On May 16, 1983, millions of people sat down to watch a TV special called “Motown 25,” a show put together to celebrate 25 years of Motown Records. Michael Jackson came out to sing “Billie Jean.” Partway through, he slid backward across the stage without seeming to lift his feet at all. That was the moonwalk, and most of America was seeing it for the very first time.
The crowd lost it. People still talk about that performance today.
Michael didn’t feel the same way about it.
He walked off the stage frustrated. The whole thing came down to one spin near the end. He’d planned to freeze up on his toes and hold it there, and in his head it just hadn’t come off the way he wanted.
“I was still disappointed about the spin,” he wrote later. “I had been concentrating so hard and I’m such a perfectionist.”
Michael told the full story in his 1988 book “Moonwalk.” The part that mattered most to him happened after he left the stage, and no camera ever caught it. But the performance itself, the one he was so hard on, is right here. Watch for that spin near the end, the move he wished he’d held a beat longer.
Michael’s first televised moonwalk during “Billie Jean” at Motown 25
Backstage, something happened that hadn’t happened before. His brothers, the ones he’d grown up singing with since he was a little kid, came over to him one by one.
“After the performance, each of them hugged and kissed me backstage,” Michael wrote. “They had never done that before, and I felt happy for all of us.”
Even that didn’t fully settle him. He was still chewing on that spin.
Then a little boy walked up. He was about ten, dressed in a tuxedo, and he looked up at Michael like he’d just seen something he couldn’t quite explain.
“Man, who ever taught you to dance like that?” the boy asked.
Michael laughed. “Practice, I guess.”
And that was the moment the night finally turned for him. Not the screaming crowd, not the reviews that would come later. A kid he’d never met. Because, the way Michael saw it, “children are honest.” If that boy was that amazed, then maybe he really had done alright after all.
He went home that night and wrote down everything about the evening while it was fresh. The very last thing he put in the entry wasn’t the moonwalk or the crowd. It was the boy and his question.
Fred Astaire called him the next morning to rave about the same performance. But it was the child backstage, and one honest question, that changed how Michael felt about the whole night.