At the height of the Bad World Tour, Michael Jackson was performing before enormous crowds around the world. Yet vocal coach Seth Riggs remembered something happening backstage that audiences rarely saw. Seriously ill children were brought in to meet Michael, sometimes arriving on stretchers because they were too weak to stand or even hold their heads up comfortably.
Riggs recalled Michael lowering himself beside the stretchers so his face would be level with each child for a photograph. The picture was then given to them as something to keep. Riggs said the encounters affected him so deeply that he sometimes had to leave the room because he was crying.
Rare Backstage Footage From Michael Jackson’s Bad World Tour
What stayed with Riggs was the change he saw in the children. He remembered them visibly perking up when Michael appeared. In Riggs’s telling, even if meeting Michael gave a desperately sick child only a little more happiness or energy, Michael considered those few moments worth making time for.
And these meetings were happening around an exhausting tour schedule. The Bad Tour ran from 1987 into 1989, yet Jackson repeatedly made room for hospitals and children along the way. In May 1988, while preparing to perform in Rome, he visited young patients at Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital.
Michael Jackson Visits Children During the Bad Tour in 1988
The Rome visit makes Riggs’s backstage memories easier to understand as part of a larger pattern. Contemporary reporting confirmed Michael spent time cheering up sick children there, including a girl recovering from a heart transplant. Other accounts from the tour also describe charitable donations and meetings with disadvantaged children in different cities.
Michael Jackson would be remembered for Thriller, Bad, “Billie Jean,” the Moonwalk and concerts that changed pop performance. But according to the man coaching his voice night after night, some of Michael’s most emotional moments happened before the curtain even rose. Watch the backstage footage, then see what he was doing for children while one of the biggest tours in music history continued around him.