MILLI VANILLI LIP SYNC SCANDAL (7/21)TOUR 1989 TICKET STUB CLUB MTV POP 1 PSA 3

Description: Milli Vanilli's Lip-Sync Scandal: Inside One of Music's Biggest Hoaxes Dancers Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan brought the band's songs to life — without singing a single note. Milli Vanilli was experiencing unheard of meteoric fame. Their debut hit “Girl You Know It’s True” was on the Billboard Hot 100 for 26 weeks, peaking at No. 2, in April 1989, so joining the inaugural Club MTV Tour alongside Paula Abdul and Tone Loc seemed to be the next logical step to catapult them into fame with live shows. Performing in front of a crowd of 80,000 at the theme park Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut, in 1989, the duo of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus started with their trademark energy and dance moves. But then their famous chorus came — and suddenly the lyrics repeated endlessly through the venue: “Girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s…” The word “true” never came. After all, it wasn’t true. In fact, very little of what Milli Vanilli was about was true at all. “I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli,” Pilatus told the Los Angeles Times in November 1990. “When my voice got stuck in the computer and it just kept repeating and repeating, I panicked. I just ran off the stage.″ Even so, after that scandal, the group went on to win three trophies at the American Music Awards in January 1990 and the Grammy for Best New Artist, beating out the Indigo Girls and Tone Loc, the following month. In a time before social media watchdogs and when lip-syncing to live performances was commonplace, Milli Vanilli got away with their ruse for longer than they might have today. But now their name is pretty much synonymous with the biggest lip-syncing scandal in pop culture history. "Girl You Know It's True" was already hit before Pilatus and Morvan were cast German record producer Frank Farian was in a disco in his native country when he heard the song “Girl You Know It’s True” by the Baltimore band Numarx — and immediately knew it could be a bigger hit. So he set out to assemble a team to recreate a new version, taking the original hip-hop track and mixing it with a bit of Eurodance, according to Billboard. He started recruiting singers in 1988 — sisters Linda and Jodie Rocco sang backup and Charles Shaw rapped on the track. “When he played the record for me, I already knew the song,” Shaw told Billboard. “I had been dancing to the Numarx version on the weekends in American clubs in Hamburg. Farian played it and I said, ‘This song ain’t new.’” Shaw says Farian admitted it wasn’t new. But he still went with it and just started mixing voices. “You can’t really hear the vocals or exactly who’s singing, because there are so many voices on the chorus,” he said. Eventually, Brad Howell and John Davis were brought in for vocals. There was no denying that Farian knew what he was doing. His version of the song quickly became popular in Europe. Now he just needed faces to go along with the music group. The musicians behind Milli Vanilli: Brad Howell (R) and John Davis (2L), who sang the vocals, Gina Mohammed (3L), Ray Horton (L) and their producer Frank Farian (2R) posing at the control board in a recording studio in 1990. Morvan and Pilatus were present in the recording studio but didn't sing one note At the time New York-born, German-bred Pilatus and Guadeloupe native Morvan were living in a housing project in Munich — poor to the point they stole food to survive — when Farian came along and offered each of the dancers $4,000 to become the faces of the duo Milli Vanilli, named after the nickname of Farian’s girlfriend. Farian wasn’t new to the game. He had done the same thing with his 1970s disco-funk group Boney M., with a singer who was actually just a dancer, lip-syncing to Farian’s own vocals. (He was able to hang onto that secret for 25 years, according to Shaw.) “Farian came back after the song hit the charts in England and said he had to have two faces for the project,” Shaw continued. “I was already paid $12,000 for doing [“Girl”] and he said, ‘Keep your mouth shut and you can do the whole album.’ I’m thinking, ‘That’s studio work for me.’” Had Farian realized how popular the group would become, he may have realized the dancers’ accents — with Pilatus’ mother tongue of German and Morvan’s of French — would be an issue. Linda and Jodie were also brought back in for more vocals. “There was no real plan… we were just recording stuff real fast, to get enough together for a four-song EP for the American market. Then Frank said Arista was involved and he was talking to Clive Davis,” Linda said. PSA POPULATION REPORT 1 of 1 MILLI VANILLI LIP SYNC SCANDAL (7/21) TOUR 1989 TICKET STUB CLUB MTV AUGUST 4, 1989 THE SUMMIT HOUSTON PSA 3 VERY GOOD

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End Time: 2025-01-31T09:44:58.000Z

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