FireAid, with Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga, is the latest in a long line of massive benefit concerts
FireAid, with Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga, is the latest in a long line of massive benefit concerts
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FireAid, featuring Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Sting, Red Hot Chili Peppers and others in a fundraiser for Los Angeles-area wildfire relief efforts, is the latest event to combine music and philanthropy. Thursday’s concerts at the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, will be streamed on YouTube, Prime Video, Apple TV+, and numerous other sites, but whether the fractured cultural landscape will unite around them the way it has in the past remains to be seen. Benefit concerts have come a long way since George Harrison’s “The Concert for Bangladesh” at Madison Square Garden in 1971.
Here’s a look at some of the biggest:. Live Aid (1985). British rockers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure expanded their Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It's Christmas?” into daylong concerts in London and Philadelphia, starring dozens of music’s biggest stars — from Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Queen to Madonna, U2 and Tina Turner.
CAUSE: Ethiopian famine. IMPACT: The concerts, broadcast live to 150 countries, eventually raised $140 million and awareness of the need in Ethiopia. The fundraiser also showed the power of pop music to inspire action, leading to decades of similar events.
Farm Aid (1985-present). John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Neil Young took the Band Aid template and applied it to small farms in the Heartland, with performances from the organizers, as well as Loretta Lynn and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, before becoming an annual fundraiser.
