Rocking the Global Village

By Jay Cocks

The dreams all run together. Feed the world. Make a joyful noise, raise a ruckus and millions of dollars. Lift a voice. Lend a hand. Come to Wembley Stadium, in London. Go down to John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. Turn on the television. Be a part of it all.

Ninety thousand came to JFK, 72,000 to Wembley. More than a billion people, including those in the Soviet Union, could have tuned in on live satellite broadcasts to watch over 60 of the world's most prominent rock acts. All together, this dream was called Live Aid. The breadth and heart of it were great.

And there were great moments in the music. Elvis Costello asking the Wembley audience to join him in "this old northern English folk song" and performing a peerless acoustic guitar version of All You Need Is Love. Bono of the Irish band U2 singing a mesmeric Bad. Sting duetting with Phil Collins on Every Breath You Take. Bob Dylan, singing a set of early songs and suggesting that a small portion of the Live Aid donations be used to help American farmers pay off mortgages. But the video superstructure constructed to beam the event across the world became an open-air jail with an infinite number of electronic windows. The audience could look in, but the musicians could never really bust out.

Television may be great for raising big bucks, but it is no friend of live music, especially not of rock 'n' roll, which needs urgency, immediacy, volume and balance. Movies and videos can heighten rock performances. Movies are seen in an enclosed environment, usually with better sound than comes from the tinny tiny speaker of a typical TV. Videos are at home on television, but they, like film, depend on editing to duplicate and convey the raw power of the music. About all a television director can do is cut back and forth between cameras. The medium does not catch the excitement of a performance, it just secondhands it along.

If this occurred to Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and guiding spirit behind Live Aid, it obviously did not give him serious pause. He meant to raise money, and the tunes could match up to the ideal or not. Music was the come-on of the day, not the essence, and world television was like a vast electronic banking window.

There were some effectively old-fashioned wrinkles as well. Jerry Lewis was not on the scene, but his presence was everywhere. American audiences might have been able to recognize the outlines of one of his Labor Day telethons hovering in the ozone over JFK Stadium. There were the earnest testimonials from world figures (Bishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta King, Pele and Linus Pauling). Phone numbers for call-in pledges appeared frequently. There were also, of course, the performers, trotted on according to strict show-biz standards: lightweights draw the day shift, heavies get prime time.

Lewis' muscular dystrophy telethons are part contemporary camp meeting and part grotesque camp, but the organizers of Live Aid, who owe a debt to Lewis and his troops for trailblazing tutorials in video fund raising, were not about to apply the lessons directly. "It doesn't take much brilliance to show a dead baby," says Michael Mitchell, former senior vice president of finance and planning for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, who produced and marketed this global TV broadcast. "The point is not problems. The point is, we can become winners. In the education pieces throughout the show, we sometimes use African famine victims as background. We do it like spice, rather than bludgeoning people to death." Revenues from the songs and testimonials, spiced according to Mitchell's recipe, will be sent to Band Aid Trust in London, then distributed by over 30 international agencies. The twin concerts cost about $4 million to mount, even with donations of facilities and services and with all the talent paying their own way, but before the first performer hit the Wembley stage, Live Aid had already earned $7 million from ticket sales and merchandising, an estimated $7 million more from TV and broadcast rights (including a multimillion-dollar deal for three hours of prime time from ABC) and several million dollars in corporate donations. The most money was expected from telethons held in some 30 nations, including Japan, West Germany and Canada.

"People are staying alive," says Geldof, because of "this reservoir of compassion" that was tapped, first with the Geldof-led fund-raising Band Aid single released last Christmastime (which has earned over $11 million), then with the USA for Africa/We Are the World project, which emulated and Americanized Geldof's original idea (estimated earnings so far: nearly $55 million), and now with Live Aid. In such circumstances, figures become a talisman against global evil, and statistics are wielded like amulets that will draw magic contributions. Three television satellites were used to present the '84 Olympics to the world, but Live Aid used twelve to bring off what Executive Director Tony Verna suggested might be "space-age Ed Sullivan." Up to 22,000 pledge calls were attempted every five minutes during the last hours of the JFK concert. Backstage, generators churned out nearly 7 million watts of power, encouraging the notion that, on this day, the air crackled with a worldwide current of brotherhood and charity.

Dollars! Numbers! Production value! It was, indeed, the biggest rock concert ever, the biggest live television event ever, but it was also eerily reminiscent of those unwieldy movie superspectacles in which audiences are encouraged to be overawed by scale and mechanics and star power. There was a certain dazzle to the unprecedented assemblage of Live Aid performing talent, to be sure. There was an undeniable complexion to it too.

Geldof and Co-Organizer Bill Graham took considerable heat when it was calculated that there were only three black acts in the 24 star acts originally announced for Philadelphia. Geldof claimed that he and Graham had combed the charts and invited every currently popular black entertainer. Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Prince and Stevie Wonder were among those who couldn't make it, but no one, for example, asked Philip Bailey. One kinetic rap group, Run-D.M.C., was told that the artists' roster had "no more room." "We were bitter, but we weren't going to beg," says Run-D.M.C. Representative Bill Adler. "Then we heard people were being added, and that made us pissed off." After some scrambling by the organizers, Patti LaBelle, Teddy Pendergrass, the Four Tops and Ashford and Simpson were invited. Some space was cleared for Run-D.M.C. too.

"I asked the biggest because the biggest will draw the most money," insisted a rankled Geldof. "It's pragmatics. Would a racist go to all this trouble to keep these people alive? People who just happen to be black? And, by the way, the fact they are black is incidental. They could be luminous orange for all I care." Ken Kragen, one of the organizers of USA for Africa, said flatly, "There is no truth that Bob or Graham ignored or didn't want black entertainers. I should know. Bob called me enough about it." "I wish the folks busy gossiping about all this backstage foolishness would concentrate on what Live Aid is really all about--helping people," comments LaBelle. "We won't get into a pissing contest with anybody at this point," says Eddie Kendricks, formerly of the Temptations and now helping out Hall and Oates with some soulful vocalizing. "We're not concerned about who's black and who's white. Hunger knows no color."

The appearances of Lionel Richie, Ashford and Simpson with Pendergrass, and Tina Turner playing dueling mouths with Mick Jagger, had the effect not so much of restoring the equilibrium as underscoring the imbalance. The fragmented brotherhood of musicians called together on this one hot day was struggling with the weight of all kinds of social responsibility, and with the refractory objectivity of the medium that brought them an anticipated worldwide audience of 1.6 billion people, then short-circuited them on intensity. The music of Live Aid was not as great as the gesture, or the effort, but the $40 million brought in at night's end buys a little life for a lot of people. "Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel," Bob Dylan sings on his new album, and, perhaps more than anything, Live Aid was a time to get prices and priorities in order. All right, then. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Cathy Booth/Philadelphia and Steven Holmes/London

With reporting by Reported by Cathy Booth/Philadelphia, Steven Holmes/London