July 13, 1985. Thirty years ago today. The anniversary took me by surprise. Live Aid is not something I think about a lot, except in the context of, “Oh yeah, wait a minute — I did see Led Zeppelin!” It was my first and last music festival, for reasons that I’ll get into in a minute.
When Live Aid happened, I was a rock critic for the Boston Phoenix and my editors Milo Miles and John Ferguson had the big idea to send me to cover it. I said yes, because Led Zeppelin. I should also mention that I was a bit on the sheltered side for a 27-year-old. The flight to Philadelphia was only the second time I’d been on a plane. So there we were, my husband and I, with tickets in hand, swaggering like big-time rock critic royalty on the Phoenix’s dime. And I do mean dime. Expense was spared. But we didn’t care because, Led Zeppelin.
How unworldly were we? We knew we were going to a 14-hour festival. We knew the temperature was supposed to be approaching 100 and humid. We knew we would be in the sun. We went to the 7-11 and bought a few bottles of water and some bags of cookies and chips. We didn’t think to pack any real food. We thought, Oh, there has to be food there. HAHAHAHAHA!
Needless to say, on a personal level, none of this turned out well. There was no food, only hot dogs that ran out by early afternoon. There was no water, but lots of Cherry Coke. It was unbelievably hot. People were fainting. The irony is not lost on me: This was a concert for African famine relief, and a bunch of privileged white Americans were hot , thirsty and hungry. Boo-hoo us.
So there I was, freaking out in the blazing sun, scribbling obsessive notes, because I knew that I had to deliver next week’s cover story in only a two-day turnaround, which I had never done. Yes, I saw Zep (let us not speak of Phil Collins on drums), and it was surreal and beautiful to finally get to sing along to “Stairway to Heaven” with my junior high idols. I saw Madonna, still in the backlash from those stupid nude photos, tell the crowd, “I ain’t taking off shit!” as she danced in the heat wearing five layers of paisley ’80s fashion.
And then we went back to the hotel, where I started throwing up and hallucinating from dehydration and my husband dragged me down to the all-night coffee shop and force-fed me oatmeal at 3 a.m. I should have been in an ER with IV fluids in my arm, but we were just kids. So that’s my Live Aid story. Not exactly the brown acid at Woodstock. But my discomfort was temporary. The African famine the concert was staged to help? Still there. So what exactly was Live Aid all about?
I came home with a massive three-day headache and wrote a huge cover piece for the Phoenix in which I attempted to answer that question, a feat which astounds me to this day. I pulled the piece out to read just now, and it didn’t make me cringe. I wish that I could link to it, but when the Phoenix folded, its online archive did too. Who needs history?
So I’m going to type out the first few grafs here.
“The Songs Remain the Same
PHILADELPHIA – “This is your Woodstock and it’s long overdue!” shouted Joan Baez to kick off the American portion of the July 13 Live Aid concert, the transglobal rock-fest-telethon organized by Band Aid founder (and sometimes Boomtown Rat) Bob Geldof to benefit African famine relief.
Oh sure, Joan, this was just like Woodstock — if Woodstock had been held in a football stadium on I-95 instead of a sleepy hamlet, or if Woodstock had been partially underwritten by Pepsi, Chevrolet and AT&T. This was just like Woodstock, except that if you weren’t there, you could watch it on TV, and if you were there, you could look forward to reliving it through the magic of your VCR. This was just like Woodstock, if Woodstock had been MC’d by screen stars like Jack Nicholson, Chevy Chase and Don Johnson, or if at Woodstock, New Cokes had cost $1.25 ($2.50 with ice – so nobody would throw cubes). This was just like Woodstock, except that nobody died and nobody was born (though one fan was airlifted from JFK Stadium to undergo his long-awaited kidney transplant). Former hippies and rads may rhapsodize about Live Aid being the dawning of a new age of benign high tech and renewal of political commitment in rock, but one lesson of the ’60s remains: the revolution will not be televised. And it won’t be sponsored by multinational corporations , either.
The crowd at JFK had not gathered to flaunt its independence or power or solidarity to a hostile establishment — rock and roll is too well established for that. After all, what better sign of mainstream legitimacy than a telethon? No this concert pounded home with a thud the ideology of rock in the ’80s. The hippie idealism of the ’60s passed into ’70s self-analysis, which in turn mutated into fashionable selfish consumerism and shabby patriotism; and in the process rock lost some of its liberal/underdog/outcast sheen. You can no longer go to a rock concert, especially one this ostentatious, and be certain that the person seated next to you is on your side. The London version, at Wembley Stadium, was presided over by the Prince and Princess of Wales; at JFK, a video of the Russian pop band Autograf was greeted with a modest chorus of boos, and most of the bed sheet banners bore T-shirt slogans like “Feed the World” — it’s unlikely that the TV cameras lingered over the messily hung banner in the west section that read, “Agribiz=Death.”
This was the pop world’s first post-MTV rockfest — huge Diamond Vision screens for those camped in the far reaches of JFK’s infield, and little time for fidgeting. The 20-minute sets zipped by at an MTV pace; between acts at JFK, you could watch live-via-satellite footage of the show at Wembley, or videos done especially for the occasion … To make us feel more at home, they even gave us commercials; Lionel Richie’s Pepsi ad, AT&T’s Reach Out and Feed Someone spot. A decade ago, who’d have thought you could gather 101,000 rock fans into a stadium in 100-degree heat, turn on the TV, and keep them amused? Ah, progress.”
I also have a tape of Live Aid that I recorded on my VCR. I never watched it.
@Joyce Millman, The Mix Tape, 2015
Joyce Millman Writes 
I have a Live Aid tape I never watched too! Why is the price on the ticket updated? Was that an up-charge for your ticket souvenir?
I never figured out the markup. They were like this when I got them. I can’t remember if I had to get them at will call, or if they were advance Ticketmaster comps that I had in hand. One more detail lost to the mists of time.
As a 20-year-old college JS student/sportswriter, I begged off an assignment covering my hometown’s state Little League World Series so I could watch and tape the entire 14 hours on a specially bought brick of Maxell-90 Hi Res cassettes. My roommate and I bought an $8 case of Black Label longnecks. We drank the beer. Never listened to the tapes.
This outstanding piece evoked a huge response both from the newsroom and the readers — Joyce’s biggest moment since her landmark review of “Like a Virgin.”
But “someone” ? — Kit Rachlis and I resemble that remark.
And it’s a crime against pop culture that the particular issue of The Phoenix that featured that piece on the cover is not available online. It’s weird — the only scanned archive I know suspiciously looks like it was done by student-slavies snagged by the paper. The missing issues are mostly summertime.
No offense meant Milo! Will give credit where it’s due. Actually, my memory is that John Ferguson, not Kit, was the managing editor on the piece.
The loss of the Phoenix online archive is a crime. And I heard that the servers have begun to degrade, so we may never get those issues back online.
Whoops — my bad. You are indeed right — Kit had left the year before. My apologies to the ghost of dear John Ferguson.
Nice one.
>