Benefit Burnout, Results Cloud Popular Charity Concerts

Charity once began humbly at home. Now, giving to the unfortunate is a stadium event.

Hands have spread across America into overflowing concert halls and cheering coliseums, with satellite uplinks and downlinks, in a high-tech maze of mega-events from Band Aid to Live Aid to Farm Aid to Sport Aid to Fish Aid.

The goals are as ambitious as the wars waged on poverty during the Great Society--helping Ethiopians, American Indians and farmers, this nation’s homeless and overseas political prisoners.

The generosity flows not from hearth or from government, but from spirited producers bankrolled by corporations and fueled by million-dollar entertainers who feed the music-starved with promises of feeding the hungry.

Few question the sincerity of these mammoth fund-raisers that germinated with the emotional British Band Aid recording session in the autumn of 1984. But amid the consciousness-raising fanfare, perplexing questions are being raised by social critics, relief organizations, political and religious leaders--even producers themselves.

Is it the cause or the concert that draws an audience, or does it matter as long as the money comes? Is the success of the event measured only in terms of dollars raised, and does the money really help? Is it even enough to matter?

Have entertainers started shaping public policy and, perhaps making all of the other questions moot, has the litany of extravaganzas created aid-concert burnout?

Stevie Wonder, comedian Cheech Marin and singers Rita Coolidge and Kenny Rankin joined Native American elders recently at “Drums Across America,” a concert in Burbank to publicize the plight of Navajos facing relocation from their ancestral homeland in Arizona.

Only about 1,000 people showed up at the 4,000-seat Starlight Amphitheater, and producer Bob Grad conceded that the effort would lose money. So much for fighting relocation.

“People are starting to get burned out because there are so many causes,” Grad said. “I don’t know. From what I’ve seen (from other benefit concerts), the purported beneficiaries don’t receive any benefits. The money from these things sits earning interest, and that can burn people out.”

The Farm Aid II marathon concert in south Texas on July 4th may have been another case of benefit fatigue.

Organizers originally planned to host the Willie Nelson-produced concert, on behalf of debt-ridden family farmers, at the 80,000-seat University of Texas Memorial Stadium.

Plagued by demands for a $200,000 liability insurance premium and slow sales of the $20 general admission tickets, organizers were forced to move the site of the concert, one week before the gala, to the Manor Downs race track. Although the benefit attracted such groups as Alabama, Asleep at the Wheel and the Beach Boys, only slightly more than 40,000 people attended.

Early estimates put the Farm Aid II gross at less than $2 million, a far cry from the $9 million earned by last September’s first Farm Aid concert.

The day before the concert, Nelson told reporters that it would take $230 billion to bail out all the farmers who are in debt.

The daylong concert was televised over the Video Hit One cable television network, which has an estimated 130 subscriber stations. Major network coverage was upstaged by Liberty Weekend.

“I’m just bored with these kinds of events,” said Los Angeles producer Sandy Brokaw, whose clients include Bill Cosby, James Brown and Jose Feliciano. “I got to the point where I thought it was great, but now I’ve gotten to the point of burnout.”

Brokaw, however, acknowledged that the brave new world of the political concert is also an industry event that offers great publicity to rising stars.

They also provide jobs. “These things are make-work projects,” said Roxanne Moffit, who served on the administrative staffs of the Live Aid and Sports Aid concerts.

“You can begin with 12 people and end up with 200 to 300,” she added. “You have all the runners the day of the event, the PR people, the corporate sponsors, the budgeting people, the technicians.”

Moffit insists that getting the big names is the best way to guarantee success. “For the concert-goer, it’s still the concert and the talent, not the cause. Only God can book U-2. That’s why the Amnesty International (concert series) was so successful.”

“That’s irrelevant,” countered Mary Dailey, Amnesty International’s communications director. “The general feeling is that people came for the concerts (six of them from June 4-11), but they enjoyed hearing about the cause of helping to free political prisoners.”

For Dailey and others, the primary purpose is to make people aware of a societal ill.

Come for Entertainment

“From the kids’ point of view, they’re coming for the entertainment,” said Harvey Goldsmith, chairman of the Live Aid Foundation. From his home in London, Goldsmith quickly added, “Sure, there may be too many benefits going, but there’s a lot of need, and these make people aware of the need.”

Producer Ken Kragen, whose Hands Across America grossed more than $30 million and who expects to net $15 million to $20 million for domestic projects, rejects the burnout notion.

“I still believe it’s always a question of imagination,” said Kragen, who was also president of the successful USA for Africa effort. “I don’t think that charity or generosity are going to go out of fashion. The question is how to tap that.”

He finds it no coincidence that Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey) introduced the $1-billion Hunger Relief Act of 1986 the week before 7.1 million people were to participate in Hands Across America.

Panetta acknowledged that he timed the introduction of the legislation around the monolithic Hands event but questioned whether the galas do more than make people feel good.

Reagan ‘All Image’

“The public needs to be concerned about changing laws,” Panetta said. “It’s like what Reagan does--just talk about it, all image--that you don’t really have to look at these problems close up. Well, none of these concerts take you to a soup kitchen. They just make you feel nice. It’s all kind of gloss.”

Kragen has rebuffed Panetta’s offers to appear at recent legislative hearings on his bill, saying: “We don’t want to get involved in politics. This is above politics.”

Panetta appreciates Kragen’s dilemma, but not his decision. “He’s trying to stay bipartisan,” the congressman said. “I can understand that from a PR point of view, but I think if you’re going to go to the wall on these things, you can’t treat this the way you’d treat a Statue of Liberty celebration.”

Arthur Simon, executive director of Bread for the World, a nonprofit lobbying organization in Washington, said the cause-oriented concert “tends to bypass or ignore the political process, where a lot of major decisions are made whether or not people go hungry.”

Simon said the original $100-million goal of Hands represents less than 1% of the annual food stamp budget. “There’s a tendency for us to think: ‘Well, people are hungry. Let’s chip in some money.’ I think that’s OK, but we need to focus on Congress.”

Marty Rogol, executive director of the USA for Africa Foundation, said the millions who participated in Hands Across America told politicians “very clearly that the issue of hunger needed to be addressed.”

“So there’s a role for private enterprise and government,” Rogol said. “I think the ball is in everyone’s court.”

Although disappointed by the turnout for “Drums Across America,” Grad insists the artistic community must always play a role in heightening awareness of social problems.

“On the governmental level, there’s a lack of leadership, and the arts community (has) filled that vacuum,” Grad said. “Picasso did that in Europe in the 1930s. The ‘80s are different, that’s all. We have the technology now for the bigger events.”

However, Lawrence Pezzullo, executive director of Catholic Relief Services in New York, is another skeptic about the ability of huge benefit concerts to solve complex problems.

“One of my concerns is that if you give Americans the impression that there are easy remedies, that can lead to anger,” Pezzullo said. “People may tire of this and start to wonder what they’re really doing.”

Concert charity does not work, said the Rev. Philip Zwerling, senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. “It functions on the level of making participants feel good. They get a good righteous feeling from participating, but in terms of helping people in need, it’s just a short-range fix.

“The tens of millions of dollars being raised is not enough. It just clouds the picture of the necessary systemic changes needed to eliminate the gap between the wealthy and poor.”