It was August 1967 and he had just turned 9, when his father, Joe, loaded everyone into a well-worn Volkswagen bus and drove from Gary, Ind., to 125th St. so the Jackson 5 could enter the Apollo Theater's famed Amateur Night competition.
They won, and Michael later wrote that he also fell in love with the Apollo, even the "musty old curtains" in which the young boy would on subsequent visits enfold himself and study how James Brown or Jackie Wilson conquered an audience.
"He was a sponge," his friend and producer Quincy Jones would later say. "He filed it all away. I don't know any entertainer who was a more serious student of the greats that came before."
Though the Apollo's heyday had passed by the late 1960s, it was still prime territory for greats.
It was not, however, the only place in New York that would over the years draw and fascinate Michael Jackson. The difference was that as he worked his way up the stardom ladder, the curtains got less musty.
Ten years later, for instance, he became a frequent visitor to Studio 54.
When he filmed "The Wiz" in New York, starting in the summer of 1977, he and his sister La Toya rented a 37th-floor apartment on Sutton Place.
As they settled into New York life, one of the places they discovered was Studio 54, then in its hedonistic prime. They were often escorted by Liza Minnelli and always taken to the basement, where there were no rules at all.
But Truman Capote later said Michael and La Toya were oases of innocence.
Michael turned down the drugs that were dispensed like Halloween candy, La Toya said, "because we didn't even know what cocaine was."
Capote did say Michael would sometimes watch the sexual action in the shadows, not unlike the way he watched James Brown.
By 1984, when Jackson was riding the wave from "Thriller," he moved up another notch on the New York ladder.
In February of that year, his grateful CBS record label threw him a black-tie party at the Museum of Natural History.
It was the kind of event that would define Michael's star persona in coming years. Guests included Donald and Ivana Trump. Jackson's "date" was Brooke Shields. During the affair, he introduced himself to Calvin Klein by saying, "I'm wearing your jeans, Mr. Klein."
While hundreds of fans waited outside all evening in sub-freezing temperatures, CBS President Walter Yetnikoff introduced Jackson as "the greatest artist of all time."
It was somewhat more elegant than the Apollo trip, which involved packing a whole family, all teens and pre-teens, into a VW bus without video screens and driving them for at least a full day in the August heat.
Any parent can just imagine what that trip was like, but Joe Jackson figured the Apollo was worth it, and he was right.
Nor was it just the prestige of winning Amateur Night, which earned them a TV offer from David Frost and helped spur Motown to sign them to a record deal.
Joe also hoped the Apollo was a place where he could cut some other deals — since the expense of promoting the group had left him in dire financial shape.
"He was offering us to take them over," says Moore. "He was serious. They needed money."
Moore and his partner Dave Prater declined the offer, as had Brown's people.
Apollo photographer Gordon Anderson would sit in the front row for the first Apollo show every week and shoot everything. He'd then print the pictures with a signature montage style and sell them to the artists for a couple of dollars.
"Joe Jackson wouldn't buy any," Anderson said 20 years later. "Said it was too much money."
Anderson was so irritated about that, he added, that he ripped up the prints and threw away the negatives.
"Not very smart," he said, laughing.
Michael Jackson, born in the Rust Belt and mostly a Californian, never lived in New York for long. But he liked the place. Just a few days before his death, he brought his children here for a relatively anonymous stroll.
And it was outside the Apollo that hundreds of fans spontaneously gathered when they heard the news he had died. The musty curtains are gone, and now, so is the wide-eyed 9-year-old who started his ride to stardom in their folds.
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