Lake Compounce ’89: the disastrous show that exposed Milli Vanilli
At the end of the 1980s, pop music was at its most egregious. A cultural leviathan thanks to the work of MTV and songwriting partnerships such as Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, this era churned out a conveyor belt of one-hit wonders and overnight sensations that were inextricable from the intensity of the West’s growing worship of commercialisation. Arguably, the most notorious group of this era was Milli Vanilli, whose meteoric rise was eclipsed by their catastrophic fall from grace.
Packaged by Boney M founder Frank Farian in 1988, even mentioning the famous manufactured band’s name establishes the corny environment that precipitated Milli Vanilli. Consisting of lip-syncing dancers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, main studio vocalists Brad Howell and John Davis, singers Charles Shaw, Jodie Rocco and Linda Rocco, and a hired touring band, the group shot to fame with their 1988 debut album, All or Nothing. Pictured on the cover of their debut, the distinctive Morvan and Pilatus looked were poised to become yet more heartthrobs of the decade.
Their second album from 1989, Girl You Know It’s True, which served as the band’s North American debut and featured the international top-three hit of the same name, as well as the number one ‘Baby Don’t Forget My Number’, saw Milli Vanilli shoot to the major leagues. It was so successful that the song earned them the Grammy Award for ‘Best New Artist’ in 1990 and confirmed them as one of the most successful pop acts of the era, after being certified platinum following seven weeks at the top of the Billboard Top 200.
However, like Icarus, Milli Vanilli flew too close to the sun, and only a matter of months after Girl You Know It’s True arrived in March 1989, the band would be on the fast track to oblivion. Ironically, MTV had a defining hand in exposing their greatest secret: that Morvan and Pilatus could not sing. Later that year, MTV launched a Club MTV Tour, which pulled together some of the day’s most famous pop acts, including Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli and Was (Not Was). Downtown Julie Brown and the Club MTV dancers also appeared.
While this was the stuff of dreams for Morvan and Pilatus, the tour would signal the end of Milli Vanilli and their dalliance with superstardom. On July 21st, 1989, during a performance at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut, a technical error exposed the duo as frauds and showed that they couldn’t sing at all. During their performance, a hard drive issue caused the recording of the hit song ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ to jam and skip. It repeatedly played part of the line, “Girl, you know it’s…” through the large PA to the crowd.
“I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli,” Pilatus later said of the incident. “When my voice got stuck in the computer, and it just kept repeating and repeating, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I just ran off the stage.”
Years later, when speaking on VH1’s Behind the Music, Downtown Julie Brown claims she ran after the perturbed Pilatus and convinced him to finish the show. “With a bit of pushing and screaming, and a couple of F-words I think as well, I got them back out there,” she recalled. Remarkably, despite their mishap, and possibly even pointing to a future already on its way for Milli Vanilli, given their constructed nature, the audience seemed not to care and, at worst, not even notice. The concert then carried on without a hitch.
Allegedly, Morvan and Pilatus did not help themselves. In the March 1990 issue of Time, Pilatus was quoted as describing himself as “the new Elvis”, stating that by measuring their success, the pair were more musically gifted than greats Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney. In 2017, Morvan denied this, saying that Pilatus – who died of a heart attack in 1998 – never used that phrase and the actual quote was misrepresented. He posited that it was likely due to Pilatus’ rudimentary grasp of English.
Adding fuel to the fire was that the American version of All or Nothing openly credited the vocals of Milli Vanilli to Morvan and Pilatus. However, another unexpected twist occurred that undid this. In December 1989, four months before the Time article’s publication, Charles Shaw revealed that he was one of the three vocalists who sang on the record and that Morvan and Pilatus were nothing more than phoneys. It was also reported that Farian, trying to clean up the fast unfolding mess, paid Shaw $150,000 to retract his statements, although things were already too far gone.
Due to the growing heat from the public, as well as Morvan and Pilatus demanding to Farian that they sing on the next album, on November 14th, 1990, the German svengali announced that the pair had been fired and admitted to them not singing on the records. Then, when confronted by Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Chuck Phillips, Pilatus confirmed that Farian was right.
“I feel like a mosquito being squeezed,” Pilatus commented to the publication. “The last two years of our lives have been a total nightmare. We’ve had to lie to everybody. We are true singers, but that maniac Frank Farian would never allow us to express ourselves.”
If this public humiliation wasn’t enough, the final indignity followed a week later. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences revoked Milli Vanilli’s Grammy. Facing the music once more, Morvan and Pilatus gave a press conference to the cultural coliseum of over 100 journalists, where they said they would return the award. As a final statement pointing to Farian’s role in all of it, they said they had “made a deal with the devil” and sang and rapped to the room to try and prove that they could sing, even if they hadn’t appeared on the records.
In the years following Milli Vanilli’s secret being discovered, Beth McCarthy-Miller, a former MTV executive who first interviewed Milli Vanilli for the network, claimed that their English prompted doubts among her colleagues about whether the duo had sung on their records. It makes you wonder why they took them on the tour in the first place.
Watch a clip of the infamous Lake Compounce moment below.
