Bangladesh Concert’s Relief Effort a Milestone

If Greg Kot’s main point (“It’s Time to Focus on Real Musical Art, Not Tribute Songs,” Oct. 8) is that there have been more bad tribute songs than good ones, and that good ones are better--well, he’s right. That’s not a particularly bold or controversial pronouncement. But we might ask, why aren’t there more good ones?

Gresham’s Law argues that “the bad generally drives out the good,” but in pop culture, Sturgeon’s Law (after author Theodore Sturgeon) reigns supreme: “90% of everything is crud.” It would be wonderful if every monumental catastrophe inspired monumentally great works of art, but it seems wholly unfair, not to say unrealistic, to complain that they don’t.

In the relatively disposable pop music field, the dismal batting average for these tribute discs is likely no worse than that of the typical industry release schedule. When we factor in the creative pressures, the time constraints, the artist availability and the recording logistics, it’s easy to understand how even profoundly good intentions on the part of talented people can still produce songs that at best are forgettable and at worst mawkishly inept.

There may only be a handful of truly memorable tribute songs, but Kot inexplicably left out one of the best: “Bangladesh,” whose composer, former Beatle George Harrison, was truly “the guy who got the whole rock-stars-for-famine-relief ball rolling,” as Kot put it, nearly a decade before Bob Geldof’s Band Aid effort.

Within months of the onset of the catastrophic famine in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) in the spring of 1971, Harrison and an all-star band featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell and other top musicians of the day organized a “Concert for Bangladesh” at Madison Square Garden, filmed the pair of shows as a movie and released not only a hit single but also a triple-album boxed set complete with 64-page color booklet.

Financially speaking, it was hardly the most successful. A photo of the check from the concert proceeds adorns the booklet’s back cover, payable to UNICEF “for relief to the refugee children of Bangladesh” in the princely sum of $243,418.50. A decade of legal wrangling by Harrison and others finally yielded up another $9 million for the relief effort.

None of this is to denigrate the achievement of conceiving, planning, promoting and executing a project of that scale in a matter of a few weeks. But apart from any financial return, there can be another salutary result of such endeavors, as sitar master Ravi Shankar, who first came up with the idea, noted in a post-concert interview.

Shankar commented that even the substantial anticipated revenue from Harrison’s single, the film, the album and the gate moneys, was only “a drop in the ocean” when spread among 8 million refugees. But to him, that wasn’t the point: “The main issue--beyond the sum of money we can raise--is that we feel that all the young people who came to the concerts [maybe 40,000 or 50,000 of them], they were made aware of something very few of them felt or knew clearly--about Bangladesh and what has happened to cause such distress.” The music offers not merely entertainment, but a “teachable moment” from which we can learn.

Today, at a time when Pakistan and its current military dictatorship are valued members of President Bush’s anti-terrorism coalition, it’s admittedly inconvenient to be reminded that 30 years earlier it was a previous Pakistani military regime that visited such misery and privation on Bangladesh. But in addition to that history lesson, the Concert for Bangladesh also deserves to be remembered as one of the more ambitious and selfless humanitarian efforts by the rock music community.

Perhaps there’s another lesson, too, in the fact that while Geldof’s Band Aid single has gone out of print, the Bangladesh concert remains widely available on CD--where, cavils and criticism notwithstanding, it still generates a continuing flow of financial aid for succeeding generations of people in need.

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Joel Bellman is press deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. The views expressed are his own.