One Voice, One Vision

The news and images coming out of Haiti for the past week have been devastating. As with any disaster of that magnitude, it is gut wrenching to sit in your home and feel helpless as thousands of innocent people struggle for survival and to get basic needs met. Empathy kicks into overdrive and you want to help in any way you can.

This applies to musicians too. But instead of merely donating time or money, they use their talents to put on benefit concerts and telethons, the proceeds from which are donated to whatever cause is most in need. Tomorrow evening "Hope for Haiti" will air on most television networks commercial free.

Putting on a benefit show after a natural disaster seems to be standard procedure these days. That might come off as snarky and sarcastic, but it's not meant to be. With 24 hour news access, to ignore human suffering is criminal and I'm glad so many people, celebrities or not, are stepping up to offer financial and material aid to those in need. But it wasn't always like that. Just by doing a little bit of reading, I discovered that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s there were really only a handful of benefit concerts given with their goal mainly of raising awareness of human rights. The two exceptions were the concerts for Bangladesh (organized by George Harrison) and Kampuchea.

Then a not so great singer from a post punk British band had an idea that changed everything. Bob Geldof, take a bow.

In late 1984 Bob Geldof was watching the news and saw a story on the famine in the African nation of Ethiopia. He was so moved by the story that he and a fellow musician, Midge Ure of Ultravox, came up with the idea of writing and recording a single to raise money to help the people of Ethiopia. They gathered many of England's top recording artists of the time and calling themselves Band Aid, produced the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" The song sold over a million copies in the first week alone.

But Geldof wasn't satisfied. He wanted to do more. He and Ure organized Live Aid, simultaneous concerts in London and Philadelphia with proceeds going to famine relief in Africa. An estimated 1.5 billion people across 100 countries watched the live broadcast, which also inspired concerts in other nations such as Australia and Germany. Live Aid raised approximately $283 million dollars for Geldof's cause. The concerts brought together so many famous performers that even today the lineup is staggering.

Twenty years after the original show, Live 8 came into being. Live 8 was a series of benefit shows preceding the G8 Conference and Summit intending to bring attention to the Global Call for Action Against Poverty. The shows planned to pressure the world leaders at the G8 Conference to drop the debt of the world's poorest nations, increase aid and negotiate fair trade policies in those countries. Guess what? It worked.

The impact of Live Aid cannot be underestimated. Live Aid is what made all the other benefit concerts that have come after it possible. Sure, I'll bet someone else would have had the idea to put on a show to raise money for charity, that's not exactly a new idea. But without Geldof and his vision, his absolutely dogged determination that people pay attention and give a damn, it would have been nowhere near as successful as it was and continues to be.

I was up at 6 am watching the Live Aid broadcast live from Sydney when the London show began. I watched every moment of the entire show, and it is something that has stayed with me my entire life. Bob Geldof is one of my personal heroes. He has shown that one person, one voice, can change the world. Now let's go help Haiti.