AMNESTY FINDS FRIENDS AMONG FANS

For the nearly 14,000 rock fans who attended Wednesday night’s five-hour opening concert in the Amnesty International tour, the excitement was what was happening onstage.

After all, this six-city series of shows, which continues tonight at the Forum in Inglewood, shapes up as the most celebrated rock tour of the year; a dramatic extension of the social consciousness of the Live Aid concerts of 1985. Among the tour headliners: Sting, U2, Bryan Adams and Peter Gabriel.

But Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International in the U.S., was equally concerned with what was happening in the Cow Palace lobby.

Healey wanted to know if the fans’ enthusiasm for the bands--an enthusiasm that resulted in an estimated 800,000 orders for the 150,000 available seats nationwide--would translate into interest in Amnesty International itself.

When he saw dozens of fans stopping at the Amnesty International tables to pick up informational pamphlets, he clasped his hands together in celebration.

“Look, they are picking up the pamphlets even before they go over to buy the T-shirts,” he said. “And they are actually filling out the post cards.”

The post cards are part of a campaign to recruit 25,000 “freedom writers”--new AI members who will write a post card a month on behalf of six “prisoners of conscience”: Hugo de Leon Palacios in Guatemala, Thozamile Gqweta in South Africa, Lee Kwang-ung in South Korea, Riad al-Turk in Syria, Tatyana Semyonova Osipova in the Soviet Union and Nguyen Chi Thien in Vietnam. These six have been adopted as symbols of the more than 4,500 prisoners AI feels have been unjustly imprisoned around the world.

“The whole purpose of the tour is to raise awareness in this country of what Amnesty International does around the world for people . . . our campaign to help those who have been arrested and tortured because of their beliefs,” Healey said.

To that end, Healey, concert promoter Bill Graham and several of the artists are holding press conferences in each city to outline the goals of Amnesty International, which marks its 25th anniversary this year.

Bono Hewson, lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, was especially passionate about Amnesty International and the significance of this tour.

“I like to think of the tour and the press conferences as sort of performance art in the area of communications,” he said after Tuesday’s press conference. “We’re using the medium itself rather than just the song or the stage. After all, this is the age of politicians as pop stars. So, why can’t pop stars be a new type of politician?”

Healey, 48, a former Peace Corps official and organizer of hundreds of youth marches in the ‘70s to raise money for hunger victims, realized as soon as he joined the Amnesty International staff in 1981 that the organization needed a higher profile in this country.

“Amnesty International is well known throughout much of the world, but it’s almost a well-kept secret in the United States,” he said. “I wanted to make it a household world and I realized rock ‘n’ roll was a way to do it.”

The Edge, the professional name of U2 guitarist Dave Evans, feels the two-week commitment is important in underscoring the depth of feeling the musicians have for the project.

Graham, the San Francisco-based concert promoter who has played a key role in many landmark events in rock, including the Live Aid show in Philadelphia, agreed that the two-week commitment sends out a strong message.

“This isn’t a case of musicians just flying in, taking their bows and leaving,” he said backstage Wednesday.

Most of the two dozen fans interviewed in the lobby said they signed the post cards because they “trusted” the artists involved.

“If U2 believes it is a good cause, then I believe it is a good cause, too,” said a 16-year-old from Lafayette. “They talk about issues in their songs, but not in a preachy way.”

After the Forum concert tonight, the “A Conspiracy of Hope” tour continues with arena shows in Denver on Sunday), Atlanta on Wednesday), Chicago on June 13 and a stadium show in East Rutherford, N.J. on June 15. The final concert will be broadcast live on MTV and on the Westwood One radio network (KLOS-FM and KMET-FM in Los Angeles).

U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers and Lou Reed will be on all six shows. Jackson Browne is on the California dates only. Ruben Blades, Miles Davis, Third World, Carlos Santana and Pete Townshend will be added to the final show--as will Fela, the dissident Nigerian singer whose 1984 arrest on a currency smuggling conviction was the subject of an Amnesty International campaign.

At the Cow Palace, artists did individual sets of between 20 and 45 minutes, with everyone returning to the stage for a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” (Dylan and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, who begin their own U.S. tour on Monday night in San Diego, reportedly will join tonight’s lineup.)