Eco-Pop Consciousness and Midnight Oil

So you cut all the tall trees down,

you poisoned the sky and the sea,

You’ve taken what’s good from the ground,

but you left precious little for me.

--from “River Runs Red” by Midnight Oil

When most bands come to L.A. on tour, you see posters hyping their arrival on every vacant wall. It works the same way when Midnight Oil hits town, except their ads pose a provocative question.

“Earth Day is a great idea,” reads the poster for the outspoken Australian rock band, which plays the Universal Amphitheatre Tuesday and Wednesday. “What about the other 364 days?”

Midnight Oil’s lead singer, Peter Garrett, has been politically active for years. A staunch no-nukes environmentalist, he ran for the Australian Senate in 1985. He’s the current president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Angry with what he terms an “arrogant” attitude of oil companies toward the environment, Garrett and his band mates recently plugged in their amps on a flatbed truck outside Exxon’s New York headquarters and played a midday “protest” concert, accompanied by a huge banner saying: “Midnight Oil makes you dance, Exxon makes us sick.”

Midnight Oil also puts its money where its mouth is. Many pop stars have embraced eco-issues, but few have made any visible effort to derail the record industry’s most glaring ecological black-eye--the CD long box. Give the Oils credit. In addition to singing about the environment on their new “Blue Sky Mining” album, they have persuaded their record label, Columbia, to manufacture all of the album’s covers, sleeves and long boxes on 100% recycled paper. (To its credit, Columbia could have billed the band for the extra expense of using recycled paper--but the label chose to absorb the costs itself.)

Better still, the Oils have convinced Columbia to issue the group’s latest 5-inch CD (the equivalent of a 12-inch record), “The Forgotten Years,” without either a long box or a jewel-box case (the CD’s only packaging is a small cardboard covering).

“The band was adamant that we use recycled paper,” said Mason Munoz, director of marketing at Columbia Records. “Initially, our production people were against it because they felt the package looked terrible. But the band said, ‘We want to make a point--we’re not worried about what the package looks like.’ ”

Garrett thinks it’s time pop stars took the lead in pressuring record companies to clean up the CD long-box mess. “To repair and save the Earth will take our entire lifetimes, not just one or two benefit concerts,” he said from Atlanta, where he was on tour last week. “Platitudes are a nice starting point, but they’re still platitudes.

“If the big stars in pop music took a stand, they could help make the industry get rid of the long box. Bruce Springsteen. Sting. Jackson Browne and the rest. If everyone put pressure on their labels, it would be very easy. No one else in the world even uses the long box anymore. It’s just wasteful packaging, just like the trash they put hamburgers in. We’d get a lot accomplished if consumers would start asking these companies, ‘Why is my hamburger surrounded by half a tree?’ ”

In rock’s gaudy era of indulgence, bands had concert riders guaranteeing them brown M&M;’s backstage. These days, Midnight Oil is formulating a contract that will prohibit concert promoters from using plastic foam products at the band’s shows.

“We have huge global problems that aren’t getting proper attention, especially from your President, who is as much of an environmentalist as I am a hairy wrestler,” said Garrett. “But it’s important to start on a personal level--which for us means records and concert appearances--and work your way up. When we have record-store people backstage at our shows, you can bet we talk to them about CD long boxes and other ways to improve the environment.”

He laughed. “We want brown jelly beans too. We just want them in a reusable container.”