The phone rang at John Travolta’s house near Santa Barbara, California, and the man on the other end introduced himself. “John, this is Michael Jackson,” Travolta remembers him saying. They weren’t strangers. “I had met him a couple of times at different venues, you know, events and things,” Travolta said. But Michael hadn’t called to catch up.
Travolta told the story on The Rich Eisen Show, in a clip the show posted on Nov. 12, 2026. It came up during a round of “Celebrity True or False”, where host Rich Eisen reads out a claim about his guest and the guest says whether it holds up. Most of the clip is about “Pulp Fiction”. Then Eisen turned to Michael, and Travolta’s answer was quick: “Yes, that’s true.”
By his telling, Michael had a request. “I wrote a song for you and I really would love you to record it if you wouldn’t mind,” Travolta recalls him saying. The star of “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease” didn’t need long to think about it. “Hey, of course,” he said he replied. “I mean, you’re Michael Jackson. Whatever you’ve got, I’m sure it’s great.”
There was one condition. Michael was in the middle of a record of his own. “Let me finish this album that I’m working on, but then I’ll call you in a few months and then we’ll record it,” he said, according to Travolta, who told him, “Okay.”
Travolta places the call in early 1983, and his dates are a little off. The album Michael was finishing was “Thriller”, which was released on Nov. 30, 1982, so a call made before it came out belongs earlier than the months he names. Nothing else in his account hangs on the calendar.
John Travolta tells the Michael Jackson story on The Rich Eisen Show
Travolta starts the story at about 5:58 and finishes it at about 8:20. Everything before that point in the clip is “Pulp Fiction” talk.
A few months went by, Travolta said, and the album arrived. He had his own reason to follow its sales. “I had the two biggest albums in history,” he said, meaning the soundtracks to “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease”. That’s his claim, and he remembers seeing “Thriller” close in on them: “This was creeping up to those sales and I was very impressed with that.”
Then the two men ended up in the same building. Travolta said he went to a Hall and Oates concert with the actress Lesley Ann Warren, whom he was dating at the time, and Michael was backstage after the show. Travolta opened with congratulations. “This is amazing what’s happening to you with this Thriller album,” he told him. Then he brought up the phone call: “But wait, you told me a few months ago that you had a song for me to sing.”
Michael hadn’t forgotten.
“He said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘I’m so sorry,'” Travolta recalled. So Travolta asked him straight out: “Well, what happened?”
The song, Michael told him, was “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”, the track that opens “Thriller”. And the reason Travolta never got to sing it took one sentence. “He said, ‘I liked it so much I decided to record it myself,'” Travolta said.
He didn’t argue. “I said, ‘Oh, okay,'” he told Eisen. “I understand.” The song had been with Michael for a while by then. He reportedly first put it on tape as a demo in 1978, in the “Off the Wall” period, and recorded it again in 1982 for the new album.
Travolta has worked out what the change of plan cost him, though. “It would have been great,” he said, “because if I had done that and it been on that album, I would have had the three biggest albums in history.”