All Hol­ly­wood musi­cals need a big final set piece, one final rous­ing num­ber to bring all the nar­ra­tive threads back togeth­er, and pro­vide redemp­tion to our fall­en hero. Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the 2018 biopic about Fred­die Mer­cury and the band Queen, uses Live Aid as its final num­ber. We’ve writ­ten else­where about how this was not real­ly the final hur­rah for the band, nor was this some kind of tri­umphant return after years in the Wilder­ness. (“Radio Gaga” and “I Want to Break Free” had been in the charts just over a year pre­vi­ous.) Nei­ther was it their biggest con­cert of the 1980s. That would be the Wem­b­ley con­cert of 1986, where they would fill the exact same sta­di­um used for Live Aid, but this time it was just for them.

But Hol­ly­wood cares not for that, so instead lets look at how faith­ful­ly Rami Malek and his fel­low actors (along with what might have been Bryan Singer as direc­tor or pos­si­bly Dex­ter Fletch­er, the man who replaced him after events we’d rather not go into, look it up) faith­ful­ly recre­ate those 20 glo­ri­ous min­utes. After all, it was one of the most watched events in the sum­mer of 1985. There is video evi­dence!

I’ll leave it up to you out there to debate over Malek’s per­for­mance, which is going to suf­fer no mat­ter what he does in a side-by-side with the real thing. Instead, notice how the film­mak­ers use cer­tain parts of the per­for­mance to com­plete the nar­ra­tives of the film. We get a cut­away to Bri­an May (Gwilym Lee) with a “by George he’s actu­al­ly got it” look on his face—relief that Mer­cury final­ly got it togeth­er for the per­for­mance. There’s no equiv­a­lent shot in real life. The kiss that Mer­cury blows to some­body off cam­era is received by his moth­er and sis­ter back at his child­hood home.

After Mercury’s call-and-response with the teem­ing audi­ence, the band dives into “Ham­mer to Fall” and the film cuts to a mon­tage to show Live Aid’s phones ring­ing off the hook, anx­ious view­ers want­i­ng to donate even more because of Queen’s per­for­mance. This is again Hol­ly­wood hokum, as dona­tions only real­ly stepped up after Bob Geld­of got in front of the cam­eras a lit­tle after Queen brought the house down and harangued view­ers.

Still, you have to hand it to the movie for hav­ing the stones to indulge in the full 20 minute set, despite sil­ly moves like cut­ting away to the movie’s “you’ll nev­er go any­where” record exec­u­tive for the line “no time for losers” dur­ing the final song. (D’oh!)

YouTube user Juan Dela Cruz, who assem­bled this side-by-side, has made two oth­er com­par­i­son videos using exist­ing footage and the film: Part One is here, and here’s Part Two.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen Rehearse & Metic­u­lous­ly Pre­pare for Their Leg­endary 1985 Live Aid Per­for­mance

Watch 16 Hours of His­toric Live Aid Per­for­mances: Queen, Led Zep­pelin, Neil Young & Much More

Bob Geld­of Talks About the Great­est Day of His Life, Step­ping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Mor­ris

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

There are two late-20th cen­tu­ry rock bands named Gen­e­sis and both of them fea­tured Phil Collins, Mike Ruther­ford, and Tony Banks. The sec­ond Gen­e­sis we know of as one of the biggest-sell­ing bands of all time and authors of such mas­sive hits as “Land of Con­fu­sion,” “In Too Deep,” and “Throw­ing It All Away.” The first we may not know at all, except indi­rect­ly by way of its front­man, Peter Gabriel, bet­ter known as… solo artist Peter Gabriel.

One rea­son Gen­e­sis, the sec­ond, is more famous than its pre­de­ces­sor must be the unabashed pop ambi­tions of the remain­ing three mem­bers after Gabriel depart­ed in 1975 and pio­neer­ing lead gui­tarist Steve Hack­ett left in ‘77. Anoth­er, relat­ed, rea­son must sure­ly be that Gen­e­sis, the first, made music that was not what most peo­ple would call acces­si­ble, even in the ‘70s, though it is unde­ni­ably beau­ti­ful and strange. Lovers of the song “Invis­i­ble Touch” might find them­selves unpre­pared for “The Lamb Lies Down on Broad­way.”

Gabriel, too, went pop in the 80s, though he only got a lit­tle less weird. Yet what large­ly drove the suc­cess of his solo career also drove the suc­cess of Gen­e­sis II: MTV made it impos­si­ble to escape “Big Time” and “No Reply at All.” Can we imag­ine an alter­nate ‘80s, per­haps, in which Gabriel’s odd-pop lean­ings and the earnest bal­ladry of Collins & com­pa­ny found a mid­dle ground? That is to say, if Peter Gabriel-era Gen­e­sis had made music videos? What too-lit­tle visu­al record we have of the first Gen­e­sis looks more and more promis­ing in the YouTube age.…

A few years back, we brought you news of a restored Peter Gabriel-era Gen­e­sis con­cert film from a 1973 show at England’s Shep­per­ton Stu­dios. Now, we have, from that same year, the con­cert above in Paris at the Bat­a­clan in “a 4K restora­tion that is a stun­ning improve­ment over any­thing seen before,” writes Rolling Stone. “Sim­ply put, it’s the most pris­tine video of a Peter Gabriel-era show that has ever sur­faced.”

This is a good thing for fans of Gen­e­sis One. The band played their final album with Gabriel, The Lamb Lies Down on Broad­way, in its entire­ty on all 104 tour stops two years lat­er. It was “the most elab­o­rate pro­duc­tion they’d ever attempt­ed,” and “in a deci­sion they lived to regret, they nev­er both­ered to film it.” The Paris con­cert, if sad­ly incom­plete, may be the clos­est we’ll get visu­al­ly to the glo­ri­ous high weird­ness of the orig­i­nal Gen­e­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Gen­e­sis (from the Peter Gabriel Era) Per­form in a Glo­ri­ous, 1973 Restored Con­cert Film

Peter Gabriel Re-Records “Biko,” His Anti-Apartheid Protest Song, with Musi­cians Around the World

Revis­it Kate Bush’s Pecu­liar Christ­mas Spe­cial, Fea­tur­ing Peter Gabriel (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How excit­ed would you be to lis­ten to a record­ing, made at an AM radio sta­tion in 1963, labeled “JONI ANDERSON AUDITION TAPE”? If you know much about the singer-song­writ­ers of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, you’d be quite excit­ed indeed. For Joni Ander­son is none oth­er than Joni Mitchell, who under that mar­ried name would go on to become one of the most influ­en­tial solo per­form­ers to come out of the folk-music scene. Not that she prized the des­ig­na­tion that thus accom­pa­nied her to star­dom: “I was nev­er a folksinger,” she recent­ly remem­bered her­self insist­ing. “I would get pissed off if they put that label on me.”

She had a point. Lis­ten to that 1963 audi­tion tape, on which she sings “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” while accom­pa­ny­ing her­self on the ukulele, and on some lev­el you’ve got to call it folk music. But even at the age of 19, Mitchell — or rather Ander­son — exhib­it­ed the dis­tinc­tive­ly cap­ti­vat­ing musi­cal pres­ence that would get lis­ten­ers of more than one gen­er­a­tion play­ing her records until they wore through.

Whether the teenage DJ who record­ed her demo had any idea of what she would become at the time, he knew full well the cul­tur­al val­ue of the tape when his daugh­ter redis­cov­ered it in the base­ment more than fifty years lat­er.

In the video just above, you can see that DJ, one Bar­ry Bow­man, react to Mitchel­l’s ear­li­est-known record­ing after thread­ing it up in his home stu­dio. “Damn!” he says, mar­veling at the crisp­ness of the sound after all these decades — and the fact that he some­how man­aged to do jus­tice to both her voice and her strings with the rel­a­tive­ly mea­ger equip­ment avail­able to him at CFQC-AM. The tape even cap­tures the dis­tinc­tive sound of her alter­nate-tuned bari­tone ukulele, which she orig­i­nal­ly took up while grow­ing up in Saska­toon when her moth­er vetoed the gui­tar.

Last year Mitchel­l’s 1963 ver­sion of “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” saw offi­cial release as part of the box set Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Ear­ly Years (1963–1967). Lis­ten­ing back to the mate­r­i­al of that peri­od sur­prised even Mitchell, and made her change her mind about her ear­li­er folk-relat­ed resent­ments: “It was beau­ti­ful. It made me for­give my begin­nings. And I had this real­iza­tion… I was a folksinger!” She may have tran­scend­ed folk music — just as she left Saska­toon for Toron­to, and then Toron­to for south­ern Cal­i­for­nia — but even Joni Mitchell had to start some­where.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Watch Joni Mitchell’s Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the years fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union a “tri­umphal­ist dis­course” arose in the U.S., writes his­to­ri­an Richard Sak­wa, “which sug­gests that the Sovi­et demise was a delib­er­ate act plot­ted and exe­cut­ed by pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan” with mas­sive mil­i­tary bud­gets and nuclear threats. This nar­ra­tive has less exclu­sive cur­ren­cy today. There are as many the­o­ries as the­o­rists of Sovi­et demise, among them the “com­pelling argu­ment,” says Jim Brown, pro­duc­er of a doc­u­men­tary called Free to Rock, “that rock and roll was a fac­tor — a con­tribut­ing fac­tor of many — in end­ing the Cold War.”

It’s not a face­tious claim and may have lit­tle to do, as some allege, with the CIA spread­ing for­eign influ­ence in the U.S.S.R. dur­ing the 1980s. A home­grown “rock sub­cul­ture,” writes Carl Schreck at The Atlantic, “had been per­co­lat­ing in the Sovi­et Union for decades by the time Gor­bachev came to pow­er in 1985.”

As Metal­li­ca came to pow­er in 1991 with The Black Album, their best-sell­ing record — and one of the biggest sell­ing albums of all time, world­wide — young Rus­sians did not need to be instruct­ed in the fin­er points of rock­ing out against author­i­tar­i­an­ism and gov­ern­ment con­trol.

Nev­er before, how­ev­er, had Russ­ian rock­ers gath­ered in the open as they did in ‘91, when the heavy met­al fes­ti­val Mon­sters of Rock stopped in Moscow for the first time since its found­ing in 1980, attract­ing a report­ed 1.6 mil­lion fans — one of the largest con­certs in his­to­ry — to see head­lin­ers AC/DC, Metal­li­ca, and Pan­tera. The show “was not the first time West­ern heavy-met­al acts have played Moscow,” wrote The New York Times. “In 1989, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and Mot­ley Crue filled Lenin Sta­di­um for two days to help raise mon­ey for Sovi­et char­i­ties.” But Mon­sters of Rock was some­thing dif­fer­ent.

Pro­mot­ed as a “cel­e­bra­tion of democ­ra­cy and free­dom” by its cor­po­rate spon­sor, Time Warn­er, and arriv­ing just a month after a failed coup attempt by Sovi­et hard­lin­ers, the con­cert was some­thing of a suc­cess­ful coup for AC/DC, who “until a few years ago… were for­mal­ly banned in the Sovi­et Union.” (One 1985 list com­piled by the Young Com­mu­nist League said they pro­mot­ed “neo­fas­cism” and “vio­lence.”) Sovi­et music crit­ic and writer Andrei Orlov ges­tured toward realpoli­tik in a remark on the sub­ject: “Look at the graf­fi­ti in the city. AC/DC is writ­ten on every wall.”

Even more rev­o­lu­tion­ary, in heavy met­al terms, was the appear­ance of Metal­li­ca at sec­ond billing on the tour. It would prove to be one of sev­er­al “ live coups,” for the band, K.J. Daughton writes. After their mas­sive suc­cess on MTV with “Enter Sand­man,” “Unfor­giv­en,” and “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters,” the band played sev­er­al major con­certs, includ­ing their “his­toric musi­cal tour de force” at Tushi­no Air­field in Moscow. “In a video of the set,” writes Didi­er Cade­na (watch it in full above), “one can see the ocean of peo­ple mov­ing around and singing along, even though the major­i­ty of the crowd only knew Eng­lish through the music.”

The con­cert was not with­out its moments of vio­lence. “The bru­tal inter­ven­tion of Sovi­et police left 53 peo­ple injured,” writes Daughton (see some of the offi­cial over­re­ac­tion above). But these were the rat­tles of a dying police state. Just a few months lat­er in Decem­ber, the Sovi­et Union offi­cial­ly dis­solved.

Can AC/DC or Metal­li­ca take cred­it? No, but they were impor­tant sym­bols for a wave of dis­af­fect­ed Russ­ian youth the Sovi­et leader him­self had no desire to hold back. Gor­bachev, after all, was “a fan of Elvis Pres­ley,” says Brown. “He liked rock and roll… And I think he takes pride in the fact that after wast­ing, you know, tril­lions of dol­lars on weapons, that words and actions and cul­ture brought these two coun­tries togeth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Sovi­et Rock: From the 70s Under­ground Rock Scene, to Sovi­et Punk & New Wave in the 1980s

The Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness