A Show Bears Witness to Passion . . . and Egos

Talk about strange evenings.

“VH1 Honors” on Sunday night at the Universal Amphitheatre was such an odd mixture of pure magic and disheartening mess that you wondered the next morning if it wasn’t all just a dream.

It may just be the sad byproduct of this cynical age, but don’t you sometimes get the feeling that benefit concerts are mostly ego exercises?

Sure, money is raised, but couldn’t pop and rock superstars generate as much cash by just whipping out their own checkbooks?

There are nights, however, when the artists and the concert organizers go beyond self-serving promotion to touch us with an almost spiritual grace. One example locally is the annual Commitment to Life benefits for AIDS Project Los Angeles, a night of genuine inspiration and passion.

In key moments, the “VH1 Honors” concert showed the potential to join that select company. The 2 1/2-hour program, which was televised live on VH1, saluted Witness, a watchdog organization co-founded in 1992 by rock singer Peter Gabriel that encourages people around the world to document human rights violations with video cameras and by other means.

Sunday’s highlights built beautifully on that theme: Gabriel joined by Natalie Merchant and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe on his cleansing “Red Rain,” then teaming with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on a passionate new song . . . Gloria Estefan offering an uplifting percussion-driven medley of her “Coming Out of the Dark” and “Reach” . . . Pete Townshend delivering a solo acoustic version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” . . . Stipe surprising us with “Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” Sinead O’Connor’s tale of betrayal.

Then there was the mess: Numbers by Rod Stewart, Tony Rich and Joan Osborne that might have been fine on a revival of the “Ed Sullivan Show” but that had nothing to do with the telecast’s theme.

The new concept of “VH1 Honors,” though, is a welcome change from its original format. In its first two years, VH1 brought on various pop stars to pay tribute to their favorite charities--an easy way to lasso big names for a TV show. One sensed that the channel would have saluted your neighborhood garden club if you could have gotten Garth Brooks or Michael Jackson to go on camera in praise of it.

This time, however, “VH1 Honors” focused on a single cause: Witness.

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But you knew we were in for a rocky journey when the telecast opened with Rod Stewart singing “Every Picture Tells a Story,” complete with his usual pop-rock vaudeville antics of mike-stand twirling and exaggerated hip-shaking. The song’s title may inadvertently underscore the theme of video documentation of state and police abuse, but it’s a pretty tenuous connection, and the spirit of the number was all wrong.

Similarly, Rich and Osborne could have come up with something more pertinent than their latest hits. And why not something socially conscious for their duets, rather than Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” and the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden”?

The program could have better used the time allotted to some of these musicians to tell us about more “citizen heroes” from around the world who have used video equipment or other means to draw attention to human rights violations, including Haing S. Ngor, the Academy Award-winning actor and Cambodian activist who was slain in February in L.A.

Actor-director Tim Robbins was a classy host, staying focused on the issue in a gentle, understated way as he introduced the performers (who also included Don Henley and Bryan Adams) and celebrity narrators (Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Anthony Edwards, Laurence Fishburne, Jimmy Smits and Oliver Stone).

Via videotape, Robin Williams contributed some funny, pointed variations on military recruitment campaigns--these aimed at alerting citizens to the power they have in a video camera to challenge state and police abuse.

Near the end of the evening, Stipe expressed that power most eloquently--without twirling his mike-stand or plugging his latest hit.

“In George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ those in power controlled the people by watching and monitoring their every move,” the singer said, standing at the podium. “Now, the people can do the watching and informing on Big Brother. Let those in power be warned: Witness is watching.”

Backstage, Bruce Harris, a “citizen hero” saluted for his documentation of police abuse of street children in Guatemala, was equally eloquent.

“The fact that people don’t know about what’s happening in Central America concerns me,” he said. “To see the reaction of the audience this evening, my faith in human nature has been restored again. People do care.”

Times staff writer Cheo Hodari Coker contributed to this article.