20 years after the history world tour, Marcus wrote a letter he never intended to send. He wrote it to Michael Jackson, who had been dead for 11 years. He wrote it because his son Raphael, who had been in a wheelchair in the front row in Amsterdam in 1997, had asked him to. Raphael said, “Write down what happened that night before you forget any of it.
” Marcus said, “I will never forget any of it.” He wrote the letter anyway. He sat at the kitchen table in his apartment in Rotterdam on a Tuesday evening in the summer of 2020, and he wrote six pages by hand on notebook paper. He wrote what he remembered from the arena, from the corridor after the show, from the specific expression on his son’s face at the moment Michael Jackson knelt down in front of Raphael’s wheelchair.
When he finished, he folded the letter and put it in an envelope. He wrote on the outside, “Michael.” He did not send it anywhere. There was nowhere to send it. He gave it to Raphael. Raphael read it. Then he held it for a long time. Then he said, “This is the one.” He meant, “This is the story.
This is the one that needs to be told.” Marcus Dere had been raising Raphael alone since Raphael was 4 years old. Raphael’s mother had died of cancer in 1989, in the same year that a bicycle accident on the road outside their home in the Zha Idike neighborhood of Amsterdam had left Raphael with a spinal injury that the doctors had described carefully and correctly as permanent.
Raphael was four when his mother died and five when the doctors completed their assessment of his spine. Marcus was 31 and working the early morning shift at the freight terminal in the port of Amsterdam, earning enough to keep the apartment to cover the medical equipment to manage the specific logistics of a life organized around a wheelchair’s requirements.
What Marcus had was his son. What Raphael had was his father and from the age of six onward a cassette player with a single tape of Thriller that Marcus had found at a secondhand stall in the Albert Kip market for two gilders. Raphael had listened to that tape until the player ate it until the ribbon stretched and the sound warped and had then listened to the warped version until that broke too.
Michael Jackson was not a background presence in Raphael’s life. He was the organizing music of it. The voice that came from the speaker in the small Amsterdam bedroom was the voice that had accompanied Raphael through the years of physical therapy, the years of school, the years of learning what his body could and could not do, and making a life that operated within those limits without being defined by them.
In the spring of 1997, Marcus learned that the history world tour would stop in Amsterdam. He learned it from a notice in the newspaper and then from Raphael, who had learned it from a friend at school and had been talking about nothing else for a week. Marcus looked at the ticket prices.
He looked at the front row accessibility seating. He saved for three months. Getting to the Amsterdam Arena for the history tour show on July 5th, 1997 required specific logistics that Marcus had spent 2 weeks working through. The arena’s accessibility procedures, the transit from their apartment in the Zha Idike district, the question of what time they needed to leave to account for the additional time that accessibility requirements added to every journey.
Marcus had planned all of this with the thoroughess of a man who had been managing logistics for 12 years and who understood that for a family with a wheelchair, nothing can be improvised. They left the apartment at noon for a 7:30 show. They arrived at the arena 2 hours early.
The accessibility staff directed them to the front row accessibility section, a dedicated area at the barrier, directly in front of the stage with space for wheelchairs and their companions. Marcus positioned Raphael’s chair. He stood behind him. Raphael was 12 years old. He had never been to a concert. He had never been in a stadium.
He had never been in any space that large, with that many people with that quality of anticipation in the air. He sat in his chair at the front barrier and placed both palms flat on the barrier rail the way he had learned over years of living with limited sensation in his lower body to feel for vibration. The physical information that arrived through surfaces when it could not arrive through the conventional pathways.
The house lights went down. Raphael felt the change in the crowd before he saw it. Felt it as a wave of pressure, of movement, of the specific electricity of 60,000 people arriving simultaneously at the moment they had been waiting for. He looked at the stage. Then Michael walked out and the arena answered, “Michael Jackson.
In the history era, gold and black military jacket with metals and gold epolettes, black trousers with gold stripe, straight dark hair pulled back, performed the history tour show with the specific quality that had defined his live performances across his career. total consuming. The kind of presence that made 60,000 people feel simultaneously that they were being addressed personally and that they were part of something larger than themselves.
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The production was vast. The stage, the lighting rig, the set pieces designed to create the impression of an event that had arrived from somewhere outside the ordinary world. The show moved through its choreographed sequence with the precision of a large production that had been rehearsed to the point where precision and spontaneity became indistinguishable.
Raphael watched from his wheelchair at the front barrier. The bass frequencies arrived through the barrier rail into his palms and traveled up his arms. The music in a form he could feel as well as hear. the specific gift that front row proximity to a large PA system gives to a person who reads the world partly through vibration.
He watched Michael’s feet the way his father had described him watching Michael on the television, following the specific footwork, the visual language of a performer who had made his body into an instrument. At some point in the set, during a transition between songs, the brief window when the production moved from one sequence to the next, Michael moved to the front of the stage and scanned the front rows. He found Raphael.
After the show, the production followed its established sequence. The encore, the final bow, the lights coming down, the crowd beginning its slow movement toward the exits. Marcus began the process of navigating Raphael’s wheelchair through the dispersing crowd. The careful practiced movement that a person who manages a wheelchair in public spaces learns over time, reading the gaps, anticipating the movements of people who are not watching for you.
He had done this in many settings. He knew how to do it. A production assistant found them before they had moved 20 m from the accessibility section. He was a young Dutch man in a black crew shirt with a production lanyard, and he came through the dispersing crowd with the specific purpose of someone who has been told to find specific people and bring them somewhere. He said Marcus’s name.
He said, “We’d like you to come back with us.” Marcus looked at him. He said, “Why?” The production assistant said, “Michael asked.” They were taken through a production entrance, through the backstage infrastructure of a large touring show, the equipment cases, the cable runs, the staff moving with posttow purpose to a room at the end of a corridor where a production manager was waiting.
He greeted them. He asked them to wait. He left. Marcus and Raphael sat in the room and waited. Marcus did not know what to tell his son. He did not know what was coming. He stood behind Raphael’s wheelchair with his hands on the handles and they both waited in the room at the end of the corridor. The door opened.
Michael Jackson came through the door. He was still in his performance clothes, the gold and black history jacket, the stage costume fully intact, and he came into the room the way he came into rooms, without announcement, without the expectation of ceremony, directly toward the purpose of being there. He crossed the room to where Raphael sat in his wheelchair.
He crouched down so that he was at Raphael’s eye level. He looked at Raphael directly, not the way adults often look at children in wheelchairs with the careful, constructed sympathy that manages its own discomfort, but the direct present look of a person who has come to talk to someone specific and is giving that person his complete attention.
He said, “I saw you in the front row.” Raphael said, “I know.” Michael said, “I saw you feeling the barrier.” Raphael looked down at his hands. He said, “I feel it better that way.” Michael was quiet for a moment. He looked at Raphael’s hands. He looked at Raphael’s face. He said, “So do I.” He said it not as a performance of solidarity, not as the kind of statement a famous person makes to a fan to be kind.
He said it the way you say something when you recognize a truth in someone else’s experience that maps onto your own. When you find in another person’s description of how they perceive the world, a description of something you have been trying to articulate about your own relationship with music. Raphael looked at him.
He said, “It’s better than hearing it.” Michael thought about this. He said, “Hearing it is part of it. Feeling it is the rest.” Michael stayed in the room for 25 minutes. He talked with Raphael. He asked him about school, about Amsterdam, about the music he listened to. Not the broad performed interest of a celebrity speaking to a young fan, but the specific attentiveness of a person who is genuinely curious about who they are talking to.
He asked Raphael what he wanted to do when he grew up. Raphael said he wanted to make music. Michael said, “What kind?” Raphael said, “I don’t know yet. I want to figure out what kind of music feels like what I felt tonight through the barrier. Michael was quiet for a moment. He said, “That’s a better reason to make music than most people have.
” Toward the end of their time in the room, Michael said something to Raphael that Marcus has never repeated publicly. That belongs to Raphael and to the letter Marcus eventually wrote. What Marcus has said is that Michael said it directly to his son looking at him in the specific voice of someone saying something they mean rather than something they are performing.
Raphael listened. His face, Marcus said, was the face of a person receiving something they will carry for the rest of their life. Not dramatically, quietly. the way genuinely important things are received. Michael stood up. He shook Marcus’s hand. He said, “Your son knows something.
Don’t let anyone tell him what he knows doesn’t count.” Then he left. Marcus stood behind the wheelchair in the empty room for a moment. He looked at his son. Raphael was looking at his own hands in his lap. the same hands that had been on the barrier rail all evening. He was looking at them with a new expression, the expression of someone who has just been told that the way they receive the world is not a limitation but a language.
Raphael Dere grew up in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. He studied music production at the conservatory in the Hague, finishing in 2008. He has worked since then as a music producer and sound designer, building over 15 years a career organized around the specific question he had articulated at 12 years old in a backstage room in Amsterdam.
What music feels like through a surface, through a barrier, through the pathways the body uses when the conventional ones are not available. His work has been recognized in the Netherlands and internationally. He has spoken in interviews about his relationship with music, about his approach to sound design, about the specific way he thinks about the body’s relationship to audio frequency.
He has not in most of those interviews mentioned the backstage room in Amsterdam in 1997. Not because it didn’t matter, because it mattered in a way that he had not yet found the right form to express. In the summer of 2020, his father wrote six pages by hand at a kitchen table in Rotterdam and gave them to him in an envelope.
Raphael read the pages. He held them for a long time. He said, “This is the one.” He meant this is the form. This is how the story is told. He said to Marcus, “You remembered it right.” Marcus said, “I told you I would.” Subscribe if this story stayed with you. Leave a comment. Has a stranger ever said something to you that you’ve carried for the rest of your life? Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the way they experience the world is not a limitation.
