This is the Statt Mann Baby!!  Time to Scatt a little bit.

The Michael Jackson story is with us forever.  Whatever we learn about the ultimate reasons for his death, they’ll be painful.  The world of creativity is smaller because his brilliance is gone.

I’m sure you have a Michael Jackson or Jackson 5 story.  We all do at some level.  And there’s even one motorsports connection – one racing chapter – in the Michael Jackson story.

Check back through the records and you’ll see the name Bob West among the writers of “I’ll be There,” the third number one hit by the Jackson 5.

“I’ll Be There” was dropped in 1970 then redone by Mariah Carey in 1992.

Bob West was a bass player and producer at Motown, the original Motown in Detroit.  He was also an SCCA driver who drove a Mustang in the Trans-Am and a Ford powered Lotus in the Formula 5000 series.  He also had a super bad Camaro he raced in the SCCA, a Camaro he found and tried to bring back to life a couple years ago, maybe with the money from Mariah Carey’s remake.

There’s a lot more to Bob’s story but in this venue, let it go at this: he put some words in Michael Jackson’s Jackson 5 history and went racing with the residue.

Man that was a long time ago…

Peace.