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spot on you he saw, he could blow that up and throw it back at you. Say if your socks smelled bad. Then he would get on you about your socks,” Rancifer recalls. “If you came around and you had some eyeglasses on that looked real funny, he’d say, ‘Oh, God, you got microscopes on!’ ”
    TheApollo Theater, on 125th Street in Harlem, had a distinctive kind of legend. It was in a lively part of town, the street corners jammed with moaning brakes and honking horns, storefronts packed with jukeboxes blaring Ray Charles and Dionne Warwick, and people yelling from shoe-shine parlors, restaurants, and appliance stores. Underneath the Apollo’s purple vertical neon sign, stars such as Sammy Davis Jr.and Jackie Robinson could be spotted chatting with box-office staff and managers about securing front-row seats.
    The Jacksons had killed at the Apollo in 1968, winning the Superdog talent contest, and had been gathering strength and skills on the circuit, but the Stairsteps were the hotter group. They had a two -year-old singer, Cubie. They did not, however, have Michael Jackson, who was absorbing technical information from superior singers and dancers at an alarmingly fast rate.“I carefully watched all the stars because I wanted to learn as much as I could,” he would say. “I’d stare at their feet, the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it.” He was always looking for mentors. Feeling isolated from his brothers, who were older and able to wander the streets, and not being able to connect with his father, Michael spent most of his time in those days standing behind dusty stage curtains. Headlining a different night at the Apollo inMay 1968, blues singer Etta James said Michael freaked her out by watching her set so intently. She told him to scat, and he ran away, wide-eyed, but returned ten minutes later to the same spot. Later, Joe made Michael apologize, and the gruff, hard-living diva was so charmed by Michael’s sincerity that she wound up giving him advice while he sat on her lap.“I don’t remember what I told him,” she said, “but I remember thinking, as he was leaving, ‘Now there’s a boy who wants to learn from the best, so one day he’s gonna be the best.’ ”
    It wasn’t only Michael Jackson who was learning from the best. Every chitlin circuit band was stealing from other acts in those days. Motown’s Temptations actually derived the famous Temptation Walk (“. . . put your right foot down, start walking all around”) from a doo-wop group called the Vibrations. Best known for “Peanut Butter” and “The Watusi,” the Vibrations did fast steps and splits and ran and jumped in the aisles. Carl Fisher, the Vibrations’ front man, occasionally noticed the Tempts’ Paul Williams watching intently from backstage. Not long after that, Williams’s band would be onstage doing oneof the same steps. Trained by television, mentored by Chicago studio pros, exposed firsthand to Jackie Wilson and the Temptations, Michael used these chitlin circuit stages as a master dance class.
    “Everybody was ranting and raving about how great the Five Stairsteps were,” recalls Teddy Young, drummer in R&B star Joe Simon’s band, which headlined one night with the Jacksons and the Stairsteps. “So the Jacksons came on. Nobody knew who they were. They did their set the first night. The second night. Then Michael kept asking: ‘How’d Jackie Wilson do that dance, and that quick turn he do?’ He kept asking, kept asking. Joe Simon is not known for dancing, but Joe actually showed him, while we were rehearsing, before showtime, how to pivot that little turn.” By the end of those Apollo dates, Michael was fluent in both James Brown and Jackie Wilson. “Right there, at the Apollo, Michael and the Jackson 5 took the torch from the Five Stairsteps,” Young recalls.
    Word spread about the Jackson 5. Motown star Gladys