Almost everybody has tried the moonwalk at least once, usually in socks on the kitchen floor. Most of us end up just shuffling backward.
It turns out Michael Jackson had a rough start with it too.
Derek “Cooley” Jaxson is a professional dancer, and in the early 1980s he was a regular on two of the biggest dance shows on TV, “Solid Gold” and “Soul Train.” Somebody very famous was watching him and his friends on that show.
It was Michael.
Jaxson told Good Morning America in 2018 that Michael’s manager at the time came knocking on their door after seeing Jaxson and his fellow dancers on “Soul Train.” Michael wanted to learn a move called the backslide.
For a feel of the “Soul Train” dance floor in those days, here’s Jeffrey Daniel of the group Shalamar, another dancer who is also credited with helping Michael learn the move, on the show.
Jeffrey Daniel dancing on “Soul Train”
So what is the backslide? Jaxson explained that you slide backward in a way that makes you look like you’re walking forward. “So it’s an illusion,” he said.
Easy to describe. Not so easy to do.
Jaxson says he was one of the dancers who taught Michael, and the lesson didn’t click right away. Michael was after something the dancers didn’t expect.
Here’s how Jaxson remembers it: “Once we got the chance to finally teach him [Jackson], he kept saying, ‘I can’t feel it. I can’t feel it,’ and we’re like, ‘Feel what? You just do it,'”
Those were the four words. I can’t feel it.
Michael didn’t let it go, either. “[And Jackson said] ‘No, no, you don’t understand. I can’t feel it.’ … He wanted to feel that slide. He wanted to feel like he was moving forward but going backward. And once he got the feel, from my understanding, that’s when he performed on ‘Motown 25.'”
So Michael was chasing a feeling, and the dancers had to wait for him to find it. By Jaxson’s account, once he did, he was ready for the world.
Here’s a short profile of Jaxson himself, the dancer who was in the room for those lessons.
A look at dancer Cooley Jaxson
Michael first did the move in public on March 25, 1983, in front of a live audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and the rest of the country saw it two months later on TV, in the performance below.
Michael’s first moonwalk on TV
As for the name, Jaxson gives that credit to Michael. “The moonwalk was coined from Michael Jackson,” he said.
The two crossed paths again later, on one of Michael’s best-known videos. “In ‘Smooth Criminal,’ which we had the pleasure to dance with Michael Jackson, we do the actual moonwalk,” Jaxson said. Keep an eye on the group moonwalk moments in this one.
Michael and his dancers in “Smooth Criminal”
So the next time you try it in the kitchen and it doesn’t work, don’t feel bad. Michael Jackson stood in a room with the dancers who knew it best and kept telling them he couldn’t feel it yet. He just kept at it until he could.