The Concert for Bangladesh: Madison Square Garden, 1971
1971 · music
On 1 August 1971 two concerts were held on the same day at Madison Square Garden in New York for a purpose that had never before brought musicians together on that scale. Millions of people had fled the war in East Pakistan into India, into camps already overwhelmed after a cyclone that had killed hundreds of thousands the previous year. The sitar player Ravi Shankar asked his friend George Harrison whether music could raise money and attention. Harrison agreed and had six weeks to arrange it.
Around forty thousand people attended the two shows. Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha opened with a set of Indian classical music, and the western half of the programme brought Harrison together with Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and Bob Dylan, who had not played a full concert in years and confirmed only at the last moment.
The concerts, the triple album and the film that followed raised a large sum for the relief of refugees, although a dispute with tax authorities kept much of it frozen for years, a lesson that later charity events were careful to learn from. The money eventually reached the children's fund of the United Nations, and the recordings continue to earn for it today.
The Concert for Bangladesh created a form that did not exist before, the large scale benefit show with an assembled cast, live album and broadcast. Everything from Live Aid to modern telethons descends from it. It is also remembered as the moment when a musician used his standing not to promote a record but to point an audience at a distant emergency and ask them to look.