Songs From the High Ground From Farm Aid to Apartheid, Rock Wrestles with Big Issues

By JAY COCKS

Songs for the starving of the world. Concerts to bolster the struggling small farms of America. Do They Know It's Christmas? and We Are the World. Band Aid and Live Aid.

Feel as if the collective spirit of rock has suddenly been hot-wired for social activism? Fine. Think this will blow over in a little, and everything will settle down? Think again; that is not going to happen for a while. There are two immediate reasons why: the release the week of Oct. 14 of an impassioned all-star antiapartheid record, Sun City, and the congenial reverberations from last week's FarmAid, the concert that featured top rock and country-and-western talent drumming up support for the American farmer. Both the Sun City record and the FarmAid concert, held at a football stadium in Champaign, Ill., celebrate a unity within the music community even as they signal a further deepening of social awareness.

That works in both political directions. Neil Young stumped heavily at the concert for the controversial Harkin bill, which is also known as the "Farm Policy Reform Act of 1985," while the Charlie Daniels Band held down the conservative wing with banner-waving ditties like In America, which offered the observation that Lady Liberty "may have stumbled, but she ain't never fell." Lou Reed pointed up the irony of rock, freshly politicized, being attacked for excessive raunch, by recalling "those people who are trying to censor records" before launching in- to his classic Walk on the Wild Side. Live Aid may have been slicker and more elaborate, but FarmAid had the edge musically. There were frequent appearances throughout the 14 3/4-hour event by Co-Organizer Willie Nelson, whose heavy responsibilities never weighted the sensual ease of his vocals. There were also high-spirited performances by CoOrganizer John Cougar Mellencamp, Bonnie Raitt, Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris, and an incendiary set by Bob Dylan, whose remarks at Live Aid about American farm troubles, says Nelson, "put the idea (for FarmAid) in my head." Perhaps the fleetest combination of hard music and solid sentiment came during John Fogerty's appearance, his first before a paying audience since 1972. After playing two songs from his new album, and before launching into a drop-dead version of the R.-and-B. classic Knock on Wood, Fogerty simply reminded the enthusiastic audience of 78,000, "The next time you sit down to a very nice meal, remember, it didn't come from a cellophane bag from Safeway. Some guy gave his whole life to that meal you're eating."

Sun City will add a fresher and far angrier voice to this chorus of conscience. Its heat, its rhythm and its political passion, in fact, set it apart from the congenial charity of other all-star predecessors. Sun City may be one of the year's best singles. Certainly it is the boldest.

The song is aimed at a broad musical spectrum, from rock to rap, and has the kind of forceful beat and dense layering that can pulverize the floor of a dance club at 3 o'clock in the morning. "That's the first level of communication," says Steve Van Zandt, who, as Little Steven, wrote the song and coproduced it with Arthur Baker. "Everybody likes to dance." If everybody can hold still long enough and listen to some lyrics, however, he will get an earful. Sun City is aimed right at the top of the charts, but its sentiments are not the sort of material usually found in Billboard's "Hot 100."

As Artists United Against Apartheid, as many as 49 performers sing on Sun City, whose title evokes a Vegas-style entertainment complex stuck improbably in a South African "homeland." Jazz (Miles Davis) is on the record. So is folk (Jackson Browne, Raitt), Latin (Ruben Blades) and reggae (Jimmy Cliff), along with the royalty of rock, both domestic (Daryl Hall) and imported (Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr). Van Zandt's original concept for a single and a dance remix has become a mini-LP of material. Among the tracks: a coruscating jazz version of Sun City by Davis, Keyboardist Herbie Hancock, Bass Player Ron Carter and Drummer Tony Williams; a free-flowing political, rhythmic stream of consciousness by Ray Barretto, Peter Wolf, Rapper Grandmaster Melle Mel and Soweto's Malopoets; and a meditation by Progressive Rock Wizard Peter Gabriel.

It is the single, however, that will probably attract the most attention and provoke the greatest response. If, as Rock Critic Greil Marcus has skeptically suggested, the recent spate of concerts like FarmAid bespeaks merely "a craze for charity," then Sun City represents a step toward outright activism. The accustomed structure for all such undertakings is present: participating musicians worked free, recording studios donated facilities, Van Zandt covered his own expenses, and Manhattan Records will donate all of the profits to the nonprofit Africa Fund.

* What is new, however, is the sound of some of the world's best musicians putting it straight on the line. David Ruffin of the Temptations and Browne sing about "relocation to phony homelands." Cliff and Hall remember "people are dying and giving up hope," and Darlene Love jumps in with "This quiet diplomacy ain't nothing but a joke." The clincher comes with the hard challenge of Bruce Springsteen's voice, which should be some strong indication of rock's new course. Anyone ever hear Elvis Presley sing a song about Martin Luther King Jr.? On Sun City, the country's most formidable rocker since Presley's passing can be heard making his feelings quite clear: "We're stabbing our brothers and sisters in the back."

"Message songs," says Hancock, "get a little boring. You begin to sound like missionaries. With Sun City, though, you get caught in the rhythms." The rhythms are new, but in fact this vocal conscience comes out of a long tradition. There were activist antecedents in the alternative culture of the '60s, but those were selfabsorbed and, as both Browne and Van Zandt point out, were intermingled with the drug culture. Perhaps inspired by such punk guerrilla bands as Britain's Clash and the Sex Pistols in the late '70s, rock has buried higher consciousness under high conscience. "It's a rebirth of the spirit we had in the '60s, but it is a little more pragmatic," says Don Henley, whose performance of his A Month of Sundays at FarmAid was a high point.

Joan Baez, who agrees that this all represents "some kind of phenomenon," also suggests, "Rock 'n' rollers are answering a need of young people to make something out of ashes and silence. They have no leadership, no hero. They've been left nothing. But it's not just the kids. People in my generation or a little younger are longing for something they tasted and that went away." Comments Van Zandt: "The trend of activism is a natural thing after ten to 15 years of being in a coma."

The traces of public drowsiness can still be found. FarmAid seems to have fallen short on phone-in donations. The total just after the concert was only between $8 million and $10 million, although subsequent contributions, as well as the sale of records and videos, may kick that amount higher. Nelson professed to be well pleased. What's important, he told TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, "is not the money so much as making people aware of the problem. That FarmAid phone number's going to be there for a year so people can contribute, and we're not gonna let them forget it."

FarmAid will have a lot of healthy competition for attention. Ken Kragen, one of the pivotal organizers of USA for Africa, has no immediate plans for fund- raising concerts but promises other "activities" for next year, observing, "We are in this for the long haul." Bob Geldof, whose Band Aid projects first brought everything to a boil, has helped organize a School Aid program, in which children all over Britain are collecting food for famine relief. He is also on a committee for Fashion Aid, a high-profile show at London's Royal Albert Hall, scheduled for Nov. 5 and featuring the work of such world-class designers as Issey Miyake, Giorgio Armani, Katharine Hamnett and Yves Saint Laurent.

For the moment, however, it is likely to be Sun City that sets the beat, quickens the pulse and takes the point for all this musical activism. "Freedom is a privilege, nobody rides for free," is the way Blades and John Oates sing it on the record. The concentrated force of that declaration is a galvanizing message to hear. And there is always this bonus: you can dance to it too.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York and Denise Worrell/ Los Angeles