Re-Living Aid

I mentioned in an earlier post that I saw a clip of Live Aid that made me think back to 1985. Spending the weekend largely with a series of writing projects that required some background noise provided the perfect excuse to dig out the DVD set of the event and watch it. I don't know that I actually set out to re-watch the whole thing, but that's what happened. Having also spent a chunk of my career reviewing music -- and trying to avoid the next project -- I decided that the hours shouldn't go past without offering my thoughts... especially since the cats have made it clear that they don't care about '80s music in the slightest.

I'm going to start with the social part of this little exercise. Included in the DVD set is the original BBC News report that caused The Boomtown Rats lead singer Bob Geldof to try to raise funds to assist the victims of the Ethiopian famine. As Americans, it's part of our Constitutional rights to complain about anything and everything... and we usually do. If you want some perspective, though, go watch a 10 minute news story that shows children literally dying from hunger while the cameras are rolling. It doesn't matter that the video is more than 30 years old because I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't take much at all to find similar pain and suffering right now in the areas of the world that we don't like to think about.

OK, with that out of the way, the most obvious question related to the little nostalgia trip is how does it hold up? Just sticking with the music, the answer is surprisingly well. The fashion is awful and I don't think anyone in their right mind is clamoring for a return of the mullet, but the music mostly still works. The set at London's Wembley Stadium is decidedly cleaner than the one at the old JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, but considering how poorly other events around the time hold up (I'm looking at you US Festival), there's way more good than bad.

Not everything falls into that "good" category, of course. REO Speedwagon hasn't gotten any better with age (and, as an aside, can someone remind me why the Beach Boys and Paul Shaffer were onstage with them?) The Black Sabbath reunion with Ozzy Osbourne has the singer being... well, Ozzy. He looks vaguely confused about where he is but also doesn't look like he cares enough to try to figure it out.

The set with Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is as much of a mess decades later as it was on the night. (Despite three-fifths of the Rolling Stones being there, Mick Jagger played separately... I'm assuming because he and Keith were having a row.)

The Woodstock-era holdovers, like Joan Baez and Neil Young, fare particularly poorly. It's like they didn't know what they were doing there... as if they felt like they were part of a protest but no one told them what they were protesting.

The Philly set, as I said, seemed to have been thrown together with little thought of cohesion. How else do you explain Crosby, Stills & Nash being followed by Judas Priest, who are, in turn, followed by Bryan Adams. The whole day at JFK was a bit of a mishmash, plagued by sound problems and a Led Zeppelin reunion that was so bad -- with Phil Collins and Power Station's Tony Thompson seemingly playing different songs at the same time on the drums -- that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page still won't let anyone see it again.

"We Are the World" hasn't stopped being an awful song. Why no one ever stepped in to tell Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie that the song is annoyingly schlocky is beyond me. I'm not quibbling about the pair's songwriting abilities, especially Richie, but for the love of God, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan -- you know, some of the greatest song writers of the 20th century -- were all part of the recording. No one saw the song before they got there?

Like always the show closing sing-alongs with everyone on stage don't work, but like Geldof says before leading the Wembley crowd through Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?," "if you're going to have a cock-up, it might as well be a cock-up in front of 2-billion people."

Even though I was a teenager at the time, there are some things that I don't remember from when it happened live. For example, I have no idea where I was when The Thompson Twins, Madonna, Nile Rodgers and guitar god Steve Stevens did their rendition of The Beatles' "Revolution," but I have zero memory of it.

So, what is worth watching again, even if just on YouTube?

For the most part, the British acts, perhaps because it started out as their cause, are almost uniformly good. Acts that never gained as much traction in the States, like Paul Young and The Style Council have little trouble revving up the London crowd. Then, there's the reminder of just how staggeringly beautiful Sade is.



Bono and U2 has been around so long that we take them for granted, but at 25, Bono was a complete badass. He's in complete control at Live Aid. In another two years, The Joshua Tree would launch them into the stratosphere, but U2 was clearly just waiting for the world to catch up to them in '85.




The round-robin of Phil Collins playing with Sting, who then goes and plays with Dire Straits is fun, even if the former front men for Genesis and The Police didn't really capitalize on having an audience of 72,000 right in front of them. Still, if you're old enough to remember it, having Sting sing "I want my MTV," at the start of Straits' "Money For Nothing" while being broadcast live on MTV was about as cool as it got in the mid-'80s.



Queen's performance is legendary and it's still awesome no matter how many times that you've seen it. In fact, here it is:



There is nothing like the Wembley crowd doing the hand-clap from "Radio Ga-Ga." The story forever has been that every act who had to follow Freddie Mercury wanted to kill him for setting the bar that high.

Another story is that Elton John's set was almost cut for time in London before George Michael stepped in to offer up a portion of his Wham! time to his hero. Not only is Elton in good form, but there's a live rendition of "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" with Kiki Dee, and Michael nails John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down." (Then there's the added bonus of John forgetting that the other half of Wham!, Andrew Ridgeley, is even there, so he forgets to introduce him, and Ridgeley not caring because he looks completely hammered.)



Similarly, David Bowie is stellar playing his '80s edition of The Thin White Duke. If there's any artist who made those ridiculous '80s get-ups look good it was Bowie. While Paul McCartney's closing "Let It Be" is, at best, perfunctory, it's still funny when The Who's Pete Townsend decides to tickle Macca while he's tickling the ivories.

Even the Brits who were in Philly provided a spark. Even if they couldn't be further apart stylistically, Eric Clapton and Duran Duran sounded like they were trying to match what they had seen on TV from their countrymen. The Pretenders do the same, which the only American in the group, lead singer Chrissie Hynde, kept marrying British guys.



It's also funny to see Madonna in a mid-show slot, with her star still on the rise. Its more interesting to see the Material Girl getting winded as she whips through her choreography while she keeps singing. Remember when it was ok for a singer to do that?




It's even funnier to watch the almost entirely white audience in Philly figuring out how to react to Run-DMC in their Adidas and slamming through "King of Rock." About a quarter of the audience are into it, and it's not the segment that was there to see Sabbath and Zeppelin.




One of the other things that anyone who watched Live Aid while it was happening remembers are the spots that were played continuously during the broadcast, asking for donations and showing starving people while The Cars' "Drive" played. By the end, everyone was pretty much sick of hearing that song, but looking at it now, the set that Rick Ocasek, Benjamin Orr (the singer of "Drive") and the rest of the Boston-bred band delivered was mighty tight.



The most consistent part of the JFK show is the early evening portion. Philly native Patti Labelle crushed John Lennon's "Imagine" and Dylan's "Forever Young." It gets even better when fellow City of Brotherly Love resident's Hall & Oates invite The Temptations' Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin out for their performance.



Jagger's contribution is the part that a lot of Americans remember since it happened in prime time. It's also memorable because it's as close to a live sex act as you could get on television as the Rolling Stones singer and Tina Turner keep trading thrusts.




Again, that's an awful lot of highlights for a fundraiser held more than 30 years ago. It's also not a bad thing to remember that there was a time when the term Social Justice Warrior was a designation that most people wanted. The music wasn't bad either.