The first-ever charity hit single was a George Harrison masterclass
The charity single is by now a well-worn road. The biggest by some way is, without doubt, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, the star-studded Band Aid effort to aid anti-poverty efforts in Ethiopia. However, the very first was actually written by Beatles legend George Harrison.
In 1971, Harrison wrote, recorded and released ‘Bangladesh’ for the Concert for Bangladesh. The people of Bangladesh had, at the time, been fighting for independence from Pakistan. Harrison had learned of the Bangladeshi plight through his friend Ravi Shankar.
Discussing the project, Shankar said: “I was in a very sad mood, having read all this news, and I said, ‘George, this is the situation, I know it doesn’t concern you, I know you can’t possibly identify.’ But while I talked to George, he was very deeply moved, and he said, ‘Yes, I think I’ll be able to do something.'”
The concert took place on August 1st, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The single had been released three days before the event to promote it and begin raising donations to be given to those suffering in Bangladesh from a horrific 1970 cyclone and the genocidal actions committed by Western Pakistani troops in a violent conflict.
Later, Harrison said of the concert: “The Concert for Bangladesh was just a moral stance. These kinds of things have grown over the years, but what we did showed that musicians and people are more humane than politicians. Today, people accept the commitment rock ‘n’ roll musicians have when they perform for a charity. When I did it, they said things like, ‘He’s only doing this to be nice.'”
‘Bangladesh’ was the first charity single, and Harrison made the Concert for Bangladesh a multi-media event through the single and the concert, as well as releasing an album and a film. It was successful at a scale that was not replicated until Band Aid in 1984.
Harrison and his friends, including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, managed to raise $243,000 overnight before millions more came in from sales of the album. Harrison, however, had been adamant not to give the proceeds to the Red Cross. He said: “Because this concert was done with such short time for preparation, also because so many of these concerts were rip-offs, we wanted to ensure that we could do the concert and nobody would think that we were keeping the money ourselves.”
Detailing further, Harrison added: “We checked different things out; we were going to give it to the Red Cross, this was the first idea – that we give the money to the American Red Cross, who in turn could give it to the Indian Red Cross – but then we heard so many different stories about the Red Cross, and how there’s, you know, hurricanes hitting someplace in America, and they just take care of the whites, and all the blacks are there, and they’re not taking care of them. You hear so many different stories about things.”
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