Shawn Stockman met Michael Jackson for the first time over dinner, and he didn’t go alone. “My mother was with me,” the Boyz II Men singer remembered.
It was the mid-1990s. Boyz II Men were on Michael’s “HIStory” album, and Michael was a fan. “He loved us. He wanted to meet us, which was crazy,” Shawn said. “And he invited us to Neverland.”
Shawn told the story on Comics & Kicks, the YouTube show hosted by Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas. The clip is posted on Taboo’s channel and on Shawn’s own show, On That Note. The group’s part on the album is on record, too. Boyz II Men sang background vocals on the song “HIStory,” People reported in 2024, in an interview with Shawn’s bandmate Wanya Morris.
Neverland wasn’t around the corner. Shawn called it “a three-hour drive.” When the guys finally climbed out of the van, Michael was right there. “Michael greeted us,” Shawn said.
He doesn’t make what came next sound like a business meeting. “We played all day like children,” he said.
Shawn figures he was 24 or 25 at the time, and the group made the most of it. They rode the bumper cars and the Ferris wheel. They fed the giraffes. Michael showed them his pet spiders and his monkeys, and one whole area of the ranch was nothing but a candy store.
“It was all free,” Shawn said. Michael’s rule for his guests was short: “Take what you want.”
Shawn noticed Michael’s clothes, too. He said Michael had “adopted the ideal from Einstein.” When your head is busy with ideas all day, “the last thing you want to think about is clothes.” So Michael just kept putting on the same outfit.
In the clip below, listen for the moment Shawn stops talking about rides and candy and says there’s one part of the day he never forgot.
Shawn Stockman tells the Neverland story on Taboo’s Comics & Kicks
This is the official clip, about six and a half minutes long. Shawn runs through the rides and the giraffes at about 2:04, gets to the house on the hill at about 2:46 and describes what was inside from about 3:20.
“Here’s the one thing that always stayed with me,” Shawn said. Up on a hill at Neverland there was another house, apart from the one Michael lived in. Shawn calls it the Firestone house. Michael didn’t hand the guys off to a guide, either. “He drove us up,” Shawn said. “It was like a minivan.”
So what was up there? “All his awards, all of them,” Shawn said. The room was “about the size of this room,” he told Taboo. Michael’s gloves sat in glass cases, the ones “from the Victory Tour and from all his MTV appearances and from Billie Jean.” Every single plaque was there as well, going all the way back to when Michael was a kid.
The awards weren’t up there by accident. Michael’s main house, the one he actually lived in, had none of them, and Shawn said Michael had a reason.
Michael “didn’t want to embellish on what he did,” Shawn explained. “He didn’t want to sit and relish and say, ‘Oh, look how great I am.'”
So every trophy, every plaque and every famous glove lived in a house of its own, and Michael drove Boyz II Men up the hill to see them. He just didn’t keep them in his own home.
Shawn took that lesson home with him, and he says he tries to live by it. His own plaques from all those Boyz II Men years are in his studio office.