The Victory Tour




It had been four years since the Jackson brothers had performed together as The Jackson 5, and now it was time for their "comeback". After a lot of persuation Michael finally agreed on doing the tour with the brothers, but only to help them out. They knew they wouldn't make as good show without him. It was named, The Victory tour. They (the brothers) hadn't been doing so well the last few years and felt like they needet to get as much money out of the tour as possible (they were afraid this might be their last big performance, and it was). So Joseph Jackson, Don King (who were promoting the whole thing, whom Michael disliked very much) and Chuck Sullivan sat down together to come up with a good concept that would make big bucks for them all. And they did. They came up with a very unique concept that was about to get bad concequences. The tickets wouls be $30 each and sold in lots of four, only. You were suppose to order the tickets, but that didn't guarantee that you actually would get them. The names were about to be selected randomly by a computer drawing cupons that had to be cut out of advertisements and to be published in a local newspaper. So the fans had to send a $120 postal order - plus a two dollar service charge for each ticket - and the cupon, to the adress that was printed on the advertisement. Only one in ten would actually get the tickets. The money orders were to be postmarked at least two weeks before the concert. And for the ones who didn't get the tickets, the delay for returning the money, which usally were four to six weeks, became six to eight weeks. In that time the Jacksons would be able to use the money. Assuming that the tour sold $144 million in tickets, $.1.4 billion in excess payments would have to be returned. In a ordinary money-market deposit account in a bank, which paid about 7 percent interest, that money would earn $8 million a month for the promoters and the Jackson family.
The ones who won the the drawing and were allowed to see the tour, didn't know which concert to attend or where to sit/stand until only two days before the concert. And if the mail was delayed, the ticket's would arrive after the concert.  Bad luck huh. The price was too high for most of the fans to pay just because you were forced to buy four at a time. The probably most loyal fans of Michael, who came from the ghetto, had no chance getting their hands on a ticket.
Now Michael didn't like the idea at all, so he and his adviser, John Branca tried to change their minds. He proposed that each ticket would cost only 20 dollars and that there would be no lots of four, no moneys order and no cupons. He was outvoted though, five to one. From that moment, Michael decided that this was going to be that last thing he ever did with his brothers: "Okay, that's it. This is going to be my last tour with the guys. I'm very serious. So I don't want you to try to run anything. Let them do it their way. I'm just one vote out of six. Let them do their thing. This is their last shot. I'm out of it."
"But why Mike?" Frank wanted to know. "They're gonna fuck it up."
"Because if anything goes wrong, I don't want to hear about it," Michael said. "I don't want to hear about it from my mother, my father or my brothers. Let them do it their way and I'm out of it. Maybe the money they make from this will set them up comfortably. Then I'm out of it."
The plan was finally out to the public and fans were outraged by it. People thought Michael and the brothers were helping out forming the plan and they even said about Michael that all of his drug-free. alcohol-free, save-the-animals image was really just a greedy liar. Frank Dileo told Michael to take action against the whole thing because it was going to damage his image big time. One day he opened the "Dallas Morning News" and found an open letter from eleven year old Ladonna Jones. The girl wrote that she had been saving all per little pennies to see the concert, but that she now couldn't afford it since she had to pay for four. She said that she was disaponted in Michael for letting this happen and wrote: "How dould you, of all people, be so selfish?"
That was the breaking point for Michael, he was really upset by it. Michael was the last person to be such a person and that was never the plan he had about tour. I put it as J. Randy T. wrote it: "It took a child's sadness, however, to force him into action." I love the way he puts it!
Even though he had said earlier that he didn't want anything to do with the planning of the tour, he now had to break in. In a drastic meeting with Joseph, Don and Chuck he told them: "Change the ticket policy. It's a rip-off. You know it. I know it. Now change it. Or I won't tour." And that was the end of it. The next day, the changes were done.

Michael truely is a person to admire.












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