Ken Kragen was magic.
I didn’t know this until two years ago, when I met him. I had never heard the name Ken Kragen, as you may not have, and thus was ignorant about how much musical joy the guy had brought into my life, and yours, and the lives of millions of other people from Hartford to Hanoi. Kragen, who died last week at age 85, was no singer, no virtuoso of any instrument. He possessed a different kind of genius, a genius he was born with and later nourished at Harvard Business School, and which he employed to great good over a lifetime in the go-go music business primarily of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The finest, fullest manifestation of his genius came in 1985, when he brought together forty-five star singers in one night to record “We Are the World.”
It had started with a notion, not his. Harry Belafonte, already a legend then, had watched the recent success of the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with awe. It was a recording by a group of stars in the U.K., released in 1984 to benefit the vast hungry population in African nations. Belafonte wanted to add to the effort with a recording by American artists—the biggest stars of the day, singing together to aid famine-stricken people half a world away.
Two days before Christmas, 1984, at noon, Belafonte called the one man he had been told could pull off such a feat: Kragen.
“And we were on the phone for two hours,” Kragen told me. “I had only met him once before, naked in the sauna at Caesar’s Palace.”
Kragen was a supermanager in the music business, a brainy and brainy-looking charmer with star clients spilling out of his pockets: Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie, Kim Carnes—chart-toppers all of them. He started working the phones out of his office on Sunset Boulevard. A couple of weeks later, when Bruce Springsteen said yes, the phones started ringing in the other direction—Kragen couldn’t say yes fast enough. Dylan. Tina. Hall. Oates. Many Jacksons, including Michael, who was writing the song with Richie. Huey Lewis, as well as the News. And some veterans: Ray. Smokey. Dionne. Willie. Waylon.
(And, for some reason, Dan Aykroyd.)
Kragen was at the centre of it all. He’d talked Quincy Jones into producing the song itself. But Kragen? He was the producer of the whole thing.
This was typical Kragen, just amplified. As a high school student, he once put on a dance to benefit the American Red Cross, raising $64—he showed me a yellowed newspaper photo of young Kenny Kragen presenting the check to the head of the local chapter. In his career as a manager, for years he had been trying to assemble a mega-concert to fight homelessness, in memory of his late friend and client Harry Chapin. When Belafonte called him on Christmas Eve Eve, Kragen said, “I thought, My whole life has prepared me to be the right guy in the right place.”
The “We Are the World” recording session was a dream night. Michael Jackson talking shop with Billy Joel while Springsteen sipped a Bud nearby. Kenny Rogers and Paul Simon singing aching harmonies. Stevie Wonder teaching a nervous Bob Dylan his solo. Kragen had his whole staff of his management company working. His personnel director was parking limos. His assistant signed people in at the door.
After the success of the song—the fastest-selling pop single ever in the United States; $63 million ($149 million today) raised for humanitarian aid in Africa; a foundation, USA for Africa, that exists to this day—Kragen would attempt other great successes. In 1986 he and others organised Hands Across America, a human chain stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to raise money to fight homelessness and hunger in the U.S. He showed me his photo of President Reagan holding hands as part of the chain.
“I’m not religious, but I always believe everything happens for a very good reason,” Kragen said to me. “We Are the World” was recorded on January 28 and released March 7, 1985. It doesn’t mention Christmas. But call it up on Spotify. It starts with a synthesiser that sounds like bells, then the ethereal horns come in. Christmasy. And the lyrics (“we must heed a certain call”), while not exactly religious, inspire good will and brotherhood and sisterhood and love and generosity, which are what we talk about when we talk about the true spirit of Christmas. They’re also, as I understand it, hallmarks of most religions.
I think the song sounds this way in part because of its Christmastime roots—Ken and Harry talking it through on that phone call, getting excited, as all around them treetops glistened and shoppers rushed home with their treasures. And in part because the man who willed it magically into existence, and who didn’t earn a dime from it, was a giver.
Although, come to think of it, giving is not just a Christmas thing. It’s something Ken Kragen did his whole life.
