By Chris Willman/Variety—
Tito Jackson, who along with brothers Michael, Jermaine, Jackie and Marlon was a founding member of the iconic family group the Jackson 5, died Sunday at age 70.
News of the death was first reported by Entertainment Tonight, which said word of Tito’s passing came from Steve Manning, a longtime friend and associate of the Jackson family. Manning told ET that he believed Tito suffered a heart attack while driving on a road trip, adding that the cause of death was officially undetermined. People magazine confirmed the news with Tito’s nephew, SIggy Jackson.
He had recently been performing with brothers Marlon and Jackie under the renewed aegis of the Jacksons, including a date as recently as one week ago in England. An L.A. audience saw a set by the Jacksons at the Fool in Love Festival at Hollywood Park on Aug. 31. Tito had also recorded and done many shows as a blues guitarist in the last 20 years, under his own banner or with the B.B. King Blues Band.
Tito Jackson played guitar, sang and, of course, danced his way into homes worldwide as the Jackson 5 became an international sensation in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with a string of smashes hits that included four straight No. 1 hits: “I Want You Back” in 1969 and “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” in 1970. “Dancing Machine,” released in 1974, did nearly as well, peaking at No. 2. During this initial burst of glory, young Michael was the primary focus of attention, but the chemistry and choreography of the less prominent brothers was an essential part of their success as a top act on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other TV variety series.
After a label change from Motown to Epic, and a name change from the Jackson 5 to the Jacksons —and the addition of Randy into the fold — the group further made it into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with “Enjoy Yourself” in 1976, “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” in 1979, and finally, in 1984, “State of Shock,” a collaboration with Mick Jagger that was more a Michael solo project than true group effort. The group’s Victory Tour hit stadiums in ’84, providing the brothers one final hurrah as a superstar act in their own right after the ascent of “Thriller” made it clear Michael’s full-time future was as a solo act. Michael left the Jacksons at the end of that tour, taking most of the attention with him, but different permutations of the family group continued to perform and record in intervals thereafter.
Tito was inducted with the rest of the Jackson 5 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Michael, who died in 2009, is the only member from the original lineup of five brothers to have preceded Tito in death.
Tito knew that, as one of the less prominently featured members of the family combo, his name was sometimes used as a punchline. “I’ve always been the quietest member of the group, so people make jokes about me,” he said in a 2018 interview with the Jitney. “One of my favorite basketball players, Charles Barkley, said, ‘If Tito wasn’t in the Jackson 5, would we miss him?’ That hit me in the heart. It crushed me.”
Initially, Tito’s guitar playing was limited to the Jackson 5’s live shows, as the brothers were not allowed by Motown to write or play instruments on their initial run of smashes. But Tito began to add his guitar parts to their recordings when the brothers broke with Motown and signed with Epic in the mid-’70s.
Tito was the last sibling from the original lineup to release a solo album — a moment that did not arrive until 2016, at which point he finally released his first record of his own, “Tito Time.” It demonstrated his interest in the blues, the form that Tito returned to and emphasized in the last part of his life.
“I got married at 18. I wanted to be around my three sons, so I didn’t pursue a solo career then,” Tito said, explaining his lack of a discography to the Jitney. “But this record “(‘Tito Time’), the first single I did with Big Daddy Kane (“Get It Baby”) did pretty good. The Alabama band plays it at halftime during their football games. Seeing the band and the cheerleaders dance to it was pretty enjoyable.”
In 2021, Tito released another blues-oriented album, “Under Your Spell,” and toured behind it. That recording included guests like Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Joe Bonamassa and his brother Marlon.
He told the Boise Beat in an interview at that time that the Jackson 5 had little-publicized blues origins, noting that he “started playing guitar and playing blues stuff before the brothers were even singing as a group. We had been doing some little harmonizing with our mom when she she was washing dishes and such. As far as having a band, the Jackson 5 or the three of us, we hadn’t organized it at that point. My father and my uncle would come over and I would jam with them.
“That’s basically how we started the Jackson 5; prior to going to the Motown sound we’d be playing a lot of blues sets. We’d include about five or six blues numbers every time we did a show. Once we made it to Motown, we didn’t do any more blues because we started having all these records and our audiences wasn’t a blues audience, so we wrote out our blues songs. We didn’t have that many, we would cover other artist’s songs. The only other time I got to play blues at that time and point is (if) there was an accident on stage (and) one of the other brothers were playing when the microphones went out. He hollered out, ‘Tito, play some blues!’ That hardly happened, but it happened a few times.”
Born on Oct. 15, 1953 in Gary, Indiana, Tito was the third child of Joe and Katherine Jackson. He started playing guitar at 10, and after his father caught him one day fooling around with one of his guitars, Joe bought him one of his own.
Tito encouraged his own three sons to go into the business. Taj, Taryll and TJ, his sons with wife Delores “Dee Dee” Jackson, formed the group 3T, with their father as their manager. 3T released a debut album, “Brotherhood,” co-produced by Michael Jackson and released via his MJJ Music label imprint, that was certified gold in several countries, including the U.K. Subsequent albums from 3T were released independently in 2004 and 2015.
Tito explained his own quiet return to music in a cover-story interview with Blues Blast magazine in 2021.
“I decided to take a little break after the Victory Tour, but the break lasted so-o- long, I couldn’t take it anymore! I wanted to play some music, and I wanted to be on stage again. I’d been playing the Jackson 5 stuff for all my life practically, but the blues had been the main music in my family. I just wanted to jam, but I couldn’t get no pros to do that kinda thing.
“I was livin’ in Oxnard, Calif., then. It’s not a huge city like L.A. So I started a little blues band with some of my buddies. Music was their secondary job though… the kinda guys that play the drums on the weekend and have regular jobs during the week. I could only do so much with these guys because I didn’t want to pull them from jobs and take them all away from the benefits they’d been building up for 15-20 years.” He said he played mostly weddings and church benefits for quite some time, before building up enough of a name as a blues musician to get gigs in Japan and France, on the way to finally recording his first album 11 years ago.
Tito told the publication he had been torn between R&B and the blues, so he first did the “Tito Time” album with more of a nod to the Jacksons’ classic styles — including the Big Daddy Kane collaboration. “I said I can always do blues because blues is a music that really doesn’t have an age. The older you are, probably, the more acceptable it is. But I decided: ‘I’m gonna do this “Jackson” album first.’ … But at the back of my mind, I wanted to do a blues album,” which turned out to be his second and final solo release, “Under Your Spell.” “My love really sits with that genre of music.”
Tito Jackson also served as a judge on the BBC celebrity singing competition show “Just the Two of Us,” and as executive producer of the reality series “The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty,” which tracked a reunion of the brothers.
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