Setting the Stage
The seed for Farm Aid was planted by Bob Dylan while on stage at a different benefit concert, Live Aid: “Wouldn’t it be great if we did something for our own farmers right here in America?” In just a few weeks, that sentiment would come to fruition with the efforts of Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young. As a result, the first Farm Aid would bridge the popularity of large-scale international benefit concerts with the nuanced, national concerns of the American Public, staged–in a flash–in Champaign County. The humanitarian call to action was simple: family farmers were in dire straits and at risk of erasure by corporate agriculture and a lack of federal support.
By the time Farm Aid was staged in September 1985, it was just one of several benefit concerts that had seen a surge in popularity and commercial success. George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 established the modern template of staging a large-scale benefit concert that operated alongside nonprofit and philanthropic agencies like UNICEF to ensure that proceeds from the event would be allocated to the appropriate humanitarian cause. In July 1985, Live Aid would famously build on this model on an international scale, using two locations–London and Philadelphia–as concert sites. Framing a benefit concert as a humanitarian project and a rock concert accomplished two important goals: first, it elevated a socioeconomic message about a local crisis to a wider audience, and second, it packaged and monetized that message through ticket sales and, usually, a concert LP.
If the showrunners of Farm Aid wanted to anchor their message to a space emblematic of their values, then Memorial Stadium in Champaign was a key fit. Memorial Stadium was logistically capable of supporting the infrastructural and economic needs that staging a large-scale benefit concert would require. But having Farm Aid in Illinois, specifically Champaign County, bolstered the concert's symbolic narrative. Champaign County is home to more centennial farms; farms that the Illinois Department of Agriculture certifies a single family has owned for at least 100 years. If one of the core goals of Farm Aid was to champion small-scale farming communities, then Champaign County was a perfect place to anchor this celebration.
For John Graham, the assistant director of the Assembly Hall at the time, he remembered that the concert needed to be set up on short notice:
“when the announcement came out that they were going to have Farm Aid. The Assembly Hall management group was tasked with putting the event on from the university standpoint, so we became the coordinators for that from the university side. And so my job as I had been the event manager at the Assembly hall, so I became the event manager here and that was coordinating the parking and the ushers and security and police and all the things that would be associated with putting the event on. It's called the front of house. So I did everything this side of the stage. The stage was positioned. About where the Illinois sign is on the field, facing this direction here. So it was. And we had about 20 days to put this thing together.”
In those twenty days, Graham, along with other members of the Assembly Hall Management Group, set to work readying everything that would be needed for the thousands of concertgoers and dozens of performers that would soon be flocking to the community.