NEW YORK – Neil Young and Crazy Horse did not disappoint, and neither did any of the big-name bands leading up to the rockers' thunderous performance in a packed Central Park.
Young, the Black Keys, the Foo Fighters, Band of Horses and K'Naan wowed the 60,000-plus fans who turned out Saturday night for a free concert in Central Park to call attention to extreme poverty.
Dubbed the Global Citizen Festival, the event was also streamed worldwide.
The Black Keys and Foo Fighters delivered raucous, loud, riff-heavy sets, and John Legend made a surprise appearance, playing "Imagine" at a piano on the Great Lawn stage, a short walk from where the song's author, John Lennon, once lived, and died.
But it was Young, with his on-again off-again band Crazy Horse, that brought the night's trancendent performance, starting with a 14-minute barrage of distortion and harmonies in the song "Love and Only Love" from the album "Ragged Glory," and ending with the Young anthem "Keep on Rockin in the Free World," backed by the night's previous performers, all wide-eyed and smiles as they performed with a true musical legend still at the height of his uncanny powers.
The concert was scheduled around the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week and organizers used an innovative approach to ticket distribution so that many concert-goers were forced to learn about an array of global problems, such as polio, malaria, child mortality, and polluted drinking water, in order to get a ticket.
Anyone wanting free tickets had to register at globalcitizen.org, which then required users to watch videos or read information about poverty-related issues. Each time material was consumed, users could earn points toward a drawing for tickets. Points were also accumulated by sharing information by way of Twitter or Facebook.
"Our social media campaign has been off the charts," said Hugh Evans, CEO and co-founder of the Global Poverty Project. The approach demonstrates a new model for harnessing digital tools that may be repeated for other big events with political or social messages.
Organizers said more than 71,000 people had signed up online, resulting in more than 3.5 million page views. On average, they spent just over six minutes consuming content or sharing information. Nearly 200,000 pieces of information were shared on Facebook, and just a bit more than that on Twitter. About 170,000 people signed petitions via the site, and there were 98,000 videos viewed to completion.
Evans said the project achieved its goals, set out last year, of getting more than 100,000 people to take action related to extreme poverty while telling a new story about the challenges. To that end, the site conveys information in detailed, documentary-like accounts and uses an array of video, graphics and stories that are friendly for mobile and digital consumption.
Financially, he said, the project also achieved its yearlong goal -- working with an array of organizations like the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, the Earth Institute and Rotary International -- of garnering $500 million in commitments to help fight poverty.
So now what?
Evans said that he's hoping the audience, built online and at the concert, will continue efforts by tweeting President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to halve extreme poverty by 2015, which is the key U.N. anti-poverty goal. And Evans is working on an announcement in October or November about "a major rock band" getting involved with the anti-poverty efforts.
- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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