40 years ago today — March 7, 1985 — “We Are the World” was released. The charity single was recorded Jan. 28 after the American Music Awards, with stars ranging from Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder to Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner. Billy Joel was one of the artists participating, and the one thing he didn’t like about the experience was “We Are the World” itself.
“I wasn’t that crazy about the song,” Billy told ABC Audio some time ago. “I think that was my main memory of that: ‘Oh, this is the song?'”
Written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, it features lyrics like “it’s true we make a brighter day/ just you and me.” Billy says he thought it “sounded like a Pepsi commercial,” but he still took part, finding ways to break up the tedium during the extremely long night.
“If you watch the shots where they have the chorus, some of the times I’m in them and sometimes I’m not,” he laughed. “They kept doing take after take … and I realized that they didn’t need me every time.”
“So I’d kind of sneak off, I’d meet with Bruce Springsteen at the cold cut table, and we’d just stand there and have a beer and listen to everybody else sing, and then we go back!” he laughed.
Billy also recalled the now-legendary moment when Stevie Wonder had to teach Bob Dylan how to sing like Bob Dylan. “I wish they had kept it [in the song], ’cause it was absolutely hysterical,” he said. It’s captured in the Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop.
Lionel Richie once told ABC Audio that a pop culture moment like “We Are the World” couldn’t happen today.
“They’ll say to you, it doesn’t fit our format or it doesn’t fit our demographics, or we’ll do some market testing now to see if it fits the marketplace,” he noted. “So by the time you end up getting the music to the people, it’s over. It’s very difficult now to get the world’s attention.”
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