NAMES IN THE NEWS : Farm Aid IV Concert Saturday

Willie Nelson hopes the fourth Farm Aid concert can elicit greater support for the family farmer.

The singer and fellow organizers, musicians John Cougar Mellencamp and Neil Young, had hoped that they had performed their final Farm Aid concert when they left the stage in 1988 in Lincoln, Neb.

“We thought the problem might have gone away by now,” Nelson, the president of Farm Aid, said last week in a telephone interview from Montreal, where he was on tour.

Farm Aid IV will be held Saturday in the Hoosier Dome before 45,000 people.

The tentative lineup of more than 60 acts includes Guns N’ Roses, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Bruce Hornsby, Richard Marx, John Denver, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Jackson Browne, Dwight Yoakum, K. T. Oslin and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The cable Nashville Network will carry the show from noon to midnight.

The concert sold out in less than 90 minutes, but Nelson said urban problems such as homelessness and unemployment dilute the concern city dwellers hold for the struggle of family farmers.

“There’s a lot of apathy out there. It’s a little difficult for someone living in a big city to get excited about what’s happening on the farm,” he said.