The Greatest Night in Pop

A Mark Goodman Cameo and a not so good look for Prince. ?

A "SoundUp! With Mark Goodman and Alan Light" Blog

Recently, Netflix released The Greatest Night In Pop, a ninety-minute documentary that looks at the writing and recording of “We Are The World,” a Gen X era single featuring some of the biggest names in music at that time—or any time, for that matter—as a benefit for starving children and families in Africa. While much of the footage that appears in this documentary has made the rounds for quite some time, it does have some interesting moments and shows just what a huge undertaking this project really was. Recently, we at the Sound Up! With Mark Goodman and Alan Light podcast took a closer look at The Biggest Night In Pop. We were most interested in what Mark, who was at MTV at the time, had to say.?

Mark:

For so many of us, me included, it's a part of our lives, our culture. It was this incredible moment. I remember back in the day people saying, that's when the music business got a conscience. That was the beginning of all of this. I have a couple of gripes here and there with the doc, but I really, really enjoyed it. It got deeper than we did back in the day on MTV. Obviously, there's a fair amount of that footage that you see in the doc that's part of the video.

Alan:?

And a lot that's been floating around on YouTube. If you're a fan of any of those artists, you have probably watched some of the raw footage of them recording that's kind of sneaked out over the years.

Mark:?

To see them working out each of their individual parts, to hear the parts where Huey (Lewis) screwed up and Cyndi (Lauper) had to take off her necklaces, all of that is really great behind the scenes kind of stuff. And Kenny Loggins, I was glad to hear the comment that he made, they had that amazing line, “check your egos at the door.” And Kenny pointed out, there was still the hum underneath of those egos in competition. And how do you get that many huge stars in one room without that happening? I thought that was really honest and pretty cool.

I mean the idea of Bob Dylan being freaked out, like ‘What do I do? Quincy, help me out!’ That was interesting, just to see that vulnerable moment.?

Alan:

It's pretty wild, the moment when Diana Ross goes and asks for Darryl Hall's autograph and then they all start signing each other's lead sheets. Darryl Hall must have lost his damn mind when Diana Ross came over and asked for his autograph, as the first person who kind of broke that wall.

Mark:

And Diana, at the end of the doc, she's crying.?

Alan:

She says she doesn't want to leave, she doesn't want it to end. It's Diana Ross—Miss Ross! Talk about check your egos at the door.?

Roger:?

Mark, can we not gloss over the fact that you are in the doc?

Mark:

I was freaked the f*** out by that. Let me just say that right here. I could not believe that.

Alan:

We get a moment of you from the Purple Rain premiere. And I know I'm a biased viewer, but how much time is spent talking about Prince in this documentary when, A, he isn't there, and they also don't mention that he recorded and gave them a whole full new song for the album.

Mark:?

It’s not that he comes off as the bad guy. He comes off as he wouldn't want to be in a crowd like that.

Alan:

He offers to play a guitar solo. They say, we don't want a guitar solo. We need your voice. And the fact that he did go and give them a whole new song and new recording instead of showing up to sing his one line should count for something.

Mark:

Showing what it really was for everyone involved to try and pull off making a complete record from nothing to the finished mix done that night—I mean, crazy. And I thought that the doc pointed that up really, really well.

Alan:?

Remember where we were in the world, this is before cell phones, this is before computers—the first Macintosh had just been rolled out a few months before, but that's not how anything was getting done. Seeing them FedExing the cassettes to everybody to learn their part, trying to imagine setting up the cars to bring them over, just the blocking and tackling logistics to put that together is really difficult for us to imagine 40 years later.

Mark:

Right. And absolutely, it was really cool to watch.?

Roger:

I still think a Prince solo at the end over the fade would have been amazing!