Gladys Knight and the Pips were on the bill at Chicago’s Regal Theater, the big South Side showplace people compared to the Apollo. Somewhere below her, a group of kids started to sing, and one voice cut through the rest.
“I heard them before I saw them, and I jumped up and I said, ‘Who is that?'” Knight told CBS News in 2009.
She goes further in a sit-down interview that the fan channel MJ Classified has posted on YouTube. “I heard this voice and it made me stop what I’m doing,” she says there, “and it’s very hard to impress me with certain things.”
That isn’t false modesty. Knight won Ted Mack’s “Original Amateur Hour” at eight, and her group gave Motown the first released version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1967. She’d heard a lot of singers.
So she asked who it was. “Oh, those are Joe’s boys,” she was told. “Yeah, the Jacksons.”
“And I said, ‘I want to meet him,'” Knight remembers. The brothers came up to see her, and they weren’t what she expected. “They were so shy and so quiet that impressed me too.”
The youngest singer in the group had no idea what he was carrying around. “He did not realize the power of his gift as yet that he had been given,” Knight says. “And he was the cutest thing.”
She says she felt it straight away. “The moment I laid eyes on Michael,” she says, “I said something wonderful. There’s something here. I think our spirits touched.”
What she watched next is the picture she’s held on to.
“Michael went to the sofa and he kind of scooted up on the sofa,” Knight says. He’d scooted up so far that his little legs hung off the edge and didn’t even touch the floor. “He was just sitting there,” she says, “and he was just in awe.” Here was a boy whose voice had just stopped one of the best singers in the building, and he couldn’t get his feet to the ground.
The two stayed close long after that day. At one point they even shared a manager, Ron Weisner, CBS News reported. Knight says Michael talked to her “like he would talk to his mom, you know, telling her inner things about himself or asking questions.”
The calls are the part she seems to enjoy telling most. Her manager never had to explain why he was ringing.
“He would call me and he said, ‘Michael’s here,'” Knight says. “And that’s all he had to tell me because he knew how I felt about him.”
And she went. “So, I would get up, whatever I was doing, you know, and go to the office and we’d sit in the middle of the floor and just talk about life.”
Gladys Knight tells how she met young Michael (fan upload)
This is a fan upload by the channel MJ Classified of an interview with Gladys Knight; the channel doesn’t name the original outlet. She describes hearing the boys at the Regal from about 0:26, asks to meet them at about 2:03, tells the sofa story at about 3:43 and gets to the “Michael’s here” calls at about 4:42.
The Regal didn’t last much longer. It closed in 1968, and the building where B.B. King had cut “Live at the Regal” in 1964 was torn down in 1973.