Tito Jackson, the Jackson 5 guitarist whose name became a punchline, died the Sunday of a heart attack at age 70.
Tito knew standup comedians used his name for cheap laughs. “I’ve always been the quietest member of the group, so people make jokes about me,” he said in a 2018 interview. “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.” In truth, it was just his nickname – his given name was Toriano – that made him a target, typically cast as an unimportant supporting character. In reality, his rhythm guitar was a cornerstone of their live act, though Motown wouldn’t let him play on their records. That changed when the group left Motown and renamed themselves the Jacksons.
The group broke up after their 1984 Victory tour as Michael went solo. Jackie, Jermaine and Marlon all released records within a few years, but Tito went on a long hiatus from the industry, raising a family and stying active by playing with local musicians. He finally released a solo album in 2016, “Tito Time,” an R&B-focused affair that included a minor hit, “Get It Baby.”
In 2019 he changed direction with a blues LP, “Under Your Spell.” It was a return to his roots, he told an interviewer.
[P]rior 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.
