When Prince Said 'No': The 'We Are The World' Fallout [Highlight From Episode 315]

Author James Campion on why Prince declined the offer to be part of the "We Are The World" sessions and the fallout after.

Listen to Episode 315: Purple Reign: Prince and The Revolution Uncovered

----------
 
BookedOnRock.com
 
The Booked On Rock Store
 
The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel
 
Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:
BLUESKY
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
TIKTOK
X
 
Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore
 
Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: [e-mail]

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of book Don
Rock Revolution Prints. The band The Era is the book.
Author James Campion is our guest. He was asked to
be part of We Are the World. He said no.
Why did he decline?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Well, I think that anybody asking Prince now, I remember
this was not well known information then. But in my research,
you're gonna ask a guy who's never been produced. When
he was eighteen years old, he was his own producer.
He's gonna work for Quincy Jones. And now I know
he loves Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones as a master,
but that's not gonna fly. He never sang in front
of anyone. How he always sang was microphone hanging above

(00:35):
the board. He would kick the engineer out, He'd kick
everybody out and record all his vocals by him side.
Never recorded a vocal after the age of seventeen with
anybody in the room.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
That is amazing.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
He's gonna sit with forty six people and sing a
song written by another person. That's never gonna happen. And
he's gonna sing a song by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
He's never sung a song in front of anyone, and
since he's seventeen years old and he's never sung another
song by another artist except for a case of You Live,
and only once by Joni Mitchell. So you're gonna put

(01:08):
Prince who's never done the three things you have to
do to be on weird with the world, sing in
public with other people, sing another person's song, and just
show up with all those people. It's completely against his
his psychology.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Now that backfired on him because people probably thought he
was looking down at it like this is not worth
my time, and that's not what it was. In fact,
he offered something to Quincy. He said, let me record
something here and I'll send it to you.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, like a guitar. He said, let me go to
the different studio. But that was what they were trying
to do, camaraderie. Leave your ego at the door. Prince
had an ego that was embedded in his psychology. He
would he I am fully convinced he did not belong
in that room, despite the fact that two is of
his most the two paragons of his life when he

(01:59):
was younger, except for James Brown, was Ray Charles. His
first teacher music teacher worked for Ray Charles, and told
him about Ray Charles and how he crossed over and
did country music and anything he wanted. He controlled his
own publishing, all the things Prince wanted to do. And
Stevie Wonder who everybody said he was the new one
who he played all the instruments on his record. They
were there, so you would think just to be in
their presence, but it just wasn't in him. Now. The

(02:22):
thing that made that worse was he sends Sheil there
in his stead and they don't want Hill, so she
feels badly. Then he lies and says he he has
the management lies and say he's sick. And then after
winning the awards on the American Music Awards, he goes
out partying in public, and then when the paparazzi tries

(02:42):
to take pictures of him and his entourage, he sends
his bodyguards out to wrest the film from them, excuse me,
and they beat him up. Now, he didn't ask them
to beat him up, but that's what happened. It was
in all the papers. So not only does he show
up to the world he's out partying. It looks so
bad and he doesn't even see it, doesn't even tell
a band or his management. Nobody knows. They find out

(03:03):
at three in the morning when they get phone calls
from newspapers. So it was such a huge deal, and
he was all the myths, all the stories that because
Prince got talking to the press in nineteen eighty, all
the stories started to come out. He's a freak, he's
a jerk, he's up his own ass. All that stuff
came out, and it was hard to deny with anyone

(03:24):
around him. It was a terrible, terrible look, but he did.
There's a great PostScript to this. He did write a
song and give it to the album We of the World,
and performed a version of it on the day that
they had live Aid in July of eighty five, for
the Tears in your Eyes, which is a religious kind
of song, a connotation to to Jesus's feeding the loaves

(03:47):
and the fishes, feeding the multitudes. Of course, with the
feeding Africa, we should say for young people, we are
the World, was a song for African famine relief. So
here is Prince on at his own time in a
hot studio trailer outside of one of the venues he
played at two in the morning with Susan Rogers, engineer

(04:09):
putting this song together, as she said, with stale chips
and salami sandwiches and warm soda, when all those people
who sang and we are the World got fully fifteen
thousand dollars cater and they all had limos, and they
were in a great A and M Studios being produced
by Quincy Jones. So that's a kind of a nice
little thing where Prince was like, you know, I'm gonna
give this. I'll take the shit, but i'm gonna give

(04:31):
this song and let's move on. But it took years
for him to get over for a lot of people,
including his fans, to get over that snub.