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Appearance at Stevie Wonder's "Hotter than July Tour"

Date range confirmed on “The Concert Database” (archived); November 12 and 13, 1980 were the nights Stevie Wonder played at MSG, but Gil Scott-Heron confirmed it was the “second night” that Michael appeared as a guest.

Gil Scott-Heron, spoken-word performer on the tour, “The Last Holiday”

By 1980, I was an old hand at playing Madison Square Garden. If I had still been living in New York, I could have gone through a yawn or two on my second night there with Stevie. New Yorkers had a shield of cool oblivion and paid little attention to the Garden, the Empire State Building, and even the Statue of Liberty.

Indeed there were millions of New Yorkers who had never visited any of those landmarks and knew only that the Garden was down near Times Square and that you played ball there.

Only the most literate music fans would mention that Madison Square Garden was also a concert venue. And even they would have to say also a concert venue, indicating that was not its primary function. Sort of like why there were so few hockey games at Carnegie Hall.

I might have been losing my arenaphobic attitude by that point. I had now done seven shows without an "airplane hangar effect," echoes that never died. I was deciding that arenas that weren't auditoriums could be modified like cafeterias that weren't gymnasiums that I played basketball in while at Fieldston. I had already decided that my prejudice against arenas was selective, that I didn't necessarily dislike playing in front of a lot of people. In fact, the more the merrier. I was starting to compare the experience to playing on television, which I had initially hated. The idea of having my songs and my band all squeezed through a midrange mono speaker the size of an ashtray had depressed me as much as the thought of doing a lip-sync on American Bandstand or Soul Train. It had almost broken my heart to see the Temptations stumbling their way through "Ain't Too Proud to Beg."

There was one thing undeniably advantageous about playing in a venue like Madison Square Garden. There would be, on certain occasions, an energy generated that turned a concert into an event, that gave an indoor performance an air of a festival, an aura of celebration. That was the special buzz, an inaudible hum of excitement and energy that vibrated through everyone in the place. It was running all through the Garden; in the darkened tunnels that led to the dressing rooms and the storage spaces crammed with sports equipment and other event paraphernalia. Hell, everyone from Jumbo to Tom Thumb or whoever P.T. Barnum had promoted had plodded or pranced through these shadowy passages. I felt it.

Beneath bright Broadway and traffic-choked avenues, there were other worlds that existed; worlds of magic and music and miracles. And tonight this was to be the world of Michael Jackson.

Another Jackson. Just what I needed.

Thousands of fans who fantasized about being like Mike, or simply liked Mike, would get a special spectacle this evening because the Prince of Pop was already in the house and rumored to be loosening up his nearly liquid limbs in some private pocket along the passageways by the time I finished my set. He was to be a very special delivery and join me and Stevie when we closed the evening. I got to see different performers join us onstage from Houston to Hollywood. You couldn't predict the next surprise Stevie would spring on his audience as we crossed the U.S.A. and Canada. It had become so routine for rockers and high rollers to finagle their faces into the finale that there was hardly a double take from the regulars or roadies, but the Michael Jackson rumor sent some shivers through both the rulers and the riffraff.

I was pleased that everyone else was pleased. From the road representatives of Dick Griffey's Concerts West to certain venue venerables of the Madison Square Garden hierarchy, there was a noticeable neurosis and noise in the arena that evening.

I had met Michael and a couple of his brothers before, but I couldn't say that I knew him or that he would have remembered me. I admired him, of course, since there was no way not to appreciate an artist who had sold as many records as McDonald's had sold burgers. I had been a guest of Greg Phillinganes on one sunshine-splashed afternoon at a studio in L.A. where the Jacksons were regrouping to do an album. Michael was one of the few phenoms remaining when I arrived and Greg organized a brief introduction to folks. I was cool with that, even pleased to meet them in person. It had not been as electric as meeting Quincy Jones or Miles Davis, but I wouldn't forget that it had happened. But what did I know? Only that this youngster, with the hair falling over one eye and a voice so soft and quiet that your ears had to reach for it, was record royalty…

But these casual encounters with artists off duty gave me no warning about how the electricity would elevate, how the excitement level would rise in the arena when Michael Jackson joined us onstage as the band went into the reggae rhythm of "Master Blaster." He would raise the voltage.

I often try to tell people how special Michael Jackson was, as though they don't know. Because I myself didn't know. I thought I did—until he came out for "Master Blaster" at Madison Square Garden.

Stevie called for the monitor man to pull the rhythm track up and with a wide grin beckoned for his "special guest," someone who needed no introduction. I looked behind me as he took three steps, paused a beat, and stood straighter and taller, turning solid then as from mist to man. I don't see that well. Sometimes.

He didn't just walk onto the stage. He turned solid as he came. A trick of the light. He glided past me into the spotlight. There was a surge of energy from the crowd that lifted the sound in the arena from stereo to quadraphonic and even the temperature seemed to rise when he touched the perimeter of the spotlight. And as the crowd's suspicions were confirmed by recognition, the buzz turned into an active roar. The monitor volume was overcome and Stevie's smile got wider and he clapped his hands close to his chest and waited for the turn, caught the opening when it swung around again and the house roar slid down to thunder again.

When the hook arrived it was like a huge transport landing on foam: "Didn't know you would be jammin' until the break of dawn . . ." Michael and I began on the beat and on the same harmony note, but as smoothly as he had floated from the shadows to my side, his voice climbed to the next harmony note where he seemed to cancel our collision and make himself at home again, two notes further up the scale.

After another chorus with me holding the mike for Mike I realized how prepared he was to do this and how unprepared I was to do it with him.

He knew the song. All of it. The lyrics, the changes, and all of the harmony parts. Hell, I hadn't got my part right until we got to Hartford. Tonight I felt like a six-foot mannequin clutching the base of the wireless like a giant gray ice-cream cone, frozen into a position of extending my arm between us, trying to collect both of our voices. It felt like reaching for water with a butterfly net. I was committed to remaining stationary and holding the sound stick steady. Michael might have been, but even while standing still he seemed to flow in every direction. Without a further thought I handed him the microphone and strolled to the shadows on our side of the stage.

In essence I got to watch two wonders at once. Up close: a smiling Stevie at center stage behind his keyboard bank with his head slightly tilted in what had been my direction; and sliding in and out of the circle of soft light that usually told me where to stand I saw this youngster, bending with impossible balance, twisting the tempo around him like a thread that spins a top. And then he reversed it, twirling like a boneless ice skater. The symmetry was perfect because he was as still as a statue when the foundation of the verse appeared and Stevie came in again. I was looking ahead and saying I had thirty more shows to try that, to get it like Mike. Probably not.

Chris Cadman, author, “Michael Jackson the Maestro”

A review in Musician, Player, and Listener magazine said: "Michael Jackson, who bopped out boldly and nipped all over the stage in designer jeans, silver jacket, and mirror shades."