Wikipedia: “Live Aid was a multi-venue benefit concert held on Saturday 13 July 1985, as well as a music-based fundraising initiative. The original event was organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise further funds for relief of the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, a movement that started with the release of the successful charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in December 1984.”
Soon after this event, Harry Belafonte began to think about an American benefit single for African famine relief. In fact, what he said was along the lines of “We have all these white bands doing stuff for black people. How about if we have black people doing something for black people?”
This documentary – The Greatest Night in Pop -details that “something” – a benefit for Ethiopia- and it has a lot of interesting background information that I did not know. For just one example, I recall seeing the video with all the musicians standing in a room singing the song. And that’s about it. But here are just a few interesting tidbits.
The arrangers of this event knew that they wanted as broad a selection of famous entertainers as they could get. When would they all be in LA? Well, many of them would be there the night of the (1985) American Music Awards which would be hosted by Lionel Richie.
They needed a song. They invited Stevie Wonder in to co-write it. Stevie never showed so it was co-written by Michael Jackson and… Lionel Richie. And while Quincy Jones was the producer, Richie was the overall coordinator of the thing, helping pull the artists in and so, was key to the effort that night.
And what better night to do it than after the American Music Awards? Not the next night. No, that night. And so that night at around midnight , some 60 or so musicians (list at bottom of post) assembled at LA’s A&M Studios. If you’ve even seen the video, you’ll see them all crammed into a small room singing.
What I did NOT know is that they were there – to quote Richie – all night long. Some of them were there till 8 in the morning and man did it look exhausting. (I recently jammed on guitar with a band for four hours and my back was killing me.) Somewhere in there after a couple of hours, Geldof came in and gave a pep talk, reminding of why they were there and it wasn’t for purposes of advancing their careers.
Springsteen was there hot off of his Born in the USA tour. He typically didn’t fly the night after a tour but in this case he made an exception. His attendance then got guys like Billy Joel to also come. (Where the hell was Bono?)
It’s fascinating to see how the vocal arranger decided who sings with who. It was based mostly on what range people sang in although Dionne Warwick wondered out loud how she got paired with Willie Nelson. (Despite appearances in the video, they were not all recording everything at exactly the same time, often pairiing off or doing solos.) It’s also interesting to see how nervous Huey Lewis was to sing ONE LINE in front of all these heavyweights. (Paul Simon joked that if a bomb hit the building, John Denver would be back on top).
The good news is there were no interpersonal beefs and in fact, everybody wound up getting everybody else’s autograph. The only temper that flared was when Stevie Wonder suggested they sing part of the tune in Swahili and Waylon Jennings left the room for a while. But he came back.
One of the most notable things for me is to see how nervous and uptight Dylan seemed. Two reasons – one is he’s used to being in control of the situation and two because he is not exactly a singer on the level of, say, Ray Charles.
Anyway, I don’t want to give the whole thing away. It doesn’t matter whether you love or hate the song. That’s not the point. Check it out just to see how they pulled this whole thing together. Some musicians are focused on a lot more than others. I had no idea, for example, that the Pointer Sisters were there much less Lindsey Buckingham or John Oates.
“Awarded numerous honors—including four Grammy Awards, one American Music Award, and a People’s Choice Award—the song was promoted with a music video, a VHS, a special edition magazine, a simulcast, and several books, posters, and shirts. The promotion and merchandise helped “We Are the World” raise more than $80 million ($214 million today) for humanitarian aid in Africa and the United States.” And it continues to raise money today.
