What you think about the 30th Anniversary concerts?

His health was fine at the start of the '88 leg yet he still had subpar vocals (for the most part) for songs he would later lip-sync.


Yes specifically for Beat It, I do wonder why it disappeared for the Victory Tour.


The opening sucks but the rest is super good, specifically "oh I'll be workin' from nine to five, to buy you things to keep you by my side", I've scoured through every concert where he sings that line live and this is the best one. In all the Bad Tour concerts where he sings this his voice cracks or he lets the backup singers do it.


Kansas 1988, Tunis 1996 and the other MSG concert exist.


There are always exceptions, but for the most part he did. That's what I meant when I said "There are naturally more variations on these but these are the main ones."
Regarding The Way You Make Me Feel
We have only heard MJ sung that part live from the Bad Tour once in the low quality amateur recording of the MSG 1988 concerts and he sings it 10x better than he did in MSG 2001. Even if he did sing that part better than the one concert we have heard from MSG are you gonna ignore the rest? How does one good line make up for 90% of bad singing?

It's crazy how people can listen to the same thing and hear entirely different things.
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Regarding his health

His health was not fine. He was suffering from laryngitis almost from the start of the 88 tour. He canceled the second show in St. Louis after performing the first concert while he was sick. the St Louis shows were the shows after the MSG concerts. MJ was suffering from lupus that attacks the lungs very aggressively and laryngitis as well. On top of that MJ still had chronic scalp pain and headaches from the Pepsi accident and he had notoriously poor sleeping habits as well as eating habits. On top of that he danced so much that he lost 5 lbs of weight during the concert that Michael Bush had to design him smaller new clothes! It's quite unbelievable that he even could sing and dance as long as he did before he realized that something had to give. This was not sustainable because he was a human after all.

Regarding WBSS
Well, you say for the most part that he did that kick but we have only seen 3 PRO WBSS footage from the victory tour (Dallas, Toronto, Kansas) and one amatuer concert (NY). I don't remember him doing that kick in NY either. I think he was just trying some stuff out, but that's just my opinion.
 
Regarding The Way You Make Me Feel
We have only heard MJ sung that part live from the Bad Tour once in the low quality amateur recording of the MSG 1988 concerts and he sings it 10x better than he did in MSG 2001. Even if he did sing that part better than the one concert we have heard from MSG are you gonna ignore the rest? How does one good line make up for 90% of bad singing?

It's crazy how people can listen to the same thing and hear entirely different things.
1:39:40
We have five instances where he sings the line.

1988 Pensacola rehearsals - Voice crack on the "side".

1988 MSG March 5 - No issues although it has a noticeably different delivery than the album version. I've not heard it until you linked it admittedly (I'm a pretty new fan).

1988 MSG March 6 - Voice crack on the "side" again. I'm not sure how you thought there were only two when I literally linked this one in the previous post. Perhaps the difference between the default grey and the white used for links is not noticeable enough. Whenever I refer to a specific moment I've been sourcing all the things I've said (as well as the list here) with timed hyperlinks in my previous posts.

1992 rehearsals - He barely sings half of it.

2001 MSG September 7th - It took me many listens before I realised this line wasn't the album. Other fans I showed to have expressed the same sentiment.

The vocals in Ryan Burr's audio sound much worse than the audio recording I usually listen to (Ryan's has a tinny sound I don't like and has more crowd sound) in which he sounds basically flawless. It is very strange that the disparity between how good his singing sounds is so great between them.
Regarding his health

His health was not fine. He was suffering from laryngitis almost from the start of the 88 tour. He canceled the second show in St. Louis after performing the first concert while he was sick. the St Louis shows were the shows after the MSG concerts. MJ was suffering from lupus that attacks the lungs very aggressively and laryngitis as well. On top of that MJ still had chronic scalp pain and headaches from the Pepsi accident and he had notoriously poor sleeping habits as well as eating habits. On top of that he danced so much that he lost 5 lbs of weight during the concert that Michael Bush had to design him smaller new clothes! It's quite unbelievable that he even could sing and dance as long as he did before he realized that something had to give. This was not sustainable because he was a human after all.
I was not aware of this, touché. Very informative.

Regarding WBSS
Well, you say for the most part that he did that kick but we have only seen 3 PRO WBSS footage from the victory tour (Dallas, Toronto, Kansas) and one amatuer concert (NY). I don't remember him doing that kick in NY either. I think he was just trying some stuff out, but that's just my opinion.
This is one out of three, and although it is much harder to identify. The shuffling in the amateur audio for this section suggests he might kick during them (in the other night in Toronto a dude even audibly reacts to it), but we can't know for sure.
 
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He also sings the song half a step down from the Bad Tour version on the 30th anniversary so, of course, his voice is going to sound less strained.
 
I really don’t care if he doesn’t hit all the notes, it’s a high intensity concert and he is a professional singer he knows ways to work around this. I’m perfectly fine with the background singers filling up notes MJ can’t reach. It would be ok too to just leave some sentences out, it’s no disgrace. The lip syncing is though 😛
All the TWYMMF performances you guys posted sounded fine to me even with the imperfections, a cracking voice? So what, I don’t want to hear the exact same audio from the album.
 
All the TWYMMF performances you guys posted sounded fine to me even with the imperfections, a cracking voice? So what, I don’t want to hear the exact same audio from the album.
I guess Michael disagreed with you and was not ok with imperfections being a perfectionist and all 😛
 
I guess Michael disagreed with you and was not ok with imperfections being a perfectionist and all 😛
For me it would be part of the charm, the experience. There is no such thing as perfection anyway otherwise he would sing it live, the fact that he couldn’t bring it live the way he wanted to and thus lip synced it is an imperfection in itself.
 
i think live concerts should sound the opposite way they sound on album versions) watch damon albarn lives. on the scene he sound like an idiot XD but that is live) and that's is what it is) if MJ made a mistake while live performace, thats is not bad that is awesome, coz its live lol) live is how singer feels the song right now.
 
Honestly I was shocked by his condition on the red carpet with Liz Taylor he had to be woken up for the show he was late
 
We have five instances where he sings the line.

1988 Pensacola rehearsals - Voice crack on the "side".

1988 MSG March 5 - No issues although it has a noticeably different delivery than the album version. I've not heard it until you linked it admittedly (I'm a pretty new fan).

1988 MSG March 6 - Voice crack on the "side" again. I'm not sure how you thought there were only two when I literally linked this one in the previous post. Perhaps the difference between the default grey and the white used for links is not noticeable enough. Whenever I refer to a specific moment I've been sourcing all the things I've said (as well as the list here) with timed hyperlinks in my previous posts.

1992 rehearsals - He barely sings half of it.

2001 MSG September 7th - It took me many listens before I realised this line wasn't the album. Other fans I showed to have expressed the same sentiment.
Well I specifically was talking about " Live concert performances" Not rehearsals because he wasn't always singing a 100% during rehearsals, But since you brought them up let's take a closer look at them

The pensacola dress rehearsal we have is most likely from the 2nd run through of the show during the same day, I am 95% sure of this because MJ performed a full dress rehearsal in front of some 100 children on that same day. You can hear how tired his voice is which is not unusual if you dance and sing with the amount of energy that MJ did for over 4 hours.

Here is TWYMMF from an earlier pensacola day and even though we don't get to here him sing that specific line you are referring to, and with the exception of avoiding some high notes he sings it PERFECTLY! No raspiness, no hoarsness, no breathiness. Almost identical to the studio version

TWYMMF from MSG March 6 (Which i think really is from the 3rd because of how perfectly it lines up with the footage in bad25)
I don't really hear a voice crack here at all. The same as March 5. Terrific vocal performances.

1992. He didn¨t do it because he didn't have too push himself that hard on a rehearsal. Not much to say other than when he did go for it he sounded awesome.

I don't understand the fixation about that single note being the decider if he did great vocal performance or not.
MSG 2001 was performed in a lower pitch which helped him hit that high note easier but the rest of his vocal performance was not good. I don¨t even think that's debatable since you can clearly hear him not reaching the high notes. singing off key, having multiple voice cracks.
But hey, in the end we all like what we like. If this is your favorite TWYMMF performance then good. We all have different tastes.
 
TWYMMF from MSG March 6 (Which i think really is from the 3rd because of how perfectly it lines up with the footage in bad25)
I don't really hear a voice crack here at all. The same as March 5. Terrific vocal performances.
This gives more credibility to the theory that the kiss happened on March 6th and that Spike Lee mislabeled the footage. Newspaper articles mention a kiss happening on the 6th not on the 3rd.
 
I don't understand the fixation about that single note being the decider if he did great vocal performance or not.
I think you misunderstand me, all I was saying is that the delivery of that particular line is my favourite. That's it. The fact we're still talking about it is purely because you latched onto it when you first responded to me. And given the new recordings I've been exposed to, both of MSG September 7th and the MSG concert, I no longer hold the September 7th TWYMMF vocals in such high regard.

But hey, in the end we all like what we like. If this is your favorite TWYMMF performance then good. We all have different tastes.
Don't worry, it's not even close to the top. Brunei December 31st for me, thank you.
 
Regarding his health

His health was not fine. He was suffering from laryngitis almost from the start of the 88 tour.
Fans need to stop with the laryngitis excuse. Did he have laryngitis during the entirety of the HIStory tour? And also on the day he did every one of his later TV appearances? Why wasn't his speaking voice affected? And why could he still do the "oows" and "aoohs" during the ad-libs?

There's an interview he did on the radio, where the host asks him if he could sing a few notes, and MJ tells him "I can't, larygintis", despite his voice being fine the rest of the interview...

As for his other health problems, we're talking show-business here: half the singers you've ever heard singing on stage are the very picture of unhealthiness, from Edith Piaf to Judy Garland, from Elvis to Liza Minelli. These are people who basically have one foot in the grave every time they set foot on stage. And they still manage to get those notes out -- only it sounds better the healthier they are.

At some point in the Eighties, somebody told MJ he could just mime along to a playback and people wouldn't mind, and it would make the show easier for him. He tried it, it "worked", and then he abused it, since the people who could have told him it wasn't acceptable -- the ticket-buying fans -- chose to let him get away with it. The result is that MJ's live work post-80's is largely disposable now, when that of other artists is looked at as definitive live material that rivals or exceeds what they did on record. The whole thing is a terrible, terrible missed opportunity.
 
Fans need to stop with the laryngitis excuse. Did he have laryngitis during the entirety of the HIStory tour? And also on the day he did every one of his later TV appearances? Why wasn't his speaking voice affected? And why could he still do the "oows" and "aoohs" during the ad-libs?
There's an interview he did on the radio, where the host asks him if he could sing a few notes, and MJ tells him "I can't, larygintis", despite his voice being fine the rest of the interview...
You literally answered your own question. There were official statements from MJ's team that stated shows were cancelled because of laryngitis. Michael's autopsy literally said his lungs were suffering from "widespread respiratory bronchiolitis and chronic lung inflammation" and that was during This Is It, when his voice was in relatively good condition.

At some point in the Eighties, somebody told MJ he could just mime along to a playback and people wouldn't mind, and it would make the show easier for him.
But it clearly wasn't easier, because he was still singing under the playback.

The result is that MJ's live work post-80's is largely disposable now,
This is clearly not the case, the Dangerous Tour Bucharest concert is way more popular than Wembley '88. Munich 1997 performances are above even that, and there are clearly many fans here that love the 90s performances. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean everyone does.
 
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I really don’t care if he doesn’t hit all the notes, it’s a high intensity concert and he is a professional singer he knows ways to work around this. I’m perfectly fine with the background singers filling up notes MJ can’t reach. It would be ok too to just leave some sentences out, it’s no disgrace. The lip syncing is though 😛
All the TWYMMF performances you guys posted sounded fine to me even with the imperfections, a cracking voice? So what, I don’t want to hear the exact same audio from the album.
For me it would be part of the charm, the experience. There is no such thing as perfection anyway otherwise he would sing it live, the fact that he couldn’t bring it live the way he wanted to and thus lip synced it is an imperfection in itself.
Agree 100%.
 
At some point in the Eighties, somebody told MJ he could just mime along to a playback and people wouldn't mind, and it would make the show easier for him. He tried it, it "worked", and then he abused it, since the people who could have told him it wasn't acceptable -- the ticket-buying fans -- chose to let him get away with it. The result is that MJ's live work post-80's is largely disposable now, when that of other artists is looked at as definitive live material that rivals or exceeds what they did on record. The whole thing is a terrible, terrible missed opportunity.
..... and that's your opinion :)
No one has come close to putting up a show better than Michael. Maybe it "worked" and he abused it, or maybe he and the fans realized, this means he can put up a better show, do more energetic dancing and actually sustain it.
 
Honestly I was shocked by his condition on the red carpet with Liz Taylor he had to be woken up for the show he was late
Is this MSG 2001 first show you're talking about? I don't know the full story here but my understanding is that on that first night, Michael was late turning up, he was discovered in his room in a zonked out state. A drug overdose? I have no idea but he seems to have been in some sort of drug induced state. I believe they hauled him into the shower and did ... whatever, to get him going again. Got him to the venue where he turned in what seems to be a duff performance.

I haven't looked into this because the whole thing depresses the hell out of me. But if this is true, if he was out of it (perhaps because he really didn't want to do the show) and they did whatever to get him up and moving, how is that any different to how Judy Garland was treated by Hollywood? I realise that if the show had been cancelled a lot of money would have been lost. Is that more important than Michael's health? In my world, no. Easy for me to say since I'm not the person losing money but I don't care. He's a human being.

If I've got the details of this story wrong, I apologise. As I said, I've never tried to verify it cos it's so depressing I don't wanna even think about it. And I'm a person who has zero interest in watching anyone lipsync through a 'live' show. It's the main reason the footage of HWT doesn't really interest me. But if all of this really happened on that night of the first MSG 2001 show I don't think the issue is whether he hit a duff note that night. I think there are more important things to be worried about.

Btw, mjfanboy27, I'm not having a go at you. I'm only mentioning all of this cos whenever I see these sort of discussions and MSG 2001 comes up no-one ever seems to mention this story of why Michael wasn't delivering a good performance on the first night. If the story, as I understand it, is true then I'd say it's pretty relevant.
 
Is this MSG 2001 first show you're talking about? I don't know the full story here but my understanding is that on that first night, Michael was late turning up, he was discovered in his room in a zonked out state. A drug overdose? I have no idea but he seems to have been in some sort of drug induced state. I believe they hauled him into the shower and did ... whatever, to get him going again. Got him to the venue where he turned in what seems to be a duff performance.

I haven't looked into this because the whole thing depresses the hell out of me. But if this is true, if he was out of it (perhaps because he really didn't want to do the show) and they did whatever to get him up and moving, how is that any different to how Judy Garland was treated by Hollywood? I realise that if the show had been cancelled a lot of money would have been lost. Is that more important than Michael's health? In my world, no. Easy for me to say since I'm not the person losing money but I don't care. He's a human being.

If I've got the details of this story wrong, I apologise. As I said, I've never tried to verify it cos it's so depressing I don't wanna even think about it. And I'm a person who has zero interest in watching anyone lipsync through a 'live' show. It's the main reason the footage of HWT doesn't really interest me. But if all of this really happened on that night of the first MSG 2001 show I don't think the issue is whether he hit a duff note that night. I think there are more important things to be worried about.

Btw, mjfanboy27, I'm not having a go at you. I'm only mentioning all of this cos whenever I see these sort of discussions and MSG 2001 comes up no-one ever seems to mention this story of why Michael wasn't delivering a good performance on the first night. If the story, as I understand it, is true then I'd say it's pretty relevant.
You're exactly correct, unfortunately. In Jermain Jackson's book, You Are Not Alone: Michael Through a Brother's Eyes he described Michael overdosing on Demoral before the concert and struggling to get him to the concert less than an hour before the show started. The red carpet footage he was talking about was this
He's holding onto Elizabeth like a child in a mall holding his mother, his fly's undone and his speech is completely slurred. There's clearly something very wrong there.
 
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You're exactly correct, unfortunately. In Jermain Jackson's book, You Are Not Alone: Michael Through a Brother's Eyes he described Michael overdosing on Demoral before the concert and struggling to get him to the concert less than an hour before the show started. The red carpet footage he was talking about was this
He's holding onto Elizabeth like a child in a mall holding his mother, his fly's undone and his speech is completely slurred. There's clearly something very wrong there.
Yeah, that's pretty much the account I came across. I generally try to avoid tabloid 'noise' around Michael but, with this story, I did think it sounded authentic but, like I said, it's so depressing I didn't wanna look into it any further. And this was a couple of years ago, Michael was already dead, so there was no gain for me to know if it was really true.

I haven't read Jermaine's book. I have issues with Jermaine! Don't feel terribly inclined to go there. But thank you for confirming this. It's depressing but I think it's important for a full account of that night to be acknowledged. Whatever the arguments about any other sub-par performance Michael did - or did not - deliver, for this particular show there is a whole other thing going on which I don't think can be ignored.
 
oh, well, we got very far from the original question of what you think about the 30th Anniversary concerts. Even on day 2 when apparently he was sober and performance is better, there is no joy in it. No joy, no attitude, no precision in his movements, even in Billie Jean he just throws the suitcase at random, picks up the hat randomly, no impromptu awws, kicks, crotch grabbing, no real audience connection. No one fainted, most importantly again no joy on Michael's face. He is just going through the motions, its not a MJ concert, live signing or no singing.
 
oh, well, we got very far from the original question of what you think about the 30th Anniversary concerts. Even on day 2 when apparently he was sober and performance is better, there is no joy in it. No joy, no attitude, no precision in his movements, even in Billie Jean he just throws the suitcase at random, picks up the hat randomly, no impromptu awws, kicks, crotch grabbing, no real audience connection. No one fainted, most importantly again no joy on Michael's face. He is just going through the motions, its not a MJ concert, live signing or no singing.
I agree but why'd you pick the moment where he was actually himself (the pre-Billie Jean set-up). That's literally the only point at which he grins. The suitcase bit wasn't random either, it was rehearsed.
 
You literally answered your own question. There were official statements from MJ's team that stated shows were cancelled because of laryngitis. Michael's autopsy literally said his lungs were suffering from "widespread respiratory bronchiolitis and chronic lung inflammation" and that was during This Is It, when his voice was in relatively good condition.


But it clearly wasn't easier, because he was still singing under the playback.


This is clearly not the case, the Dangerous Tour Bucharest concert is way more popular than Wembley '88. Munich 1997 performances are above even that, and there are clearly many fans here that love the 90s performances. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean everyone does.

He may have had laryngitis during some of the shows on some of the tours, but he obviously didn't have laryngitis for the whole year the HIStory tour lasted. It was just a PR excuse.

As for him singing under the playback, it's obviously much less of a hassle/a risk to sing when you know the vocals won't be heard: off-key notes, forgotten words, lack of energy don't matter, as nobody will hear it. MJ had to sing under the playback because miming is less convincing when sound doesn't actually come out of your throat, and the deal was that the mic would kick back in for the adlibs, so he had to "half-sing" anyway.

MJ couldn't get away with so much obvious lip-synching today. He'd have at least to pre-record new vocal tracks to use as playbacks during the concert. With cell phones and social media, audiences (especially in the West, where singers lip-synching is more controversial then in some other parts of the world) would have expected either more live singing, or at least more effort being put into minimizing/hiding the miming. MJ singing along to the CD on Don't Stop Til You Get Enough would not fly today.
 
Yeah, that's pretty much the account I came across. I generally try to avoid tabloid 'noise' around Michael but, with this story, I did think it sounded authentic but, like I said, it's so depressing I didn't wanna look into it any further. And this was a couple of years ago, Michael was already dead, so there was no gain for me to know if it was really true.

I haven't read Jermaine's book. I have issues with Jermaine! Don't feel terribly inclined to go there. But thank you for confirming this. It's depressing but I think it's important for a full account of that night to be acknowledged. Whatever the arguments about any other sub-par performance Michael did - or did not - deliver, for this particular show there is a whole other thing going on which I don't think can be ignored.

It's not just Jermaine who's talked about this, but also Frank Cascio, who was there, as well as at least one of MJ's other collaborators (I forget whom). I remember journalists mentioning how out of it MJ looked on the red carpet.

We also have a first-hand and incontrovertible account, from Randy Phillps of AEG, that MJ was "locked in his room drunk" when it was time to do the TII press conference. Philips wrote that in an email to an AEG colleague as it was happening. So there is a history there of MJ acting this way.
 
He may have had laryngitis during some of the shows on some of the tours, but he obviously didn't have laryngitis for the whole year the HIStory tour lasted. It was just a PR excuse.
It's not a PR excuse, because PR never made such claims. He said he had laryngitis during the HIStory Tour once ever. Unless you mean to imply that PR somehow doctored every copy of his autopsy just for an excuse for playback?

MJ singing along to the CD on Don't Stop Til You Get Enough would not fly today.
Why do I have to keep repeating myself? Listen to the brief live vocals in the Off The Wall Medley, he sounds just like the CD, even more so than in 1981.
 
It's not just Jermaine who's talked about this, but also Frank Cascio, who was there, as well as at least one of MJ's other collaborators (I forget whom). I remember journalists mentioning how out of it MJ looked on the red carpet.
Yeah, I came across this stuff. For me, the issue is not 'how out of it' Michael looked. I think the issue is, if he took a drug overdose, that's an indication of high distress about something. I'm more concerned about that.

We also have a first-hand and incontrovertible account, from Randy Phillps of AEG, that MJ was "locked in his room drunk" when it was time to do the TII press conference. Philips wrote that in an email to an AEG colleague as it was happening.
Are you sure you wanna bring Randy Philips into this? Isn't that the guy who bragged about slapping Michael on his backside and screamed in Michael's face? I don't care if the story isn't true. Maybe Randy was just trying to pretend he's a big shot but it doesn't matter. The fact that he could write that email, the fact he didn't expect anyone to challenge him, that's bad enough, never mind if it actually happened the way he said it did.

Plus, the story is that Michael was drunk and refusing to go out cos he was terrified and / or suffering from massive stage fright. If either or both of those things are true my concern would be for Michael and how could we help him. And that would not include screaming at him or assaulting him. If Mr Big Shot Randy *did* slap Michael on his backside, that's assault.

So there is a history there of MJ acting this way.
'Acting' this way? Really? If Michael was so distressed by the thought of performing at certain times that he gets drunk or takes an overdose or refuses to go out and do the TII announcement I'm not sure I'd dismiss that as him 'acting' in certain ways. I would assume there was some level of serious distress going on that needed to be addressed properly.
 
Michael Jackson was not immune to age, wear and tear to the body & vocal cords... And with 30th Anniversary - it's clear he was not OK to perform. He stated every tour was his last since the Bad tour for reasons. Touring took a huge toll on him, going night after night traveling, rehearsing, performing while struggling for sleep in his late 30s & 40s at the level of performance he was expected to put on is an undertaking for a machine, not a human...
 
Not that big of a fan of Michael's shows after the first few shows of the Dangerous tour & that applies to the 30th anniversary shows. But there are some things I do like such as the band, the lighting, mostly live vocals & the choreography in Beat It; wonder if they used elements from the One Night Only choreography (that had Kung Fu elements in it which could be seen in the 30th anniversary performance as well).
 
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