Rock 'N' Miracle

Almost 42 years ago, Ravi Shankar, George Harrison and "friends" staged rock's first mass act of philanthropy. Harrison, whom Shankar lovingly described as "my student, my brother, my son, all combined," was enjoying his peak years as a solo superstar. His presence alone ensured that the concert was more than just a worthy cause, in accordance with what we might call Geldof's first law of the charity gig. "The only responsibility the artist has is to create good art," says the man behind Live Aid. "They only fail when they create bad art."
The Concert for Bangladesh scored high on those terms, despite the fact Harrison was, according to his first wife, Pattie Boyd, "extremely nervous. He had to really steel himself to do it." Of the gig itself, Boyd recalls: "You could feel the electricity in the air. It was a momentous occasion. Afterwards there was a feeling of a huge elation. There was lots of talk, lots to deal with. It was too big to just disappear."
Rather than vanish, it expanded. The Concert for Bangladesh raised $2,43,000 overnight, and spawned a single (Harrison's typically literal Bangladesh, specially written for the occasion), as well as a triple album and a film. It has since raked in $17m for Unicef, funding projects not only in Bangladesh but in trouble spots from Angola to Romania to the Horn of Africa.
The concert did more than simply raise money; it left a deep imprint on the times. So did Live Aid, partly because it was the first major music event given blanket TV coverage, but also because Geldof, very much a child of 1968, the high watermark of pop and politics, understood the relationship between the two and how it could be harnessed. In an age of defined ideological divisions, framed by the 1984/85 miners' strike, Live Aid tapped into a desire among musicians to address social issues.
It is just a coincidence that the Concert for Sandy Relief, the gargantuan spawn of the Concert for Bangladesh, was staged the day after Shankar's death (December 11, 2012). There is no reason to doubt the good intentions of any of the stars who played—McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Kanye West, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Alicia Keys, the Who, Roger Waters, the surviving members of Nirvana, and many more. It's to their credit that they did the show and helped bring in the reported $30 million in ticket revenue to go towards relief from the destruction of Hurricane Sandy.
The Concert for Bangladesh resonated because it united those two lightning rods for 60s idealism – Dylan and, in the form of Harrison and Starr, the Beatles – at a time when music was still regarded as a counter-cultural force powerful enough to change the world. The result, Jonathan Clyde, of Apple (the Beatles' company), who oversees the Concert's legacy, says, "put Bangladesh on the map. For the generation involved in the war of liberation it meant a huge amount. It helped their independence become recognised."
Ravi Shankar had something to add. "I've been to Bangladesh and I can't tell you the love and respect they have for what we did," he said. "It was like a miracle."

Source: The Guardian, newrepublic