The entertainer and humanitarian Harry Belafonte was so impressed by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the report launched by an all-star lineup of British and Irish musicians in late 1984 to lift cash for famine reduction in Africa, that he wished to do one thing related with American musicians. However Mr. Belafonte, in his late 50s on the time, knew he needed to recruit present stars to tug off the concept.
“I wanted a youthful era of artists,” he wrote in his memoir, “My Music” (2011), “those on the prime of the charts proper now: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers and Cyndi Lauper. Once I appeared on the administration of most of those artists, I stored seeing the identical identify: Ken Kragen.”
Mr. Kragen, after some persuading, latched onto Mr. Belafonte’s imaginative and prescient and have become a pivotal behind-the-scenes drive in creating “We Are the World,” the collaborative tune recorded by a dizzying array of stars (together with Mr. Belafonte) and launched in March 1985. The tune turned a worldwide hit and, together with an album of the identical identify, raised thousands and thousands of {dollars} for starvation reduction in Africa and elsewhere.
“When Belafonte known as me, the primary name I made was to Kenny Rogers,” who was one in all his purchasers, Mr. Kragen recalled in a 1994 interview with Larry King on CNN. “Then I known as Lionel Richie. Then I known as Quincy Jones. Lionel known as Stevie Surprise. Inside 24 hours, we had six or seven of the largest names within the trade.”
Quickly “six or seven” had snowballed into dozens, with Paul Simon, Bette Midler, Bob Dylan, Stevie Surprise and Diana Ross amongst them. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Richie wrote the tune; Mr. Jones performed the recording session in January 1985, a gathering that turned the stuff of music legend.
Mr. Kragen, who went on to arrange or assist set up different formidable fund-raising tasks, together with Fingers Throughout America in 1986, died on Tuesday at his residence in Los Angeles. He was 85.
His daughter, Emma Kragen, confirmed the dying. No trigger was specified.
As Mr. Kragen typically informed the story later, his aim at first on the “We Are the World” challenge was to recruit two new stars a day. However quickly recruiting wasn’t his downside.
“Lionel Richie had this line — he says, ‘You’re who you hug,’” he informed Mr. King, “and the factor is that everyone wished to hug anyone who was hipper or anyone who was extra profitable. So the day that I bought Bruce Springsteen, the floodgates opened, as a result of he was the most popular artist in America.”
At that time, Mr. Kragen went from dialing the cellphone to answering it — loads.
“I began to get calls from all people,” he informed The Los Angeles Occasions in 1985, simply after the recording session. “I attempted onerous to chop it off at 28 — to today I don’t know the way it bought to be 46. Nonetheless, we turned down virtually 50 artists.”
Mr. Kragen was the founding president of USA for Africa, the inspiration set as much as administer the help cash raised by “We Are the World,” which continues immediately. Based on its web site, it has raised greater than $100 million to alleviate poverty.
Kenneth Allan Kragen was born on Nov. 24, 1936, in Berkeley, Calif. His father, Adrian, was a lawyer who later taught regulation on the College of California, Berkeley, and his mom, Billie, was a violinist.
Whereas learning engineering at Berkeley, Mr. Kragen started frequenting native nightclubs and shortly turned pleasant with the Kingston Trio, a fledgling group that always performed on the Purple Onion in San Francisco. He started reserving the group at schools, and when he graduated in 1958 he was requested to handle them; as a substitute he went to Harvard’s graduate college of enterprise. Earlier than beginning there, he took a visit to Europe together with his mother and father; when he got here residence, a brand new group was getting a number of buzz nationally: the Kingston Trio.
“I simply wished to die,” Mr. Kragen informed The New York Occasions in 1986. “I assumed I’d blown the possibility of a lifetime.”
However as soon as he earned his graduate diploma in 1960, he discovered new alternatives as a expertise supervisor and promoter. He managed the folks group the Limeliters after which, in 1964, picked up the Smothers Brothers. He and his enterprise accomplice on the time, Kenneth Fritz, have been govt producers of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which throughout its three-season run, from 1967 to 1969, was one of the talked-about exhibits on tv due to its battles with censors.
In 1975 he went to work for Jerry Weintraub, a expertise supervisor with a formidable roster that included John Denver, Led Zeppelin and the Moody Blues. (Mr. Weintraub would quickly grow to be a famous movie and tv producer.) In 1979 Mr. Kragen began his personal firm. His purchasers included the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John and Trisha Yearwood.
Mr. Kragen produced tv films that includes Mr. Rogers, in addition to TV specials for the singer Linda Eder and others. His fund-raising efforts included Fingers Throughout America, whose aim was to create a sequence of individuals holding palms that stretched from coast to coast. The occasion occurred in Might 1986. The coast-to-coast chain didn’t fairly materialize — there have been gaps in numerous locations — and although the occasion raised thousands and thousands of {dollars} for starvation and homelessness, it fell wanting its $50 million aim. However some 5 million individuals participated, together with President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Kragen married the actress Cathy Worthington in 1978. Along with her and his daughter, he’s survived by a sister, Robin Merritt.
In 2019 Buzzfeed requested Mr. Kragen if he might envision a reprise of Fingers Throughout America. He couldn’t. Folks, he mentioned, could be too busy documenting their participation with selfies to really maintain palms.