Other critics were - and still are - harsher, deriding the concert as a failed exercise in misguided imperialist sympathy. Music was the come-on of the day, not the essence, and world television was like a vast electronic banking window.” He meant to raise money, and the tunes could match up to the ideal or not. “If this occurred to Bob Geldof … it obviously did not give him serious pause. “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,” TIME’s critic Jay Cocks wrote. TIME’s coverage was decidedly ambivalent, noting Live Aid’s success as a charity benefit but seeming nonplussed about the larger idea of it. A number of journalists raised their eyebrows at the scale of the event. In Philadelphia, Bob Dylan allegedly infuriated Geldof when he suggested onstage that some of the day’s proceeds go toward struggling American farmers. When Paul McCartney played “Let It Be,” the microphone on his piano failed for the first two minutes of the song (not that it mattered much-in one of the most moving moments of the entire broadcast, the audience sang along anyway). “That’s what Live Aid changed in the music business - afterwards, you had this explosion in scale, the rise of these massive, often outdoor concerts.” The acts who succeeded that day were the acts who realized that,” David Hepworth, the British music journalist who co-presented the BBC’s Live Aid coverage, told TIME. “The audience was at the center of it - they were the stars of the show. When Elvis Costello covered The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the stadium joined in. Two years before The Joshua Tree confirmed U2’s position at the vanguard of superstardom, Wembley Stadium stood rapt as the group delivered a twinkling rendition of the now-mostly-forgotten “Bad,” with a mulleted, wholly unpretentious Bono leaping from the stage to dance with a young woman in the front row. In London, Queen delivered what many consider to be the band’s finest performance. Kennedy Stadiums, by all accounts playing their hearts out. Bob Geldof, the musician turned inadvertent activist who found himself at the helm of the event, envisioned a show “as huge as humanly possible,” one that defied all precedent to bring music to the world, and in turn aid for Africa.Īnd so for 16 hours on July 13, 1985, the biggest names in rock-‘n’-roll took to the stages of Wembley and John F. Woodstock was larger as a physical event, of course - an on-site audience of 400,000 compared with the 90,000 at Live Aid’s Philadelphia stage and the 60,000 in London - but whereas Woodstock was a gleeful veneration of the counterculture, Live Aid sought to occupy the mainstream psyche with a traditionally uncool message: one of humanitarian awareness and sympathy. In the contemporary cultural narrative, Live Aid was arguably the most important music happening since Woodstock.
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