exploremusic

A quarter century ago today, the world came together in a new and different way. Over the previous six months, Bob Geldof (still of the Boomtown Rats) and Midge Ure (then of Ultravox) willed Live Aid into existence as a way to address the famine crisis in Ethiopia. More than fifty performers played the gigs at Wembley in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Two billion people in sixty countries watched on TV. Phil Collins played both gigs, flying between Heathrow and PHA on the Concorde.

Technologically, it was a wonder. Financially, it was a success, raising an estimated 50 million pounds. Sociologically, it was one of those events that continue to reverberate through history and popular culture. Whether LiveAid and the similar events achieved their change-the-world goals is debatable, but let’s leave that fight for another time.

I was working my weekend shift at a radio station in Winnipeg on July 13, 1985. There was a black-and-white TV in the control room, but the tuning knob had been ripped off with the TV tuned to the weather report so that none of the jocks would be tempted to watch sports when they should be concentrating on their shift. Despite our pleas to the boss that Live Aid was an important event and that we should be able to watch and report on it, we were shut down. “It’s not that big a deal,” he said, “Do your job.”

But it WAS a big deal. The idea of seeing the world’s biggest rock stars on TV was still very novel. After all, we had only been watching music videos on TV for a couple of years. And there was the utopian dream that rock’n’roll COULD change the world. After all, hadn’t Band Aid proved it back at Christmas?

Good thing that one of the guys stole some needle-nosed pliers from the engineering department and had switched the TV to the local community access channel, which, amazingly, was the only channel carrying the broadcast.

The Wembley event started at 12 noon London time, 6am CDT. By the time I arrived in the studio at noon CDT, the UK portion was more than half over. I had missed the entire morning because I couldn’t afford cable. By mid-afternoon, there was a sense that this was A Big Event. Maybe bigger than anything we had ever seen.

For the next six hours, I got a crick in my neck from looking to the right at a 90-degree angle. The 13-inch screen was fuzzy and ghost-y and all the audio was in over-compressed mono. I wish I could say that I remembered the late-day performances in London (U2, Queen, The Who), but I was busy doing radio. I do remember some of the JFK portion (Simple Minds, Power Station, Duran Duran, Mick Jagger’s duet with Tina Turner), but it took replay news reports before any images burned into my mind.

That day and for weeks afterward, Live Aid was all anyone talked about. Stories from backstage started to emerge. Later, there were concerns that the aid supplies purchased with Live Aid donations were either being pillaged by the Marxist regime in Ethiopia or being allowed to rot on docks and warehouses.

Slowly, we came to realize that maybe we had been a little idealistic in what everyone hoped would be achieved. Many things stayed the same, but at least some people—in fact a good many people—were saved by Live Aid and the Live Aid-like events in the years that followed.

About the only sour thing I’ll say is that the idea of The Big Rock’n’Roll Event for a Noble Cause has lost its appeal and effectiveness. Every time someone declare something is worthy of attention and awareness, the reaction amongst artists, labels, managers and promoters is “I know! Let’s put on a show!” We’ve become accustomed to seeing rock stars not only on TV but on our computers and smartphones. We will never, ever see anything with the first-time oomph and wide-eyed naïve appeal as Live Aid.

Glad I was there to see some of it, even though it was in mono and in black-and-white.

If you want to read more, Wikipedia has a good summary of what happened.