We Will, We (Still) Rock You

40th Anniversary of Live Aid

It was forty years ago today…when Sergeant Freddie taught the band to play.

And uncorked what many fans and critics agree was the most epic live rock and roll performance in history.

In honor of that moment, sharing an excerpt from Recapture the Rapture where I happened to tell that tale and unpack it with a bit of neuroscience.

And here’s the full 21 minute performance if you want to soak it in yourself.

Even though “writing about music is like dancing about architecture!” as Elvis Costello once quipped.

We shall try…

From Recapture the Rapture

The Stomp Heard ’Round the World

Saturday, July 13, 1985. Wembley Stadium, London. Bob Geldof had a massive problem. He was trying to pull together the benefit concert to end all concerts—a global fund-raiser for the Ethiopian famine ravaging that country.

It was supposed to beam out to 150 countries and raise millions in aid relief. But nothing was going as planned. Paul McCartney’s microphone had crapped out for the first two minutes of the classic Beatles tune “Let It Be.”

U2 ran long and had to drop their anthem “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

Fuses blew for the Who.

Led Zeppelin—reuniting for the first time since their madcap drummer John Bonham had died—flailed, drunken and out of tune.

And with each of these mishits and wobbles, the fund-raising stalled. The donations needed for Ethiopia just weren’t coming in. Phone banks sat quiet.

Then, a last-minute addition walked onto the stage. The band Queen.

It didn’t look good for them either. Freddie Mercury, the band’s volatile but charismatic leader, had recently taken a hiatus from the group and descended into debauchery and drug use.

He’d also just been diagnosed with AIDS, which in those days was an effective death sentence. Their future together as a band was far from certain.

But for the next twenty-one minutes, none of that mattered.

At 6:41 p.m. London time, the band went on. “I remember a huge rush of adrenaline as I went onstage and a massive roar from the crowd,” Queen guitarist Brian May recounted.

“Freddie was our secret weapon. He was able to reach out to everybody in that stadium effortlessly, and I think it was really his night.”

(Queen, being, well, a little bit Queeny)

Mercury belted out a line, Aye­Oh! really more of a yodeling vowel, and the audience responded—amazingly in tune. It sounded like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where a whole hillside in India erupts with a singsong chant. Goose bumps around the world.

Then they laid into “We Will Rock You.”

stomp stomp clap. stomp stomp clap. stomp stomp clap.

The opening that, to this day, gets kids and grandparents on their feet at football games and swim meets. The rhythm that moves people.

By the end of that song, nearly eighty thousand Brits in the stadium and billions more around the world were standing, stomping and clapping to Queen’s beat.

Forty percent of the world’s population, all listening, moving, dancing, and singing—connected. A 2005 music industry poll acknowledged it as “the greatest live rock and roll performance of all time.”

By the end of the night, the trickle of donations had turned into a flood. Nearly $150 million came in. On that day, at least, Queen ruled.

Such a simple beat. stomp stomp clap.

Such an obvious thing to do.

As May reflects, it’s “one of those things that people think was always there!” But it nearly didn’t happen at all.

The original 1977 recording of “We Will Rock You” was faster and had none of the audience engagement. It wasn’t until a particularly rowdy night in Birmingham that May and Mercury realized something unusual was happening.

“They were singing along with everything we did,” he says. “And I said, ‘Obviously, we can no longer fight this. This has to be part of our show.’”

But what seemed like a new level of interactivity to May and Mercury was actually ancient—as old as music itself.

“Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated,” Daniel Levitin, professor of neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music, explains. “Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.”

The morning after the Birmingham show, May woke up with the stomp stomp clap beat in his head.

“I was thinking, ‘What can you give an audience that they could do while they’re standing there?’” May told NPR’s Terry Gross. “They can stamp and they can clap and they can sing some kind of chant,” he says. “To me, it was a united thing. It was an expression of strength.”

“It has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized,” says John Blacking, the anthropologist and author of How Musical Is Man? “The embodied nature of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound, characterizes music across cultures and across times.”

That’s why May’s insight to empower his audience with the simplest tools available—their hands and feet—to enact one of the simplest beats available was such genius.

It worked.

First time.

Every time.

For everyone.

“Our culture, and indeed our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers,” Daniel Levitin explains, “the Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys [and Freddie Mercurys]—and the rest of us.

The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us.” And not just a little bit of money, Levitin argues.

“Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs combined.”

But Queen had the intuition to see that people would give even more to be part of the performance. The “two-way process” that they had first experienced in Birmingham wasn’t an innovation after all—it was a restoration to the way music had always been.

So after that Birmingham show the band went to an abandoned church-turned-sound-studio to record a fresh cut of “We Will Rock You.”

They piled up a bunch of loose boards that were lying around and started stamping on them to simulate the clapping of a large crowd. It sounded great, but May, a physicist at Imperial College before becoming a guitar god, wanted more.

“When we recorded each track, we put a delay of a certain length on it,” May explains. “And the distances were all prime numbers.

None of the delays were harmonically related. So there’s no echo on it whatsoever, but the clapped sound—they spread around the stereo, but they also kind of spread from a distance from you—so you just feel like you’re in the middle of a large number of people stamping and clapping.”

And with that physics-geek recording trick, Queen did something magical—they re-created the timeless experience of “feeling like you’re in the middle of a large number of people stamping and clapping.”

By the time they walked onstage at Live Aid, everyone listening already knew their part by heart.

That feeling of connection to others through the power of rhythm and song is, according to ethnomusicologists, even older than language itself.

“Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found [and] predate agriculture in the history of our species,” Levitin writes.

“We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music [emphasis added]. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary. Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments.”

Think about that. In most histories of civilization, we pin language right up there with tool-making and fire as the cornerstones of our leap from hairy ape to human.

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals,” physicist Stephen Hawking wrote. “Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination.

We learned to talk.

We learned to listen.

Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.”

But if Levitin is right, learning to talk and listen happened even earlier than that.

Quite possibly, while we were still grunting and pointing, and hadn’t developed anything resembling the complex syntax we might associate with formal language, we were calling and responding, listening and speaking—connecting and coordinating— with the primal power of rhythm, melody, and voice.

“Humans are social animals,” Levitin explains, “and music may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts such as turn-taking behaviors.

Singing around the ancient campfire might have been a way to stay awake, to ward off predators, and to develop social coordination and social cooperation within the group. Humans need social linkages to make society work, and music is one of them.”

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, when ancient humans began to make music, dance, and sing, they did it not just to connect with each other but to transcend themselves. When the synchronized breathing, chanting, drumming, and dancing reached a peak, individuals likely entered trance states.

In his book Human Evolution, Dunbar describes one of the oldest surviving cultures on the planet and how they make the most of music to enhance social cohesion.

“Among the San Bushmen of southern Africa,” Dunbar writes, “trance dances are particularly likely to take place when relationships within the extended community have started to unravel as people bicker among themselves. A trance dance restores the equilibrium, almost as though it wipes the slate clean of the toxic memories of the injustices and slights that poisoned relationships.”

Think of it as an archaic Groove and Reconciliation Committee.

Batch forgiveness.

No talking stick or therapist required!

As Alice Walker puts it in the title to one of her essay collections, Hard Times Call for Furious Dancing. In these times of hypersensitivity, micro- PTSD, and nonstop culture wars, we could heed this advice.

So when concerned mothers and fathers of the 1950s and ’60s fretted about the destabilizing power of rock music on their impressionable children, when they lamented that Elvis, Beatlemania, and Woodstock heralded the decline of civilization, they had it backward.

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll weren’t the end of civilization, they were its beginning.

For tens of thousands of years, they have served as the building blocks of culture—heightening group cohesion, honing our ability to communicate, and providing glimpses of the Sublime. Without them, we might still be pointing and grunting, cowering in caves.

stomp stomp clap. stomp stomp clap.

Ancient. Primal. Profound.

For twenty-one minutes at Live Aid, the world was united against hardship and suffering by doing what came naturally.

Celebration.

If music really is the food of love, we’d do well to turn it up.

(and if you want to dive into the rest of the chapter all about the power of music to mend and inspire, check it here)