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

• Prince famously turned down an opportunity to join the recording session for the 1985 charity single “We Are the World,”
• 40 year later, fans never received a clear answer as to why he decided not to attend the recording, refusing to give a straight answer before his death in 2016.
• Based on comments from others familiar with the situation, it seems Prince’s feud with Michael Jackson may have contributed to his decision not to participate.

It’s been 40 years since the 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 become the most successful charity single in history, which has raised over $80 million since its release on March 7, 1985. 

But the song lacked a dash of purple, if you catch our drift. Prince was one of the most notable absences from the star-studded session, and for years, fans have debated the precise reason why. 

The world-conquering success of Purple Rain ensured that Prince was one of the first people to be approached for the project. His longtime engineer, Susan Rogers, recalls being present when he got the call from the track’s producer, Quincy Jones. “I only heard Prince’s side of the conversation — I was in the control room waiting — but he declined it,” she says in Alan Light’s book Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. “It was a long conversation. Prince said, ‘Can I play guitar on it?’ And they said no.” And so, Prince refused.

His no-show status was all the more surprising given that he had appeared alongside many of the other participants at the American Music Awards, held a short distance across town mere hours before the “We Are the World” recording was due to begin on Jan. 28, 1985. The recording date was chosen specifically because so many musicians would be in Los Angeles for the ceremony. In addition to taking home three trophies that night, Prince also delivered an iconic version of “Purple Rain,” now hailed as one of the most legendary sets ever performed at the award show.

In fact, the performance was so good that few believed the reports that Prince was too sick to attend the “We Are the World” session. (The story was later revealed to be a rumor started by his co-manager, Bob Cavallo, in a desperate attempt to avoid headlines trumpeting that his client had bailed on a charity gig.) 

Prince’s band, the Revolution, was kept in the dark about the whole enterprise. “I don’t remember even knowing about ‘We Are the World’ until that day, when everybody was talking about it backstage [at the AMAs],” Revolution keyboard player Lisa Coleman says in Let’s Go Crazy. “[People were] like, ‘We’ll see you tonight, right?’ And I was like, ‘What are they talking about?’” The Purple One was not pleased when his band started asking questions. “Prince was pissed,” guitarist Wendy Melvoin adds in Let’s Go Crazy. “He was like, ‘I don’t want to see any of you there, you’re not allowed to go there.’” 

Throughout the night, Prince got pressure from all sides urging him to attend the recording — including those in his own camp. “At the American Music Awards, [Prince] keeps telling me the only thing he’ll do is play guitar,” recalls Cavallo. “So I call Quincy, and he says, ‘I don’t need him to f–king play guitar!’ He got angry.”

Lionel Richie, one of the co-writers of “We Are the World,” also made a personal appeal to Prince as the session got underway at A&M Studios. “I sat on the phone with him for the longest time,” Richie told Access Hollywood. “I said, ‘Prince, we’re all down [here] waiting on you’…I would love to tell you that that’s different from anything else he’s ever done. That’s just Prince. Of course he’s not going to be at a group of singers at the time when we want him to show up.” 

But the song’s organizers weren’t going to cave that easily. Sheila E, Prince’s musical collaborator and on-off romantic partner at the time, claims she was invited to join the supergroup in what she believes was part of a scheme to coax Prince into the mix. “I was looking forward to singing one of the verses, but they kept asking, ‘Well, do you think you can get Prince here?’ ” she says in the 2024 Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, which chronicles the making of the song. “I’m like, ‘Wow, this is weird.’ And I just started feeling like, ‘I feel like I’m being used…because they want Prince to show up and the longer they keep me, maybe Prince will show up.’ ”

Of course, he never did. The solo line that was earmarked for him ultimately was sung by Huey Lewis. The exact reasons why Prince stubbornly refused to participate are disputed, but many assumed it stemmed from his ongoing rivalry with Jackson, the song’s other co-writer.

In many ways, the pair were more alike than they were different. Born less than three months apart to devout religious families in the industrial Midwest, Prince and Jackson probably had a lot to talk about when they weren’t holed up in their Xanadu-like mansions concocting their unique blends of soul-funk-disco alchemy. Prince burst onto the music scene with For You in 1978, one year before Jackson came into his own as a solo creative force with Off the Wall.  The battle for chart supremacy began when MJ upstaged 1999, Prince’s bestseller to date, with the industry-changing blockbuster Thriller in December 1982. 

An onstage showdown occurred a few months later at a James Brown concert held at the Los Angeles Beverly Theater in 1983. The Godfather of Soul inadvertently lit the fuse when he pulled Jackson out of the audience for an impromptu duet. MJ, who’d been mimicking Brown’s moves since he was a child fronting the Jackson 5, was primed for an invitation from his mentor and promptly wowed an ecstatic crowd with his physical and vocal gymnastics. 

With the excitement at a fever pitch, Jackson whispers something into Brown’s ear. Moments later, Brown is calling for Prince to join them onstage. “Prince, you gotta do something! You gotta do something!” Prince eventually arrives onstage, riding on the back of a large hirsute bodyguard known as “Big Chick.” The scene only gets weirder from there.

Prince removes his gloves with his teeth and throws them into the crowd before commandeering a guitar from someone in Brown’s band.  Just when he seems poised to shred, he starts to falter. (His associates claim he was inadvertently given a guitar that was strung left-handed.) After managing some simple rhythmic licks, he starts freestyling, Prince-style — stripping off his shirt, emitting feral shrieks into the mic, and flipping the stand. This continues for a moment, but he looks frustrated and possibly even embarrassed. Things don’t seem to be going as he hoped. Eventually, he makes a memorable exit by attempting to swing offstage from an oversized prop lamp post. Unfortunately, the thing is made out of papier mache, and it topples into the crowd along with Prince himself. 

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.  

It’s a masterclass in attitude, but it’s not his finest hour in terms of stagecraft or musicianship. Many in Prince’s inner circle — not to mention Prince himself — believed that Jackson had intentionally brought him onstage to humiliate him. (Paisley Park executive Alan Leeds recalls getting a call 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 in the parking lot with his limo. “He said that was his intention,” Jones said in a (highly controversial) interview with GQ in 2018. “It was just very obvious what the hell happened — [Prince] made a damn fool out of himself.”

Jackson reportedly found the whole incident hilarious. “He made a fool of himself,” he says in recently unearthed private tapes made for his 1988 memoir, Moonwalker. “He was a joke…people were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video.” According to legend, Jackson occasionally screened the footage at his private theater, both for his own amusement and the benefit of guests. It would be the only time the pair shared a stage. 

Given the strained relations between them at the time, it makes sense that Prince wouldn’t want to work with Jackson on “We Are the World.” The song’s vocal arranger, Tom Bahler, theorized that Prince feared a second round of humiliation, this time in front of four dozen members of the musical elite. “I think if anything, he was afraid of Michael,” Bahler told Rolling Stone in 2024. “This is pure conjecture on my part. Michael was not afraid of him. Michael wasn’t afraid of anybody. He loved everybody.” 

Ken Kragen, the Hollywood mega-agent responsible for assembling the gargantuan talent roster for the song, disagreed and maintained that Prince didn’t come because he was unwilling to work with any other people. “He always recorded alone and not with an engineer,” he told The Mirror in 2015. “He would go into the studio, do his own engineering and record every instrument and sing and no one else would be there. All of a sudden, he couldn’t be in a room with his peers.” Richie echoed the sentiment during a 2021 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, claiming that Prince would only sing on the track if he was in a separate room. 

However, Revolution guitarist and Prince protégée Melvoin offered a much simpler and far less psychologically complex explanation: he just hated the music. Speaking to Light, she says the real reason Prince never showed was “because he thinks he’s a bada– and he wanted to look cool, and he felt like the song for ‘We Are the World’ was horrible and he didn’t want to be around all those motherf—–.” (Sheila E disagreed, insisting to PEOPLE in 2024 that Prince “liked it.”)

Yet another deliciously petty theory is that Prince supposedly backed out of the session because Bob Geldolf — the Boomtown Rats singer and mastermind behind the British counterpart to USA for Africa, Band Aid — allegedly called him a “creep.”

The world may never know the real reason Prince backed out of “We Are the World.” He never explained the decision before his death in 2016. However, we do know what he got up to later that night — and it’s the spiritual inverse of raising money for charity. 

At the American Music Awards, Prince’s co-manager Bob Cavallo emphasized the importance of keeping a low profile later that night if he declined to attend the session. “I say to Prince backstage, ‘I’m gonna say you’re sick — if you go out tonight and you’re seen, I can see the headlines: “Prince Parties While Rock Royalty Saves Millions”…You’ve got to stay home, ride it out, and be sick.’ ” Prince heeded the advice and accompanied his team back to the Westwood Marquis hotel for a low-key celebration. 

Then, when his management hit the sack around 2 a.m., Prince declared it time to party. He rounded up his remaining entourage and headed towards Carlos and Charlie’s, a hip Mexican eatery on the Sunset Strip. The decision wasn’t universally popular within Prince’s group. “It was horrible,” remembered Melvoin. “He had us go to Carlos and Charlie’s and have a f—— party. I remember it perfectly, thinking, ‘This is so wrong. This is so wrong.’ We were embarrassed. Everybody in the band was horrified.” 

Word of his visit soon traveled through the showbiz grapevine, and a handful of paparazzi were waiting as he exited later that night. Still wary of any bad press for skipping the “We Are the World” session, Prince’s imposing bodyguards demanded that the photographers hand over their film. A fight broke out when they refused, and two of Prince’s bodyguards, Lawrence Gibson and Wallace Safford, were arrested and hauled off to jail — Gibson on suspicion of strong-arm robbery and Safford for misdemeanor battery. (Both were released on bail a short time later.) 

For Prince’s team, the damning press was a waking nightmare. The lede in the UPI wire service story contrasted the scuffle at Prince’s party with the cast of charitable do-gooders who spent the night trying to help starving children in Africa: “Quick-fisted bodyguards provided a violent counterpoint to a night of international camaraderie.” Prince’s co-manager, Leeds, was horrified. “I’ve had scandals on tour where musicians got busted and s— happens,” he would recall to Light, “but I’ve never read anything that was on page A1. It was just plain weird.” 

The incident sparked the first major backlash of Prince’s career. Saturday Night Live parodied the incident in a sketch featuring Hulk Hogan and Mr. T as the bodyguards, with Billy Crystal portraying Prince and performing a song called “I Am the World.” The hugely-popular (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) syndicated newspaper comic Doonesbury referred to him as a child. The Los Angeles Times summed up public opinion succinctly, writing that Prince’s behavior on the night of Jan. 28, 1985  “led many to think of him as an arrogant jerk.”

Prince would ultimately contribute the song “4 the Tears in Your Eyes” to the album that contained “We Are the World,” but for many, it was seen as too little, too late. The response struck Sheila E as unfair. “We were already giving to so many,” she told PEOPLE in 2024. “Not just foundations, but a lot of the times on that [Purple Rain] tour…we were already stopping at children’s hospitals and doing free concerts for the kids who have cancer and disabilities…It was just too much.”

Prince never spoke publicly about the “We Are the World” incident. However, he seemingly shared his side of the story in his 1993 song “Hello.” 

I tried to tell ’em that I didn’t want to sing

But I’d gladly write a song instead

They said, “Okay”, and everything was cool

‘Til a camera tried to get in my bed

We’re against hungry children, our record stands tall

There’s just as much hunger here at home

We’ll do what we can if y’all tryna understand

A flower that has water will grow

And the child misunderstood will go