I’d say, ‘Janet, what do you see when you hear this sound?’ And this time she said, ‘Dying children in Africa.’ ‘You’re right. I’d just hum from the bottom of my throat. “I’d sing to her, just a note, a rhythm of a note. “I used to ask my sister Janet to follow me into a room with interesting acoustics like a closet or the bathroom,” he wrote. In his autobiography Moonwalk, Jackson claimed he already had the root of the song.
Meanwhile, according to Kragen, Wonder “disappeared” to Philadelphia, so Richie co-wrote the song over a week in Jackson’s bedroom at his family home in Encino. Jeff turns to me and says, ‘You know, Ken, I feel like the seeds that were planted by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and others in the Sixties and lay fallow in the ‘Me’ generation of the Seventies have now, in the Eighties, broken through the ground, blossomed, and are bearing fruit.’” “Jeff Bridges and I were driving out to Live Aid together on one of the rehearsal days. “We really should have had Baez,” he says. Kragen remembers Eddie Murphy’s manager rejecting the request and can’t recall Madonna’s excuse, but cites only John Denver and Joan Baez as artists he didn’t book but wished he had. I wanted about 20 people, we ended up with 45.” The floodgates opened and mostly I had to turn people down. “I called John and said, ‘Can we get Bruce?’ and he said, ‘Oh my god, Bruce is finishing up two years on the road, touring constantly.’ I said, ‘John, you personally are going to be able to take credit for saving millions of lives if you get your client to do this.’ The next thing I know, on 15 January, Jon Landau called me and said, ‘Bruce Springsteen is in,’ and from that day I never made another outgoing call. “John Landau was managing Bruce Springsteen and I knew John,” says Kragen. The key moment was when Bruce Springsteen came on board. We thought we would get Prince because Sheila E was a good friend of Lionel’s, Lionel was number three, Kenny was in the top 10, we already had a big hunk of the top 10.” I had the number one artist, Michael Jackson. “I took the Billboard charts and decided I would not go to sleep each night until I had confirmed two artists from the chart,” he says. With only a month to go until the AMAs, Kragen and his team of 50 set about piecing the line-up together at a furious pace.
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The likes of Fleetwood Mac’s Buckingham, The Jackson Five, Bette Midler and the table-thumping godfather of rock’s mid-Eighties famine relief efforts Bob Geldof were reduced to mere faces in a chorus line of 46 stars.Įnjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up USA for Africa, as the band would be known, was not short of spotlight hoggers – among its ranks could be found Jackson, Dylan, Charles, Joel, Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner.
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Such were the scenes at A&M Recording Studios in Los Angeles on 28 January 1985, when the biggest musical stars in America – minus Madonna and Prince, plus Dan Aykroyd – convened to record “We Are the World”, the USA’s answer to Band Aid’s “ Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. When you put together, for one night only, the greatest supergroup ever constructed, even with a sign saying “check your egos at the door” at the entrance, sparks are going to fly. Lindsey Buckingham disturbed Michael Jackson hiding in the bathroom, and Waylon Jennings stormed out when the row got too heated.