Then, loud enough that the three Apollo Records executives at his table could hear it, and the arbitration clerk setting up the recording equipment could hear it, and the court reporter already typing could hear it, he said, “Gentlemen, the King of Pop has graced us with his presence. Now, perhaps we can settle the question of who actually writes his music.
” One of the executives smiled, another looked at his phone. Michael didn’t stop walking. He didn’t look toward Garrick’s table. He reached his chair, pulled it back, and sat down. He placed both hands flat on the table in front of him. Diana set her folders down beside him and opened the top one without looking up.
The arbitration clerk cleared his throat softly. Someone clicked a pen. Garrick sat down, still half smiling, and turned back to his legal pad. Harold Fenner, the arbitrator, arrived at exactly 9:00 and called the session to order. He was 63, gray-haired, with the manner of a man who considered himself fair-minded while not being especially motivated to prove it.
He had worked with Garrick’s firm on four previous cases. Diana knew this going in. Garrick’s opening was efficient and confident. Apollo Records, he explained, had come into possession of documented evidence suggesting that the primary melodic motif in Billie Jean and five related compositions from the same period had originated with one Raymond Holloway, a Chicago-born jazz pianist who had worked out of Gary, Indiana, for most of his professional life and died in 1981.
Holloway had, in the late 1970s, served as an informal musical mentor to a young Michael Jackson. Apollo’s position was that the melody had been developed during those sessions and that proper attribution and compensation had never followed. Garrick said the words proper attribution with the careful emphasis of someone who understood that those two words, arranged in the right sentence, did a particular kind of damage regardless of what came after them.
Diana wrote one word on her legal pad and underlined it twice. Wait. Raymond Holloway had been born in 1921 on the South Side of Chicago. He learned piano by listening through a shared wall, pressing his ear against the plaster on cold evenings, and memorizing what he heard. He was the kind of musician other musicians knew about and the general public didn’t.
One of the ones who hold parts of a tradition that never make it to the radio, but never disappear either. He moved to Gary in 1962 and opened a small music school in a building that had been a dry goods store. He charged very little, sometimes nothing. Joe Jackson had brought his boys to Holloway’s school for roughly 18 months in the late 1970s when the Jackson 5’s original run had wound down and Michael was doing the work that would become Off the Wall and then Thriller.
Holloway was in his late 50s by then. He and Michael worked together alone a handful of times, separate from the group lessons, with no contract, nothing documented. Holloway didn’t operate that way. He operated on time and trust and the understanding that music didn’t belong to anyone who hadn’t actually made it.
He died in 1981. His music school was still running. His sister Dorothy had kept it going for 12 years after his death, quietly with contributions from former students and once an anonymous check that covered a full year’s rent. Nobody in the room except Michael knew where that check had come from. Dorothy Holloway was 74 years old and had taken a bus from Gary the previous evening.
She sat in the gallery three rows back next to her oldest friend Gloria Reed who had driven from Pasadena at 5:30 that morning so Dorothy wouldn’t have to sit alone. Dorothy wore a dark blue coat and kept her hands folded in her lap. She had a small brooch that Ray had given her decades ago shaped like a quarter note.
She touched it sometimes without noticing. In the back row, a 28-year-old man named Calvin Webb sat with a canvas bag on his lap and one hand pressed flat against the outside of it. He was a recording engineer out of Inglewood. He had never been in an arbitration hearing before. Calvin’s grandmother had been one of Holloway’s earliest students.
After Holloway died, a wooden crate of his belongings had come to her. Sheet music, a tuning fork, three magnetic tape reels. She kept them on a shelf for years without playing them. When Calvin was 22, he borrowed a tape machine from the studio and played them. The first two reels were practice recordings, Holloway working alone, talking quietly to himself the way musicians do in empty rooms.
The third was different. A session, two voices, the second one younger, familiar enough that Calvin had sat completely still for a long time after recognizing it. They worked through something together, a melodic figure that surfaced and disappeared and returned and changed and came back again. And then Holloway stopped and said clearly, “Michael, that melody is yours.
I helped you hear it, but you wrote it. Don’t ever let anyone take that from you.” Calvin had held the tape in his hands for a while after it ended. He called Diana Parks’ office 4 days ago. Garrick’s case moved through the morning with the smooth momentum of something rehearsed until the uncertainty has been removed.
He called two witnesses, a musicologist and a former colleague of Holloway’s, who testified that the melodic language in question was consistent with Holloway’s compositional style. He introduced two exhibits. Fenner sustained his objections and overruled Diana’s with the mild efficiency of a man clearing a desk. During cross-examination of the musicologist, Diana asked three questions, received three carefully constructed non-answers, and sat back down.
She wrote something on her pad and set the pen beside it. Michael sat with both hands on the table and watched. Garrick stood for his redirect and said pleasantly, “Mr. Jackson, you’ve maintained throughout that Billie Jean originated entirely with you. Is that correct?” “Yes,” Michael said. It was the first word he had spoken since the session opened.
“And the only evidence you can offer this proceeding of that fact is your own testimony?” Diana said, “Objection.” Fenner said, “Overruled.” Michael said, “For now.” Garrick looked at him for a moment, then he smiled and said nothing further. Diana asked Fenner for 10 minutes. He gave her five.
She walked to the back of the room and sat down next to Calvin. She kept her voice low. “Now,” she said, Calvin unzipped the bag. He took out the tape reel carefully, the way you handle something you’ve been keeping safe for a long time. Diana took it from him with both hands and walked to the front of the room. She set it on the table in front of Fenner.
