Celebrating Human Resilience

Nudity can be sensual, of course. But often it can stand for openness and honesty.

Add dance music and body paint, as the party-art organization Naked Spin did on the Universal Amphitheatre stage as the prelude to Elton John’s AIDS benefit on Wednesday, and it can also be celebratory.

That display was the perfect tone-setter for the night, billed as “The Concert: 20 Years of AIDS,” to raise funds for the Elton John AIDS Foundation and AIDS Project Los Angeles. With John joined by eight acts including Sting, Jon Bon Jovi, Alicia Keys, Craig David and Matchbox Twenty, many of the highlights were themselves stripped down, in an emotional and musical sense. And many sets poignantly bridged the sad wisdom of today with the innocence of pre-AIDS times--an era, as young singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright noted on stage, that’s not even remembered by many on the bill.

On a night that honored the fund-raising and educational efforts of the MAC cosmetics corporation and Elizabeth Taylor (who appeared briefly on stage), it was Sir Elton who most dramatically and elegantly juxtaposed bare, unsentimental honesty (with music from his new “Songs From the West Coast” album) with celebrations of what now seem like carefree times (via some of his ‘70s hits). But the musician also injected sensuality into the event with some good-natured leering aimed at Sting and Bon Jovi.

Throughout the show, there were looks back in time to put perspective on today. After Sting opened the show with a crisp, buoyant run of four big hits, the focus was on relative newcomers.

English soul contender David impressed, his fluid singing and rap interludes standing up with just the accompaniment of a guitarist. Subsequent performers turned to music of the past to help put their emotions forth: Pete Yorn with an acoustic take on Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”; LeAnn Rimes with a showy, a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace”; performing solo at a piano, Alicia Keys trumped Rimes with a gorgeous “Ave Maria.”

Wainwright was joined by his father, Loudon Wainwright III, and John on the elder Wainwright’s somber self-analysis “One Man Guy.” Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora opened their brief set with John Lennon’s “Imagine”--which in tandem with Matchbox Twenty’s choice of “Instant Karma” raised the sobering thought that we’ve lived without Lennon even longer than we’ve lived with AIDS.

John, of course, remembers the earlier times all too well, and his hourlong closing set seemed designed to grapple with, and perhaps reconcile, the differences.

The new songs by John and lyricist Bernie Taupin present a middle-aged man who’s rueful but resigned to the cultural and personal changes time has wrought. But if those songs bear the weight of time, John turned to old ones to cast off the burden.

“I Want Love,” which pines for the uncomplicated love that’s possible only in youth (and before AIDS), was followed by the gospel release of “Take Me to the Pilot.” “American Triangle,” with the murder of Matthew Shepard on the Wyoming plains forever destroying the “code of the West” myth once so beloved by John and Taupin, was countered by the relatively simple lost soul of “Levon.” And to conclude, John dispelled all sorrow and regret with a feisty “The Bitch Is Back,” helped out by Sambora and a frisky, flirty Bon Jovi.

That was the musical equivalent of body paint.