2:14 Bruce Springsteen steps up to the microphone and with his eyes closed, belts out the chorus. Springsteen fans don’t usually think of his voice as one of his principal assets, but landing on the song like a tractor-trailer full of gravel, he demonstrates here that it’s a powerful instrument. In early 1985, the Boss was at his commercial peak, halfway through his record-tying streak of seven Top 10 singles from a single album (Born in the U.S.A.). The night before, he had played a four-hour concert at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York. While most of the stars arrived in limousines, accompanied by security guards, Springsteen drove himself in a pickup truck, parked it nearby in a grocery-store lot, and walked into the studio by himself.
4:54 The single’s most thrilling section, the duet between Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, wasn’t planned before the session — or really, at all. After Dylan finished his section, Jones summoned Springsteen to the microphone. Jones remembered, “God must have tapped me on the shoulder to save the record by suggesting that I ask Bruce Springsteen — for no logical reason at all — to supply solo answers to the choir melody on the title choruses because of the textures and intensity of his truly unique vocal equipment, especially in this register.”
“You sounded fantastic, Dylan,” Springsteen told him as he got ready to sing. Dylan stayed in the room to listen to Springsteen. Jones instructed him, “It’s like being a cheerleader of the chorus.”
“I’ll give it a shot,” Springsteen said, stuck his sheet music in a back pocket, and nailed it. “Broke in a genuine sweat,” he said after his take, and soon headed out the door, walking past a half-dozen limos on his way to his pickup truck. By 8 a.m., everyone had called it a night.
When he woke up, Jones listened to the tapes and realized he didn’t have enough material: “The energy I needed to conclude had dissipated earlier than I had anticipated. The power of the choir had peaked after two choruses and one change of key.” Then he realized he could use the Springsteen vocals — and give them some extra kick by replacing the choir with Stevie Wonder. So he summoned Wonder back to the studio (he’s wearing a multicolored patchwork shirt in this section, not the blue-and-black sweater he sported on the night of January 28th), had him record the chorus, and patched it all together “with the vocal intensity of these two master artists.” Their call-and-response earned almost a full minute of the single’s running time.
The single sold over 8 million copies in the United States (some sources claim as many 20 million copies worldwide), while the accompanying album (which included the track Prince had promised, “4 the Tears in Your Eyes,” plus the Canadian all-star song from Northern Lights, “Tears Are Not Enough,” but not the heavy-metal famine benefit group called Hear’n Aid) sold over 4 million more. USA for Africa raised more than $75 million for famine relief; “We Are the World” still earns money today.
Although distributing food in Ethiopia was a logistical and political nightmare, and some of the money raised was squandered, the song did a lot of good in the world. Stone may not have been turned into bread, but music was turned into rescued lives. “We Are the World” had a faint messianic aroma and a self-congratulatory aftertaste, but the hearts of its participants were fundamentally in the right place. As Springsteen said that night, “Anytime somebody asks you to take one night of your time to stop people starving to death, it’s pretty hard — you can’t say no.”
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