Howard Stern reminds fans that Sheryl Crow sang backup for Michael Jackson on tour
Over the Memorial Day weekend, “The Howard Stern Show” revisited singer Sheryl Crow’s connection to Michael Jackson, surprising some fans who didn’t know the Grammy-winning Missouri native toured with Jackson early in her career.
The show posted a clip from a 2017 interview with Crow in which she talked about providing backing vocals for Jackson’s Bad World Tour supporting his 1987 album, “Bad.”
The post read: “Sheryl Crow tells Howard in 2017 about her surreal experience touring the world as Michael Jackson’s backup singer: ‘It was unbelievable when I think about it.’”
It was Jackson’s first solo worldwide concert tour — 123 shows over 16 months that began in Tokyo in September 1987.
Crow, who was added to Kansas City’s Fan Festival concert lineup for the World Cup this week, was the only woman among four backup singers on the tour.
“How am I just learning this,” one fan wrote on the Stern show’s Facebook page where the clip was posted Sunday.
“I’ve told folks this (and) they wouldn’t believe me, lol,” wrote another fan.
Crow recalled the tour in her 2022 Showtime documentary, “Sheryl,” revealing that she watched old TV shows with Jackson and his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, while on tour, and also alleging Jackson’s former manager sexually harassed her.
“Making this documentary was such a weird experience because you just basically hand over a pile of archives and stuff I’ve never even seen, and sitting and doing interviews for hours on end and recalling all this stuff,” Crow told Stern in May 2022.
“And recalling the harshness of some of these situations was so draining. And also, it was in a weird way liberating to finally talk about a lot of this stuff I’ve never ever talked about.”
The Bad tour was one of Crow’s first big gigs after the University of Missouri grad left teaching grade school to move to Los Angeles and chase a singing career. Photos of her singing on stage with Jackson led to rumors that they were a romantic item; they were not.
“We did 30 days of rehearsal and then wham bam, we’re in front of 65,000 people in Tokyo at the Yokahama Stadium,” she said in the old clip posted Sunday. “I mean, it was unbelievable when I think about it ... I didn’t even own a passport ...
“And also, he had ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,’ ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ ... and ‘Man in the Mirror,’ which were all solos for me. So it was just a dream.”
She described how she and Jackson had to do a quick change on stage before “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “and he’d be on the other side and he would throw grapes over and giggle, you know. He’d throw things over. He was like a kid.”
“To be working with an adult who can only relate to you as a child, it’s gotta be weird,” Stern told her.
“It was weird. I mean he was a walking dichotomy because ... he was so childlike, almost like he had arrested development at age 11 or something like that. But then, when you’re rehearsing, man, he’s like on it, knows what he wants, hears every part.”
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