Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid, the all-star song released in 1984 to raise funds for the emergency in Ethiopia, whose population was reduced to hunger and exhausted by the civil war, was an explosive Christmas hit (in November the yet another version). In the 80s pop was particularly active on such issues, especially at Christmas. Even the proceeds of Last Christmas of Wham!, released that same year, were donated to charity for the Ethiopian population. Not many people know, however, that there was another supergroup set up for the same cause, but coming from a completely different environment, that of metal which at the time was associated with Satanism, drugs, sex, squandering of money, self-destruction, excesses and even crimes. We're talking about Hear 'n Aid, a metalhead fringe of the movement to “feed the world” who released the single Stars on January 1, 1986, the last gift to the cause before the solidarity trend deflated. But let's go in order.
As we said, Band Aid made a splash starting from England thanks to the pen of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure (still in Ultravox at the time). A few months later the Americans took the field with We Are the World written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, and there too lots of money for charity. Do you think that any metalhead or hard rocker has been contacted to participate in such initiatives? Not even in the slightest, apart from members of Journey in USA for Africa, due to their being “transversal”. And not because metal didn't make any cassettes, on the contrary, it was one of the most popular genres at the time. There was instead an image problem, it was thought those long hairs would discourage the average public from purchasing especially in a period like the Reagan era in which the famous school/church/parents committees did nothing but sabotage certain records.
The creator of Hear 'n Aid is Ronnie James Dio. The former Rainbow and former Black Sabbath singer, inventor of the horn gesture and leader of Dio at that time was in the midst of his rise and was sincerely interested in humanitarian initiatives such as We Are the Worldto which he would have liked to be invited. The epiphany after an interview with Jimmy Bain and Vivian Campbell, bassist and guitarist of Dio. The Radio KLOS DJ points out the absence of certain hard & heavy musicians in these supergroups, and Dio comes up with the idea of making a Band Aid with top people in hard music.
In the ranks of Hear 'n Aid there are 40 exponents of the metal that counts: Quiet Riot, Judas Priest, Vanilla Fudge, Rough Cutt, WASP, Night Ranger, Iron Maiden, Dokken, Blue Öyster Cult, Mötley Crüe, Queensrÿche, Yngwie Malmsteen, Ted Nugent and even the parody band Spinal Tap. In short, the crème de la crème of the genre, or almost. Obviously the focus is mainly on the two things that make metal metal: the singers and the guitarists. If it is clearly easier for singers to share melodic phrases with a skilful use of editing to create turnover, for guitarists it is more complicated. But God doesn't give a shit and in fact, he puts together a whole series of guitar heroes (11 to be exact) stacking them one after the other with their solos until he lengthens the song in a way that is as delirious as it is exhausting (seven minutes not It's certainly a radio duration for a song that should instead go into heavy rotation).
Stars it's a decent hard rock song, a carbon copy of Dio's hit Rainbow in the Darkjust to be on the safe side. God's whole band is in action (I dare you, they are the authors), but there is no explicit text on the problem of world hunger. “We are stars”, says the text, we talk about equality, about uniting for a good cause. Some of the musicians involved in that period certainly didn't live the life of boarders, just think of Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe who had practically just killed Razzle, the drummer of Hanoi Rocks, in a car accident (they were both stoned in the same car driven by Vince), but Ronnie James wants to go all the way to reach as many people as possible, abandoning certain clichés. Not only in the song, which winks at AOR, but also in the name of the project. Why not a name like Metal Aid instead of the so “Christian Democrat” Hear 'n Aid? The answer is obvious: it's a name that everyone can understand, even those who aren't used to studs and black leather.
There is also a documentary about the making of the piece in which the musicians are interviewed and the salient moments of the recording which took place in the same studios as USA For Africa are filmed, complete with the classic choir all together, hands on headphones and an eye on the director, with the semi-grotesque effect of making it seem cuckoo singers asking for food in the nest (special mention for Rob Halford of Judas Priest who seems to want to blow his brains out from the effort).
All this humanitarian impetus cares very little, with the artists fighting with their respective record labels over contractual problems due to participation, so much so that the release of the album is postponed for months, effectively canceling out the impetus that the operation would have had. Only three million will be raised for the cause, a joke compared to the money from Band Aid and USA for Africa, but at least it will be well spent. Unlike Geldof's creature, there will be no food waste or episodes of corruption or fraud. Ronnie James sends equally distributed agricultural equipment to Ethiopia, after having wisely founded a non-profit association, demonstrating that metalheads have more salt in their heads.
Like any operation of this kind, in addition to the single, the album cannot be missing: Hear 'n Aid it contains live tracks by artists not present on the single such as Kiss, Motörhead, Rush, Scorpions and Accept and – no one knows why – a song by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but this is not enough to make it take off in the charts. Not even the official video serves to promote the album, MTV airs it without much belief in it. The single reaches 26th place in the UK charts, probably thanks to word of mouth, when it could have defended itself much better with a targeted promotional strategy, perhaps not based on a photocopy of previous musical-solidarity operations.
Did Hear 'n Aid make sense or not? In his own small way he contributed better than others to the cause. It's not a question of who knows what artistic peak, also because you feel the urgency of doing something on the fly and rushing sometimes doesn't help. It was definitely a great moment weird in the history of metal, a stance along the lines of «we're tired of being thought of as bad, we're good» (and Ronnie James has often announced a return to the field of Hear 'n Aid for charitable purposes, the last time in 2015, then as usual, contractual disputes got in the way). And today, in a situation in which genocides are passed off as normal, we are missing characters like the antiheroes of Hear 'n Aid, people who make hard music but who are capable of writing one of the most touching incipits ever in its simplicity: “Who cries for the children? I give…”
