Why Prince Skipped the ‘We Are the World’ Recording Sessiontheinsiderinsight

• Prince famously turned down a chance to hitch the recording session for the 1985 charity single “We Are the World,”
• 40 12 months later, followers by no means obtained a transparent reply as to why he determined to not attend the recording, refusing to present a straight reply earlier than his loss of life in 2016.
• Based mostly on feedback from others aware of the scenario, it appears Prince’s feud with Michael Jackson might have contributed to his determination to not take part.

It has been 40 years for the reason that brightest musical luminaries of the ‘80s gathered in a Hollywood recording studio to make “We Are the World.” A-listers like Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Lionel Richie, Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen lent their time and voices to what would turn out to be probably the most profitable charity single in historical past, which has raised over $80 million since its launch on March 7, 1985. 

However the music lacked a splash of purple, if you happen to catch our drift. Prince was some of the notable absences from the star-studded session, and for years, followers have debated the exact cause why. 

The world-conquering success of Purple Rain ensured that Prince was one of many first folks to be approached for the undertaking. His longtime engineer, Susan Rogers, recollects being current when he received the decision from the monitor’s producer, Quincy Jones. “I solely heard Prince’s aspect of the dialog — I used to be within the management room ready — however he declined it,” she says in Alan Gentle’s guide Let’s Go Loopy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. “It was an extended dialog. Prince stated, ‘Can I play guitar on it?’ They usually stated no.” And so, Prince refused.

His no-show standing was all of the extra stunning provided that he had appeared alongside most of the different contributors on the American Music Awards, held a brief distance throughout city mere hours earlier than the “We Are the World” recording was because of start on Jan. 28, 1985. The recording date was chosen particularly as a result of so many musicians could be in Los Angeles for the ceremony. Along with taking dwelling three trophies that night time, Prince additionally delivered an iconic model of “Purple Rain,” now hailed as one of the most legendary sets ever carried out on the award present.

The truth is, the efficiency was so good that few believed the stories that Prince was too sick to attend the “We Are the World” session. (The story was later revealed to be a rumor began by his co-manager, Bob Cavallo, in a determined try to keep away from headlines trumpeting that his shopper had bailed on a charity gig.) 

Prince’s band, the Revolution, was saved in the dead of night about the entire enterprise. “I don’t bear in mind even understanding about ‘We Are the World’ till that day, when all people was speaking about it backstage [at the AMAs],” Revolution keyboard participant Lisa Coleman says in Let’s Go Loopy. “[People were] like, ‘We’ll see you tonight, proper?’ And I used to be like, ‘What are they speaking about?’” The Purple One was not happy when his band began asking questions. “Prince was pissed,” guitarist Wendy Melvoin provides in Let’s Go Loopy. “He was like, ‘I don’t need to see any of you there, you’re not allowed to go there.’” 

All through the night time, Prince received strain from all sides urging him to attend the recording — together with these in his personal camp. “On the American Music Awards, [Prince] retains telling me the one factor he’ll do is play guitar,” recalls Cavallo. “So I name Quincy, and he says, ‘I don’t want him to f–king play guitar!’ He received offended.”

Lionel Richie, one of many co-writers of “We Are the World,” additionally made a private attraction to Prince because the session received underway at A&M Studios. “I sat on the telephone with him for the longest time,” Richie told Access Hollywood. “I stated, ‘Prince, we’re all down [here] ready on you’…I’d like to inform you that that’s completely different from the rest he’s ever performed. That’s simply Prince. In fact he’s not going to be at a gaggle of singers on the time once we need him to point out up.” 

However the music’s organizers weren’t going to cave that simply. Sheila E, Prince’s musical collaborator and on-off romantic accomplice on the time, claims she was invited to hitch the supergroup in what she believes was a part of a scheme to coax Prince into the combination. “I used to be trying ahead to singing one of many verses, however they saved asking, ‘Effectively, do you suppose you may get Prince right here?’ ” she says within the 2024 Netflix documentary The Biggest Night time in Pop, which chronicles the making of the music. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that is bizarre.’ And I simply began feeling like, ‘I really feel like I’m getting used…as a result of they need Prince to point out up and the longer they hold me, possibly Prince will present up.’ ”

In fact, he by no means did. The solo line that was earmarked for him finally was sung by Huey Lewis. The precise explanation why Prince stubbornly refused to take part are disputed, however many assumed it stemmed from his ongoing rivalry with Jackson, the music’s different co-writer.

In some ways, the pair had been extra alike than they had been completely different. Born lower than three months aside to religious spiritual households within the industrial Midwest, Prince and Jackson in all probability had rather a lot to speak about once they weren’t holed up of their Xanadu-like mansions concocting their distinctive blends of soul-funk-disco alchemy. Prince burst onto the music scene with For You in 1978, one 12 months earlier than Jackson got here into his personal as a solo artistic pressure with Off the Wall.  The battle for chart supremacy started when MJ upstaged 1999, Prince’s bestseller up to now, with the industry-changing blockbuster Thriller in December 1982. 

An onstage showdown occurred a couple of months later at a James Brown live performance held on the Los Angeles Beverly Theater in 1983. The Godfather of Soul inadvertently lit the fuse when he pulled Jackson out of the viewers for an impromptu duet. MJ, who’d been mimicking Brown’s strikes since he was a baby fronting the Jackson 5, was primed for an invite from his mentor and promptly wowed an ecstatic crowd along with his bodily and vocal gymnastics. 

With the joy at a fever pitch, Jackson whispers one thing into Brown’s ear. Moments later, Brown is asking for Prince to hitch them onstage. “Prince, you gotta do one thing! You gotta do one thing!” Prince finally arrives onstage, using on the again of a giant hirsute bodyguard referred to as “Huge Chick.” The scene solely will get weirder from there.

Prince removes his gloves along with his tooth and throws them into the gang earlier than commandeering a guitar from somebody in Brown’s band.  Simply when he appears poised to shred, he begins to falter. (His associates declare he was inadvertently given a guitar that was strung left-handed.) After managing some easy rhythmic licks, he begins freestyling, Prince-style — stripping off his shirt, emitting feral shrieks into the mic, and flipping the stand. This continues for a second, however he seems annoyed and presumably even embarrassed. Issues don’t appear to be going as he hoped. Finally, he makes a memorable exit by making an attempt to swing offstage from an outsized prop lamp put up. Sadly, the factor is made out of papier mache, and it topples into the gang together with Prince himself. 

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It’s a masterclass in angle, however it’s not his best hour when it comes to stagecraft or musicianship. Many in Prince’s interior circle — to not point out Prince himself — believed that Jackson had deliberately introduced him onstage to humiliate him. (Paisley Park govt Alan Leeds recalls getting a name from Prince’s drummer Bobby Z saying, “Oh boy…he made an ass of himself tonight.”)

Quincy Jones claimed that Prince was so enraged that he tried to run Jackson down that night time within the car parking zone along with his limo. “He stated that was his intention,” Jones stated in a (extremely controversial) interview with GQ in 2018. “It was simply very apparent what the hell occurred — [Prince] made a rattling idiot out of himself.”

Jackson reportedly discovered the entire incident hilarious. “He made a idiot of himself,” he says in recently unearthed private tapes made for his 1988 memoir, Moonwalker. “He was a joke…folks had been working and screaming. I used to be so embarrassed. It was all on video.” In keeping with legend, Jackson often screened the footage at his non-public theater, each for his personal amusement and the advantage of friends. It will be the one time the pair shared a stage. 

Given the strained relations between them on the time, it is smart that Prince wouldn’t need to work with Jackson on “We Are the World.” The music’s vocal arranger, Tom Bahler, theorized that Prince feared a second spherical of humiliation, this time in entrance of 4 dozen members of the musical elite. “I feel if something, he was afraid of Michael,” Bahler told Rolling Stone in 2024. “That is pure conjecture on my half. Michael was not afraid of him. Michael wasn’t afraid of anyone. He cherished all people.” 

Ken Kragen, the Hollywood mega-agent liable for assembling the gargantuan expertise roster for the music, disagreed and maintained that Prince didn’t come as a result of he was unwilling to work with any different folks. “He all the time recorded alone and never with an engineer,” he told The Mirror in 2015. “He would go into the studio, do his personal engineering and document each instrument and sing and nobody else could be there. Impulsively, he couldn’t be in a room along with his friends.” Richie echoed the sentiment throughout a 2021 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, claiming that Prince would solely sing on the monitor if he was in a separate room. 

Nevertheless, Revolution guitarist and Prince protégée Melvoin provided a a lot less complicated and much much less psychologically complicated rationalization: he simply hated the music. Speaking to Light, she says the true cause Prince by no means confirmed was “as a result of he thinks he’s a bada– and he needed to look cool, and he felt just like the music for ‘We Are the World’ was horrible and he didn’t need to be round all these motherf—–.” (Sheila E disagreed, insisting to PEOPLE in 2024 that Prince “appreciated it.”)

One more deliciously petty theory is that Prince supposedly backed out of the session as a result of Bob Geldolf — the Boomtown Rats singer and mastermind behind the British counterpart to USA for Africa, Band Help — allegedly known as him a “creep.”

The world might by no means know the true cause Prince backed out of “We Are the World.” He by no means defined the choice earlier than his loss of life in 2016. Nevertheless, we do know what he received as much as later that night time — and it’s the non secular inverse of elevating cash for charity. 

On the American Music Awards, Prince’s co-manager Bob Cavallo emphasized the importance of protecting a low profile later that night time if he declined to attend the session. “I say to Prince backstage, ‘I’m gonna say you’re sick — if you happen to exit tonight and also you’re seen, I can see the headlines: “Prince Events Whereas Rock Royalty Saves Hundreds of thousands”…You’ve received to remain dwelling, trip it out, and be sick.’ ” Prince heeded the recommendation and accompanied his group again to the Westwood Marquis resort for a low-key celebration. 

Then, when his administration hit the sack round 2 a.m., Prince declared it time to occasion. He rounded up his remaining entourage and headed in direction of Carlos and Charlie’s, a hip Mexican eatery on the Sundown Strip. The choice wasn’t universally in style inside Prince’s group. “It was horrible,” remembered Melvoin. “He had us go to Carlos and Charlie’s and have a f—— occasion. I bear in mind it completely, considering, ‘That is so fallacious. That is so fallacious.’ We had been embarrassed. Everyone within the band was horrified.” 

Phrase of his go to quickly traveled by means of the showbiz grapevine, and a handful of paparazzi had been ready as he exited later that night time. Nonetheless cautious of any unhealthy press for skipping the “We Are the World” session, Prince’s imposing bodyguards demanded that the photographers hand over their movie. A struggle broke out once they refused, and two of Prince’s bodyguards, Lawrence Gibson and Wallace Safford, had been arrested and hauled off to jail — Gibson on suspicion of strong-arm theft and Safford for misdemeanor battery. (Each had been launched on bail a short while later.) 

For Prince’s group, the damning press was a waking nightmare. The lede in the UPI wire service story contrasted the scuffle at Prince’s occasion with the solid of charitable do-gooders who spent the night time attempting to assist ravenous kids in Africa: “Fast-fisted bodyguards supplied a violent counterpoint to an evening of worldwide camaraderie.” Prince’s co-manager, Leeds, was horrified. “I’ve had scandals on tour the place musicians received busted and s— occurs,” he would recall to Light, “however I’ve by no means learn something that was on web page A1. It was simply plain bizarre.” 

The incident sparked the primary main backlash of Prince’s profession. Saturday Night Live parodied the incident in a sketch that includes Hulk Hogan and Mr. T because the bodyguards, with Billy Crystal portraying Prince and performing a music known as “I Am the World.” The hugely-popular (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) syndicated newspaper comedian Doonesbury referred to him as a child. The Los Angeles Instances summed up public opinion succinctly, writing that Prince’s conduct on the night time of Jan. 28, 1985  “led many to think about him as an boastful jerk.”

Prince would finally contribute the music “4 the Tears in Your Eyes” to the album that contained “We Are the World,” however for a lot of, it was seen as too little, too late. The response struck Sheila E as unfair. “We had been already giving to so many,” she instructed PEOPLE in 2024. “Not simply foundations, however quite a lot of the occasions on that [Purple Rain] tour…we had been already stopping at kids’s hospitals and doing free live shows for the youngsters who’ve most cancers and disabilities…It was simply an excessive amount of.”

Prince by no means spoke publicly in regards to the “We Are the World” incident. Nevertheless, he seemingly shared his aspect of the story in his 1993 music “Hiya.” 

I attempted to inform ’em that I did not need to sing

However I would gladly write a music as a substitute

They stated, “Okay”, and every thing was cool

‘Til a digital camera tried to get in my mattress

We’re towards hungry kids, our document stands tall

There’s simply as a lot starvation right here at dwelling

We’ll do what we are able to if y’all tryna perceive

A flower that has water will develop

And the kid misunderstood will go