Lionel Richie was out promoting his memoir, “Truly,” when he sat down across from Joe Rogan and the talk turned to an old friend. He’d known Michael Jackson since 1971, when his band, the Commodores, went on tour as the opening act for the Jackson 5. The episode is No. 2388 of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” and it came out on Oct. 2, 2025.
On that first tour Michael was 12 or 13, and Lionel remembers going looking for him. “I’d go down the hall and I’d say, ‘Where’s Mike?’ And they said, ‘He’s in the room,'” he told Rogan. The warning from the people around the boy never changed: “Watch out, be careful. The girls are coming. Stay in the room.”
One day Lionel was told Michael was “hiding in the bathroom. The girls are out there.” He didn’t buy it. “I said, ‘Girls? What do you mean? There’s no girls out there.'” The whole hotel floor had been sealed off. So Lionel went and got him. “Come go with me,” he told Michael.
The grown-ups weren’t happy about it. “They got mad at me,” Lionel said. He knew they were protecting what he called “the golden goose.” Then he made his case: “But the golden goose needs play time, right? He’s still a kid.”
Lionel tells the tour story at about 3:49 in the clip below. A couple of minutes later, at about 6:28, he looks down at Michael’s feet.
Lionel Richie tells Joe Rogan about Michael on tour and the shoes
This is the official JRE Clips upload, cut from episode No. 2388 and just under nine minutes long. The 1971 tour runs from about 3:49 to 5:01, the stolen clothes come up at about 6:02 and the shoes story starts at about 6:28.
The boy in the hotel room grew up, and the fame only got bigger. Lionel told Rogan that even sending out the laundry was a gamble. “You get half of your clothes back,” he said. “The other half of your clothes are souvenirs.” People, he said, “were stealing his clothes.”
Then he got to the shoes. Some days Michael would walk into Lionel’s house, and Lionel would find himself looking down at his friend’s feet.
“Michael, your shoes are flopping on your feet,” he told him. “They’re two sizes too large for you.”
Michael didn’t argue. “I know, Lionel,” he said. He explained that a man had given him the pair somewhere along the way, “and I told him thank you very much.”
Lionel tried the obvious fix. “But Michael, you could have gotten the shoes in the right size,” he said.
So why hadn’t he? Michael’s answer was short: “I know, but I didn’t want to embarrass him.”
He’d rather wear the wrong size than embarrass the man who gave them to him. “So he’s walking around with two sizes too large,” Lionel told Rogan.
Lionel did have a fix for the rest of the outfit. “We wore the same size,” he said, so he sent Michael straight to his own wardrobe: “Go in the closet, get a pair of jeans.” Michael went. “So literally he changed clothes.”
Complex wrote up the interview the next day, and its account matches. Lionel told Michael, “Michael, you could’ve gotten them in the right size,” and Michael answered, “I didn’t want to embarrass the guy.”
The whole shoes story takes Lionel less than a minute to tell, from about 6:28 to 6:54, and the closet and the jeans follow right after it.