Chris Tucker has a story in his stand-up that starts with a guest list nobody else can match. “I went over Barry Gibb’s house from the Bee Gees,” he says. He didn’t go alone. Michael Jackson went with him, and the evening’s entertainment was Hollywood’s biggest night on TV. “We was watching the Oscars at Barry Gibb’s house.”
The TV wasn’t the only show. Netflix Is A Joke, the channel that posted the clip, titled it “Chris Tucker Sang With Michael Jackson and Barry Gibb.”
For Michael, that house wasn’t a once-a-year stop. Barry has lived in Miami since 1974, and the two men went back to the mid-1980s, when they worked together on “Eaten Alive” for their friend Diana Ross. In the early 2000s Michael started coming over. Then he kept coming.
Barry told the story to Alexis Petridis of The Guardian in December 2020. “Well, we sat around in my lounge for days at a time, just having fun, not really writing songs,” he said. He also had a theory about why Michael kept turning up. He believed Michael “was visiting people he knew that he could relate to, because he didn’t know who his friends were.”
It’s a touching thing to hear about the most famous man on earth. In Barry’s lounge he wasn’t the King of Pop. He was just a friend who had come over.
The visits did produce one song. In December 2002 the two friends recorded “All in Your Name” at Middle Ear, a studio in Miami Beach, and Barry’s son Ashley filmed them at the microphone on a small home video camera.
Barry, though, had a family to run, and Michael’s visits didn’t come with an end time. “But then he started to hang out at the house all the time and I had to get up in the morning,” Barry said. “I’m 12 years older than him, I had to take my kids to school.”
So one of the biggest voices of the 1970s had to find the right words for the King of Pop. “At some point, I said: ‘Michael, wherever it is you’re going, you’ve got to go,'” Barry remembered. The Guardian noted that he chuckled as he told it.
Then came the punchline. “So I politely asked Michael Jackson to leave my house because I couldn’t get anything else done.”
Barry never stopped calling him a friend. When he finally shared “All in Your Name” in 2011, he wrote: “Michael Jackson and I were the dearest of friends, that’s simply what it was.” He called Michael “the easiest person to write with” and said the song was “the message that Michael wanted to send out to all of his fans all over the world, that he did it all for them and for the pure love of music.”
Chris Tucker tells the story of his Oscars night at Barry Gibb’s house
This is a clip from Chris’s stand-up, posted by Netflix’s own comedy channel. He starts with hanging out with Michael, and the visit to Barry Gibb’s house begins at about 1:53.
Michael and Barry sing “All in Your Name” together in the studio
This is a fan upload of the official 2011 video for the song, cut from Ashley Gibb’s 2002 home footage. Michael and Barry stand side by side at one microphone at Middle Ear, Barry singing with his eyes shut and Michael smiling next to him, and Michael is also seen at the mixing desk.
Barry held on to the song for nine years before fans heard it. The footage they finally saw came from a small Hi8 camera in his son Ashley’s hands.