Remembering Michael Jackson, Four Years Later

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I first met Michael when I was in Detroit. He came to Motown, and they were talking about this boy from Gary, Ind., and the Jackson 5, and everyone was excited. He was a little boy then. He would always come into the studio curious about how I worked and what I did. "How do you do that?" "Why do you do that?" I think he understood clearly from seeing various people do the music scene that it definitely took work. He must have been around 9 or 10 then, and I definitely felt that he would be someone. You heard the voice, and all he could do was grow. And that's what he did.

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I remember playing air hockey one time, and we were going back and forth. I play air hockey on the side as opposed to the end of the table because it's more accessible for me to really understand what's happening. He said, "Oh, you're cheating." And I said, "Aw, I'm not cheating, come on." And we went on and on for hours, just playing air hockey and being silly. He had a childlike heart. And that was very, very impressive to me. At the end of the day, we're all human beings, and for those who can't see that it is possible for a man who's an adult to have a childlike spirit, it doesn't mean that they're weird, it doesn't mean they're a freak or whatever ridiculous things people say. We have all kinds of people in the world. The most important thing is that your heart is in a good place.

Rapper and actor Ice-T appears on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

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I met him once. He was in New York at the Sony studios shooting a video, and I was there with one of my groups. And I was requested — Michael wanted to meet me. I went in the back, and he was sitting between two women and he shook my hand, and it was cool. Somebody like Michael Jackson — you don't even think they know you exist. You know, you're a rapper. And the fact that he was like, "Ice-T is here. I would like to meet Ice-T." And I shook his hand and it was a very cool moment. One of my friends said, No matter how tough you are, Michael Jackson will have the biggest gangster in the front row screaming like a bitch at his concert. That's about the best compliment you can give.

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At the end of the day, his legacy to me is, he was original. That's one thing about Michael Jackson — you can't say any of his stuff was taken from anybody else. It was 100% original. All the new people who are going to mimic him — the little 'N Sync kid [Justin Timberlake] — they know they doing the Michael Jackson.

Actress Anjelica Huston met Michael Jackson working on Captain EO, Francis Ford Coppola’s 3-D movie that was shown at Disney theme parks.

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I met Michael on the first day of rehearsal, and I was stunned — even though, obviously, I knew his image very well — at how incredibly sweet and how modest and how innocent he was. And fragile too. In person you felt he was almost breakable. But then this thing happened when he would start to work: your heart would beat faster and the hair on your arms and the back of your neck would stick up as he literally took your breath away. I think he was the most electrifying performer I've ever seen.

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I think it was very hard for Michael to express anger. He was, I have to say, one of the most polite people I have ever met in my life. I never heard Michael say a swear word, even when he was upset. He had the most beautiful manners. And I think music was really the only way in which his passion could come through unguarded. It was immense. He was on fire as a performer — I've never seen a talent like it. I think, actually, there was a lot of the otherworldly in Michael. He had this talent that I've never encountered before, and I've seen a lot of extraordinary people perform. He was, I think, very misunderstood. I never believed any of the allegations or insinuations against him. We had lunch together about a month ago, and he talked about his ordeal. He felt like he had really been put through the ringer. He said they wanted blood. I felt so bad for him, and I felt that he was really broken-hearted from what had been done. He was a meteor: his flame burned incredibly bright, and not for long but mightily.

Director and choreographer Frank Gaston Jr. has worked with En Vogue, Toni Braxton and Destiny's Child. He currently coordinates routines for Beyoncé.

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The first time I met Michael was when I danced in the video for "Smooth Criminal," and for some reason I remember his fingernails, because they were so well manicured. That was my first job in L.A. as a dancer. And it was the most amazing job — I made $10,000 because the job was for three months. Just the dance section. Isn't that something? There were, like, 40 dancers on the job. You know the scene in "Smooth Criminal" when he gets on the table? I'm standing right there because they wanted me to spot him, so if he fell, I would catch him. And he would never fall.

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I had gone to see his show in Europe, where it was, like, 100,000 people and they don't have seats on the main floor of the stadium. They just stand up and they're like cattle shoulder to shoulder. And that was just amazing, seeing all the medics come in and out because people were fainting, people were crying. I can't explain it. It was like the Holy Ghost: if you ever go to a black Baptist church, people shout, ladies faint. That's the only thing I can describe that's like how it was. And Michael told me one thing too: When people would grab him when he was walking through from backstage, and they could grab him or something, he said it was like fire — because they would grab him and they would pull him. They didn't want to hurt him; it was that they just wanted a piece of him.

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Most people, when they're rehearsing a dance movement, they don't do it full-out. Michael would always do everything to the fullest in rehearsal. He would do it like he was onstage, every time. And as a dancer, you would be like, Why is he doing it that hard? Every chromosome worked, the minute he moved. I don't know if you've ever seen when he was going to court [in 2005], he got on top of his car. Even in that moment, he didn't dance like he was on top of his car, he danced like he was onstage. He danced like every chromosome was working, right there, on top of a car. And when you really look at that tape, when he jumps on top of the car, he hurts his knees. He has to land on his knees when he jumps on the car from the ground. But even though his knees were in pain, he still gave everything he had. If you rewind it and look at it one day, you'll know what I mean.

Carson Daly is the host of NBC's Late Night with Carson Daly. He was the host of MTV's Total Request Live from 1998 to 2002.

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I interviewed him once, when Invincible came out. It was crazy. I remember staying up late to write my questions like I always did, and I wrote a bunch of questions for Michael Jackson. I had to turn them in to the record company, and then the day of the interview, they basically regurgitated one question and gave it back to me and said, "Here — just ask him this." It was very well crafted, well worded. Something to the effect of: How does it feel to have a No. 1 album again in 13 countries? That just spoke to the team that was around him. I walked over across the street maybe an hour before we went live. It reminded me of a presidential process in the sense of the handlers and the route I was to walk: across Times Square and through Virgin Megastore, through the back door. I finally got in. I remember coming down the huge escalator at Virgin Megastore, and it was empty. And Michael was sitting in an aisle, flipping through records. The last handler sort of took me maybe 50 feet away, and I started walking down this aisle toward one of the greatest men ever. The first thing that struck me was how tall he was. Everybody I had met in Hollywood up until that point was disappointingly short and sort of underwhelming. I remember he made a bunch of very humble social gestures that just made me take a great liking to him. He took his glasses off — he was wearing gloves — he took his glove off, and I shook his hand. And he was gracious and, of course, famously soft-spoken. He said, "Very nice to meet you, Carson," and then we just sort of sat there for a minute and flipped through vinyl. We talked about music and how much he loved vinyl. It was just a very bizarre, amazing 20 minutes with Michael Jackson in the aisle of a record store talking about music.