Rallying Rock ‘n’ Roll Anew

He’s dumped the T-shirt and put on a good sport coat for this, a tie, for God’s sake, good shoes. But his gray hair is still splaying out of his ponytail. He’s still urgent, still mad. It’s like they say: You can take the man out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the man. Jack Healey isn’t about to let the world forget its shortcomings.

You can hear people stop shuffling in their chairs when he starts speaking to students and the media this week, and when he stands there, looking balefully around the room with long silences in between his words, you start forgetting he’s a rock producer for the moment and start remembering he used to be a Franciscan monk.

“Do we know what the hell we’re doing? What we’re about?” he asks, and when no one raises a hand, he goes on. “I’d like to think that in the last century, governments didn’t do very well, and we the citizens, the average, the poor, the wounded, the confused, we are [now] going to make it work the way it never did before ... a citizen boom that would reach out to the whole world. My God! Wouldn’t that be a moment? An earthquake. An earthquake of decency, a century of such uncommon decency that we can all look each other in the eye with equality, and justice--and something to eat.”

Healey is back. After a decade of lying low in the ‘90s--let’s face it, was there a place for a Jack Healey in the Microsoft moment?--the man who spearheaded the unprecedented Amnesty International pop-rock tours in the 1980s has put together a concert series again, this one on behalf of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Groundwork 2001 anti-hunger campaign.

The six-night concert series in Seattle concludes Monday with a sold-out KeyArena event featuring Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Mana, Alanis Morissette and Femi Kuti. It will cap off a week that included such artists as Emmylou Harris, Dave Matthews, Philip Glass and Daniel Lanois for a cause (world hunger) that has absolutely nothing to do with global terrorism. Or at least, FAO liaison officer Bob Patterson says, not until you think about it.

“I think clearly we had the biggest and best articulated cause-related musical event of the year--until Sept. 11. We’ve lost impact,” Patterson said, referring to the celebrity-studded musical events of the past month that raised more than $150 million to aid victims of the World Trade Center disaster.

“But people are going to be looking for positive ways to engage with the world. And there’s a very key element here,” Patterson said. “Hatred and violence are desperate acts. When people have hope, when desperation cannot breed, those acts don’t take place.”

It was Healey’s charisma and, frankly, impudence (he tracked down Bono in Dublin and started the conversation by declaring the U2 singer “wasn’t Irish enough”) that lined up acts such as U2, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Sting for what became one of the defining moments in pop-rock activism, the Amnesty International human rights tours. The three years of concerts reached places as far away as Ivory Coast and India. They were unprecedented in their ambition and, emerging with events like Farm Aid and Live Aid out of the age of disco, conscience.

Then came the ‘90s, an era when rock took everything from the family farm to land mines to rain forests on its back, and Healey departed his job as executive director of Amnesty International for a lower profile. Oh, he kept his hand in--rebuilding a factory in Bosnia to employ war widows, producing a benefit concert for detained Myanmar resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Bangkok, putting together a “Punks for Human Rights” album with Jason Rothberg in Los Angeles.

Mostly, he was depressed. “I’m deeply troubled by the drive for wealth and the immensity of human suffering of the ‘90s, deeply troubled,” he says. “Everyone had high hopes for the Clinton administration, but I found them mostly to be smug and uncaring.... I’d run into ‘em on the street, and I couldn’t even look ‘em in the eye.”

Maybe it was fate, maybe it was a coincidence, but when Patterson started looking for people to help him put together a benefit concert for the FAO’s Telefood program--it provides small-scale assistance such as grain silos, chicken houses and fish smokers directly to food producers, shunning major food and cash aid--somebody in Los Angeles applying for the job (Patterson won’t say who) put down Healey as a reference.

Because Healey lived near Patterson’s office in Washington, D.C., Patterson drove over and knocked on his door. “He came out and we stood on his step, and he said, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, of course, he worked with the FAO Freedom from Hunger campaign way back in the ‘60s. He knew all the issues. He was really the godfather of marrying together causes with celebrity in this country. But he had a funny phrase. He said, ‘I don’t do rock ‘n roll anymore.’ But he kind of changed his mind.”

From the beginning, Healey made it clear he would handle the vision and the logistics, but he wasn’t going to book the talent. Life was simply too short to spend it dealing with managers, he said. So Patterson thought of producer-composer Lanois, who seemed to know a lot of people in the business. He has worked with U2 and Bob Dylan, for starters.

“I had $17 in my pocket. I took $14 and bought a Daniel Lanois CD in the hope there would be a contact there. There was. It was Brian Eno’s wife, and when I called her up, she said, ‘Call Melanie, she manages Daniel.”’

Patterson called Melanie Ciccone in South Pasadena. “I said, ‘My name’s Bob Patterson, and I work with FAO. You probably don’t know what that is.’ And she said, ‘Of course I know what FAO is. I grew up on a farm. I studied international economics.’ ”

In fact, Ciccone had worked in the barrios in Brazil, Chile and the Dominican Republic, and when Lanois said he wasn’t up to taking on Groundwork, Ciccone volunteered.

“We had about a six-week telephone friendship,” Patterson recalls, when he expressed his concern about lining up big-name acts. “I know a lot of people in this business,” Ciccone reassured him. “I said, ‘Of course, you’re Dan Lanois’ manager.’ She said, ‘You don’t get it. I know a lot of people in this business.’ I said I know. She said, ‘You may have heard of my sister, Madonna Ciccone.’ I felt really stupid at that point.”

Ciccone had never taken on such a massive project, but as she started, she realized that she already knew what to do. Not only was her sister Madonna, but her husband is singer Joe Henry, and he “has lots of friends in the music business,” she said. “I made a list. I said, ‘Gee, I think I know how to get to these people.’ And I just started calling managers and agents.” Jakob Dylan was the first to sign on. “Joe was talking to him, and something came up that I was doing this thing, and Jake said, ‘Tell her if she needs me, I’m there.”’

When it was clear the concerts would be held in Seattle--its international connections, lively music scene, agricultural setting and strong political consciousness made it a natural, not to mention a less-tapped-out donor market than L.A. or New York--Ciccone went to Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis. “We said, ‘Hey, we’re doing this concert right in your backyard, and it seems so right to have you and so wrong not to have you.’ We met immediately and his whole staff became available to us.”

Madonna agreed to act as honorary chairwoman and to contribute a track to the Groundwork CD, which also features cuts from Tom Waits, Youssou N’Dour and Sheryl Crow, among others, on sale at Starbucks for $17 ($14 of which goes to FAO). There’s also a potential TV broadcast, and Adobe Systems of San Jose kicked in $1.5 million for production costs.

With luck, Ciccone is hoping to get Pakistani qawwali singer Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to perform as a surprise guest Monday night, maybe even doing a duet with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who recorded a song with Rahat’s legendary late uncle, Nusrat, for the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack before he died in 1997.

“Our job is to create a bridge over a big river of who has and who has not, and America versus non-America. It’s an opportunity to make a statement. I mean, you gotta do it,” Ciccone said. “Would I love to have Paul McCartney? Yeah. Do I think it’s critical to have a Pakistani performing on the stage with an American? I think it’s more important than anything.”

Healey says he’ll be happy if they can start at $1 million raised--what do you expect, when Pearl Jam says they’ll back out if the tickets go over $50?--and he admits that might not sound like a lot. On the other hand, it doesn’t cost a lot to buy farm tools for people to grow their own food, he says. The main point is to get people listening again.

“If you can get the word out to some little girl or boy through music, you can reach that heart,” he says.

“What we’re going through now, it’s terrible about innocents dying in New York and D.C. And we don’t have a prophet, we don’t have a Dr. King, to say, ‘This can be changed.’ So we’re doing what a citizen can do, to say, hey, we’re gonna change that.”