“We Are the World” On Its 30th Anniversary: 5 Things To Know

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Sources: People – By Michael Miller | All Things Michael

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Thirty years ago, 45 of the biggest (and most diverse) names in American pop music came together on Jan. 28 to record a song with one purpose: ending famine in Africa.

The song was called “We Are the World” and megastars like Michael Jackson,Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and many more gathered together to record the track in one legendary night.

“We Are the World” sold over 20 million copies and won numerous awards, including three Grammys – but the most important number is the money it raised: an unprecedented $63 million for humanitarian aid.

In honor of the song’s 30th anniversary, here are five amazing facts about the extraordinary circumstances of its recording:

1. The song wasn’t fully written until the night before recording.
Jackson and Richie – who co-wrote the song – finished the lyrics and melody on the night before their deadline. “I love working quickly,” Jackson later said of the process as quoted in Michael Jackson: The King of Pop by Lisa D. Campbell. “I went ahead without even Lionel knowing, I couldn’t wait. I went in and came out the same night with the song completed – drums, piano, strings, and words to the chorus.”

2. The recording took place the same night as the American Music Awards.
Many of the stars who joined forces to record “We Are the World” were competitors just hours earlier. Lauper, Turner, and Richie were among those who came straight to the studio from the 12th annual AMAs. Richie actually hosted the award show, and Lauper and Turner had both given live performances. Jackson skipped the awards to record the guiding vocals to the song – but still managed to win two AMAs despite his absence.

3. “We Are the World” wasn’t the only song the stars sang that night.
“We Are the World” was the brainchild of activist/entertainer Harry Belafonte. It was Belafonte’s dream to gather a supergroup of his favorite artists to record a song that’s proceeds could be donated entirely to charity. In honor of his efforts, the entire room of stars broke out into an impromptu rendition of Belafonte’s classic hit, “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song.)”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/9sVSuxw9qZg[/youtube]

4. Lauper’s jewelry ruined one of the solo takes.
The motto of the evening was “check your ego at the door” – but in Lauper’s case, checking her accessories might have been more helpful. Still, she definitely won outfit of the evening.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/HpReqNFVL-0[/youtube]

5. No one left without swapping autographs.
“Mass hysteria broke out because everybody wanted everybody else’s autograph,” Richie of one point in the night. “I realized that there was a room of everybody being fans of everyone else.”

As Kenny Rogers remembers, “Everyone wanted a memento that we could all keep ourselves. And we had the sheet music so we had all the other artists sign it. I don’t think there was one out there who didn’t get everyone to sign it.”

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http://vallieegirl67.com/2015/01/25/we-are-the-world-on-its-30th-anniversary-5-things-to-know/
 
^^ I'd say that sheet signed by everybody is worth of millions:D

“Mass hysteria broke out because everybody wanted everybody else’s autograph,” Richie of one point in the night. “I realized that there was a room of everybody being fans of everyone else.”

I just cannot imagine that The boss asking autograph from the King of Pop, or King of Pop asking autograph from King of Cool etc. Must have been mental(just a saying) in that room:D
 
I really love the from of the USA for Afirca poster signed by many artists including Michael's.

I drew a couple of drawings for the special day.

we_are_the_world_30_by_prince_of_pop-d8fqvze.jpg


The other one is up at the "Picture Of The Day".
 
Wonder how much footage was shot of that night. They could do an in depth documentary about it. Be something to see.
 
Spanish news had quite along piece on this the other night
 
I have this DVD i love it.:clap:

Hi, do you know which region code this DVD has? I'm trying to order it on ebay but I'm kind of confused on how many different versions of the DVD they have released. I keep finding different descriptions on the regions. Some say REGION 1, some say 2, some say Multi-region and I've even seen pics with Region 0 on the disc. Could you please check yours to see what it says on the disc? Thank you very much :)
 
Hi, do you know which region code this DVD has? I'm trying to order it on ebay but I'm kind of confused on how many different versions of the DVD they have released. I keep finding different descriptions on the regions. Some say REGION 1, some say 2, some say Multi-region and I've even seen pics with Region 0 on the disc. Could you please check yours to see what it says on the disc? Thank you very much :)

The DVD I have is Region 0.
 
We Are the World' at 30: Stars Will Never Be That Earnest Again
In praise of dated musical ego-checking
MEGAN GARBERMAR 10 2015, 7:30 AM ET

USA for Africa/Wikimedia Commons
In the late-night hours of January 28, 1985, Quincy Jones ushered some of the world's most famous pop stars into the A&M Studios in Los Angeles. Among them were Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, and Kenny Rogers. The stars—46 of them in all, many of them at the height of their careers—were greeted with a sign: "Check your egos at the door."

This was both impossible and appropriate. The vocalists—an ad-hoc supergroup that would come to be known, pragmatically, as "USA for Africa"—were there to record, over the course of a long night, a song that was written for them by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, inspired by Harry Belafonte, and produced, in part, by Jones. It was to be a charity drive in musical form. Proceeds from the song's sales, the idea went, would go toward alleviating a famine in Ethiopia. It was a song that was also an idea: "We Are the World."

The result of the stars' efforts that evening was a treacly pop confection released 30 years ago this week; slight in melody but heavy in joy, designed to glorify its singers and its listeners at the same time. In terms of self-satisfaction it fell somewhere on the continuum between "Do They Know It's Christmas" (also recorded to benefit the Ethiopian famine, and a direct antecedent to "We Are the World") and Michael Jackson's 1991 follow-up, "Heal the World." Despite all that, and probably because of it, "We Are the World" was amazingly successful as a commercial project. Released thirty years ago, in early March of 1985, the song became the fastest-selling American pop single in history; it topped music charts worldwide; it was the first single ever to be certified multiplatinum.

It also, however, managed to do what Jones, via his sign, had asked: It checked its stars' egos. The singers shared the song's lyrics, each taking a line or two. They had their moment to solo—and, whoa, solo many of them did—but then faded back into the ensemble. And they seemed genuinely glad to be in it together. In that studio that night in 1985, clad in jeans and sweatshirts, there was no star among the stars. They were all serving as backup singers to a purpose that, their song declared, was greater than they were.


"We Are the World" spawned some epic jokes; it also gave rise to a sequel following the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

But, thirty years later, what still stands out about that original recording is how unique it is—in terms of its lack of irony, in terms of its "look what we're doing, guys!" self-congratulation. The 2010 version of the song replicated the celebrity-togetherness aspect of "We Are the World"; it did not, however, capture the celebrities' own apparent glee at being in that room, singing their hearts out together. It didn't capture all that sticky-sweet—but affecting—joy. "We Are the World," the 1985 version, may be full of keyboard riffs and indoor sunglasses and fluorescent shirts and frizz-perms and man-mullets; the most dated thing about it, though, might be its embrace of the idea that celebrities can come together and form, with little ego but a lot of earnestness, a "we."

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...e-that-earnest-again/387244/?UTM_SOURCE=yahoo
 
Was watching a documentary, recently, during a PBS Pledge Drive about John Denver and how he was not invited to be on "We Are The World." John, during the 1970's was doing humanitarian aid in Africa. I got the impression John would have liked the recognition. Here is an article, mentioning John Denver and how he felt at the time.


We Are The World: 25 Years Later

Posted in Articles | Tags: ken kragen, lionel ritchie, live aid, michael jackson, quincy jones, we are the world
February 12, 2010 | Goldmine Staff

By Joe Matera

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KEN KRAGEN was one of the driving forces behind “We Are The World.” It was Harry Belafonte who first contacted Kragen (front row, left) about the project. Photo courtesy of Ken Kragen
KEN KRAGEN was one of the driving forces behind “We Are The World.” It was Harry Belafonte who first contacted Kragen (front row, left) about the project. Photo courtesy of Ken Kragen
The artists who participated in the recording of “We Are The World” were all told beforehand by producer Quincy Jones to check their egos at the door.

What a humbling experience it must have been to be a part of a project that not only yielded the biggest-selling single ever, but also raised millions of dollars for famine relief in drought-stricken Africa.

“We Are The World” was released March 7, 1985 and it shot up to #1 in just three weeks. Quite literally, it was the feel-good hit of the year, and for once, the music industry stopped worrying about profits and focused its attention on doing good.

The story of the making of “We Are The World” is one that still inspires all these years later.

The germ for the idea of what would become “We Are The World” was hatched by entertainer Harry Belafonte.
Belafonte was so moved by Bob Geldof’s Ethiopian famine relief supergroup recording project “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” that he contacted his friend, entertainment mogul Ken Kragen (above photo, front row, left).

“I remember that call vividly,” recalls Kragen today. “It was Dec. 23, 1984, when Harry called me to say, ‘Look at what Bob Geldof is doing in London with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’”

At the time of Belafonte’s call to Kragen, the Geldof song was a sensation and the U.S news media was taking notice of the efforts to raise money for Africa.

“During that phone call,” says Kragen, who at the time was managing Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers, “Harry told me there were hardly any African artists involved in Geldof’s project and yet, we had all these very successful African-American artists such as Prince, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson who were dominating the U.S record charts. He suggested we should do a big concert here to raise money for Africa. And I told him, ‘Why don’t we take the idea that Geldof did and create a record with all these artists and ours could be a bigger thing than Geldof’s. And Harry replied, ‘Great. Do it.’”

After the initial idea was put to Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder, both excitedly offered to write the song. Kragen then put in a call to famed producer Quincy Jones to tell him about the project. Jones informed Kragen he wanted Michael Jackson involved in the recording as well. Jones made the call to Jackson, who then phoned Kragen back saying not only that Jackson wished to be involved in the recording, but that he wanted to write the song with Lionel and Stevie. All three then got together to put pen to paper.

“In early January of 1985” recalls Kragen, “Quincy was getting quite nervous because the day of the recording was fast approaching and all they [Richie and Jackson] had so far writing-wise for the song was the chorus, ‘we are the world, we are the children.’ Finally, with days to go before the recording session, Lionel and Michael finally came up with the final song.”

In the meantime, Kragen had lined up additional performers. “I would check the Billboard record chart and start at the top,” says Kragen. “Michael was at #1, and so I worked my way down the chart every day with the idea that before the day ended I’d get two more of the top 20 people to agree to be involved.”

Eventually, Kragen secured 45 artists for the project, including Daryl Hall, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis & The News, Kenny Loggins, Steve Perry, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner and Dionne Warwick.

“I was only shooting for 20, not 45 artists,” he says. “But when I finally secured Bruce Springsteen, who at the time, when it came to the rockers, was #1, I went from being the guy making the call to the guy picking up the phone and artists saying, ‘I want to be part of it.’ Many times I had to say, ‘No,’ because we were trying put a limit to artists who were the biggest sellers. But the flood gates opened and the list grew beyond 20.”

Two artists who missed out were Joan Baez and John Denver, both strong advocates for the poor and deeply involved in the issues of hunger and homelessness.

“Baez was non-existent on the record charts at that point,” says Kragen. “And she wasn’t the kind of icon with the current artists that Dylan was. When I went to the people involved with the project and mentioned to them about having Denver involved, they told me, ‘John Denver is so pop at this point that if we put him on, some of the rockers won’t want to be there as they’ll feel that it will swing the project too much towards the pop side.’”

Denver took the slight in stride. Baez wasn’t so forgiving.

“Later on, Denver was on a morning television program being interviewed, and he was asked about why he wasn’t included on the project and if it upset him,” says Kragen. ‘John took his hands and said, ‘Yes, it upset me about this much’ and he held his hands close together. And then he added. ‘But that was overwhelmingly diminished by the size of my admiration for what they did,’ and he held his hands out as far as far as he could. Baez on the other hand never forgave me for not asking her.”


Leave your ego at the door

Eventually, a session for a demo recording was set for Jan. 22, 1985. The session took place at singer Kenny Rogers’ Lion Share Studios. “We had to record a demo tape so we could send it out to the artists with the music on it,” says Kragen. “The musicians from Toto were used on the demo for the rhythm track and both Michael and Lionel went into the sound booth and recorded the song. And that was what went out to all the artists.”

During the session Stevie Wonder arrived informing all he was ready “to write the song.” Unbeknownst to Wonder, at that point the song had been completely written. So Jackson and Richie and sat at the piano and played the song for Wonder. Wonder offered up a couple suggestions and then exited.

“Following that demo session at 3 in the morning,” says Kragen, “we all sat around on the floor of the studio: Quincy, Lionel, Michael, myself and the vocal arranger, Tom Bahler.

Quincy looked at us and said, ‘If we don’t put everything in writing, there will be chaos at the recording session, as we’re dealing with superstars here.’ So he wrote everything on the printed music and that went out with the tapes. He clearly marked exactly what they [the artists] were going to sing and where and specifically their names. Also, we couldn’t allow the artists to figure out where they were going to stand, so we were going to need to put tape down to show where they stand. Otherwise they’d be jostling as to who was going to be in front, as being superstars they’re all used to being the focal point of attention. He also added a letter he wrote telling them to leave their egos at the door.”

As the recording date fast approached, a last-minute revolt by some of the rock artists involved came perilously close to scuttling the whole project.

Kragen explains, “The night before the recording session I was at the American Music Awards rehearsal and was told by one of the managers that the ‘rockers don’t like the song, it’s too pop for them and they don’t want to stand on the stage next to the non-rockers. They don’t think it’s a good image for them. So they’re leaving and not doing it anymore.’ But by the time the recording session came around, they had changed their minds. Later I found out they had gone to Bruce Springsteen, who had told them he was going ahead with it, as he was there to feed people and save lives. And at that moment they reneged on their threat to walk out.”

The recording session for “We Are The World” took place Jan. 28, 1985, the same night of the American Music Awards ceremony.

As each artist made their way afterwards to the A&M studios on La Brea Avenue, limousine after limousine pulled into the studio lot, except for one specific artist Kragen was surprised to see.

“This crowd started to form” remembers Kragen, “and soon there was a big crowd around the entrance gates of the studio. I was at the gate and looked through the gates and saw this commotion in the crowd and this guy pushing his way through the crowd. He gets to the front gate, looks up to me and I realized it is Bruce Springsteen! And he says to me, ‘Man I got a great parking space right across the street in La Brea.’ He had driven himself there, parked the car himself and made his way through the crowd.”

Michael Jackson arrived at the recording session way ahead of everybody else and laid down some tracks and material that would later appear on the “We Are The World” video. The recording session finally began in earnest around 10 p.m., and it was a marathon effort that finally finished up at 8 the next morning, with only Jones, Kragen and Diana Ross remaining.

“We had it very well organized” says Kragen. “Because Quincy had said, ‘When you’ve got superstars there, you can’t leave anything to chance.’ This was the first time any one of them had ever got together in a group like this. And they were blown away by their contemporaries. Everybody was awed by Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and other superstars they had never met before. For example, Billy Joel met Ray Charles for the first time and about six months later, they had an album out of music together”.

An incredible legacy

Despite the many egos in the room, the recording session proceeded without incident. After all of them had recorded their parts, several individuals were asked to record various separate pieces.

“Springsteen did some extra stuff” says Kragen, “and Dylan did some stuff, too. But when he initially got up to the microphone, he was so unnerved being in the presence of all those people, he could barely get it out. Lionel and Quincy then cleared the room and got everybody into the control room and then Lionel, Quincy and Stevie Wonder sat at the piano and one after the other, each did a perfect Bob Dylan for Bob. They all sounded like a perfect Dylan, as they mimicked him. They sang his part for him, and he listened to it and then got up and did it exactly like himself.”

Jones later spent a number of weeks fine-tuning the session and brought in certain artists such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder to contribute more material.

“When you look at the video, you will see those studio pieces which were added later in the choruses,” explains Kragen. “Quincy did quite a bit of manipulation after the fact. But all of the choruses and almost all of the original solos you see on the video were done in that studio. They placed mics in a semi-circle, and we literally recorded the song from one artist to the next to the next and so forth, except for the Dylan piece and the extra pieces”.

With the project far exceeding all expectations, plans were soon put into motion to put together an album’s worth of material, though initially only a single was planned.

“We really wanted to make some major money from this project,” says Kragen. “So we decided to put an album together of unreleased tracks from the artists who were in this project. I collected unreleased tracks, as we asked everybody to send them to us. The hard thing was we got about 20 tracks but only used 10 on the album. Paul Simon sent us a track but it’s not on the album. Prince was the first one to send us a track as he wasn’t at the session. I think he felt bad about not being there that he went and immediately gave us a track that we could put on the album.”

Kragen affirms that the “We Are The World” album brought in the biggest amounts of money, “around 60 million dollars. I’m not sure what happened to those other tracks we couldn’t put on the album,” Kragen wonders. “I think they were delivered back to the artists over time. The album’s retail price was $9.98, and out of that we only had about $1 worth of expenses. Everything else was free. Even the distributors distributed it for free. the record stores sold it for free. I think we primarily paid for the vinyl and the packaging and that was it.”

“We Are The World” went on to become one of the fastest-selling singles of the modern-pop era. The initial shipment of 800,000 of the records sold out within three days of its March 7, 1985 release. And its legacy is still reverberating today.




- See more at: http://www.goldminemag.com/article/we-are-the-world-25-years-later#sthash.A3t8VZsT.dpuf
 
Media Traffic


Exactly 30 years ago the supergroup USA For Africa shot atop the Global Chart with the charity single 'We Are The World'.

Following Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas' project in United Kingdom, activist Harry Belafonte had the idea for the creation of an American benefit single for African famine relief.

Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wrote the song and at January 21, 1985 many famous artists of the music industry at the time came together for the recording session with star-producer Quincy Jones.

'We Are The World' was released at March 7, 1985 and sold much more than one million copies in the first few days in the USA alone, the fastest selling single until then. Despite these stellar sales the song debuted 'only' at no.21 on the Billboard Hot 100. The reason: until 1991, when NielsenSoundscan began to tracking the music sales in the USA, Billboard used a point-based system for the two component-chart (sales and airplay).

Later 'We Are The World' got a quadruple Platinum certification in the USA for shipments of 8(!!) million singles and became the biggest hit of the year 1985 globally. And it's the fifth most successful song of all time, according to the performance on the Global Chart with a total of 14,6 million points.

The members of USA For Africa in alphabetic order: Dan Aykroyd, Harry Belafonte, Lindsey Buckingham, Kim Carnes, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Sheila E., Bob Geldof, Daryl Hall & John Oates, James Ingram, Jackie Jackson, La Toya Jackson, Marlon Jackson, Michael Jackson, Randy Jackson, Tito Jackson, Al Jarreau, Waylon Jennings, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis & the News, Kenny Loggins, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson, Jeffrey Osborne, Steve Perry, The Pointer Sisters, Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder.

www.mediatraffic.de/30-years-ago.htm
www.mediatraffic.de/alltime-track-chart.htm
 
Lionel And The Snake
Writing the charity anthem ‘We Are The World,’ with Michael Jackson was a terrifying experience for Lionel Richie – because he didn’t realise Michael’s pet python had escaped in the room where they were creating music magic.

Lionel recalls he and Michael were close to completing the ‘USA For Africa’ song, when he saw something slithering out the corner of his eye.

He says, “As I glance over my shoulder I’m looking into the face of a yellowish python. I am screaming like the last horror movie… and he (Michael) goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is. Y’know Lionel, he was lost in the room. I knew he was here somewhere.’

“I said to him, ‘Michael, are you telling me you had a python in your room…?’ He said, ‘He’s been lost for a week.’ ”

Source: contactmusic & MJWN
 
Huey Lewis (February 2020)

Huey speaks about We Are The World around 3:15 - 5:11
 
Re: Huey Lewis (February 2020)

I just listened to Huey's recent interview on Questlove Supreme. He says more about the session at 1:12:20 - 1:22:35.
 
Michael Jackson's two solo spots in We Are The World...

# 1 - Placed between Billy Joel and Diana Ross

# 2 - Placed between Daryl Hall and Huey Lewis
 
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