Smokey Robinson found Michael Jackson alone in the theater at midnight. The theater was dark except for the stage lights Michael had asked someone to turn back on. He was practicing the same eight counts over and over. Smokey sat in the third row and watched for 20 minutes before Michael knew he was there.
The date was March 24th, 1983. The following evening at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 25 years of Motown Records would be celebrated in a television special that would be broadcast to 47 million people across America. The show had been organized around the label’s history, its artists, its catalog, its cultural significance.
Every major Motown act had been invited. Many had agreed. The audience would include people who had been part of the label’s story from its earliest days. Michael had been scheduled to perform two songs, a medley of Jackson 5 hits with his brothers, and Billie Jean, his own solo.
The song from Thriller that had been at number one for 7 weeks. What he had decided to do with Billie Jean, specifically what he planned to do in the breakdown section of the song, he had not told anyone in the production team. He had been working on it for weeks. Tonight, he was working on it alone in an empty theater at midnight.
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever was the largest celebration in the history of Motown Records, a television special organized to mark the 25th anniversary of a label that had changed the course of American popular music. Berry Gordy had founded Motown in 1959 with $800 borrowed from a family savings plan and a specific conviction that the music being made in Detroit’s black community, the gospel, the rhythm and blues, the specific quality of voices shaped by the church and the street, deserved production that would allow it to reach every ear everywhere. He had been right. By 1983, Motown’s catalog included some of the most significant recordings in the history of popular music. Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, The
Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson. A generation of artists who had defined what American popular music sounded like. The television special was designed to gather these artists together, to place them on a stage in a room, to recall and celebrate what had been built. For many of them, it was a homecoming.
For the viewers at home, it was the specific pleasure of watching people from your past look at each other across 25 years and still recognize what they shared. For Michael Jackson, it was something more specific than a homecoming. He had grown up inside Motown, had arrived at 11, and had been shaped by the label’s infrastructure, its production standards, its particular vision of what black excellence in popular music could look like.
He had been the youngest performing member of the Jackson 5, and had understood in the years since leaving Motown that what he had been given there, the training, the standards, the specific demanding vision of quality that Berry Gordy had applied to every record that left the building had been foundational.
He had not performed live on television in years. He had never performed Billie Jean live. This was the night he would change both of those things at once. Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson had a relationship that was built on the specific intimacy of Motown, the world where both of them had learned what they were.
Smokey had been at Motown almost from the beginning, had been one of Berry Gordy’s earliest artists and collaborators, had helped shape the label’s sound and its creative culture in the years before Michael arrived. He had known Michael since Michael was 11 years old. He had watched him develop inside the Motown system, had been in the building during the Jackson 5 sessions, had been present for the specific transformation of a gifted child into something that the building’s considerable experience with gifted people had never quite seen before. Smokey had a quality that the people who knew him well described consistently. The capacity to hold what he saw about people without needing to do anything with it. He watched. He understood. He did not, in most cases, offer what he understood unless he felt it was
specifically useful. He had watched Michael from the time Michael was 11. He had understood something about what Michael was, about the specific cost of being that thing, about the particular loneliness of a gift that operated at a scale that made ordinary human contact structurally difficult. He had understood it because it was not entirely foreign to him.
On the night of March 24th, Smokey had returned to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium at 11:30 to collect a jacket he had left in his dressing room after the afternoon rehearsal. He had walked through the stage door, nodded to the security staff, and was heading toward the dressing room corridor when he saw, through the stage door to the auditorium, that the stage was lit.
He stopped. He opened the door to the auditorium. He looked at the stage. He went in. What Michael was working on at midnight in an empty theater was the breakdown section of Billie Jean. The specific transition in the performance where, for 16 bars, the song created the space for something that was not singing.
He had been developing something for this space for several weeks. Not a dance routine in the conventional sense, not choreography designed to be visually impressive at a distance, something more specific. A vocabulary of movement built around the illusion of weight shifting without weight moving, of momentum without displacement.
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A language that the body could speak independent of the music, in dialogue with the beat rather than in service of it. The specific movement he was drilling, the one that the audience of 47 million people would see the following night, and that would be described in every subsequent account of that performance as the moonwalk, was not something he had invented from nothing.
He had been influenced by existing traditions of street dance, by specific techniques he had observed and absorbed over years of watching other performers, by the particular physical intelligence of a dancer who had been developing his body as an instrument since childhood. What he had done was take what he understood from those influences and find within it a specific movement, a backward glide that produced the visual effect of walking forward while moving backward, and develop it to the point where it looked effortless. The effortlessness was the result of the drilling. The drilling was what he was doing tonight. He did the eight counts. He stopped. He looked at his feet. He did them again. Twenty rows back in the dark, Smokey Robinson sat very still and watched. Smokey sat in the third row of the empty
auditorium for 20 minutes. He watched Michael drill the same sequence. Eight counts, stop, look at the feet, eight counts again. The repetition had the quality of a person who has a problem, a specific technical problem, and is solving it by doing the thing over and over until the solution becomes physical knowledge rather than conscious instruction, until the body knows it without the mind having to tell it.
What Smokey observed from the third row over those 20 minutes was the specific quality of preparation that he had seen in his years in the industry in only a small number of performers, the capacity for self-assessment without self-criticism, the ability to watch your own work clearly, to see what is not yet right without being derailed by the distance between the current version and the intended version.
The patience of someone who trusts the process because they have been through it enough times to know that repetition is not failure. It is the method. At some point, Smokey could not say exactly when, Michael looked up from his feed and looked out into the dark auditorium. He stood very still for a moment.
He said, “Smokey?” Smokey said, “Yeah.” He said it from the third row without moving in the quiet of the empty theater in the specific easy way of someone who has been found doing something they weren’t hiding. Michael looked at him for a moment. He said, “How long have you been there?” Smokey said, “A while.
” Michael said, “Did you see it?” Smokey said, “I saw it.” Smokey came down to the stage. He didn’t hurry. He came down on the aisle from the third row to the stage steps at the front, and Michael watched him come. And when Smokey was on the stage, they stood together in the single spotlight in the empty theater.
Smokey said, “I’ve been watching you for 20 years, since you were 11 years old. I have never seen you work like this.” Michael said, “I just want it to be right.” Smokey looked at him for a moment. He said something that people who knew Smokey Robinson well would have recognized as characteristic of him.
Something direct, something that cut to the quality of the thing rather than the surface of it. He said, “Do you know what you have?” Michael said, “I know I have something. I don’t know if I have it right yet.” Smokey said, “You have it. You’ve had it for a long time. What you’re doing tonight he gestured at the stage floor at the marks Michael had been drilling is not trying to find something.
It’s trying to be worthy of something you already have. Michael was quiet. Smokey said, “There’s a difference. Being worthy of it, that’s why you’re here at midnight. But you need to know the difference because when you walk out there tomorrow night you can’t be trying to find it. You have to already know you have it.
” Michael stood in the spotlight for a moment. He nodded. Smokey said, “Go home. Get some sleep. You have it.” Michael stayed on the stage for another 20 minutes after Smokey left. On the evening of March 25th, 1983 Michael Jackson walked onto the stage of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in front of a live audience and the cameras of a national television broadcast.
He performed the Jackson 5 medley with his brothers first. The return to the group, the celebration of the shared history, the specific pleasure of watching the family that had started it all still capable of the thing they had been doing since childhood. The audience responded with the warmth of recognition.
These were people they had grown up with, music they had grown up with. Then Michael walked out alone. He was wearing a black sequined jacket, black trousers, white socks, and a single white glove. He had rehearsed this outfit, this entrance, this moment many times. He had been rehearsing the movements for weeks.
He had been working on the eight counts at midnight the previous night. He said before the first note that he wanted to do something that would take him out of the realm of the Jackson 5 and establish who he was as a solo artist. He said it from the stage to the audience directly. The audience listened.
The music started. What happened in the next 4 minutes, the performance of Billie Jean that has been watched by more people than almost any other live performance in the history of popular music was not simply a good performance of a good song. It was a person arriving completely at what they were in front of the audience that could most understand what it meant when Michael executed the moonwalk in the breakdown section, the backward glide that looked like walking forward, the movement he had been drilling alone at midnight in an empty theater. The audience’s response was audible in a way that audience’s responses rarely are. Not as generalized noise, but as the sound of people recognizing something they had never seen before. The Motown 25 special aired on NBC on May 16th, 1983
to 47 million viewers. The response to Michael’s performance was immediate and historic. Within days, the television industry had received more mail about a single performance than it had received about any broadcast in recent memory. The specific movement, the moonwalk, was the subject of that response.
People trying to describe what they had seen, people trying to understand how it was possible, people trying to communicate the experience of watching something that looked like it shouldn’t work and watching it work completely. Michael Jackson was 24 years old. He had been performing in public for 13 years.
He had been building toward this moment, toward the complete arrival at what he was for all of those years. The moonwalk was not where his career began. It was the moment when the public understanding of what he was caught up with what he had always been. Smokey Robinson has spoken about Michael many times across the decades.
He has spoken with the specific authority of someone who knew him early and knew him well, who had watched him from 11 years old and had been present for moments that the public record does not contain. He has said, “Michael understood that performing was not about showing people something. It was about showing people themselves.
Every movement, every note, it was a mirror. He was always showing you something about what it means to be human, to feel deeply, to want something better.” He has said, “I saw him work for it the night before the night everyone else saw the result. That’s what I remember, not the moonwalk, the midnight before the moonwalk.
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