An Inconvenient Groove

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You can blame Mick Jagger for getting the Smashing Pumpkins, Foo fighters, Bon Jovi, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Lenny Kravitz, Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, John Mayer and 150 other artists to all play for free for Live Earth, the 24-hour concert held on July 7. If the head Rolling Stone, who isn’t even playing the event, hadn’t told producer Kevin Wall at the end of the Stones’ 1978 tour that Wall drank too much, there would probably never have been a Live Earth concert to combat global warming. Wall, who supplied staging for the Stones, as well as George Harrison and Led Zeppelin, was so chagrined that he left the music business for 12 years. In the interim, he joined AA, got sober and realized he needed to do something to wipe away the taint of his messy past behaviors.

“When I came back to the business, it was at the time that HBO started producing music specials,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ll do this commercially, but I want to also do stuff that I believe in, to pay back, sort of make amends.’”

Before he knew it, he was donating his technical expertise to Live Aid, the Freddie Mercury AIDS Awareness Day and the Free Nelson Mandela concert in 1988. That particular show was a watershed moment for the impresario. “From the opening of that show, when Sting was saying ‘Hello, world,’ and knowing that a billion people were watching, I got shivers. But never so much as when six months later, Nelson Mandela—who there wasn’t even a single photograph of for 25 years—was let out of prison. That’s the power of what we do. We get to bind music to message, and transfer the emotion.”

Three years ago, musician and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof called asking for Wall’s help on Live 8, so he took on the gargantuan task of becoming executive producer of the fest, brought together one of the largest audiences in history to combat poverty and ended up winning an Emmy for his efforts. Pretty good for a man who started out as a production assistant for Pink floyd back in the dark ages of rock, which goes a long way toward explaining why Roger Waters is on the bill for Live Earth—but not why Geldof isn’t.

To be fair, global warming hasn’t been one the causes close to Sir Bob’s heart. The man who brought us “We Are The World” has been less than charitable about Live Earth. “It sounds like Live 8. … We’re getting lots of responses from people who think we are organizing this,” the former Boomtown Rat complained to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Even worse, he thinks the concert lacks specific goals.

“But why is [Gore] actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody’s known about that problem for years. We are all f—ing conscious of global warming,” he said, adding, “I would only organize if I could go on stage and announce concrete environmental measures from the American presidential candidates, congress or major corporations. They haven’t got those guarantees, so it’s just an enormous pop concert, or the umpteenth time that, say, Madonna or Coldplay can get on stage.”

Even without Geldof, Live Earth promises to be a behemoth. It has attracted “celebrities and thought leaders,” according to one if its press releases, and will span nine major cities on seven continents. Yes, even Antarctica, where some lucky entertainer—Snow Patrol, perhaps—will be performing at the South Pole, where the temperature will be hovering around -56 degrees come July 7. But the one thing that’s important to remember is that these concerts are not about raising money for the science to reverse global warming, but rather just to raise awareness.

“Our show is not a fundraiser,” explains Wall. “It’s a major launch of a messaging campaign and a behavioral change. Trying to raise money in a show like this—no matter how successful it is, it’s more important to just move the consumer in a behavioral change. And if you can get them to make a change, only that will move government. That’s who has to pay for it.”

But there will be money, since over 1 million tickets have been sold already. “That will fund the Alliance for Climate Protection,” said Wall. “It was set up by Al Gore, and it will continue to put out this exact same message for the next three to five years.”

But how did Al Gore get involved? Because Kevin Wall asked him. Although, it was certainly a no-brainer for the man—whom George Bush Sr. called “The Ozone Man” during the 1992 election—to head up a concert to staunch global warming. “I walked out of seeing Al’s movie [Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth] in a state of bewilderment—very emotionally charged up. I knew I had to do something. I thought, ‘What I know how to do is pull this together, create one day, put together 2 billion eyeballs and give Al Gore the microphone.’ So the light bulb went off [ed.: a florescent light bulb, no doubt], and I answered the call.”

And then he made one to Al Gore. The next afternoon, the two of them were having lunch. By the weekend, he was sitting in the kitchen nook at Al and Tipper’s house outside of Nashville, poring over long lists of bands they wanted to perform and a set of rules for the concert that they wanted to implement—things as simple as printers having to use 100 percent recycled paper, electricians using bio-fuel as opposed to diesel, toilet suppliers using environmentally sound detergents. “We aimed for bands that were published in some sort of social consciousness to start, or bands that were in the environmental area,” explained Wall.

“I recruited the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Gore told Billboard in April. “They told me yes when they came onstage at the Grammys. I’ve talked to a lot of them, and I haven’t gotten turned down yet.”

But the Red Hot Chili Peppers are far better known for their nefarious habits than their social conscience. “We didn’t say everybody was socially conscious. We just aimed for that,” says Wall. “It’s a black art on how to build the texture of a global show like this, because you have pop, and you have to have legacy artists, and you have to have global appeal. And there’s not a map, so it’s something that’s done sort of by feel. But we’ve had an overwhelming response. It was unbelievable, and it’s resulted in this lineup that we have.”

Continuing down that bumpy road, Geldof isn’t the only one railing at the inclusion of Madonna, who not only agreed to headline the London show but wrote a song entitled “Hey You,” available for free download at the Live Earth site.

Green campaigners pointed out that last year Madonna flew as many as 100 technicians, dancers, backing singers, managers and family members on a 56-date world tour in private jets and commercial airliners, as well as a cadre of fuel-guzzling cars, including a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, Audi A8s and a MINI Cooper S. Yet she will headline the London concert to combat the climate crisis.

“Madonna’s Confessions Tour produced 440 tons of CO2 in four months of last year,” says John Buckley, the managing director of the British-based CarbonFootprint.com. “And that was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs.”

And Madonna isn’t the only one environmentalists have in their sights. Al Gore has been chastised for his extraordinary personal energy usage—air conditioning his 10,000 square-foot Tennessee home—by telling critics that he maintains a “carbon neutral” lifestyle by buying carbon offsets,” meaning he tries to offset any energy usage, including plane flights and automobile trips by purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere. The only trouble is he pays off his big carbon footprints through Generation Invest Management, a London-based company with offices in Washington, D.C., of which he’s the chairman.