Fact Check: Did Michael Jackson's Escaped Snake Frighten Lionel Richie?
A Daily Ostrich investigative report.
![Fact Check: Did Michael Jackson's Escaped Snake Frighten Lionel Richie?](/content/images/size/w1200/2024/08/tp-tunnel.jpeg)
Should you come to visit Portland, Oregon, and you ask TripAdvisor what entertainments to enjoy, you'll learn about the shanghai tunnels. Through these historic tunnels, according to legend, unsuspecting tavern rats were carried off to the docks, and forcibly conscripted onto merchant vessels bound for the far east.
I've taken the Shanghai Tunnel Tour and, here, as a public service, I'll spoil it for you. If you took the tour yourself, you'd join your group on a downtown sidewalk, exchanging glances charged with anticipatory electricity. Presently your chipper tour guide would lead you into a stout old building, down a narrow staircase, into a musty subterranean chamber. There, by the flickering orange light of an ancient sodium bulb, the guide would retell the lore of the tunnels, casting out a chilling tale of conscription gangs and clandestine abduction. Then he'd ask the group, in a theatrical whisper:
"Do you think it really happened? Were unfortunate men really kidnapped through this very tunnel?" He'd pause while you and your group exchanged wide-eyed nods, and then finally answer his own question.
No. The tunnels were built to transport goods around a rainy city. It's unlikely that anyone was ever shanghai'd through the tunnels.
After all, the conscription gangs didn't need tunnels. They would roll their inebriated victims up in carpets, leaving one hand free to sign an X on the sailor's contract, and they'd carry those carpets down the street in view of everybody. It was a well accepted practice—a convenient means to rid the town of habitual drunks. Why shanghai anybody through a tunnel, when you can do it in the open air?
The tunnels came to mind this morning, as I sought to verify an anecdote my brother told me about the writing of We Are the World, the 1985 supergroup single. As the story goes, Lionel Richie was at Michael Jackson's home studio for a last-minute songwriting session, but Michael failed to mention that his boa constrictor, Muscles, had escaped from his cage, and was missing. In his new documentary about We Are the World, Lionel Richie is quoted as follows:
“Out of the corner of my eye, I see some albums falling over. And I hear [hissing noises]. I look over my shoulder—there’s the biggest fricken’ snake...I was like, ‘I gotta out here, quick!’ I'm screaming like—this is the end. I saw this horror movie, and it’s not good for the brother!”
The Daily Ostrich would never repeat such assertions without corroboration, so I turned to the internet and dug into the claimed encounter with an escaped snake. There I found the recollections of producer Quincy Jones, as related to The Guardian.
“[Michael] would come to the studio with Muscles, his snake...I didn’t like that. The snake used to wrap itself around my leg. Man, I didn’t like that at all. It would crawl across the console. I’m not into snakes.”
"One day I said, ‘Where’s Muscles?’ and we went downstairs and Muscles was in the parrot cage. He had just eaten the parrot and his head got stuck in the bars of the cage.”
So we can officially bust this myth: Muscles did not escape his cage, since there was never any cage for Muscles, save those he entered on his own agenda.
The same was true for Bubbles, Michael Jackson's chimpanzee. Bubbles would show up at friends' houses unexpected, and sit in on recording sessions. Recording "There Must Be More to Life Than This" with Freddie Mercury, Jackson reportedly turned to the chimp after each take and said "Don't you think that was lovely?" or "Do you think we should do that again?" until Mercury's wish to break free became sufficient that he quit the project.
Bubbles joined Jackson on the 1987 Bad world tour, with Jackson requesting two-room hotel suites, so Bubbles could have his own room. Jackson and Bubbles paid an unplanned social visit to the Mayor of Osaka, Japan, who invited them both to stay for tea.
And with that, I can finally put my finger on the precise level of power I want to achieve in life. I don't want unbridled power, not ultimate power. I merely want that useful degree of power that allows one to bring wild animals with them everywhere, terrifying all and sundry, and no one, however famous or high-ranking, can dare to intervene.