From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

Forty years ago Sunday, between 1.5 billion and 1.9 billion people around the world — depending on who’s counting — watched Live Aid on television, one of Philadelphia’s proudest moments in rock history.

Now selections of Live Aid, the massive, one-day concert held in 1985 simultaneously spanning Wembley Stadium in London and the old JFK Stadium in South Philly, will be re-created in Philadelphia.

Seventeen local musicians will rotate through dozens of songs from the Live Aid setlist at Union Transfer on Sunday evening in a concert coordinated by the Martha Graham Cracker Cabaret.

Like the original Live Aid, essentially a telethon for famine relief in Ethiopia, the anniversary concert will be a fundraiser.

“We’re raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, an incredible organization that raises money for people who are dealing with either of those blood cancers,” said Dito van Reigersberg, whose drag persona Martha Graham Cracker is the front person of the cabaret. Reigersberg himself recently underwent aggressive treatment for leukemia and lymphoma.

‘I had no idea that this was going on’

Back in 1985, 29 acts appeared before a crowd of 90,000 in Philadelphia, including Tina Turner at the height of her career duetting with Mick Jagger, Hall and Oates, Patti LaBelle, Run-DMC, a reunited Led Zeppelin with Phil Collins on drums and a young Madonna who began by addressing the crowd with, “’Sup?”

Dressed in a long white coat in the sweltering heat, Madonna opened with a nod to nude photographs that had just been published days before.

“I ain’t taking s*** off today,” she told the crowd.

Although Reigersberg was just 12 years old at the time and barely remembers it, he will perform duets of quintessential Live Aid songs with David Sweeny, also known as Johnny Showcase.

Sweeny also has little personal connection to the original event.

“I was dancing to my radio listening to DeBarge,” Sweeny said. “I was 5 years old. I had no idea that this was going on.”

“I remember much more the ‘We Are the World’ record coming out,” Reigersberg said about the star-studded song, also a fundraiser for famine relief, released a few months before Live Aid.

Philadelphia singer PJ Brown, of PJ Brown and Her Resistance, was 15 years old in 1985, a touchstone year for her.

“You had ‘We Are the World’ and you had Live Aid. Those were the two big moments, musically, in my childhood,” she said.

“I watched most of it. Back then you had to see it in pieces,” Brown said. “You had a friend use the VCR to record part of it, and then they loaned it to you, which you had to bring back ‘cause they had to loan it out to somebody else. That’s how life was back then.”

Brown will be performing a stripped-down, blues version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” as part of the anniversary concert.

Ian Morrison, in the drag persona Brittany Lynn, will perform “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” from Queen’s legendary Wembley Stadium set, regarded as one of the best rock performances ever.

It was a historic moment Morrison discovered only after the fact. At 13 years old, he was not paying attention at the time.

“I was getting bar mitzvahed in 1985. It was a month earlier but I was still riding that wave,” he said. “My older siblings went to the stadium, but it was 1985. I lived in the Northeast. Center City was scary to the Northeast people back then.”

Morrison will merge the Brittany Lynn persona with a glam-era Freddie Mercury, whose penchant for platform boots was not too far removed from drag.

“I’m going to rock a square kitten heel and see what kind of mustache I’m doing,” Morrison said. “It’s got to be like a ‘70s daddy mustache.”

Rock and roll chaos

As a gesture of good will performed on a global scale, the original Live Aid raised over $100 million for famine relief. Although rumors swirled that the bulk of the money was not used for food but instead diverted to Ethiopian rebel groups to buy weapons, in 2010 the BBC publicly apologized to Live Aid co-creator Bob Geldof for giving that impression.

Live Aid was, after all, a rock-and-roll show, which naturally involves chaos.

To quickly rotate bands on an off stage during the live television broadcast, Philadelphia concert promoter Larry Magid and his team devised a turntable mechanism so that one band could perform in front as the next sets up in the rear, then transitioning by rotating the stage like a plate.

In a 2016 talk at the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History, Magid admitted that just seconds after the stage cleared following the final performance of that night, the turntable collapsed under its own weight.

“Had it broken a minute before, people would have died,” he said.

The original Live Aid produced a memorable scandal suggesting Phil Collins ruined the Led Zeppelin reunion with his shoddy, unrehearsed drumming. It became one of rock and roll’s cattiest ongoing fights. Collins later blamed Led Zeppelin for their sloppy performance and Robert Plant’s shredded voice.

The concert was supposed to be an opportunity for Collins to perform a high-profile stunt of playing on two continents on the same day.

“He took the Concorde,” Reigersberg said. “He was starting in London and then he was, like, ‘I’m flying to Philly!’”

“He and Led Zeppelin bombed,” Sweeny said. “They didn’t have enough time to rehearse. They just kind of threw it together. There’s a ridiculous interview afterward where they’re selling [Collins] out and throwing him under the bus. Jimmy Page can barely talk, he’s so inebriated. Robert Plant keeps talking about how good his solo career is going.”

“It’s a train wreck,” Sweeny said. “It’s so delicious.”

The power of music

Paula Holloway was not at JFK Stadium in the summer 1985. She had just finished high school and had launched her professional career, which led her to become a singer with Patti LaBelle’s touring band.

At the 40th anniversary tribute concert, she will perform songs that had been sung by her former mentor during Live Aid, including LaBelle’s a powerhouse version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with soaring vocal gymnastics.

“I’m trying to do it in a way that people will reflect back to when she did it. But everything I do has a little bit of me in it, too.” Halloway said. “I try not to go too far away from what people expect because that’s what people relate to: the feelings that a song allows them to have.”

Although Reigersberg was not personally engaged in the original 40 years ago, he said it had an incredibly positive and long-lasting impact that resonates to this day.

“Anytime a group of people gets together and thinks about people other than themselves, it’s something to be celebrated,” he said. “Living in the moment that we are now, where I think there’s some debate about whether people should help other people or not — this is our doubling down on the idea that reaching out to other people and helping them, and caring about them, is a worthwhile thing to do.”

“Martha Graham Cracker and Friends: The Live Aid Tribute Concert” will be performed at Union Transfer on Sunday, July 13.