Nobody Made Michael Jackson Cry Like Stevie Wonder — The Story Behind Their 40-Year Friendship D

They met in 1972. Michael was 13, Stevie was 21. They were both on Motown, both more famous than any person their age had a right to be, both carrying the particular weight of having been extraordinary in public since before they understood what extraordinary meant. They looked at each other and recognized something.

It took 40 years to fully understand what it was. Motown Records in the early 1970s was the most successful black-owned music business in American history. A label that had, in the decades since Berry Gordy founded it in a house in Detroit, produced more number one singles than any other address in popular music. It had produced the Supremes and the Temptations and Marvin Gaye and the Four Tops.

It had produced Stevie Wonder, who had signed at 11 years old as Little Stevie Wonder and had spent a decade being one of the most remarkable child prodigies the music industry had ever seen. And it had produced the Jackson 5, who had arrived in 1968 with a 13-year-old lead singer whose voice and stage presence had made Berry Gordy reportedly say that he had found the next Sammy Davis Jr.

, a comparison that within two years had already proven inadequate. Two child prodigies, two people who had been performing since before they could reliably read, two people for whom the music industry was not a career path, but the entire atmosphere of their childhood. When they met, something happened that the people who witnessed it have described consistently in the years since. Not friendship, exactly, not yet.

Something more immediate than friendship. Recognition. The recognition of two people who have been living in conditions that are essentially incomparable to everyone around them and who have just found someone who understands from the inside. Stevie was 21 in 1972, but he was also in the ways that mattered much older.

He had been blind since shortly after birth. He had been performing professionally since he was 11. He had spent the intervening decade navigating the music industry, which was not designed for people like him, and the world, which was also not particularly designed for people like him, with the combination of extraordinary talent and extraordinary stubbornness that would come to define his entire career.

He was, by 1972, already the person he would spend the rest of his life being, complete in the particular way that some people are complete at 21 because the circumstances of their life have compressed the usual developmental timeline. Michael was 13. He was, in the most important respects, not complete at all.

He was a child who had been performing since he was five, who had never had an ordinary childhood, who was carrying the weight of his family’s financial survival, and his father’s expectations, and the collective attention of the music industry, all at an age when most children are worried about homework and friendships and the ordinary negotiations of early adolescence.

He was not ordinary. He had never been ordinary, but he was 13, and the not ordinariness of his situation was still something he was inside rather than something he could see from the outside. Stevie could see it from the outside. He has spoken about meeting Michael in 1972 in interviews across the decades, carefully, without excessive detail, in the way of someone who understands that some things belong to the relationship and not to the public accounting of it.

What he has said is that he recognized something in Michael immediately. Not the talent, which was obvious, something underneath the talent, a a quality of being simultaneously more present and more absent than the situation seemed to require. More present in the music, completely, overwhelmingly in the music when the music was happening, more absent everywhere else.

Stevie recognized this because he had felt it himself. They began spending time together at Motown, in the studios, in the particular proximity that a shared record label creates, the constant overlapping of sessions and schedules, and the informal time that accumulates around formal work. They talked. They played music together.

They discovered that what they shared went beyond the surface similarities, the child prodigy status, the Motown connection, the unusual relationship with fame that comes from having been famous since before you developed the adult self that is supposed to manage fame. What they shared was the music itself.

The specific relationship to music that exists in people for whom music is not a choice or a skill or even a passion, but something more primary than all of those things, something that functions in their lives the way breathing functions, not because they decided to do it, but because the alternative is not available.

Stevie would sit at the piano and play. Michael would listen. And at some point, reliably, Michael would cry. This is something that multiple people who were present in the studio sessions of the 1970s and 1980s have described in various forms across the years. Not the emotional response that music sometimes produces in listeners, the sudden sting of tears that a lyric can trigger, the involuntary catching of breath that a chord change can cause.

Something more sustained than that. Something that happened to Michael Jackson when Stevie Wonder played, specifically, that did not happen in the same way anywhere else. Quincy Jones, who worked with both men across their careers, has spoken about witnessing it. He described it as the most complete emotional response to live music he had ever seen in another musician.

He said, “Michael would hear Stevie play, and it was as though all of his defenses simply went away. Everything he carried, and he carried an enormous amount, it just went for as long as Stevie was playing.” The friendship deepened across the 1970s. Michael’s solo career had begun its separation from the Jackson 5, the individual artist emerging from the group act with the particular combination of inevitability and difficulty that such separations always involve.

Stevie’s career had entered its most remarkable period, the stretch from 1972 to 1976 that produced Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life, a run of albums that many music critics consider the greatest sustained creative output in the history of popular music.

Michael was listening to all of it. He has spoken about Stevie’s influence in interviews across his career with the specific analytical vocabulary of a musician who understands exactly what he is hearing and why it matters. He talked about the way Stevie approached melody, the understanding that melody is not decoration, but the primary carrier of emotional information.

That the right melody can communicate what words cannot. He talked about the rhythmic complexity, the harmonic sophistication, the way Stevie could make something technically extraordinary feel completely natural and inevitable. But what he returned to most often in these accounts was not the technical analysis.

It was something simpler and harder to articulate. He said in one interview that Stevie’s music made him feel like the world was larger than it usually seemed. That the world the music described was bigger and more generous than the world he usually moved through. This is what made Michael cry in the studios and the informal sessions and the 40 years of friendship that followed the initial recognition in 1972.

Not sadness, not even joy exactly. The specific emotion that arrives when you encounter something that confirms your sense of what the world should be. Your sense of the possible, of the generous, of the worth of being here. Stevie gave Michael that. Reliably, repeatedly, for 40 years. In return, and this is the part of the friendship that tends to get lost in the public accounting, Michael gave Stevie something equally important.

He gave him honesty. The people who surrounded both men across their careers have noted this with consistency. Michael Jackson with Stevie Wonder was more direct than he was with almost anyone else. Not because Stevie was blind, the connection people often try to draw, the suggestion that blindness somehow created a different kind of trust, is one that Stevie himself has always resisted.

But because of what Stevie was to Michael. Someone who had known him since he was 13, someone who had no investment in the public Michael Jackson, someone who could not be dazzled by the fame because he had his own and understood what it actually meant. Michael could say things to Stevie that he could not say elsewhere about the loneliness, the specific, persistent loneliness of someone who is surrounded by people every day and genuinely connected to almost none of them.

About the difficulty of trust in a life where the default assumption of everyone you meet is that you have something they want. About what it cost to be what he was in public and what he needed to recover in private. He could talk about the fear, not the stage fright that performers discuss openly, the manageable anxiety that is part of the professional landscape, the deeper fear, the fear of a man who had been performing since he was five and who had never, in all the decades since, been fully certain that what was being loved was him rather than the performance. Who could not always tell where the performance ended and the person began. Who was not entirely sure, on certain nights, that the person existed independently of the performance at all. Stevie listened to all of this with the attention of someone who understood it

from the inside. He had his own version of it, different in the specifics, the same in the essential shape. Two people who had been extraordinary in public since before they could understand what that meant, trying to figure out who they were when the extraordinary was set aside. They never fully solved this problem.

Nobody does. But they worked on it together for 40 years in the particular way that close friends work on the insoluble problems of their interior lives. Not by solving them, but by refusing to pretend they don’t exist. They collaborated formally on several occasions, most notably on Just Good Friends, a track from Michael’s Bad album in 1987, which is a lighter piece than the depth of their friendship might suggest, but which captures something of the ease and warmth of two people who have known each other long enough to be simply comfortable. They appeared together at public events, at award ceremonies, at the particular institutional moments that the music industry creates for its legends. But the friendship was primarily private, primarily in the studios and the informal sessions and the phone calls that Michael made at unusual hours. He

was a notoriously late caller, a function of his performance schedule and his insomnia, and that Stevie always answered. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. The memorial service was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on July 7th, 2009. It was watched by an estimated 1 billion people worldwide, one of the most watched television events in history.

There were speeches and performances and tributes from people who had known Michael in various capacities across his career. Stevie Wonder performed Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer and They Won’t Go When I Go. He did not speak at length. He is not in public grief a man of many words, but what he said in the brief statement that preceded his performance contained more truth about Michael Jackson than everything else said at that memorial combined.

He said, “I just want to say that my heart is broken and I’m not going to say much more than that.” He sat down at the piano. He played. And in the Staples Center in Los Angeles, in front of 17,000 people and a billion watching at home, the thing happened that had been happening in studios and in formal sessions for 40 years.

The thing that Quincy Jones had described as the most complete emotional response to live music he had ever witnessed. People cried. Not the managed performative tears of a public memorial where crying is expected and socially appropriate, something more unguarded than that. The specific response that Stevie Wonder’s playing had always produced in the people who loved Michael Jackson, the response that Michael himself had produced reliably for four decades whenever Stevie sat down at the piano.

He was not there to cry anymore, but the music was still there. And the music was still the music. They met in 1972. Michael was 13. Stevie was 21. They recognized something in each other that took 40 years to fully understand. What it was was this. Two people who had found in each other someone for whom the music meant what it was supposed to mean.

Someone who understood the world the music described, the larger, more generous, more possible world, and who never stopped believing in it. Who sat down at the piano and played it into existence again and again for 40 years. And then one of them was gone. And the other sat down at the piano and played. If this story moved something in you, share it with someone who has a friendship that has survived everything, the years, the changes, the distance, because it was built on something real.

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