Live shows go wrong all the time. A wire snags, or a lift jams, or something that worked a hundred times just stops working. What really tells you about a performer isn’t the mistake itself, it’s how they handle the ten seconds right after.
As the story goes, Michael was running one of his big aerial moments at rehearsal, the kind where he floats out high over the crowd. Then the arm jerked. For a few genuinely frightening seconds he was left hanging up there, holding on for dear life, dangling in the air while the crew below scrambled to reach him.
They got him down safe. And the people who were there always remember what he did next. He didn’t shout or go hunting for someone to blame. He just said, calm as anything, that it needed fixing, and got on with the rehearsal like nothing had happened.
Now you might read that as a star simply on his best behavior for one afternoon. The folks who actually worked beside him, year after year, tell the very same story.
His longtime guitarist on what he was really like
Jennifer Batten played lead guitar right beside him for roughly a decade, across the Bad, Dangerous and HIStory tours. That’s years of rehearsals, red-eye flights, late nights and technical disasters piling up. By her account the tantrums and diva meltdowns you’d expect from a global superstar just weren’t there. He was prepared, focused and steady, even when things fell apart around him.
The one time she ever saw him look even a little nervous, by the way, was the Super Bowl. Not a tour date, not a stunt gone wrong. A halftime show in front of a hundred million people. Everything else, he took in stride.
More from guitarist Jennifer Batten on life on tour
It’s tempting to imagine the King of Pop as all spectacle and nerves under those blinding lights. The people who stood a few feet from him for years paint a much calmer picture. Even left dangling off a broken rig with his heart pounding, he kept his cool, and he was decent about it too.