Afterwards, Michael pulled me to the side and says, ‘Kennedy, I gotta talk to you for a second. “Michael says, ‘Hey Rebbie! Hey Janet! You gotta hear this song Kennedy did.’ Every time we stopped the song, Michael called three more people down. “I performed it about eight or nine times,” he recalls. After bringing in a boombox with a demo cassette of the song, the nervous singer performed over the music. The fledgling songwriter went to the Jackson residence to show the family what he’d been recording. But the truth is more organic: Jackson was six years older than Rockwell, with the latter often spending his childhood days at the Jacksons’ home. “She would open her eyes, see my face and go, ‘Ahhhh!!!!'” (The prank inspired the lyrics “When I’m in the shower/I’m afraid to wash my hair/’Cause I might open my eyes/And find someone standing there.”)Įnlisting Jackson to sing the hook sounds like classic label maneuvering a way to help out the unknown artist with a heavyweight co-sign. “When she would take a shower, I would go up to the glass, wait until she was washing her hair and then press my face against the glass,” he says. He’d think back to his days as a kid looking out of his bedroom window and “seeing his neighbor sticking his head out the window trying to look up in our apartment.” While writing the song, he lived with a girl who was the recipient of many pranks. Inspiration came from both the past and the present. “The prayer was, ‘God grant me the creativity to write a song that’ll go to the top of the charts and tickle the taste buds of the music connoisseur.’ Everything came to me so easily after that prayer.” Over the next two days, Rockwell sat down on his bedroom floor and began writing “Somebody’s Watching Me,” with most of the studio version recorded during the first take. He dropped to his knees and decided, on a whim, to pray. Rockwell had written tracks before, but they were, as he put it, “mediocre at best.” He was frustrated. He was so busy with them that a lot of times he was not available for us as kids.” My father tried to teach us the love that the artists even had amongst themselves and his interactions with them. “But I wanted it to be a family affair because Motown has always been a family. “I never thought of it that way,” he says. Looking back on it now, Rockwell says he never considered using the Gordy name despite the doors it would open. One year later, Kennedy Gordy would take on the name Rockwell, enlist Michael Jackson and his brother Jermaine for background vocals and turn the song, now titled “Somebody’s Watching Me,” into an international and enduring smash hit that, more than 30 years later, remains the perennial paranoia-rock anthem and Halloween mix go-to song. Keep writing and you’ll come up with something one day.’ I was devastated.” That’s OK,'” Kennedy Gordy tells Rolling Stone. “He said something like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s alright. But after listening to his son’s demo, his reaction was less than exuberant. Gordy, of course, had hundreds of Number One songs to his name – either as producer, songwriter or label head – so he knew a hit when he heard one. Berry Gordy was in his Los Angeles mansion in 1982 when his son, 18-year-old Kennedy William Gordy, brought the Motown Records founder a pop-funk demo he had created on a tiny 4-track recorder in his one-bedroom Hollywood apartment.
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