Michael Jackson topped the Billboard Hot 100 13 times as a solo artist. His first No. 1 hit was probably his most interesting.
“Ben” sounds like a tender ballad about friendship. But it was written for a movie of the same name about a young boy who befriends a killer rat.
“I just hate everyday love songs,” Jackson told rock journalist Timothy White. “I want a brand-new thought. That’s what I love about ‘Ben.’ There’s a mystery to it. You wonder, “What is this about?”’
Donny Osmond said Don Black and Walter Scharf wrote “Ben” for him. But Osmond was on tour at the time.
“Mike and I just laughed about that all the time, how fate could have been a little bit different, that would have been my song,” Osmond told Broadway World. “But the thing that made us crack up is that I had a hit about a puppy and he had a hit about a rat.”
Osmond eventually recorded “Ben” for his 2015 album, The Soundtrack of My Life.
“Ben” was released July 12, 1972, and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Oct. 14. It won the Golden Globe for best song from a movie and earned an Oscar nomination.
In a 1972 review for Rolling Stone, Vince Aletti said the song was “a little too thick.” But he praised Jackson’s singing and how one passage “still makes me tear up.”
Jackson returned to the top of the charts with 1979’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” on his way to becoming one of the most successful artists of all time.
But he never forgot his first No. 1 hit.
“‘Ben’ meant a lot to me,” Jackson wrote in his memoir “Moonwalk” as quoted by Motown. “Nothing had ever excited me as much as going to the studio to put my voice on film. I had a great time.”
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