Don't believe the Live Aid optimism

The seeds of today were always there.

(Revised 2022 essay)

Today we celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the “global super concert” Live Aid in 1985. So far, I’ve read only positive media stories celebrating the optimism of an age that united to end world hunger, in contrast to rage and anger of today.

As someone who was at Live Aid 40 years ago, I can certainly regale you with the spectacle of experiencing cultural icons of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries at one event. But I’ve always viewed Live Aid as a dystopian metaphor regarding human nature. So hidden within the upbeat stories reminiscing about the idealism of Live Aid, let me share instead a story about the roots of today’s social malaise.

For the youngin’s in the audience, Live Aid was an 18-hour concert, broadcast around the world from two stages in London and Philadelphia, featuring dozens of mega stars to raise money for famine relief in Africa. When I rolled into the since demolished JFK Stadium in Philly at 6 am, the pre-concert party was in full swing, with thousands of teens and twenty-somethings engaging in the traditions of youth. Fortunately, my concert ritual involved more organic and less dehydrating practices than many of the concertgoers. Given it was already 80 degrees, on the way to 95 degrees, pacing for an 18-hour concert seemed like a good idea. So, my friends and I first sat in the end zone, opposite the stage.

As Joan Baez opened with “Amazing Grace” around 9 am, people mingled in front of us under garden hoses that were strung up and supported by a series of wooden poles. The hoses were punctured every foot or so, with water spraying downward for people to drink or cool off. There were about ten rows of hoses, each row roughly 100 feet long. By the time the Four Tops sang “Reach Out-I’ll Be There” around 9:30 am, people were joyously dancing under what was then a giant shower, doing the conga and drinking the water from above.

By Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” thirty minutes later, the mood changed. No more dancing as the crowd grew thicker and more determined to fill their bottles, jugs and—eventually--coolers with water. By the time Run-D.M.C finished their set, and Rick Springfield took the stage at 10:30 am, the only source of cooling water had people elbow to elbow, fifteen rows deep from all sides, waiting their turn for relief.

Soon it was self-evident, the water structures were not going to survive. My friend stated the obvious, “How can we end world hunger, when we can’t save our own water?”

Sure enough, by the time Crosby, Stills and Nash started “Teach Your Children” around 11:30 am, the crushing force of the crowd created competing waves of humanity pressing against the other. This forced the makeshift poles and water hoses to sway tenuously toward collapse. As the 80,000-plus stadium sang the peace anthem’s chorus (“And know they love you…”), the hypnotic sway of the crowd ignored the impending collapse of our drinking water supply.

By the time the Beach Boys completed “Good Vibrations” by 1pm, nothing remained of the cooling station, with nine more hours left under a cloud of humidity that hung inside the open-air stadium. Around 2pm, I made my move, walking around the outer concourse when I heard the opening guitar riff of the Pretender’s “In the Middle of the Road”. I couldn’t help myself and ran (bopped?) to the nearest entrance. Rounding the corner to run up the entrance ramp into the stadium, I was stopped cold by at least 100 lifeless bodies stacked two deep on the floor in the pedestrian tunnel. After a second of fright, I realized they were NOT dead, but just the folks whose partying peaked six hours earlier.

I spent the next few hours listening to Santana, Madonna, Tom Petty, Neil Young and Eric Clapton, slowly moving forward as people carried out friends from the front, all the while tripping over passed-out bodies I could not see. The last three hours I was in the 20th row range, enjoying Led Zeppelin (sans Bonham), Neil Young joining CSN and others. Eventually I was second row for some serious Rock and Roll history with Tina Turner and Mick Jagger performing “It’s Only Rock and Roll, But I Like It”.

Many people will see this story of getting 2^nd row of one of the most famous concerts in history as a testament to the virtues of individual responsibly and the just rewards for personal initiative. Maybe. But it was also an example of people following the conventional wisdom (getting wasted before a concert) even when it ignores basic commonsense that this was an 18-hour concert.

Humanity is always flawed. We are always capable of self-destruction. The obvious lesson this story has for today is that even as we try to save humanity, our behavior is killing humanity. At the time, this story was an oddity that hardly reflected the reality of the time. That’s because it was an era when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill fought using the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of politics and, for better or worse, public voices were limited to an elite few with access to TV networks or newspapers.

But 40 years later, the whole dynamic has changed. Now our cultural and political conflicts are compared to the Civil War era and we have a new media ecosystem that has made us uniquely stupid. Human fragility is universal and spans all human history, yet in some eras this fragile reality is greater than others. Are we in “just a phase” today that will work itself out?

The central question of our time is: can we develop a modicum of enlightened self-interest and not (metaphorically) start drinking at 6am for an 18-hour concert? Or are we experiencing the impact of the early days of the digital age we are now in? Is the devolution of our human impulses over the last 40 years a harbinger of new levels of human impulses based on AI, transhumanism, uploaded human consciousness and who-knows-what technology, that will be in place at the 75th anniversary of Live Aid?