Every family has a running joke. In the Jackson family, one of them played out in front of thousands of fans.
It happened on Michael Jackson’s Dangerous World Tour. The tour opened in Munich on June 27, 1992, and closed in Mexico City on Nov 11, 1993. That’s 70 concerts across Europe, Asia and Latin America, with no US dates, and the profits went to charities including Michael’s Heal the World Foundation.
Along for a big part of the ride were three teenagers. Taj, Taryll and TJ are the sons of Michael’s brother Tito Jackson, and they later became the group 3T. Taj was born in 1973, Taryll in 1975 and TJ in 1978, so they were somewhere between about 14 and 20 back then.
Taryll later told the French magazine “Black & White” that before this tour they only traveled on school breaks. This time was different: “During the Dangerous Tour, we had the opportunity to spend time away from home without having to go back to school. Each day, for months, we saw everything. We saw the fans, the way our uncle would act with them. He taught us lots of things.”
This home-video style clip from the tour’s Japan leg in 1992 shows Uncle Michael with his nephews away from the stage.
Michael Jackson with his nephews 3T in Japan, 1992
In that 1996 interview, the magazine asked Taryll a fun question: “Do you see Michael as your uncle or as the King of Pop? Can you, for example, tell him anything you want?”
The boys had noticed something. Show after show, Uncle Michael kept slipping up on the same words in one song. And they weren’t shy about telling him.
The song was “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” his 1987 duet from the “Bad” album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the Dangerous tour he sang it live with Siedah Garrett, his duet partner on the record.
Here’s how Taryll told it: “Oh yes! One time, during the Dangerous Tour, he’d get the words wrong during ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ and show after show, he’d make the same mistake. We kept telling him but he’d always forget. One day, he finally sang the words correctly and at that very moment, he pointed at us from the stage.”
He’d been listening after all.
Taryll never said which words Michael kept getting wrong, so that part stays a family secret. This performance from Bucharest in 1992 gives you a feel for the song as the boys heard it on that tour.
Michael Jackson singing the duet live on the Dangerous tour
The nephews had another trick up their sleeves. They brought a video camera on the road, and one time they asked their uncle to wave at them from the stage.
He did. Taryll said: “We have a video camera and another time we asked him to wave at us while he’d be onstage and he did so during ‘Heal The World,’ that was funny. It reminds us he’s still our uncle.”
This Bucharest performance of “Heal the World” isn’t the night he waved, but it’s the same song on the same tour, so you can see the show the way the boys did.
Michael Jackson performing “Heal the World” live on the Dangerous tour
Being family didn’t make the shows any less amazing to them. “Anybody would get stunned seeing him perform, it’s the same for us,” Taryll said.
For three teenage boys on the road, that wave and that point were their proof. Uncle Michael was paying attention to them, even with thousands of fans watching.