Lionel Richie held out a hand to show Naomi Campbell how small Michael Jackson was when they first went on the road together. “He was about like that,” he told her on her YouTube show “No Filter with Naomi” in 2021. “Me and Michael were together since early.”
It started with a job offer. Lionel was 22 and singing with the Commodores, a group that had come together as students at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. They hadn’t signed with Motown yet. Then Motown’s Suzanne de Passe got in touch with the band’s manager, Benny Ashburn. As Lionel tells it, she said, “I have my first job. My job is to take this new group called The Jackson 5 across America on their first US tour.” She added one more line: “I’m looking for an opening act.”
“We had an audition,” Lionel said. “We played for The Jackson 5 across the entire US tour. When we got to LA, California, they saw us, they signed us, [and] magic happened.”
Michael’s official website dates that run to 1971, when the Jackson 5 began their summer tour with the Commodores as the opening act. The headliners were kids. Jackie, the oldest, was 20. Michael turned 13 that August. Most of the Commodores were grown men trying to build a career, and they were now sharing hotels and flights with five brothers who already had four No. 1 hits.
Lionel didn’t single anyone out. They were “very, very young,” he said, “and very mischievous.”
Lionel Richie tells the Jackson 5 tour story on “No Filter with Naomi”
This is the official upload of Naomi Campbell’s 2021 interview with Lionel. He starts on the audition and the Jackson 5 tour at about 14:13, and he gets to the pranks at about 15:16.
“They just loved to play all these crazy pranks,” Lionel said.
The first trap was at the hotel. In those days you could leave your shoes outside your room at night and the staff would polish them by morning. The brothers found the shoes first. “If you leave your shoes outside the door to be polished at the hotel, you wake up the next morning, they’ve put ice cubes,” Lionel said, “and what they didn’t tell you is that by morning, it’s melted, so your shoes are [wet].”
The plane was worse. The Commodores wore big afros, carefully picked. Somewhere over America, the Jacksons went to work on them. “Or they’d put itching powder in our afros on the plane,” Lionel said. “If you’ve ever seen an afro just beautifully picked, it’s one thing. An afro with itching powder in it after an hour flight… they thought it was so funny.”
So the band that was supposed to warm up the crowd every night spent its days scratching its head and drying its shoes, while the headliners laughed. The Commodores started to wonder what they’d signed up for. “We kept thinking, ‘Are we babysitting?'” Lionel said.
They didn’t just take it, though. “But we got ’em back,” he said with a smile. “We got ’em back.” He didn’t tell Naomi how. She had a prank story of her own about Michael, from the set of his “In the Closet” video, which she starred in with him in 1992.
Motown signed the Commodores after that tour, and Lionel’s friendship with Michael lasted. Fourteen years after the itching powder, the two of them sat down together to write “We Are the World.”