10 concerts that changed the world
The writer William S. Burroughs once wrote: “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.” That statement might be straight out of the beat playbook, but there is no doubting that, on occasion, old Burroughs has been proved right. The history books are full of moments when a few chords and poetic disdain have been weaponised to change the world. After all, the very nature of music speaks of unification.
If you can imagine a world without the Promethean cultural deities of the 1960s, like Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and The Beatles, then you may as well contact the powers-that-be and have them hand a Pulitzer prize directly to your imagination. While musicians might not legislate the makeup of this world, they now doubt have a hold over the direction of it.
Nothing illustrates this like a live concert. In 1967, 200 million people saw The Beatles play ‘All You Need is Love’ via a ground-breaking satellite link-up. At the time, that wasn’t far from one in 16 people on the entire planet receiving a message of unified peace in one fell swoop of sonic beauty. Capturing such an audience was an untold feat in human history, and amid tempestuous times, the Fab Four broke through clouds of uncertainty with an assegai of hope and exultation.
A great deal of concerts throughout history have achieved something similar. Whether it’s a city-sized orchestra in Baku predicting the futurist world of modern music, a riot cementing infamy for The Rolling Stones or the power of protest displayed by Pussy Riot, there are concerts that stand out from a simple good night on the tiles and tap into something ground-breaking.
10 concerts that changed the world:
Arseny Avraamov, Baku, 1922
Arseny Avraamov approached the precipice of a purpose-built tower surveying the sprawling metropolis of Baku. He was about to conduct an entire city in song. In a futurist melee, the might of man and machine would turn industry, sirens, choirs, bands, wailing babies, screaming banshees, a blasting salvo of ammunition, car horns, foghorns, cannons and a chorale of the finest musicians in the world into one unified song. This was a revolution. An entire city and all of its workings were abuzz with song.
In the process, he devised new genres of music to match the growing urban environment of the world. He also accurately predicted synthesised sounds, amplified vocals, and many other techniques that underpin modern music.
As he wrote in the 1916 article, Upcoming Science of Music and the New Era in the History of Music (given that music was largely acoustic and almost entirely separate from science at this time, that title alone is prescient enough): “The timbre is the soul of a musical sound. To build abstract harmonic schemes and then ‘orchestrate’ them is not creative any more; in this way it is possible to reach a full decomposition of the process of musical creation down to the sequence of compositional exercises: to invent a sequence of tones, to incorporate any rhythm, to harmonize the melody obtained and, finally, to start its colouring, using an historically readymade palette.”
Léon Theremin, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, 1928
The Theremin might not have had the sex appeal of a crooning Ol’ Blue Eyes, but making music magically appear from thin air is always going to titillate the inner nerd in all of us, and that placed the Soviet Union in a prominent place in the Cold War battle of everything and anything. It was invented by Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or as he is known, your friend and mine, Léon Theremin.
It came at a time when Europe had just suffered the bloody scourge of a war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Technology was paradoxically behind this death toll, but surely it could now also illuminate a brighter future. In other words, technology was a curse if it was used badly, but if it was applied with ethics, then it could propel us to a bright new utopia. A ground-breaking musical contraption was surely a harmless sign of the latter. When he showcased it in New York, he wowed audiences and is said to have inadvertently accelerated America’s wariness of the USSR.
But the legacy of his goes beyond introducing tech into music instrumentation and how that exacerbated the Cold War. During his time in the US alongside his machine, Theremin would report on other pending industrial patents. He spent 11 years there and reportedly unofficially informed soft knowledge back to the Soviets throughout. However, he was never fully behind the cause, and eventually, the Soviets recalled Theremin, imprisoned him for being a counterrevolutionary, and sent him off to a special scientific camp where he was instructed to come up with a bugging device—this went on to change the world as much as his old musical machine.
Robert Johnson, Carnegie Hall, 1938
As a young man coming age in the roaring 1920s, John Hammond’s passion for music was profuse. With great jazz unspooling all around him, he was not alone in this regard. However, Hammond was miles ahead of many of his fellow revellers in seeing the potential for music to bring about social change. As he once said: “I heard no colour line in music. [Music] was the most effective and constructive form of social protest I could think of.”
So, with that in mind, he set about celebrating the black lifeblood of that with a concert in the heart of New York: From Spiritual to Swing. He put Robert Johnson on the bill before even making contact with him. The blues devil had re-invented the genre and brought a new sense of rockstar persona to the world of music.
Sadly, Hammond’s efforts to book her were in vain as he was informed he had died as mysteriously as he had emerged at the age of 27. Nevertheless, Hammond set about honouring him all the same, so the show opened with a spotlight shone on a gramophone and a mic, and a recording of Johnson played out in place of the real thing, prompting a legion of youngsters to partake in a blues revival that eventually spawned the likes of Bob Dylan.
Elvis Presley, Pan Pacific Auditorium, 1957
Towards the middle of the 1950s, sexual liberation became a force that challenged the ideologies of sex. The arts, in all of its guises, were at the forefront of this. Rock ‘n’ roll played such a hand, in fact, that when the snake hips of Elvis Presley were in full swing in 1956, it led CBS towards the decree that he was only to be filmed from the waist up following his gyrating antics on The Ed Sullivan Show. From thereon, his iconoclastic displays were viewed under the watchful eye of the authorities.
When he played at the Pan Pacific Auditorium, the Los Angeles Vice Squad were there with cameras and clubs. This sent a ripple of rebellion among the fans. When the headline in the paper the next day read, ‘Elvis Wriggles, Fans Scream at Pan-Pacific’ and told of the hubbub at the event, it further imbued Elvis with an aura of cool defiance and the rock ‘n’ roll revolution was emboldened almost inadvertently by the authorities themselves.
Bob Dylan, Newport Folk Festival, 1965
It was a sunny afternoon on July 25th, 1965, when Bob Dylan stepped out on stage at the Newport Folk Festival with one of the most vilified Stratocasters of all time under his arm. It was a move that cemented his status as an iconoclast and, in the process, became one of the most influential ‘I’ll go my way’ moves in the history of music.
Backed by the wildly underrated Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Dylan took to the stage and defied expectation in every which way. The impact of the moment was two-fold: the simple subversiveness of Dylan’s electric middle finger to folk’s Amish standards earmarked a crystallising moment for musicians that success was not something to be perused; you simply gathered it up in your boundary-pushing wake.
Secondly, it coupled the introspection of folk with the energy of rock ‘n’ roll that mutated the art of songwriting to an irrevocable end. Following that appearance at Newport was a trilogy of mostly electric records: Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and despite a slew of fans turning their backs on his ‘turncoat antics’, each of those is in with a shout of being crowned the greatest album of all time. This was punk before punk was even thought of.
Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock Festival, 1969
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of love, it was the age of folly, it was Woodstock 1969 – the high point of the counterculture movement in every which way. The famed festival marked the fuzzy peak of spring’s hopeful intoxication and forecasted the despair of winter’s comedown. For three days in August ’69, just north of New York City, in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, the great unwashed came together, and the world has been reeling from the miasma kicked up ever since.
As Jimi Hendrix poeticised: “500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God’s tears of joy, and for once, and for everyone, the truth was not a mystery. Love called to all; music is magic.”
While Hendrix’s highfalutin recollection of utopian liberation might uphold one side of the Woodstock coin, the obverse was equally apparent. Cue Pete Townshend of The Who’s appraisal: “Well, it changed me. I hated it.” The literal highs and lows of this pretty much define the counterculture movement. While the concert itself might not have changed the world, it symbolises a movement that was akin to a modern renaissance.
The Rolling Stones, Altamont Free Concert, 1969
The fact that The Altamont Speedway was only found and confirmed as a venue 48 hours before the event served as a warning. When the Hell’s Angels were hired to work security for just $500 worth of beer was a huge red flag. It soon became no laughing matter as the portents came to very violent fruition. There were three accidental deaths and the brutal stabbing of Meredith Hunter following a frantic ordeal with security.
In many ways, while Woodstock might have symbolised the revolution that went before it, Altamont was the moment it stepped one toke over the line, and the prelapsarian dream of the 1960s came to an inevitable, gory end. Now, rock ‘n’ roll was no longer the scorned realm of peace and love hippies but rather a rightly condemned world that was treating danger a little too trivially. Suddenly, the divide between mainstream culture and the counterculture grew, and that chasm is still stretching today, even in a far more sanitised age.
The Sex Pistols, The Lesser Free Trade Hall, 1976
On February 21st, 1976, a piece in NME written by Neil Spencer ran with the headline: “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming”. Therein it documented tales of band members cavorting with half-dressed members of the public on stage, chairs and tables being utterly Chernobyled in a seeming mutiny against anything perceived as banal, and a Frenchman shouting to Steve Jones, “You can’t play!” and the guitarist flippantly replying, “So what?” The rest is ancient history. It suddenly became more important to have something to say rather than the proficient means to say. Art became more expressive rather than virtuoso.
Thereafter, the Sex Pistols found themselves riding the crest of the perfect wave that finally broke upon the shore of pop culture on June 4th, 1976, at The Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Present that day were Joy Division, Factory Records founders Martin Hannett and Tony Wilson, Mick Hucknall, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Morrissey, John Cooper Clarke and many other liars. These all went on to kickstart a new punk revolution thanks to one incendiary show.
David Bowie, East Berlin’s Reichstag, 1989
In 1987, David Bowie played a concert in East Berlin near the Reichstag. A crowd of 70,000 gathered. As Bowie rallied through a triumphant set, an amassment of revellers began to build in the west. From the far side of the wall, a crowd was heard. “It was like a double concert where the wall was the division,” Bowie recalled in an interview with The Atlantic. “And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. When we did ‘Heroes’ it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer.”
As the concert gloriously sprinted towards a fever-pitched crescendo, a chant of “THE WALL MUST FALL” rang out, and momentarily, Berlin was united in a harmonious symphony of song. In a panicked frenzy, the authorities trying to police the orgiastic melee began to brandish bully clubs against the revellers and, in an ironic twist, landed the blow that would quash the regime.
Suddenly, the great wall seemed ridiculous, and from naive beginnings, the red tape of politics was eviscerated in a perfunctory declaration of unity. While championing Bowie as the conquering hero of the Berlin Wall is a little bit glossy-eyed, there is undoubtedly nothing that makes the bastards of this world look stupider than the great boon of art.
Pussy Riot, Moscow Subway Station, 2011
In November 2011, masked women began scurrying up a scaffold in a Moscow subway station. The shocked faces of would-be passengers looked on. They soon found themselves amid a flurry of feathers as down pillows were pulled apart by the assailants. However, this was no strange fantasy snow globe; the pounding punk music accompanying the protest made sure of that. The song, titled ‘Release the Cobblestones’, rattled around the underground. The masked band decreed: “Your ballots will be used as toilet paper by the Presidential Administration”.
Only a matter of months later, three of the women present that day were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. Two of the women would eventually serve 21 months in prison before an amnesty was approved. One of those women, Nadya Tolokonnikova, recently spoke to the Guardian, saying, “If you fight with a dictator like Putin, you have to show them that you are willing to die—and I was.”
The other woman, Masha Alekhina, was jailed once more back in February for “extremist propaganda”. This was a mark of defiance that signalled the first ripples of civil discontent in Russia. While it might not have presently changed the world beyond that, there is hope that the subversive seed sowed will have reverberating impacts.
