Less than a month before its scheduled Oct. 4 date in the 60,000-seat Texas Stadium, FarmAid ’97 – boasting a bill of some 30 acts, Willie Nelson, one of the FarmAid founders, faced a wrenching decision: cancel the show and bow out of a 12-year labor of love, or press on in the face of mounting expenses that could only take money away from his project’s intended beneficiaries, impoverished family farmers.
“I was in a coma for about three days,” Nelson remembers. “We already had spent a whole lot of money, and I just couldn’t bring that kind of show into Dallas and let ’em play to 10,000 seats. It looked like it was going to be a disaster.”
According to executive director Carolyn Mugar’s office, FarmAid during its dozen-year lifetime has dispensed some $13 million in direct-service grants over 12 years to more than 100 farm organizations, churches and service agencies in 44 states, providing emergency legal and medical assistance, as well as food to the neediest of the half-million family farmers still on the land. Nearly $300,000 of these funds has been spent in Illinois, says FarmAid program director Harry Smith.
Randi Roth, executive director of one of the beneficiaries, Farmers Legal Action Group Inc. in Minneapolis, says FLAG provides “thousands of hours” of legal research and advice to farmers who could not afford these services. Roth says FLAG “would not have been able to do that anymore” without FarmAid funding and was discussing “turning off our phones” when FarmAid ’97 was reported in deep trouble.
But if Nelson persisted with the Dallas show — which was having to compete with an entertainment-studded Texas State Fair and another looming high-dollar extravaganza in the impending Dallas appearance by the Rolling Stones — a flop would further hurt, instead of help, all of FarmAid’s dependent organizations.
So Nelson canceled the event, telephoning such prominent pop acts as Beck, the Dave Matthews Band, John Fogerty, the Allman Brothers Band and Steve Earle, along with festival co-founders Neil Young and John Mellencamp. He says he told them “they were going to play to an empty building, so why do it? It wouldn’t be helping the farmers, and it wouldn’t be helping them (the acts).”
“It was, uh, rather devastating,” Nelson recalls. “I thought maybe it was time to stop doing these things. We never had intended to raise enough money to bail out the farmers, because that would take trillions of dollars. All we were trying to do was let the people know what was going on.”
That can continue, thanks to an improbable midnight resurrection.
A well-placed Nashville source, who refuses to be quoted by name, says someone in the FarmAid braintrust finally raised the possibility of moving the show to another city, which nobody had considered because there was less than a month to go until Oct. 4, the date on which The Nashville Network had committed itself to do a live FarmAid telecast.
But now, the source recalls, a quick check was made of big venues around the country, and it turned out that the New World Music Theatre was available. The Tinley Park amphitheater also is co-owned by Arny Granat of Jam Productions, who worked on the first FarmAid, held in 1985 in Champaign.
“So Willie called him up and said, `I understand you have a 30,000-seat facility that’s not booked on this day.’ `Yes sir.’ `Well, do you think you could put the show in there and go on sale (with tickets) on Saturday and donate that facility to us?’
“Nobody’s going to turn Willie down,” the source says. “Or at least Arny didn’t.”
Suddenly, a few hours after being canceled in Texas, FarmAid was back on, having been transferred nearly a thousand miles. Although the production had to be cut from 12 to 7 hours, and about 20 of the original bill’s acts couldn’t make the Chicago switch because of ancillary bookings they had accepted around Texas, all the superstars remained in place. So did the TNN telecast, and Billy Ray Cyrus volunteered his additional services to the marquee.
Evelyn Shriver, Nelson’s publicist, says the one-day cancellation seemed to transform the event into a front-page story again, and “several cities” offered help.
Nelson mentions Indianapolis as one of them, but adds that Granat gave them the most generous financial offer. Shriver says Granat’s offer also presented the “largest comfort factor” because he “believed in his heart and soul that the show would do great there.”
Tickets didn’t go on sale in the Chicago area the following Saturday, as Nelson had requested — it took until the subsequent Monday to make that happen — but on that Monday 12,000 tickets, nearly twice the total sold in Texas in a month, were sold in one day with no paid advertising. Within another 36 hours (and still before the paid advertising kicked in), 15,000 — including all of the $35-$50 reserved seats — were gone, with only $25 lawn seats remaining, according to Jam vice president Andy Cirzan. After a week, Cirzan reported the sales total at around 20,000 and momentum continuing to build.
Jam’s Granat, who took on the FarmAid burden at the same time Jam was in the final stages of kicking off the U.S. tour of the Rolling Stones in Chicago, seems to downplay his pivotal role, saying mainly that he “got a call” asking for help and that he “ended up working it out for them.
“I guaranteed them some cost stuff and got on the radio and did some PR. What the hell. You gotta give something back,” Granat says.
He apparently gave back a lot. According to Nelson, Granat not only donated use of the World, he gave FarmAid a gate percentage under which it could realize “a few hundred thousand dollars” if the venue’s 30,000 capacity is sold out.
