Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS via GI
Bob Dylan surprised thousands of fans at Willie Nelson’s sold-out Farm Aid Festival with a surprise late-night performance on Saturday (September 23) at the Ruoff Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana.
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The performance came 38 years after Dylan came up with the idea for Farm Aid.
On July 13, 1985, in Philadelphia, Dylan walked onto the stadium stage of Live Aid, the mega-benefit organization raising money for the Ethiopian famine. Between songs, he thought about the event’s global audience: Couldn’t a similar benefit help America’s family farmers?
“The question hit me like a slap in the face,” Nelson recalled to Billboard in 2015. The musician was on the road that day, watching “Live Aid” on his tour bus television and began to think about the economic crisis that was afflicting his family at the time, with farmers evicting their land and going bankrupt. He then called his friends, including the musician who made the suggestion.
Dylan was among the notable cast of country and rock musicians who performed the first Farm Aid in Champaign, Illinois on September 22, 1985, which also included Nelson’s Farm Aid co-founders Neil Young and John Mellencamp, as well as Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, Don Henley, Billy Joel, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, Bonnie Raitt and many more – including Tom Petty, who died in 2017, and Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers.
Three decades later, Farm Aid remains the longest-running music concert for a good cause, having raised more than $64 million to support family farmers and a sustainable food system.
Farm Aid’s executive board now includes Dave Matthews and Margo Price, and Saturday’s program also included Bobby Weir & the Wolf Bros. featuring the Grateful Dead’s Wolfpack, Lukas Nelson, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Allison Russell, The String Cheese Incident and Particle Kind. Also on the program: Clayton Anderson, The Black Opry with Lori Rayne, Tylar Bryant and Kyshona, the Jim Irsay Band with Ann Wilson of Heart, Native Pride Productions and the Wisdom Indian Dancers.
At Farm Aid in 1985, Dylan performed with Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“At the time, Tony Dimitriades, Tom’s manager, was in a business partnership with [the late] Elliot Roberts in Lookout Management,” who represented Dylan, recalled Bill DeYoung, a music critic, author and Petty historian, in a 2017 interview with Billboard. DeYoung worked for many years at the Gainesville Sun, the newspaper in Petty’s hometown of Florida.
“Dylan needed a band for the first Farm Aid,” DeYoung said. “Everything else came from that.”
Everything Else included the True Confessions Tour, which Dylan and Petty embarked on together early the following year, in February 1986, during which the Heartbreakers supported Dylan at some 60 shows in Australia, Japan and the United States – including two nights at the RFK Stadium in 1986 Washington, DC and three nights at Madison Square Garden.
The singers also performed at the second Farm Aid on July 4, 1986 – via satellite from their tour stop at Rich Stadium outside Buffalo, New York. A second excursion, the Temples in Flames tour, followed in 1987.
And the creative friendship between Dylan and Petty – born at Farm Aid – blossomed.
In 1988, Dylan welcomed Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison to his Malibu studio to record the song “Handle Me With Care.” Originally intended to be the B-side of a single from Harrison’s Cloud Nine album, the song instead became the inspiration for tongue-in-cheek supergroup The Traveling Wilburys.
So Dylan found a potent touring partner in Farm Aid and a successful recording collaboration. On Saturday, the legendary singer contributed to the goal of helping America’s family farmers that he first proposed on stage 38 years ago.
This is a developing story and will be updated.