Because of Bohemian Rhapsody, my daughter is probably sick of hearing me talk about LiveAid.
I drove a little over an hour to a friend’s apartment the night before. She had to work a 9-5, so I stayed in the apartment and ran two VCRs, capturing as much as I could from MTV and ABC. The London feed was far superior because it focused on the bands. The feed from Philly had MTV’s VJs there, and they kept showing them (I don’t remember any of them being in London, but I could be dead wrong about that). Plus, I think I was running cassettes on the stereo because there was an FM simulcast.
LiveAid was my first exposure to some bands like Status Quo, and a deeper dive into some others, like Boomtown Rats. I soaked almost all of it in - I was rarely away from the TV that day. At lunchtime, Sue came home and brought me McDonald’s, if memory serves. It coincided with Dire Straits, who were coming to Pittsburgh shortly after that. We’d been debating whether or not to go. We were both blown away by there performance, to the point that Sue pulled out her purse, wrote a check, and said, “Buy the f*cking tickets”. Good thing - I believe it was their only performance here, and it sold out.
The performance of the day was Queen, and it really wasn’t that close. There were a ton of performances I really liked. Others were meh, but it was an incredible thing to watch. They made a huge deal about Phil Collins doing a set in London then jumping on the Concorde to play in Philly. David Bowie’s set was dynamite, especially ‘Heroes’ and ‘TVC15’. That, Dire Straits, and Queen are the sets I’ve watched the most in the years since. The Who was good but plagued with technical problems. I really enjoyed Elton John, particularly because he had Kiki Dee with him. Madonna was good, and this was when she was merely a superstar, not the megastar she’d become in short order - this was right after the Playboy pictures ‘scandal’, which Bette Midler sort of referenced in her intro.
Without pulling out a list of artists, I know I’m skipping over about a ton of stuff, like Clapton, the Cars, Zeppelin (whose performance is one of the ones not on the DVD set that was released). Hell, this thing had The Beach Boys there as well.
But of that day, the image that never fails to give me chills is the crowd doing the claps from the video during ‘Radio Ga-Ga’. It was obvious that quickly in their set that Queen owned the day, and the fact that virtually the whole stadium was doing that when it wasn’t a Queen concert or a Queen crowd - man, what an image.
