sean recalls that Michael introduced himself.
Then came the question.
It wasn’t about records or show business. Sean recalls Michael asking: “Do you and your sister fight very often?”
Of all the things the biggest young star in the building could have asked, he wanted to know about brothers and sisters.
Sean answered. Then, as Sean remembers it, Michael admitted something about his own family. “My brothers and I fight, too,” Michael said. And then, with a sincere smile, he added, “sometimes.”
Anyone who grew up in a big family will understand that. Michael had plenty of brothers, the same ones who sang with him in the Jacksons. By his own account, they had their moments too.
But the visit had one more sweet moment, and this one was for Grandma.
Sean’s grandmother, Ruth Carty, happened to be in town. A Youngstown native, she was visiting from Sarasota, Florida. Michael agreed to stand next to her for a photo.
Any grandmother would show a picture like that to everybody she knows.
That’s the Michael that Sean Barron remembered. In the middle of making one of the biggest albums of his career, he chatted with a studio family like an old friend and made a visiting grandmother very happy.