A moment to remember when Michael Jackson mattered as a singer and songwriter, and not the parody of himself he later became.

Do you remember where you were the first time you heard Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”?

I know I do. It was early evening in February 1983, on Saturday night in Chattanooga, TN. My best friend Mickey and I were doing what we always did on Saturday nights, cruising up and down the main drag and desperately searching for female companionship. Like always, Mickey’s custom-built stereo was cranked up almost as loud as it would go in his Ford truck, loud enough to hurt, loud enough to rip the windows down, and proclaim to the world “Hey! Look at us! Aren’t we so cool?” We weren’t, and in fact never were.

But that didn’t stop us from trying. The soundtrack to our lives was being built, one song at a time, on those Saturday nights, in that truck, on that street, jammed with traffic, but oh so lonely.

I was trying to get the attention of three girls in a red coupe that had just passed us in the left-hand lane, as we made our way between the two most popular nightspots in town, where we’d wheel through the parking lots, apparently hoping for a chance encounter with love. (Don’t laugh, it happened often enough.)

At that precise moment, with cold winter wind whipping through the open passenger window to the detriment of my carefully combed hair, the first seven chords of “Beat It” (and what song ever had a more recognizable intro?) cut the evening like an axe made of ice, chopping through the usual cruising score, and decapitating all that had come before.

“Oh man, listen to this!” Mickey exclaimed, diving for the volume control to eke a few extra decibels out of an already saturated soundstage. “There’s a solo by Eddie Van Halen in this Michael Jackson song!”

Now, I’d enjoyed earlier work by MJ. In the waning years of high school, fumbling attempts on the dance floor had been made to “Rock With You” and “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough”. My sister owned the album Off The Wall and played it dutifully, and I’d really liked Quincy Jones’ smooth production, but it wasn’t something I’d have purchased myself. Besides, I had an album I liked a lot better with “The Wall” in the title, and Pink Floyd were gods to me, then.

And here I was now, doing all that I could to project coolness incarnate, while my best friend was blasting out Michael Jackson beats to the street, the city, the world, and probably to points in near orbit.

The funky clean rhythm guitar began a pas de deux with a gritty distorted rhythm passage, which in turn started a counterpoint to a straight-on backbeat. Then Michael’s distinctive voice began firing out the lyrics like so many machine gun bullets, so different from his usual smooth delivery as to cause a disconnect, a moment where, tied to the out-of-character music, one had to ask oneself “This is Michael Jackson?”

And the words! “Don’t wanna see no blood, don’t be a macho man… you wanna be tough, better do what you can” hit home in too many places for a skinny young man out to prove himself, for whom confrontations of the kind examined in the song were all too common, fraught as they were with the dichotomy of the strong male stereotype and the desire not to end up in lots of tiny pieces at the hands of rivals, for whom a misfired glance or unguarded word was a red flag in front of an angry bull.

“No one wants to be defeated” the song says, and those words were never truer for me than on that cold night. A struggling young man with few prospects but vivid dreams, I bled those words every day. On yet another Saturday night, it seemed as if Jackson was speaking directly to me.

By the time the song had reached the guitar solo, Mickey and I were jamming on every frequency. As the Eddie-fueled fretwork reached its frenzied crescendo, something clicked, something turned over inside. In one of those moments that isn’t recognized until one looks back from a long perspective, sometimes many years, something changed in me.

I think it was for the better. I’m certainly a better man now than I was then, with many accomplishments I’ve come to regard as worthy of my skills and efforts. To credit all that to one song would be ridiculous, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have some effect, and you know what they say about butterflies in China.

Later, Jackson would become tabloid fodder, a parody of himself written large as can be written. But before that, at his peak, he still had the power to move, to change lives.

Recording artist J Smooth of Smooth Studios put it this way: “I remember as a teenager seeing a documentary about the Jackson family and how Michael started as a child and how he became a star. I don’t remember all the dirty details but knowing that he and his family had just as many complications as any other family, he still made it!”

Smooth’s penchant for understatement rings out – “making it in this case means selling more than 750 million records worldwide.

But the crux of Smooth’s point is this: “Being that I have had such a strong passion for creating music since I was a child, seeing him become one of the biggest stars in the music business has given me the courage and inspiration to follow through with my dreams.”

Because, after all, no one wants to be defeated.