“Michael, he’s on TV, he’s on TV!”
That was the wake-up call. Michael Jackson said his mother, Katherine, would shout it at 3 in the morning, and he’d run to the television to see who she meant.
He shared the memory with Ebony magazine for its December 2007 issue. Ebony’s Bryan Monroe sat down with him in a New York City hotel suite, 25 years after “Thriller” came out. The magazine called it Michael’s first U.S. magazine interview and cover story in a decade.
Monroe asked how it felt to know he had changed history. Michael talked about tours and stadiums, about looking out from the stage and seeing people “as far as the naked eye could see.” Then he went all the way back to the beginning. “I’m a guy who used to sit in my living room and listen to my father play Ray Charles,” he said.
That living room was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, the home Joe and Katherine bought after they married. Joe played guitar in a band called the Falcons. But the late-night wake-ups were Katherine’s doing, and she wasn’t going to let her little boy sleep through this one.
Michael never said which shows they caught or what year it was. He did say how young he was: “no more than like six years old.”
So who was on the TV? It was James Brown, the man the music world called the Godfather of Soul.
“I’d run to the TV and James Brown would be on TV,” Michael told Ebony. “I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.'”
He had told the same story out loud the year before, on Dec. 30, 2006, at a public goodbye to James Brown in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia. NPR reported that more than 8,000 people packed the James Brown Arena, and Michael’s appearance was a surprise. He called Brown his greatest inspiration.
“Ever since I was a small child, no more than like six years old, my mother would wake me no matter what time it was,” Michael said. “I was sleeping, no matter what I was doing, to watch the television to see the master at work. And when I saw him move, I was mesmerized.”
He kept going. “I’ve never seen a performer perform like James Brown. And right then and there, I knew that that was exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, because of James Brown.”
Michael got to say it to James Brown’s face, too. At the BET Awards in Los Angeles on June 24, 2003, he walked out as a surprise to give Brown a Lifetime Achievement Award. He danced briefly with the 70-year-old singer and wrapped a cape around his shoulders, a nod to the cape routine Brown made famous on stage.
“Nobody has influenced me more than this man right here,” Michael told the audience, the Associated Press reported. In this fan upload of the broadcast, Michael joins him at the microphone at about 6:40.
Michael surprises James Brown at the 2003 BET Awards
The clip starts with Brown’s own performance that night. Then Michael comes out to honor him, and the two of them share the stage.
In that same 2007 interview, Michael explained why he never stopped studying the greats. It “takes years to become a great entertainer,” he told Ebony. “Years.”