Berry Gordy had a nickname for young Michael Jackson, and it wasn’t a fancy one.
Gordy is the man who started Motown Records in Detroit and signed Michael and his brothers when Michael was just a kid. “I called him the sponge,” Gordy told Billboard in 2017, looking back on the kid who took in everything around him.
By October 1988, that boy was the biggest star on earth. Michael was in the Detroit area for sold-out concerts at the Palace of Auburn Hills on his “Bad” tour, and on Sunday, Oct 23, he made a trip back to where it all began.
It was cold and raining. About 2,500 fans waited outside the Motown Museum on West Grand Boulevard just to catch a glimpse of him, and this footage puts you right there in the rain with them.
Michael’s rainy visit to the Motown Museum
Michael spent about half an hour inside. At one point he sang while one of Gordy’s sons played the piano. He also left the museum some gifts that day, but the words he had for the man who’d given him his start are the part to remember. He told the crowd:
“I’m very happy and proud to be back to the soil from which I came. Berry Gordy is the man that made it all possible for me. I want to say thank you, Berry, and I love you.”
That’s not something you hear a superstar say about a record boss very often. “Entertainment Tonight” covered the visit, so you can watch the same TV report fans saw back in 1988.
Entertainment Tonight’s 1988 report from Detroit
When the museum visit wrapped up, the day wasn’t over.
Michael, Gordy, Gordy’s sister Esther Edwards and a small group of guests headed to Gordy’s mansion in Detroit’s Boston-Edison district for a quiet dinner. And this wasn’t just any big house. According to People magazine, it was the Detroit home where Michael and his brothers had once stayed for a while.
So Michael wasn’t only visiting his old boss. He was going back to a house he’d stayed in as a kid.
And Gordy knew exactly how he wanted to spend the night.
Before the dinner, People reported, Gordy said they might run around with no shoes on. They might go up to the attic where Michael used to sleep. They might head down to the basement and play pool. The magazine called it a chance to be like kids again.
There’s no way of knowing how much of that plan really happened. But it says a lot that the man who built Motown pictured his night with the King of Pop as barefoot fun in the attic and a game of pool downstairs.
Want to see the kind of house they were talking about? This video tour takes you inside Gordy’s former Detroit mansion.
Inside Berry Gordy’s former Detroit mansion
Michael never forgot what Gordy promised him and his brothers back when they were boys. In the Michigan Citizen, a week before the visit, he looked back on it.
“Berry told us he was going to make us the biggest thing in the world,” Michael said. He remembered another line, too. “‘We are going to make history together,’ he said.”
By 1988 that promise had come true. And he still took a rainy Sunday in Detroit to thank Berry in person and sit down to dinner in the old house.