The sessions began on the night of January 28, 1985 at A&M Studios in Hollywood, California, and did not end until well after sunrise on the morning of January 29. At this point it was already clear that there would never be anything like “We Are the World” again. “The Greatest Night in Pop,” a new documentary on Netflix, brings it all to life: co-authors Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and an incredibly long list of other superstars all crammed into one room to record the most over-the-top posse cut in the history of mankind, produced by Quincy Jones.
On the occasion of the release of the new documentary – and the 39th anniversary of the recording session – the US colleagues from Rolling Stone Music Now took a look back at the epochal mega-project and with Bao Nguyen, the director of the documentary, long-time collaborator of Quincy Jones, Tom Bahler, who arranged the vocals for “We Are the World”, and one of the singers of the evening, Sheila E, spoken. Some highlights follow; To hear the full episode, go to your podcast provider of choice here, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or press play on the article.
Sheila E. felt betrayed by the song’s producers. In the podcast, she addresses the revelations in the documentary, in which she explains that she felt deceived by promises of a solo singing part that never came. Instead, the producers kept urging her to call Prince, her close collaborator at the time, and get him to come to the recording session – which of course he never did. “Lionel and Quincy kept saying, ‘Why don’t you call Prince,'” she tells Rolling Stone Music Now. “Everyone took turns trying to get me to call him back and ask him to come down…. I just thought, wow, they were all my friends. This is cold-blooded.” (Lionel Richie, one of the producers of the new documentary, did not dispute Sheila E.’s portrayal, according to Nguyen.)
Bruce Springsteen spoke for the documentary after Lionel Richie reached out to him personally. “In a way, life has imitated art,” says Nguyen, “because [der ursprüngliche Song] required all these artists to call each other and say, ‘This is going to be a hit.’
When choosing the voices for the many singers, Quincy Jones left the decision largely to the arranger Tom Bahler, but he also had a few ideas of his own that he definitely wanted to implement. “I have two wishes,” Bahler remembers Jones saying to him. “Firstly, Lionel was the first to write and start the play, so he should be the first voice we hear. Then, because Michael came along and they finished it together, Michael was supposed to sing the first chorus.’ And then, this is his humor, he said, ‘And I think you should bring Diana in for the second half of the first chorus, because some people think they’re the same person.'”
Much of the session’s behind-the-scenes footage had no sound – but the filmmakers were able to painstakingly restore the sound after learning that Life magazine reporter David Breslin had saved his own lo-fi recordings of everything. “Our archive producer said, ‘Oh, let me just approach this Life magazine journalist and see what he’s got,'” Nguyen says. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got hours of footage from my voice recorder.’ And so we were lucky.”
Viral TikToks claiming Michael Jackson was unhappy with Huey Lewis’ performance are incorrect. As the documentary explains in great detail, Lewis didn’t get his solo on the song until during the recording session, when it became clear that Prince – who producers hoped would take the part – wouldn’t be showing up. If anything, Jackson’s stoic expression during this part of the session only reflected his own shyness and everyone’s stress over the sudden change.
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