I don’t know what I’m more surprised by...
...that we’re already halfway through July and summer is at its midpoint, or that Live Aid happened forty years ago today.
Back then, I was nineteen. Queen took the stage and played that ridiculously long song from the '70s that I thought sucked, mostly because when I was thirteen, I sang, “Momma, just killed a bear,” at a pool party.
Every kid who heard me barked back, “It’s man, not bear, dummy!” I was mortified. Swore off “Bohemian Rhapsody” for a decade after that. Now here I am, in my late fifties, cranking that same ridiculous song every time it comes on.
Funny what time does.
Freddie Mercury only had six more years left after that incredible performance. None of us knew then that he had been diagnosed with “that thing” the gays and drug users were getting... or so we ignorantly believed. Then that kid in Kokomo got it. He wasn’t gay or a drug user.
.....and slowly, we got smarter. Slowly.
Forty years sure does change a lot. When Live Aid aired, the 59-year-olds were World War II vets. Most of them are gone now. The kids who were nineteen that day? We have replaced the old geezers.
In 1945, nineteen-year-olds were finishing up kicking the shit out of nazis and japs.
In 1985, nineteen-year-olds were watching MTV and meeting Marty McFly for the first time.
As for today’s nineteen-year-olds? I couldn’t even tell you what the hell they’re doing. That’s how I know I’ve turned into that old geezer. Maybe not quickly, but steadily, over forty years.
Live Aid was a game changer. It showed what music and mass media could do. It united 1.5 billion people, made hunger and poverty a part of the conversation in the West and it opened the door to celebrity activism. From Woodstock to Live Aid to Lollapalooza… and now a never ending parade of rigged up pop stars and dim witted cue-card readers taking up causes too complex to grasp in just a soundbite.
Enough of the flashback. It’s Sunday Funday.
The remnants of the full moon is melting across the early morning sky, and it is the kind of July day you remember forever...
...watermelon, potato chips, a Tupperware pitcher of red sugar water, kids splashing under the sprinkler, a Cub or Sox game crackling from a transistor, beach towels splayed across the grass, and some old geezer flipping burgers on the Weber.
Perfect day to be a little high, a little low because any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me.
To me...
