kirkerblog 4.0

Kirk Gallery may be closed, as of 5pm Sunday, in bricks-and-mortar format, but it lives on in cyberspace -- and I've moved on much more quickly than expected. Today I found out that I've been approved to start selling vintage on Bond & Bowery. Those of you familiar with Manhattan probably know that it's an intersection (one that happens to be four blocks from my old apartment there), but it's also an international online marketplace for good modern vintage. It's one of several competitors that have popped up the past couple of years to compete with the field's 100-pound gorilla, 1stdibs.com, but at a far lower cost to dealers and with a much less rigid management structure. 1stdibs requires that their own photographers shoot each piece featured on their site, for instance -- a key reason they can only feature dealers from a couple dozen cities throughout the world -- and also that all dealers maintain a storefront, even though some of the best antiques & vintage dealers only sell privately. Although 1stdibs is finally covering Austin as of a couple of months ago, I already knew I'd be closing my gallery's physical location when I heard the news, so even if I wanted to cough up their stiff fees, an application would have been moot.

Bond & Bowery's traffic is fairly hefty considering they have a fraction of 1stdibs's amount of dealers or merchandise, and it's used quite a bit in the trade and aficionados in the know who want something immediately and don't want to pay the outrageous prices 1stdibs dealers typically charge (you may remember my rant earlier this year about Todd Merrill, the country's biggest Paul Evans dealer). Our Web site has already gotten quite a bit of exposure, but this should provide it significantly more. I will be proceeding my only bona fide competitor in Austin vintage circles, Austin Modern, onto Bong & Bowery: owner Elle Greene opened a vintage store on Burnet five years ago but ended up closing it last year to go strictly virtual. I'd say my merchandise as a whole is a little more upscale than Elle's (she has quite a bit of stuff I'd classify as kitsch and a much lower percentage of pieces by specific designers, and unlike her I've never sold vintage accessories), but we certainly have quite a bit of overlap.

Anyway, we should have our first pieces up on Bond & Bowery by the end of the week.

Wow. Nothing like the words "final clearance" to draw a horde! I sent out an e-mail to the gallery's customer list yesterday announcing a markdown of everything left on the floor to 50% off; I'm not exaggerating when I say our sales the past two days were better than the previous six weeks. It probably helped that Barkitecture was going on today, plus we had unseasonably gorgeous weather (sunny and mid-70s), but still. Really, though, there are some damn good deals, and I'm raising anything not sold back up to full price on Monday (for Web sales), but it's nice to clear out excess inventory and go out with a solid sales punch.

Eleven days and counting. By the way, I appreciate all the sympathetic calls and e-mails I've received since my last blog post announcing the closure, but really, I'm fine! Nobody died here. Yes, it's unfortunate that a combination of a crappy economy and an implacable landlord is forcing the closure of my gallery, but any stress I had over it has subsided, and people don't need to be walking on pins and needles around me. At this point I'm mainly looking forward to it all being over.

That said, what isn't over is my business of investing in 20th-century design, and once again it's auction season and time to gauge a barometer of where the market's headed. Building on the fairly strong Treadway/Toomey and Rago sales last month, Wright had its biannual Modern Design sale yesterday, which falls in the middle between Mass Modern and Important Design in the continuum of 20th-century design importance. The results of the last Modern Design sale in March were, as a whole, dismal: Eames sold well (with a few notable exceptions, e.g. an Eames lounge chair set selling for an incredibly weak $2,500), but nearly everything else flopped spectacularly, with iconic examples of 20th-century design selling for the single lowest prices I've ever seen, at auctions large *or* small. A Hans Wegner Papa Bear chair -- signed, mint condition, classic black fabric -- sold for a mere $3,250, for instance, not including buyer's premium. (Just to give you an idea how bad that is, a similar one sold last week on eBay of all places for $6,600. The going dealer rate for a mint Papa is about $12,000.) A classic Saarinen Egg chair, also signed, sold for $2,000; while I've admittedly paid less than that for one myself, the one I bought was essentially destroyed and required a Six Million Dollar Man-style refurbishment.

This week's sale? Not only did Eames sell well, but nearly everything else (or at least everything made by well-known designers) sold extremely well. The two Papas on the block sold for $7,000 and $9,000 respectively. A weathered Egg sold for $4,000 -- still well below peak prices, but nevertheless double the sale price of last March. Eames lounge chair prices rebounded; the two on the block sold for $3,250 and $4,250 respectively. Edward Wormley sold remarkably well overall, and even Nakashima made a strong comeback after so many of his lots failed to sell (both at Wright and elsewhere) last spring. The only off-the-deep-end sale price I noticed was a Curtis Jere mirror selling for $8,000 (plus 25% buyer's premium); I've been more bullish on Jere than a lot of people, but even I think $8K for one of their pieces is absurd. What few people seemed to be buying were pieces from the more obscure designers at the sale, some of whom even I've never heard of. (Brazilian furniture may be gorgeous, but unless a given piece was designed by Niemeyer or Rodrigues, its odds on the block are dubious at best.)

On a final auction-related note, I was sad to see recently that one of my best "secret" vintage sources has at last been revealed to the general antiques-buying public. The auction house that lit the whole fuse in terms of my interest in the business was Tepper Galleries, which I found out about three years ago only because I briefly dated one of their auctioneers right before moving back to Austin. Their primary business is pre-20th-c. antiques, but occasionally they hold modern sales -- usually a handful of pieces within a larger antique sale, but occasionally stand-alone modern auctions -- and it was there where I scored my single most stellar deal to date: a pair of Andre Dubreuil Spine chair knockoffs. While they'd be worth an order of magnitude more if they were original, even knockoffs command a massive premiums, given the design complexity involved. 1stdibs currently has a pair of knockoffs listed at $9,500; I paid $80 for my pair. No, that's not a typo. Tepper is actually the oldest auction house in Manhattan, pre-dating even Sotheby's, Christie's and Doyle, but they have steadfastly resisting joining the 21st century and until recently had a Web site straight out of 1995. They didn't even *list* auction items online, let alone sell them there. Alas, they have at long last gotten a clue: their first online auction, hosted by LiveAuctioneers (which hosts Internet auctions for nearly every auction house in the country besides Sotheby's and Christie's, which have developed their own live-auction software), takes place tomorrow. What was formerly an insider secret few people outside of New York interior design circles knew about now has national, and even international, exposure.

Yes, the rumors are true: I'm closing my gallery, at least in its present bricks-and-mortar incarnation. Last day of business will be October 18. You know that "threes" thing I alluded to a couple of blogs back? This is it: my third idea in a row that turned out to be ahead of its time -- and on top of that launched two weeks before the worst economic crisis in 75 years.

There's a simple reason I decided to shutter the place -- the economy sucks, and we don't have enough in-store sales to justify the overhead I'm paying to maintain a large storefront -- coupled with about a dozen much more complex matters, including my landlord's failure to offer me or any other 2nd St tenant any kind of realistic rent relief, as I alluded to both in a recent Statesman article as well as a guest editorial I wrote for the Austin Business Journal (unfortunately the final paragraph somehow got chopped off the online version). I'll elaborate more -- much more -- in the future on what's been going on for most of the past year, and what's going to end up happening as a result, but suffice it to say some much-needed change is already in the works.

Somewhat ironically, August turned out to be our best sales month to date, by a significant margin, and that was during what is typically one of the slowest furniture/home accessories sales months of the year, and without us running any ads or promoting any discounts the entire month. Still, it wasn't enough to justify keeping the business going -- at least in absence of the abatements AMLI should be providing, but isn't.

I'm keeping the gallery's Web site going, however, and will continue to sell the majority of my merchandise online, as well as keep the 20th-century vintage thing going, both in private sales and at auction. The latter is actually recovering from its comatose state, as documented here over the past six months: Rago and Treadway/Toomey had surprisingly strong sales at the first auctions of the season about a week ago, and good work was once again selling at the high end of estimate ranges as well as beyond them. I'm certainly not declaring a permanent uptick yet, but all indicators are for the moment good.

I also have a couple of other things up my sleeve that have nothing whatsoever to do with retail or design, but more on that in a few months.

Sorry - got sidetracked and wrote Part 2 much later than planned. Anyway ... a few months after getting laid off from iluvcamp, I decided to go into business for myself. I've always been an inveterate traveler, along with the rest of my family, and I'd noticed there wasn't (at the time) any place to go, either online or off, for unadulterated, expert reviews of a given hotel -- with significant detail instead of the 100-150 words seen in an average print travel guide review, and containing actual photos of the facility instead of the marketing department-shot ones illustrating the places at their finest, not "warts and all." From that sprouted the business plan for a site I called Urban Passport. It started out in concept as a hybrid online/offline guide (which no one else was really doing at the time) -- the book version would drive traffic to the Web site, and vice-versa -- focusing on a given major city's hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, shopping, and pretty much everything besides its main tourist attractions; they were designed for frequent travelers who'd already seen the Buckingham Palaces and Eiffel Towers and now wanted the latest scoop on new boutique hotels, cool restaurants, and the best nightclubs. Since there were already a few nascent sites covering all of the above Stateside, I decided to focus on overseas destinations, and started with one with a low learning curve: London, where there's no language barrier and where I'd already lived for a spell during college.

I moved there for four months in 2001 to write the prototype in person, and I have to say it was one of the most memorable periods of my life to date. I was actually doing quite a bit of work, but said work involved staying in luxury hotels and reviewing as many as a half-dozen bars each night. (I took a journal with me to crib notes about each place; my notes inevitably got fuzzier and fuzzier as each night progressed.) Since I knew I'd get lonely all by myself, I rented a two-bedroom flat for the full four months in what was then a dodgy area of the East End, a half-block from an abandoned council estate, and invited numerous American friends -- as well as my mom -- to come visit, for periods ranging from a few days to three weeks. Some of the longer visits included side trips; my friend Robert and I flew to Ibiza for a long weekend, details of which would probably result in a visit from INTERPOL were I to describe them, and my mom & I went to both the Amalfi Coast in Italy as well as the tiny village between Rome & Naples where my greatgrandfather was born. (Two hints here: visiting the Amalfi Coast during the peak August season is a godawful idea unless one enjoys dodging jumbo buses on veritiginous, blind-curve-laden mountain roads designed for horse-drawn carts, and it's not a good idea to visit rural Italy and hope to communicate with the locals without knowing at least a little bit of Italian.)

Anyway, I returned from the trip 20 pounds heavier -- eating two large restaurant meals a day, coupled with going out drinking nearly every night, will do that do you -- but a veritable mount of copy written: reviews of about 80 hotels, 120 restaurants and 300+ bars, pubs & clubs. Six months' worth of copyediting and Web-development later, Urbanpassport.net launched just in time for SXSW Interactive '02. (It's a whole other tangent why I didn't initially land the Urbanpassport.com domain, but let's just say I acquired the de facto rights to it a few months after launch.) We held the launch party during Interactive at the Lucky Lounge; my dad flew in for the occasion, and we had around 1,000 attendees total. All in all, a good start.

The site got off to a good start as well. In case you were wondering where the site's revenue was generated: although each hotel review was completely unbiased, we had an affiliate relationship with IAN, a unit of Hotels.com; if someone reserved a given hotel through the site -- which, thanks to a then-newfangled Web technology called XML, we were able to do seamlessly on the site, even though all the data (and subsequent customer fulfillment) was handled by an affiliate of Hotels.com -- we received 50% of the agent's commission (8%-10% of a guest's total room expenditure, minus taxes). That figure could really add up if we're talking week-long trips with multiple rooms (one for the parents, one for the kids) at a five-star London hotel; I think my single biggest commission was nearly $500. Although the site was pulling some substantial revenue numbers pretty quickly, I also quickly realized two things: there wasn't any realistic revenue to be had from anything but hotel reviews, and the site had to expand said hotel reviews rapidly beyond London in order to reach a critical mass.

By that fall I'd made the decision to focus exclusively on hotel reviews (besides London - I maintained the existing city guide there), and I also decided to add a dozen more European cities, which I visited in a seven-week solo marathon, with all of a four-day break in the middle. Glamorous though it might sound to hop between international capitals, it actually kinda sucked; I switched hotels nearly every night, and I had to live out of a single mid-sized suitcase the whole time, one that had to fit clothes appropriate for temperatures ranging from the 80s (in Barcelona, where I started in mid-September) to sub-freezing (in Prague, where I ended in early November). After that I decided to write some reviews in three non-European test markets, just to see if the site's success could be replicated beyond the continent: random though they may seem, I picked Las Vegas, Vancouver and Hong Kong. In all three cases, each city had a critical mass of business travel but wasn't adequately covered hotel review-wise by any existing travel guides, online or off. I visited each destination and wrote about a dozen hotel reviews for each.

By 2003 I'd moved to New York both in hopes of launching the long-planned print counterpart to the guide, and also because I was still traveling back and forth to Europe frequently to keep the content up-to-date and also keep adding new hotels. I managed to find various European-based freelancers to write new/update existing content -- particularly for London, since I had kept its city-guide going and needed people to write up new restaurants, bars and clubs as they launched -- but finding reliable ones proved much more difficult than anticipated, particularly in countries where it was difficult to find fully bilingual native writers (the Czech Republic sticks out in my mind here). An additional problem was getting the site indexed in the free search listings on Google and the various search engines; the concept of "search-engine optimization" was still in its infancy then, and the original site hadn't been developed around it structurally, so we relied predominantly on paid Google and Yahoo! keyword ads to bring traffic to the site. This worked fine in 2002, when the price per click was as low as five cents, but after keyword advertising exploded in popularity a few years later, this proved harder and harder. (At one point prices hit SIXTY TIMES that amount for some hotels.)

Also by 2005 or so, the print world was starting to fully branch out online, and user-generated content sites were flourishing as well. Back when I started in 2001, Time Out -- which had magazines in London and New York, and travel guides for dozens of cities across the globe (still the best out there, in my opinion) -- had only the most basic of Web sites containing little of what they printed in both the magazine and the print travel guide series it spawned. Today nearly all Time Out content is online. TripAdvisor, funded in large part by Barry Diller's billions, usurped the vision I'd had for publishing "amateur" photos of a hotel to contrast with the professional marketing-department ones seen in brochures, and also allowed users to book hotel rooms through the site, albeit indirectly and through multiple online booking sites. Finally, in 2006, I threw in the towel on driving traffic via paid Google ads and launched Urban Passport 2.0, this time redesigning the site to be search engine-friendly (much to the detriment of its aesthetics) and even hiring someone who was supposedly one of the top SEO experts in the country to refine it. No dice: even the optimized site failed to cut through all the static and generate substantive traffic through free-search links. I finally decided to shutter it in 2007. (Somewhat ironically, my gallery site has avoided this fate; searches for a given furniture designer or accessory manufacturer often have us in the Google top ten, and I've sold a number of vintage pieces to out-of-town buyers this route.)

It was then with a little amusement, coupled with a little bitterness, that I read a New York Times article six weeks ago featuring a company that had replicated my concept of detailed, professional hotel reviews to an extent that it almost sounded plagiarized from my 2001 Urban Passport business plan -- except the new Oyster.com had the deep pockets of Bain Capital behind it. (As a reminder, it's the private-equity firm spun off from Bain Consulting by Mitt Romney and others.) Granted, Oyster's reviews and photo albums are considerably more extensive than mine were, arguably to the point of excess -- does one really need to see 85 freakin' shots of a single hotel's pool?? -- but the premise is remarkably similar.

So: good idea imploded by poor execution and inadequate funding ... just like iluvcamp. Btw I think I'm gonna put Part 3 on ice for a little while, since speaking of hotels this week has brought two rather interesting turns of events as far as Austin hotels go: someone's planning a boutique hotel for West 6th, and to my surprise, the new W is in trouble. I knew its condos had been delayed, but I had no idea construction might grind to a halt unless Stratus can find someone willing to lend them $180 million. (Btw I remain skeptical about this supposed boutique hotel going up on Sixth. The lack of a specific address is bad enough, but I also checked the city's permit site to see if any building plans had been submitted for approval; no new hotel or mixed-use projects on Sixth have been submitted for consideration in the past year, and the city's permitting process -- particularly for a mixed-use project in a core downtown neighborhood -- is laborious, to put it mildly. That said, it has Bunkhouse -- the management group that oversees the San Jose and Saint Cecilia -- behind it, so it can't be total fiction.)

I gotta say: this summer is proving to be one of the most yin-yang periods I can recall experiencing in my adult life. Really incredible highs -- becoming an uncle, launching Pirwi, subsequently landing a Product of the Day mention on Dwell's home page, etc. -- matched with really incredible lows, most of which I'd just assume not get into here. One, I will admit, was my first serious car wreck in over a decade; no one was hurt, thank God, but my car's still in the shop and will require in all six weeks of repair time (the body shop's backlogged, but OTOH it's the best in town), and the car that hit me (a late '90s Civic) was totaled. And it was mostly my fault, too: I was turning left across two lanes of traffic into a parking lot; two large trucks exiting simultaneously distracted me and made me hit the brakes; and as a result I miscalculated how fast the Civic was coming towards me in the opposite direction. Visibility was only a slight issue: this happened at the top of an incline, but mid-afternoon in bright sunlight, and I ended up getting hit broadside on the passenger side. I'm amazed my car ended up comparatively unscathed -- no airbags deployed, no windows broken -- whereas the Civic crumpled like an accordion (with both front airbags set off and the windshield shattered), never mind that it's actually larger than my car. Score one for Teutonic engineering, I suppose.

I have threes on the mind tonight; bear with me, as I'm in an odd mood. Many conversations I've had lately have included some mention of the phenomenon of celebrities dying in threes ... which through convoluted logic got me thinking about the fact that I've now worked for three companies in a row -- two of which I founded -- that had very good ideas that were essentially ahead of their time.

The first company was the one I didn't start: it had an admittedly stupid name, iluvcamp, but a great concept, as well as a Rhodes Scholar for a CEO. I don't know if any of you readers went to summer camp as a kid, but for people who did, it seems to almost invariably be one of their most cherished childhood memories. I didn't go to camp myself, admittedly, but my dad did for many years and even went back to work as a counselor as he hit the tail end of high school. When I was a kid he even made us go on a lengthy road trip up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula (Dad grew up in suburban Detroit since my grandfather was a designer at Ford) to check out the camp itself, though by then it had been shuttered for 15 years or more. Point being, I get it, the fervent devotion kids have to camp, and iluvcamp's owners -- who also owned two camps here in Texas, including one of its most popular ones, Camp Champions -- came up with the brilliantly simple concept of bringing summer camps into the digital age. A part of the camp experience not always known is the fact that while some parents are happy to have a break from their kids, others miss them terribly and hate the fact that they're missing out on the seminal experiences they're having there -- and kids can be away at camp for up to eight weeks at a stretch. iluvcamp's business model had several different elements, but the principal one was a site (or, more specifically, a customizable application) called "campparent." The company created a custom software application that would allow camps to take digital photos of the kids and auto-upload them to a server, where they would automatically be sorted out and posted on the camp's own Web site. (For privacy purposes, all of the sites were encrypted and password-protected, and only parents with kids at a specific camp could see that camp's photos.) Although I know the idea of uploading photos to a Web site seems like kid's play today, thanks to Flickr & Google & the like, as well as ubiquitous high-speed home Internet access, but keep in mind this was back in the year 2000; digital photography had yet to hit the mainstream then, and most home Internet users still used dial-up analog modems.

The company had a multiple-revenue-stream model, which I learned from my previous employer -- Hoover's Online, one of the very few Internet content companies to successfully survive the Web 1.0 bust (they went public in '99, made a profit every quarter even after the bust, ended up being bought by Dun & Bradstreet four years later for just under $120 million, and today generate annual revenue figures nearly as high as D&B's purchase price) -- was critical to success in the Internet sphere. (I'd previously interviewed at a number of companies that I learned clearly via the interviews had no realistic business model whatsoever -- the most infamous being drkoop.com, one of the biggest dot-com failures of all. Shocking though it seems in hindsight, a company that had generated less than $50,000 in revenue in 1998 went public the next year and at one point had a market capitalization of over $1 billion. Their only current and future revenue source, as I figured out during my interview, was banner ads, and I realized immediately after exiting their lavish, Aeron chair-filled class-A office space that they were toast; no amount of banner ad sales on a niche Web site could possibly cover that level of overhead. I was right: that billion-dollar company was liquidated for under $200,000 two years later.) Anyway, iluvcamp planned to not only secure sponsorships and partnerships with advertisers and vendors selling the many products kids have to take to camp -- that was my job, incidentally, working as their Director of Sponsorship Development and helping their non-techie ad sales team explain to potential clients the nuts and bolts behind the curtain and what kinds of custom marketing solutions we could provide -- but also, most importantly, sell prints of the shots taken. Again, this seems almost anachronistic today, when people post photos on Facebook & Google instead of getting them printed on paper, but back then there was still a booming business in "event photos." Any of you go on ski trips back then? Remember the ski area-licensed photographers at the top of the mountain, who'd sell you a keepsake photo with a brilliant mountain backdrop that you could pick up, already framed, at the end of the day for a "mere" $20? That was the crux of the concept, which to its credit worked, at least for iluvcamp's first summer.

Well, sort of. Okay, this post is already much longer than intended, but suffice it to say iluvcamp's model had several flaws, one of them being that rural summer camps nine years ago had no feasible form of high-speed Internet access -- satellite connections were still in their infancy, and despite their myriad technical problems cost an arm and a leg -- and in order to be printed on standard film paper, the shots taken by counselors had to be uploaded at the highest possible resolution, meaning it could take a veritable eon for dozens or hundreds of full-res shots to upload over a 56K connection. Another problem was the company founders' disastrously poor choice for a chief technology officer, one who had a sterling resume running a large technology division but zero actual experience working in an Internet-related field. He went with a custom software app for powering this whole enterprise instead of working within the parameters of an off-the-shelf program, but somehow missed the part in the contract with the developers where the company would require a $125,000 monthly "consulting fee" for maintaining the customized database. Oh, and the software guys had the license on the code, so it couldn't be used at all minus their involvement. (Btw this was a tech company that considered itself so upper-echelon elite that it literally offered a brand-new $200,000 Ferrari as an incentive to anyone who could recruit a mere handful of programmers who actually got hired; basically they only hired types who had MIT Ph.D.'s in six fields and had already cured several forms of cancer.)

By the following year the founders realized the insanity of their error, the CTO & software had been unceremoniously dumped, and the switch had been made to Vignette's off-the-shelf database software, but by then it was too late: after frittering away about $2 million of their $7 million in startup funding on the failed software system, and having failed to secure the follow-up funding planned for expansion (it being 2001 and well into the dot-com bust by this point, capital for content-focused Web companies had essentially evaporated), they had the horrible but unavoidable circumstance of having to tell the hundreds of camps they'd successfully signed on as customers that they'd be going out of business right before summer camp season began.

Lesson learned? Even the smartest, savviest people make ill-advised business decisions when entering fields in which they have no prior experience and when relying on the advice on supposed experts who turn out to be full of shit, mistakes that are always ultimately exposed but most brilliantly so during the midst of an economic downturn. As it turns out, this lesson has proven unfortunately apocryphal.

Okay, this is long and it is quite late, so I'll follow up with Part 2 tomorrow or Saturday...

No, this one has nothing to do with business. I'm talking about Michael Jackson.

I can't defend -- or, really, comprehend -- much of what he's done starting around 20 years ago. The numerous plastic surgeries ... the skin bleaching ... the incredibly sketchy relationships with young boys which very well may have been sexual ... all of that. It's been obvious for a very long time that Michael sustained a deep level of trauma at an early age, and while I'm not going to armchair-psychologize, his attempt to morph his physical body into a figure most closely resembling an anorexic Caucasian woman is a pretty much indisputable sign of deep internal self-hatred.

Rather, I'd like to remember Michael at his prime. I have friends ranging in age from 20 to 60+, and in conversations the past few days with the younger end of that spectrum -- who weren't yet alive when Jackson fever reached its apex -- it's hard to explain the phenomenon, much like I can't rationally process "Beatle mania" because it happened so long before I was born. Still, I'm happy to admit that the first concert I ever saw as a young boy was The Jacksons at Texas Stadium in 1984, and I vividly recall the hysteria that accompanied every aspect of it, including the unprecedented requirement of purchasing a minimum of four tickets at $30 each. Although today such a figure seems laughable -- the best seats at a Stones show are at least ten times that -- it was highly controversial at the time, and Michael received significant negative publicity over the fact that his ardent lower-income fans couldn't afford such an outlay. If I recall correctly, they ended up loosening the four-ticket-minimum restriction, but tickets were still in such demand that a lottery system was in place to obtain them, so we considered ourselves privileged when we landed seats for the Dallas show -- never mind that our designated seats were at the opposite end of the stadium as the stage, and it was impossible to see them perform minus the Jumbotrons erected for the event.

Though ostensibly a "Jackson Five reunion," everyone knew that it was all about Michael, and his solo hits took precedence. Still, the air in the stadium that night was electric in a way I haven't seen since, and when the crowd burst into hysterics once Michael busted out the moonwalk during "Billie Jean," I could for the first time understand what all the Beatlemania fuss two decades earlier was about.