It sat at 2300 Jackson Street, and it was home to a big family. When the brothers practiced, their neighbors would crowd around the little house, looking and listening through the windows.

Those neighbors were hearing something special. In 1967, when Michael was eight, the boys signed with a small record label in Gary. A year later they signed with Motown, and in 1969 the family packed up and left Indiana behind.

What happened next was hard to believe. The Jackson 5’s first four singles all went to No. 1. Songs like “I Want You Back” and “ABC” were on every radio in America, and the little boy out front with the big voice was suddenly one of the most famous kids in the country.

So in 1971, two years after they’d left, the brothers went back to Indiana.

TV network ABC built a whole special around the trip and called it “Goin’ Back to Indiana.” It aired on September 16, 1971. There were studio songs, guest stars and silly comedy bits, including a pickup basketball game with NBA legends Bill Russell and Elgin Baylor. But the heart of the show was the homecoming concert, filmed in front of a sold-out Indiana crowd.

Michael was 12 years old. Here are the boys on that homecoming stage.

Michael and his brothers at their 1971 homecoming concert

That’s the Jackson 5 at full speed, with Michael leading his brothers through the hits. The special and the album that came with it used about half of that concert. The album went on to sell more than 2.6 million copies around the world.

Now for the part most viewers never knew.

The special was built around the idea of the boys coming home, and it played like a Gary show. But the sold-out concert in it wasn’t filmed in Gary at all. It was shot on May 29, 1971, at the Coliseum in Indianapolis, about 150 miles away from that little house on Jackson Street.

Gary didn’t miss out, though. Earlier that same year, the brothers did go home. They put on a concert at West Side High School in their old hometown, for the people who knew them before anyone else did.

When Marlon and Jackie went back to Gary in 2020, Marlon said seeing the old house and the sidewalks he used to walk brought the memories rushing back. And the neighbors who once leaned in by those windows could always say they heard the Jackson 5 first.

On his Dangerous tour in 1992 and 1993, he didn’t walk out at all. A machine hidden under the stage shot him straight up through the floor and several feet into the air. He landed on his feet just as fireworks went off around him. That’s how Michael’s own official account describes it.

It was a huge tour. Michael played 69 concerts on it and sang for more than 3.5 million fans, and that flying entrance was how he opened the show.

One of the most famous nights of that tour came on October 1, 1992, in Bucharest, Romania. The stadium was sold out. Cameras were rolling too, because the whole show was being filmed for TV.

Here’s that entrance, put together from the concert footage.

Michael comes up through the stage in Bucharest

One second the stage was empty. The next, there he was in a sparkling jacket and dark glasses, standing in the smoke.

That night went out on HBO in America and on TV all over the world. It became the highest-rated special HBO had ever aired at that point. Years later the concert came out on DVD, so fans could watch the entrance again and again.

If you’d like to see the whole night, Michael’s official channel has the full Bucharest concert. The show opens with that same flying entrance.

The full Bucharest concert from Michael’s official channel

So what was that machine called?

Stage crews call it “the toaster.” Yes, like the one on your kitchen counter. According to the stage company PRG, Michael’s Dangerous tour was the first time this kind of lift was used. Today you’ll find toasters in theaters, on TV and at concerts.

When Broadway put Michael’s story on stage in “MJ: The Musical,” PRG built a brand-new toaster just for it, so the actor playing Michael could make the same entrance he made back in 1992.

That’s how the man who wrote “Never Can Say Goodbye” has described hearing the Jackson 5’s version of his song for the first time, sitting in his car. He wasn’t a Motown star. He was a young actor from Broadway who wrote songs on the side and was trying hard to sell them.

He’s said the song came from a real heartbreak. He wanted to say goodbye to someone, but he couldn’t, because he still loved her too much.

In 1970 he took his songs to Motown’s office in Los Angeles. The walls there were thin. A producer working in the room next door reportedly heard the melody and knew right away it was a hit. He wanted to record it with the Jackson 5, and he didn’t want to wait. The story goes that it was cut that same night.

The producer gave the slow ballad a beat that Michael could move to and added strings. Then Motown boss Berry Gordy asked for part of the melody to be rewritten. The songwriter did it with young Michael right there in the room, so Michael could learn the new part on the spot. “He was young, but he was professional,” he later said.

The Jackson 5 record that went to No. 2

“Never Can Say Goodbye” came out in March 1971. It went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, held back only by “Joy to the World.” Michael was 12, singing a grown-up song about not being able to let go, and somehow he made you believe every word.

Here’s Michael singing it on TV that same year.

Young Michael sings it on TV in 1971

The song didn’t stop with the Jackson 5. Isaac Hayes recorded it, and later Gloria Gaynor turned it into a dance floor hit. Its writer went back to Motown too and gave the brothers another song, “Lookin’ Through the Windows,” in 1972.

But his own career went somewhere else entirely.

The writer was Clifton Davis. A few years later he was starring in his own TV comedy, “That’s My Mama.” Then, from 1986 to 1991, he played Reverend Reuben Gregory, the pastor on NBC’s “Amen,” opposite Sherman Hemsley. Week after week, viewers watched him lead a church on TV.

And off camera, he became a minister for real, just like his own father, a Baptist preacher.

He never stopped loving that song, either. In 2021 he put out his own album named after it. And in 2025, at 80, he sang “Never Can Say Goodbye” himself on the CBS soap “Beyond the Gates.” “It’s quite amazing to think I wrote this song way, way back,” he said.

So in the summer of 1983, with “Thriller” still flying off the shelves, the two of them finally got together to make music.

They didn’t book a fancy studio. Freddie came to Michael’s family home in Encino, California, where Michael had his own recording studio set up inside the house. Freddie’s personal assistant, Peter Freestone, was there with him, and he’s told the story in interviews since.

The two stars worked on three songs. One was “State of Shock,” a song Michael already had nearly finished. Another was “There Must Be More to Life Than This,” a soft piano tune Freddie had started writing. The third, “Victory,” they made up right there on the spot.

There was just one problem. The home studio didn’t have any drums.

So Peter stood up and banged a toilet door in perfect time while the tape rolled. He says that what sounds like a bass drum on one of those tracks is really him and that door, going for about five minutes straight.

Freddie later talked about those songs himself, and he never lost hope for them. Queen used a piece of that old interview to open the trailer for their 2014 album.

Freddie talks about the songs he made with Michael

“They were great songs,” Freddie once said. “But the problem was time, as we were both very busy at that period.”

He wasn’t wrong. Michael was the biggest star in the world, and Freddie had Queen. When Michael later called and asked Freddie to come finish “State of Shock,” Freddie was stuck in Munich, Germany, working. Michael asked if Mick Jagger could sing it instead, and Freddie said yes. Michael and Mick’s version became a big hit in 1984.

Freddie recorded his own solo version of “There Must Be More to Life Than This” in 1985. But the version with Michael’s voice on it stayed locked away.

It took 31 years. In 2014, Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor finally put the duet out on their album “Queen Forever,” with Michael and Freddie singing together and the band playing behind them.

The song Michael and Freddie finally released

So why did Freddie want out of that house in the first place?

Michael’s home back then had what Peter Freestone called a mini zoo, and he says Michael’s favorite animals at the time were llamas. Queen’s longtime manager, Jim Beach, later said Freddie phoned him from the sessions and begged, “You have to get me out of the studio.” The reason, Freddie reportedly told him, was that Michael kept bringing his pet llama into the room while they worked.

Peter’s own memories of that day don’t mention the llama at all, so nobody can be sure how much of it is true. But it’s become one of the most loved stories about two of the greatest voices in music.

And the third song, “Victory”? Peter says it has never been heard.

The song was “Can You Feel It.” Michael wrote it with his older brother Jackie, and it opened the Jacksons’ 1980 album “Triumph.” Michael and his younger brother Randy sang the lead. It’s a big, booming song with a simple message. Tito Jackson has said it’s one of those songs that tell people we’re all equal.

Michael wanted a video big enough to match it. He was only 22, and he’s reportedly the one who came up with the idea.

So the brothers didn’t just stand on a stage and sing. The video was reportedly only the second one the Jacksons had ever shot on real film instead of videotape.

The original film was called “The Triumph,” and it ran about nine minutes. It opens with a narrator with a deep, smooth voice setting the scene. Then the brothers show up in shiny satin. They glow against a sky full of stars and sprinkle gold dust down on the city and the people below. Two of Tito’s young sons, Taj and Taryll, reportedly turn up in it too.

All five brothers are in it: Jackie, Tito, Marlon, Michael and Randy. Here it is.

The Jacksons light up the sky

For 1981, those effects were a very big deal. Billboard later called the video “a cinematic masterpiece with strikingly advanced visual effects for its time.”

In 2001, it was voted one of the 100 best music videos of all time in a poll for MTV’s 20th birthday. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 12 on its list of Michael’s greatest videos. The song did well too. It went all the way to No. 1 on the US dance chart and No. 6 in the UK.

So who built that glowing world? It was a Hollywood effects studio called Robert Abel and Associates, best known back then for award-winning TV commercials.

Soon after the Jacksons’ video, that same team helped create scenes for Disney’s “Tron,” the 1982 movie about a man who gets pulled inside a computer. The studio worked on the movie’s opening titles and on one of its big scenes inside the computer world.

So the people who made Michael and his brothers glow in the sky were also part of one of the most famous sci-fi movies of the 1980s. You can still find the video on Michael’s official collections today, including the bonus disc of the 2010 box set “Michael Jackson’s Vision.”

That’s how director Simon Wincer remembers the first time a test audience saw his movie. It was 1993, and the movie was “Free Willy,” the story of a lonely 12-year-old boy named Jesse who makes friends with a whale named Willy at a struggling amusement park and decides to set him free.

Hardly anyone at the studio had paid much attention to it. It was a small family picture with no big stars. Then a crowd sat down to watch it one Saturday morning in Woodland Hills, just outside Los Angeles.

The cards came back with a score of 96. Wincer later said it was one of the highest scores Warner Bros. had ever seen at a test screening. A second preview was set up, and this time everyone from the studio showed up to watch.

All of a sudden, the little whale movie had money to spend.

“So the budget for the music went up,” Wincer said, “and we could afford a song from Michael Jackson.”

Getting Michael was one thing. Getting a brand new song from him was another. He reportedly couldn’t finish a new one in time. Wincer has also reportedly said that one of the film’s producers first told Michael about the movie after running into him in a dentist’s waiting room. Once Michael saw an early cut, he gave them a song.

It was one he already had.

The filmmakers placed it right at the end, after the scene everyone remembers. To get Willy to leap over the seawall, the crew built what Wincer called a “rocket-launcher” and put a full-size model whale on it. Then, as the credits began to roll, Michael’s voice came in.

He also made a music video for it. It mixes footage from his world tour concerts with scenes of Jesse and Willy, and music TV channels played it over and over that summer. Early VHS copies of the movie reportedly ran the video before the film even started.

Michael’s music video, mixed with scenes from the movie

“Free Willy” opened in July 1993 and turned into one of the surprise hits of the summer. Michael’s song climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also the very first single on Michael’s own record label.

The following June, at the 1994 MTV Movie Awards, it was up for Best Song From a Movie. It went up against Celine Dion, The Proclaimers and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia,” which had just won the Oscar a few months before.

Michael’s song won.

That song was “Will You Be There,” from his 1991 album “Dangerous.” He had first sung it on TV back in 1991, long before anyone had heard of Willy, with a choir behind him and an orchestra opening the track. A boy and his whale gave it a whole new life.

That’s how Jennifer Batten remembers trying out for Michael Jackson in 1987. Back then she was a guitar teacher in Los Angeles, giving lessons by day and playing gigs almost every night of the week, weddings included. She has said there was nothing on her résumé that stood out.

Michael was getting ready to take his “Bad” album around the world, and his team needed a band. About 100 people came to try out. Jennifer stayed home first and learned his songs inside out. When she walked in, the only advice she got was to play something funky.

So she did. “I think ultimately that’s what got me the gig,” she said years later.

Here’s Jennifer talking about her time on that first tour with Michael.

Jennifer remembers the “Bad” tour

The tour opened in Tokyo in September 1987, with three sold-out stadium shows. Jennifer had reportedly never been outside the United States before that trip. Now she was on a stage in Japan in front of tens of thousands of fans. “I’d never played for that many people before,” she said.

Life on Michael’s tour was nothing like playing weddings. Her “Beat It” solo was faster than the record, and she played it wearing a suit that lit up and changed colors. She put glow-in-the-dark tape on the neck of her guitar so she wouldn’t lose her place in the dark. Michael also reportedly closed Tokyo Disneyland for a few hours so his whole team could have the park to themselves.

She didn’t just last one tour. Jennifer played on all three of Michael’s world tours, about 10 years in all, and she was right there on stage with him at the 1993 Super Bowl halftime show.

Here she is many years later, looking back on her time with him.

Jennifer looks back on playing for Michael

So how did she find out the job was hers? She never got the call.

In a 2025 interview with a Spanish newspaper, Jennifer said Michael never actually told her she had been hired. He simply sent her a plane ticket to Japan. Once she got to Tokyo, she was chatting with Sheryl Crow, then one of the tour’s backup singers, when Michael came up behind her and tapped her on the back. He told her he loved the way she played the “Beat It” solo.

That’s when she knew she was really in the band.

That’s how Michael Jackson talked about making “The Wiz” a couple of years after it was done. It was his very first movie. In 1977 he was a teenager from a famous singing family, and he had just landed a big part in a musical version of “The Wizard of Oz.” Diana Ross was playing Dorothy. Michael was the Scarecrow.

Not everyone was sure about him at first. The director reportedly thought of the Jackson brothers as a Las Vegas act, not movie actors. Then Michael flew to New York to meet him, and that was the end of the doubts.

He moved into a Manhattan apartment with his sister La Toya, and filming started that summer at a big old studio in Queens.

Every morning began the same way. Michael sat down in the makeup chair, and he stayed there for hours. Some reports put it at about four hours a day. The young artist in charge of it would later build creatures for movies like “The Terminator” and “Aliens.” For the Scarecrow, he covered Michael’s face in soft rubber pieces and gave him a big round nose.

Then came the rest of it. A huge shaggy wig. A hat. A vest stuffed with scraps of old newspaper. The costume was hot and clumsy to move in, but Michael made it work. He’d studied Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and he wanted his Scarecrow to move like nobody else’s.

Most actors would have counted the minutes until they could peel it all off. Quincy Jones, who made the music for the movie, recalled that the long hours in that makeup never bothered Michael one bit.

Michael and Diana Ross on the yellow brick road

Here’s the Scarecrow in action, dancing down the road with Dorothy in one of the movie’s best-loved scenes.

“The Wiz” came out in October 1978. Critics weren’t kind to the movie, but they loved Michael. One of America’s best-known film critics wrote that Michael filled the role “with humor and warmth.”

So how much did Michael love being the Scarecrow?

The days on that set were long. And at the end of some of them, he reportedly didn’t bother taking the makeup off at all. He kept the Scarecrow face on through the night and went to bed in it.

A year later, he made “Off the Wall” with Quincy Jones, the man he’d worked with on that movie set.

That’s what Paul McCartney told a 17-year-old Michael Jackson when they shook hands at a crowded party in Beverly Hills. It was June 1976. Paul had just finished a big tour of America with his band Wings, and the party was their way of celebrating the end of it.

Michael already loved the Beatles. Now one of them was standing in front of him saying he’d written a song with Michael in mind.

“I was very surprised and thanked him,” Michael remembered in his 1988 book, “Moonwalk.” Then Paul did something even better. Right there in the middle of the party, he started singing it to him.

The song was called “Girlfriend,” a light, bouncy love song. Paul reportedly said later that he’d always thought of it as something he might give to the Jackson 5 one day.

The two of them swapped phone numbers that night and promised to get together soon.

You can probably guess what happened next. It’s the same thing that happens to most of us after a good party. “Different projects and life just got in the way for both of us,” Michael wrote, “and we didn’t talk again for a couple of years.”

Paul didn’t sit on the song. In February 1977 he took it into the studio in London and recorded it with Wings. It came out in March 1978 on their album “London Town.” Paul sings the lead himself, with his wife Linda and bandmate Denny Laine behind him.

Paul and Wings sing “Girlfriend” first

So that seemed to be that. The song Paul had written for Michael now belonged to Paul.

But Michael was about to make the most important album of his young life. He was 20 and going solo, with a new producer working beside him: Quincy Jones. They were hunting for songs.

And somehow “Girlfriend” turned up again.

Michael recorded it for “Off the Wall,” which came out in August 1979. His version skips a whole middle section that Paul’s version has. Listen to how the same song changes when Michael sings it.

Michael’s own version from “Off the Wall”

Here’s the twist.

The song didn’t come back to him through Paul. It came back through Quincy. After “London Town” came out, Quincy heard “Girlfriend” and suggested it for Michael’s new album. He reportedly had no idea that Paul had already sung it to Michael at that party three years earlier.

“Girlfriend” went on to be the last single from “Off the Wall,” released in Britain in 1980. And Michael and Paul did finally get together, just as they’d promised. They went on to sing “The Girl Is Mine” and “Say Say Say” as a duo.

At one point, Oprah wanted more than answers. She asked Michael to sing something for her right there, with no music playing behind him.

Michael didn’t jump at the chance. He smiled, ducked his head and seemed a little shy about it, the way most of us would if someone asked us to sing in front of a room full of people.

Oprah didn’t give up. She had a song in mind, one of his own, and she asked for it by name. She even asked him to “do that whole beat thing.”

There was nobody around to play along with him. So Michael started making the music himself.

What came out of him next had Oprah hanging on every sound. A thumping drum beat and a deep bass line came out of his mouth at the same time, as if a whole band had been hiding inside him. Here’s that moment from the interview.

Michael answers Oprah’s request

For Michael, this was simply how he worked.

He often built his songs with his voice first. In his own words, he’d “sing the bass part into the tape recorder.” One of his studio engineers remembered Michael singing every note of every chord to a guitar player, and sometimes a whole string part, one piece at a time, into a little cassette recorder.

An early demo of “Beat It” shows the same thing. Michael is alone on the tape, beatboxing and singing the song the way he wanted it to sound.

So when Oprah asked, he didn’t need to think about it. The music was already in his head, every layer of it.

The song Oprah asked for was “Who Is It,” from his 1991 album “Dangerous.” A few weeks after the interview, it came out as a single in America. It climbed to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s dance club chart.

Here’s the finished record. This is the version of the music video that aired in America, packed with clips from his earlier videos and concerts.

The finished song, as fans heard it in 1993

Listen closely to the drums and the bass line, then go back to the Oprah clip and compare. The beat Michael made for Oprah at Neverland, with nothing but his mouth, is right there under the music.