At some point all of us are Bob Dylan in “We Are the World:” the squarest peg in the roundest hole, wishing we were literally anywhere else on the planet, but determined to make the best of our circumstances while also regretting every decision that led us to the present moment.
Dylan was among the constellation of pop stars summoned to record what would become the world’s biggest charity single, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and released under the banner of USA For Africa in an effort to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
“We Are the World” brought together almost every household name from the music business in the mid 1980s: Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, Billy Joel, Tina Turner, Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson, Kenny Loggins, Ray Charles. (Madonna was not invited; Prince was asked but did not show up.)
Its recording during a single overnight session in the winter of 1985 is the subject of “The Greatest Night In Pop,” an immensely entertaining new documentary, directed by Bao Nguyen and available on Netflix.
The song’s iconic music video shows the artists gathered around studio microphones, trading lines in the verses and joining in unison for the big “We are the world, we are the children” refrain, collectively resembling a “Last Supper” mural from an era of big hair and “Miami Vice” suits.
Dylan is there, looking not like the greatest-ever American songwriter surrounded by peers who revere him but, rather, like someone who lied on a resume and now has a high-ranking position in a company he’s never heard of.
Or just like someone who is socially anxious, who doesn’t thrive in large groups and who realizes five minutes into the party that he should have stayed home. Dylan sways a-rhythmically, glances uncomfortably around the room and barely mumbles when every other performer leans fully into that absurd, saccharine chorus.
This footage has existed for years, and Dylan’s image has been extensively memed, often with text to the effect of, “Current mood: Bob Dylan in the ‘We Are the World’ video.” But the story of the song’s recording, as recounted in “The Greatest Night In Pop,” makes his “We Are the World” experience somehow even more relatable.
Dylan was in a creative lull in the mid-’80s. And during the recording session, he was a face in a crowd of great and distinctive singers from a decade whose pop trends had passed him by.
And Dylan, while obviously a distinctive singer, is famously not a great one, at least in a technical sense. He was given a solo of the oft-repeated lines, “There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives. It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me,” right before a triumphant power-ballad key change. His struggle to get the words and notes to fit together correctly provides some narrative tension toward the end of the documentary.
Here is an enigmatic artist who has inspired every other person in the studio, trading on some of his mystique for a humanitarian cause and giving his voice to vacuous lyrics, but struggling with self-consciousness about his vocal abilities and unable to perform in a room full of other rock stars.
The producer, Quincy Jones, clears the place out and, in an incredible moment, Stevie Wonder coaches Dylan by impersonating how he imagined the words would sound in Dylan’s trademark gravel-and-glass-shards voice. Bob nails the next take.
This is about as high as the stakes get in “The Greatest Night In Pop,” and the limited ambitions are sort of refreshing. There is less rock-star drama than one might expect given the personalities assembled. There is no examination of the charity-single phenomenon from a geopolitical perspective. The cameras capture surprisingly little substance use considering the cocaine energy reverberating from the entire enterprise.
But we do repeatedly see the handwritten sign in the studio that says: “Check your ego at the door.” And if Bob Dylan can do that, so can the rest of us.