Between "Do They Know It's Christmas" and the Live Aid concert, a group of mostly American musicians got together under the name USA for Africa and recorded their own song for Ethiopian famine relief: "We Are The World." It was organized by Ken Kragen, inspired by Bob Geldof, produced by Quincy Jones, and written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Jones had the bright idea to record the song on the night of January 30, 1985, right after the American Music Awards, when many artists would be in town. The core group was recruiting singers right up through the AMAs, and weren't sure who would show up.
Bette Midler. Cyndi Lauper. Kenny Loggins. Willie Nelson. It was like a record store come to life. Everyone looked a little mystified. Smiling, yes, but . . . maybe not quite sure what was happening.
At one point, the gate opened for a man on foot: Springsteen. Jeans, black leather jacket, gloves with the fingers cut off. Twenty-four hours ago, he was on a stage in Syracuse. He drove himself to the studio in a rental car, and he told Kragen, “I got a great parking spot right on La Brea!”
Stepping from the parking area into the anteroom and finally into Studio A was like leaving the natural world. “Everybody usually walks around with their assistant, or their entourage,” [Daryl] Hall says. “But you had to walk in the door yourself, just you, and be in this room with a lot of people like you, with your peers, many of whom I had never met, and vice versa—they had never met me. It was—what’s the word?—slightly disconcerting. I’m a pretty self-sufficient guy, but I’m used to walking into a situation having some support around me.”
The result was a night of magic. The song itself was fairly bland, but the participation of a Who's Who of stars was unmatched. Read an oral history of that recording session 35 years ago at Esquire magazine. -via Metafilter
