Hard to believe it’s been almost 40 years now since John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young founded Farm Aid to help American farms and farmers. The very first Farm Aid benefit concert took place on this day, September 22, 1985, at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois.
The idea was begun when the guys heard Bob Dylan during a July 13th benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief.
“I hope that some of the money ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks.”
— Bob Dylan, July 13, 1985
The first performers included Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, John Fogerty, Sammy Hagar, Daryl Hall, Don Henley, Robbie Krieger, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Eddie Van Halen, Foreigner, and more!
They raised over $9 Million for U.S. family farmers.
But, they soon realized one concert wasn’t going to solve the problem, so they’ve returned every year to grow the event, and continue to help American farmers with one of the biggest, and most diverse concert lineups imaginable.
And the first show featured one of the first performances with Sammy Hagar and Eddie Van Halen, which is an amazing thing to behold. Unfortunately, while this was their planned introduction as Sammy as the new Van Halen frontman, Sammy got so excited by the crowd’s reaction to his solo show that night, he accidentally introduced “I Can’t Drive 55″ by saying, “Here’s a song for all you tractor-pulling motherf----rs!” and the radio and TV feeds were immediately cut off. So when Eddie got on stage and they announced Sammy as the new singer...nobody saw or heard it.
But they still killed on this amazing performance of “Rock and Roll”.
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