MJ (25 page)

The
Bad
world tour was set to kick off in September 1987 in Tokyo. It was to be Michael’s first solo tour ever, and he worried over the tiniest of details. Musical director Greg Phillinganes took on the laborious task of meeting with Michael, studying his dance moves, then translating them to the rest of the band.

Jennifer Batten, who’d been teaching at LA’s Musicians Institute,
competed against one hundred guitarists for the job. She had played “Beat It” regularly in a cover band, and during auditions, she nailed it. Batten was hardly a glam-rock queen and wore her hair conservatively.
“She’s unbelievable!” was Michael’s reaction upon taking in the audition. “But we’ve got to do something with her look.” Tour costumers gave Batten a makeover, and she emerged with bigger, spikier hair than any member of Mötley Crüe or Poison, plus a leather jacket festooned with patches and buttons. Once selected, the band rehearsed for a month before meeting MJ in person.
“He was just gorgeous to look at,” Batten says. “Very radiant and happy.”

Sheryl Crow, a singer from Kennett, Missouri, had moved to LA to make it in the music business and was working as a waitress at a combination French restaurant and jazz club. She showed up to the closed auditions uninvited.
“I guess they assumed that I had been recommended by Bruce Swedien or Quincy Jones and I sat in front of the cameras and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sheryl Crow and I would love to go on the road with you,’ ” she told Larry King years later. “And he called me back and I sang with three other singers and a few days later I was getting a passport to go to Japan and a month later I was onstage in front of seventy-five thousand people.” But some on the
Bad
tour remember her being more ambitious.
“She was really dedicated to working. When the musicians would take a break, she might be in the corner jumping rope or something,” says John Lobel, the tour’s lighting supplier. Crow was integrated into a quartet of backup singers Michael hoped to fashion into an update of Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires. At rehearsal, the quartet was going over “Billie Jean” when Michael cut it off.
“I want this,” he said, demonstrating his trademark pants and hiccups: “Billie
Jean
is not my lover
ah-ah-ah
.” Darryl Phinnessee, a backup singer, realized MJ had Bobby McFerrin in him in addition to everything else. “Not just the breaths, but the articulation of where to breathe, was part of his phrasing,” he recalls.

Michael was hands-on to the point of irritating his employees. After
spending twenty minutes with his backup singers, Michael told them,
“When you sing the first ‘Ooh!’ think of a nice, cool breeze ruffling the tree leaves.’ ” Allen Branton, one of the tour’s lighting designers, recalls:
“We’d rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and as we got closer to the end, we’d run the show two to three times a day, full-speed, costumes, pyro, the works.”

The first part of the
Bad
tour, in Japan, began with “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” The set list included Jackson brothers retreads like “Things I Do for You” and “This Place Hotel.” MJ spent all two hours of every show in constant motion. He moved what seemed like every part of his body, pointing, thrusting, posing, tap-dancing, moonwalking backward, forward, and side to side, and, of course, holding the famous pose in which he grabbed his crotch and thrust his shoulders upward. And everything happened fast.
“The vicious challenge was trying to get him to slow stuff down,” Phillinganes says. “He wanted to do everything at eight hundred miles per hour, because of his dancing. But he didn’t care. The crazy thing was, we did everything that fast without losing that groove.”

The Japanese tour set the tone for a new phase of Michaelmania—tickets cost $40, which grew to
$700 on the resale market. The tour would sell
4.4 million tickets and gross $125 million over sixteen months, the most ever for a concert tour at that time. Even better for Michael, while he received credit in the media for controlling every detail of the
show, DiLeo and tour manager Sal Bonafede, singer Neil Diamond’s right-hand man for years, tightly managed the budget. This was in sharp contrast to the Victory tour, where expenses only seemed to go in one unfortunate direction. Each show had a payroll of
$500,000, and MJ’s money people hewed closely to that number.

During the
Bad
tour, Michael’s inner traveling circle shrank to what he called the “B-Crew”—photographer Sam Emerson, DiLeo, makeup artist Karen Faye, and costume designer Michael Bush. It was a close-knit group and Michael seemed liberated from his family. “There wasn’t
the tension there of him not speaking to the brothers,” Emerson recalls. “It was just us.” But he began to sequester himself from the rest of the
Bad
musicians and dancers.
“During rehearsals, we all had access to him and there were plenty of breaks,” Batten says. “Once we were on the road, it was very separated.” The one hundred people in Michael’s entourage separated into three hotels, one for Michael and security, a second for performers, and a third for roadies. Occasionally, Michael invited the full group to dinner for American holidays or field trips at Tokyo Disneyland, after the park had closed to the public. When dancer Eddie Garcia went on
Space Mountain three times in a row and began to get sick, Michael laughed at him.

After Japan, Michael and company decamped to Pensacola, Florida, to overhaul the show with more
Bad
material, and, as a result, more of his solo identity. In the place of chestnuts such as “Lovely One” were “Man in the Mirror,” “Smooth Criminal,” and “Dirty Diana.” That meant more responsibility for Currell, the
Synclavier expert, who wore a Spaceman costume onstage decorated with keyboards and electronics. Currell looked goofy, but nobody in the audience knew his machines contained much of the DNA of Michael’s new songs, to the point that the musicians didn’t have to play on much of them. When Michael asked drummer Ricky Lawson to play a particular kind of hand clap, he dutifully responded, “Oh, yeah, I can do something like this.” Currell had to explain Michael wanted the exact hand-clap sound from
Bad
. Michael sometimes wanted his own backup vocals, as they had been recorded on
Bad
, and Currell had to explain to the backup singers that they would not be needed for the job. Few realized just how important Currell’s $1.5 million worth of onstage equipment was to the continuing health of the tour. Worried about being accused of fakery, Currell wouldn’t discuss the gear—which looked like giant refrigerators toward the back of the stage—with anyone other than MJ. Before a show in Italy, one of Currell’s engineers informed him that a roadie had dropped his $500,000 Synclavier, containing all the necessary sounds
of the show, off a truck. It took some deadline-pressure joint-soldering, but Currell’s technician fixed the device half an hour before showtime.

Michael brought in Vincent Paterson to rearrange the choreography to “Smooth Criminal,” “Beat It,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Thriller” in a way that resembled their classic videos. As the tour went along, Paterson and others on the crew realized they really didn’t need to add much—Michael was the star, and the rest of the show could be minimalistic.
“The beauty of watching that thing was, you see Michael Jackson without any of that shit around him,” Paterson says. “He doesn’t need the sets and the thirty-million-dollar rocket ship coming out of the sky.” Tom McPhillips, the set designer, had a similar epiphany after the Japanese shows. No longer did he believe the stage should look like the aftermath of an apocalypse.
“I just understood that I was designing a ballet,” he says. “It’s just really about the floor and perhaps a background. But there is nothing on the stage to distract you from the dance.” Not all Michael’s ideas worked. He had asked his lighting people to build a tower for him to climb up and point into the audience. Every time he waved, he decided, light would emerge from his fingers. Lobel, the lighting supplier, dutifully visited a naval surplus store in Long Beach, California, to buy a searchlight from a World War II ship. But once the tour started, Michael apparently forgot—he didn’t climb the tower at all. It became an inside joke among the crew. Finally, a tour carpenter replaced the light with a mop bucket. “Michael didn’t like it when he finally did climb up and found a mop bucket up there,” Lobel says.

The
Bad
tour, for the first time, was Michael Jackson’s vision—he pressed his handpicked dancers into his own choreography rather than negotiating moves with his brothers. He’d never had a stronger set list, beginning with “Startin’ Somethin’ ” and reeling off one theatrically staged megahit after another, from the colorful zoot-suit ensemble of “Smooth Criminal” to the werewolf and zombie masks of “Thriller.” To his meticulously designed costumes of sparkling red-and-white military-
style jackets and all-white jumpsuits, he added idiosyncratic fashion touches like tape on his fingers. He scrunched his face into an Elvis-style sneer, which matched his fierce new look, a long, curly mullet and a thinner and more angular nose. He was in constant motion, twirling, moonwalking, kicking, and strutting, but he’d learned a new trick, pointing and posing for seconds at a time to buy himself crucial moments of rest. He seemed determined to show off his singing voice, too, finishing the Motown medley with elaborate “I’ll Be There” moaning, scat-singing, and gospel-style speaking in tongues: “Don’t go now! Oh me! My gal! Don’t know me! Oh my! My gal! Eee-hee! Whoo!” He seemed to sing himself into exhaustion, barely able to pick himself off the floor—very James Brown. Then he leapt up—“I think I’m gonna rock!”—and strode into “Rock with You.” Batten and her gigantic platinum-blond hair, which took two and a half hours to tease into a massive Mohawk every night, became his most memorable foil, particularly on the solo for “Beat It” and the heavy-metal histrionics throughout “Dirty Diana.” The two chased each other around the stage, Michael kneeling at her feet and mimicking her improvisations with air guitar.
“I would use the tremolo bar to do these wild bends. The more dramatic and the more wild, the more he liked it,” Batten says. “We played off each other, really. I would feel his energy and it would make me want to take it certain places.” Sheryl Crow provided a different female energy, teasing her blond hair into an ultra-mullet and squeezing herself into tiny black skirts. Crow’s big duet with Michael, “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” displayed an offbeat sexual chemistry; they stood face-to-face, Michael thrusting into her and miming some kind of crotch massage as she touched his stomach.

On the
Bad
tour, Michael frequently entertained celebrity guests.
“Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Sophia Loren, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Diana Ross, Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, U2, Jeff Bridges, Dustin Hoffman, Donna Summer,” lists Rory Kaplan, the tour’s keyboardist. “It was like an event, every night.” Prince bought a hundred front-row seats for his entourage, including
stars of his own band such as percussionist Sheila E., and was spotted backstage, striding stoically, without a friendly word for anyone. The Victory tour had been a pain in the butt, what with the attorneys, managers, NFL owners, Don King, and the Jackson brothers. The
Bad
tour was fun.
“It was Michael’s absolute, complete, controlled vision,” Kaplan says. “What he wanted. Everyone he picked. How he wanted it presented.”

The flip side to this freedom was Michael’s personal judgment and decision-making skills, which were starting to become questionable as he began to feel the power of conducting one hundred employees in stadiums that held from seventy to a hundred thousand screaming, worshiping fans. Michael had been begging Jolie Levine, who had been a production coordinator for the
Bad
album, to join him on tour as a personal assistant. During the
Bad
recording process, Levine’s son, Yoshi, eight or nine at the time, had become one of the singer’s playmates for water-balloon fights and video games—
“the popular kid with Michael” at the time, as Levine remembers. Michael wanted Levine to be his assistant for the
Bad
tour, and called frequently to beg her to take the job. Finally, she agreed, hiring a live-in nanny to take care of Yoshi while she was gone. But once she made it to the road, Michael made it clear that she should not invite Yoshi to visit the tour at any point. MJ had another kid with him—Jimmy Safechuck
^VI
, another young companion Michael had been hanging out with at the time. “He didn’t want [Safechuck] to have to feel like he had to compete for Michael’s attention,” she says.

“I don’t think that’s a good way for kids to grow up. Traveling with Michael Jackson, it’s a whole different thing,” Levine continues. “It’s private planes and the gold treatment everywhere you go. Nobody says no to you. I didn’t think that was very good for him.”

Michael’s insistence on bringing children with him on the road was beginning to worry the people around him. One day in 1988, during the
Bad
tour in Japan, DiLeo walked into a meeting between Michael and Emerson, his photographer.
“I gotta talk to you, Mike,” the manager said.

“What about?”

“It’s about you having these boys out on tour. I think we have to stop.”

“Why?”

“Because one of these days, one of these boys is going to jump up and say something. One of these boys is going to make an allegation.”

“It’s just watching movies and kid stuff.”

“I know that, and you know that, but the public is going to believe the boys.”

“That’ll never happen.”

DiLeo backed down. He had no choice. But Michael’s friends and colleagues began to divide into two camps. One group believed MJ’s relationships with young boys were innocent fun. Michael had told the public numerous times he considered himself a grown-up Peter Pan who’d been denied a proper childhood. As an adult, he was making up for it. Kids were innocent. They didn’t judge. They didn’t care about celebrity. They played. Many who knew Michael recall the star walking into some party, mechanically glad-handing the grown-up guests, then cruising to the backyard to play with the children.
“When he met adults, they could never seem to get over the fact that he was Michael Jackson,” says Levine, his personal assistant. “But when he met kids, they were like, ‘Wow, you’re Michael Jackson!’ for fifteen minutes. Then it was like, ‘I’m going to kick your ass at video games.’ ”