Today In 1985: Live Aid

Live Aid happened on July 13, 1985. I thought it made sense to relive those great Queen performances for all those years ago. Their performance during Live Aid might well be the best concert of all time. Those 72,000 people who were in Wembley Stadium were so lucky - they truly witnessed a piece of history!

Live Aid (Live, 13th July 1985)

Comments

[JCD]

I remember this very day so well. For some reason I did not know this was happening, even though I was a card carrying devotee to MTV, as most teenagers were at the time. I was just about ready to walk out of my house to go to work (my first job that I had started recently), but decided I had a few minutes to kill so naturally I turned on MTV to see what video was playing that I had already seen a thousand times that week. Lo and behold it was a live show that I had never seen. MTV always played a recorded concert on Saturday nights so this was a surprise. I came in as the band playing was about to leave the stage, after they had fully exited the stage Martha Quinn came on and was telling who would be playing next and the other bands to follow. I was absolutely crushed that I had to leave for work almost immediately. It took every ounce of my fiber not to call out sick that Saturday afternoon, I had the phone in hand ready to do just that. Luckily, it was a part-time job so when I got home that late afternoon Live Aid will still on and watched til' it went off. Great times to had in the 80's. R.I.P. MTV (Sat.night concerts, videos and Headbangers Ball) !!

[Bkallday]

What a great, transcendent front man, & person just in general. There will never be another & imho, there has never nor will there ever be a front man as good as Freddie Mercury was. Long live his legacy and long live their band’s songs(with him singing them of course). 🤘🏼

[JCD]

Queen used a lot of studio magic on their records but were absolute monsters live. Their songs took on a whole next level of intensity that their studio counterparts could not achieve. For me, I always liked live Queen as opposed to studio Queen. Check out Queen Live Killers cd and the Live in Montreal dvd. And of course, Live Aid.

[Metalboy!]

Queen was KILLER as was Black Sabbath and Judas Priest! Too bad Led Zeppelin were such a shambles.

My friends and I were all over this! I stayed at my friend’s house that weekend and a bunch of us were hanging out by the pool overlooking a huge river in Maryland while religiously videotaping the event from start to finish. .

We all took turns running in and out of the house to make sure the VHS deck was still recording, frantically putting in a new tape every hour so as not to miss a moment recording this once in a lifetime live event.

JCD is right, RIP MTV! Recently, I have been going through all my stuff I’ve had in storage for decades and by total coincidence, just unearthed several VHS tapes of LIVE AID plus around 25 with 2 or 3 HEADBANGER’s BALLS.

Many of those recordings include rebroadcasts from earlier in the day of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s press conferences where we would show “surgical strike” bombings of Iraq. That footage works great in between all the Metal of Headbanger’s Ball.

Now, alas, but the time I get around to transferring all these tapes to digital, they’ll still work. Yeah, I hear ya, most of the stuff (and then some) are probably on YouTube, but ya gotta remember what you wanna watch that way, haha!!

Just a couple of days ago, I was lamenting how music is getting lost with everything going over to digital. For example, The LIVE AID set released a few years ago does NOT have the complete Sabbath and Priest shows featured.

And now that DVDs and CDs are all but extinct, there’s another wave of music that will disappear, much as it did when they reformatted FM radio before that virtually disappeared.

But, hey, what the h*ll, as long as people keep it alive, Rock & Roll will never die!

[JCD]

Several years ago I bought the entire day of events from someone off of Ebay, 8 or so recordable dvds. All the interviews, the commercials (I think) and banter between the VJ's. Oh how I miss my precious Martha Quinn, although I can still hear her on Sirius/XM Radio. I also bought the official release although far from complete as Metalboy mentioned. Those were the days when music was everything.

[Metalboy!]

So cool you have that, JCD! The Ultimate Metal Man Cave Companion. Now, all I need is the Man Cave!

[Metalboy!]

... made of steel, of course!