In July 1968, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers came to Chicago’s Regal Theater with a hit behind them. “Does Your Mama Know About Me” had reached No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May, and the band’s guitarist, a Canadian named Tommy Chong, had co-written it. The world would later know him as half of Cheech & Chong. That week he was a Motown musician with a show to play, and the opening act was a family band from the area that had no record deal with Motown yet.
Chong told the story to Steve-O on the podcast “Steve-O’s Wild Ride!”, in a clip the show posted in March 2021. Steve-O asks, “What about the time you met Michael Jackson?”
“We met Michael in Chicago at the Regal Theater,” Chong says. “Him and his band had won a contest at the high school and the winner got to open for Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers and Jerry Butler.”
So the Vancouvers got a look at the contest winners, and out front was the smallest of the brothers. “That was the first time we saw him,” Chong says. Then he describes him: “Here’s this little guy, who’s the littlest guy you ever saw, and he’s acting like a seasoned performer.”
He remembers the set, too. Michael, he says, “was a big Jackie Wilson fan,” and the boy was doing all of Wilson’s steps. Then the brothers sang “My Girl,” the Temptations song. “Oh, they were incredible,” Chong says.
Tommy Chong tells Steve-O about meeting little Michael Jackson
This is the official clip from “Steve-O’s Wild Ride!” Chong tells the whole story from about 0:03 to 2:12, starting with the Regal Theater and ending with Bobby Taylor’s invitation to Detroit.
The show isn’t where Chong’s story ends. “And we shared a dressing room,” he says. The Vancouvers were grown men and Michael was a little boy, so he’d worked out his own way of getting ready next to them.
“Michael used to get a little Coca-Cola case, you know, turn it upside down and stand on it and stand in the mirror and, you know, comb out his little natural,” Chong says. A natural was what people called an Afro in those days.
That’s the picture Chong has carried for more than 50 years. The boy who had just danced like Jackie Wilson in front of a Chicago crowd was up on an upturned soda case with a comb in his hand. Chong’s verdict on him is short: “He was a cool guy.”
The shared dressing room led somewhere. Chong says Bobby Taylor was the kind of guy who’d say “hey come on to Detroit,” and that’s what he told the Jackson 5 and their father, Joe: “Come on to Detroit, you stay at my place, then we’ll get you into Motown.”
The brothers signed with Motown in March 1969, and Taylor became their first producer there. He supervised most of their debut album, including their cover of the Miracles’ “Who’s Lovin’ You.”
Millions of people know Chong’s face from the movies and have no idea he was ever in a Motown band, or that his band shared a bill with the Jackson 5 before Motown signed them. “We knew Michael before anybody,” he tells Steve-O, “before Berry Gordy, before anybody.”