025/ One late night in Los Angeles in 1985
If you haven’t caught it yet, you must dig into the super-fun Netflix doc The Greatest Night In Pop. It documents an all-nighter in January 1985, when a bunch of the world’s biggest music superstars gathered in Los Angeles to record ‘We Are The World’.
The brutal extent of the famine in Ethiopia had crossed into mainstream western consciousness, thanks to a proper old school media blitz. Bob Geldof’s Band Aid was a gigantic hit. So Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson get together to write an American equivalent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and the rest is, well, an unexpectedly terrific documentary.
The film keeps it light on deep context or background, close-focusing on the logistics and corralling of the stars, the songwriting process (Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie dick around in Michael’s mansion full of animals, until Quincy Jones tell them to hurry the fuck up), and then, as centrepiece and backbone of the film, the mammoth all night recording session itself, which was all filmed, because they knew they needed the footage for the video to play on MTV. The recording session was timed to start after the American Music Awards (where Lionel Richie was hosting and, it turned out, pretty much winning the night) in order to catch all the stars in L.A.
We’ve not seen this footage before and the interplay of such huge names all trying to get a job done in one night is genuinely enthralling. So many great bits, funny and touching.
However, one of the most fascinating things to watch for is the elephant in the room that we’re not being shown, especially given the context: it’s simply hilarious that this session appears so absent of booze and drugs and other malarkey. It wouldn’t matter I guess (it was always going to be largely hagiographic) except for a moment where the editors create an artificial exception, as if to prove the rule. By which I mean: they totally throw the poor soul singer Al Jarreau under the bus, for having supposedly drunk too much wine to quickly nail his vocal.
Viewed through the lens of history, though he was a big star at the time, Jarreau is one of the lesser artists here, who did not go on to be an outright legend, or still a household name today, almost forty years on. I mean, we’re spending a night in a studio containing Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte, Bruce Springsteen. Quincy Jones is running the room.
It’s also 1985. Everyone just came from a huge awards show. Many of them won awards there. Before they even started work, it was probably the greatest night of Lionel Richie’s life.
Reader, I love what they do with this film but trust me when I tell you that building was awash with cocaine, pills, whatever else you can imagine. The very notion that only poor old “didn’t he sing the theme to Moonlighting?” Al Jarreau was the naughty one, because he was swigging from a bottle of wine — cutaway to some b-roll of the bottle, there on the floor, in a corner near the piano…
Yeah, come one, that’s not that story.
They do address and unpick (very entertainingly) Bob Dylan’s infamous total discomfort and inability to contribute. However they leave out any other reasons, and focus solely on his nervousness.
I’m fascinated by the lesser-remembered names, who were weighty enough in the winter of 1984 to get asked to take part. They’re still all big stars in their own right, just haven’t landed like the true legends.
Jarreau is one, Steve Perry from Journey plays a big part, the Pointer Sisters are there. But the great lost name is Kim Carnes. Carnes was mainstream American massive in the first half of the eighties, after co-writing a hit album for Kenny Rogers, then had a huge breakthrough record of her own, Mistaken Identity, which contained the global mega hit ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. Funnily enough, it was her sixth solo record that made her famous enough to be a part of this shebang. You’d never see that gradual a career growth pattern today, sadly. She gets a solo line too, and what a beautiful raspy blues-rock voice she has. Carnes was the one contributor I had to actually look up.
There are sort of like two Stevie Wonders in this film, both fantastic value. I’ve come away with a modest shift in my view of Wonder, understanding him now as a more anarchic, puckish, even disruptive spirit than I did before. There’s the Stevie Wonder who almost upends the session, with time running away from them, trying to bully in a counter-melody line in Swahili, to make it more authentically ‘African’. Except it’s firmly pointed out to him that Swahili isn’t a language spoken in Ethiopia. This moment finally does for Waylon Jennings, by the way, who just fucks off into the night.
Then there’s also the Stevie Wonder who totally saves the day, Bob Dylan-wise. I can’t spoil that bit though, it has to be seen.
The outright biggest four names of the mid eighties were Bruce, Madonna, Prince and Jacko. They got two of them. They also clearly sold Sheila E a bit of a dummy, using her as bait to lure Prince into the session, and promising her a solo bit to sing that didn’t transpire. Prince obviously never had any intention of showing up. That’s perhaps the only truly bitter note of the film. Sheila E was having her own breakout year, with a big hit solo record and she’d smashed it at the awards earlier in the evening, but she gets treated too much like a bit player.
Anyway, flaws and missed lines and all, the thing is a joy.
It’s interesting to me that the British Band Aid project now feels so clangingly outdated and tasteless, not so much as charitable project (though it has clearly done immense financial good over the decades) but as a cultural notion. Yet the perhaps tackier, less well constructed, at least on the surface more self-regarding, USA For Africa ages much better. Partly this is simply via being more representative and diverse, and partly its very cheesiness makes such issues matter less. Band Aid is partly awful because it thinks its good. It is po-faced. USA For Africa ends up pretty stonking, because it doesn’t care if it’s good. Band Aid says, in almost entirely white male voice, thank god you’re not like them, now give us your fucking money. USA For Africa says, they are us, we are them, we’re all one — and that still lands.
I have always been interested in the comparison of the two songs. They both were milestones in their own way. I moved to the USA shortly after these songs came out and I would myself, over the next 7 years, do a lot of comparing of the two countries and cultures.