Various Artists - Rally for Nuclear Disarmament, Central Park, New York City, 6-12-1982

A few days ago (as I write this in December 2025), I posted five hours of a concert called "Peace Sunday," which was a big benefit concert for the anti-nuclear war movement in 1992, held in Los Angeles. As I was researching that one, I discovered there was another concert for the same cause that took place a week later in New York City. I did a little more digging, and found part of it that got broadcast on radio station WNEW at the time. So I'm presenting that here. 

There's a lot about this concert that I don't know, apparently lost in the mists of time. I do know there was an absolutely enormous protest rally in Central Park on June 12, 1982. News reports say about a million people attended, making it the largest protest rally in the history of the U.S., at least up until that time. Part of that all day event was a concert. Some of it was broadcast on the radio, and that's what I have here. But I can't find any information about how much more there was that is now missing. 

However, I do have some clues. Rita Marley actually performed four songs, which I found on YouTube. But the sound quality, apparently from homemade video footage was poor. I managed to salvage one song to at least represent her, but I had to do a LOT of work on it (using the MVSEP program) to make it at least listenable. Note the sound quality gets better after that, so don't be discouraged because it's the first song. I also know Jackson Browne played the song "For Everyman," which is not here. The radio broadcast cut in part way through the song, and there were technical problems, so only the last minute was salvageable. That was so little that I decided to just cut it out entirely. I also know performed a duet of the song "I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine." One can find a video of that on YouTube, but the quality was so bad that I had no hope of salvaging that one. They also did the song together in the studio for Ronstadt's 1982 album "Get Closer," by the way.

Furthermore, at the end of the concert, there were appearances by Jesse Colin Young, Bonnie Raitt, Carly Simon, and Graham Nash. I suspect one or more of them probably had songs of their own earlier in the concert. I also saw a mention that Holly Near sang something at some point. The problem is, the radio broadcast only showed highlights of some of the big names, and even then it seems they took commercial breaks from time to time, skipping songs. If anyone knows more (for instance if you attended and remember what happened), please let us know.

To make matters more complicated, two days earlier, there was a related concert with a very similar name, the "Concert for Nuclear Disarmament," held at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, just outside New York City. That holds about 15,000 people. I found a review of that concert. There were only three acts: James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne. But because there were fewer acts, each of them performed almost full sets. I found one audience bootleg of part of that, but the sound quality was pretty terrible, so I won't be posting it. 

Anyway, having something (in worthy sound quality) is better than having nothing. What we have here is pretty nice, even though many of the performers are the same ones who played in the "Peace Sunday" concert a week earlier in Los Angeles. Linda Ronstadt even played "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)" with the same two well-known backing singers, Rosemary Butler and Nicolette Larson.

It was notable that Bruce Springsteen performed. However, I consulted the "Brucebase" website, which is very thorough, and that confirms that he only performed on two songs, while a guest during Jackson Browne's set. He sang his own song, "Badlands," with Browne on backing vocals, then Browne sang his own "Running on Empty" with Springsteen on backing vocals. 

Another interesting tidbit is that James Taylor and John Hall jointly performed the song "Children's Cry." Taylor mentioned before the song started that they had written it together specifically for this concert. I did a little searching. It seems the only time this song was ever played was at this concert and at the "Concert for Nuclear Disarmament" two days earlier. And it apparently was never officially released in any form.

This concert recording sounded pretty decent, but there were issues. Some time back, musical friend Lil Panda did some audio editing to improve just the Linda Ronstadt songs. So I used his version for those. I also tried some editing of my own. I ran all the songs through MVSEP, and got rid of most of the crowd noise during songs while keeping it at the ends of songs. I then ran all the songs through MVSEP again, and adjusted the balance between the lead vocals and the instruments. For maybe half the songs, the lead vocals were too low.

It anyone has more of this concert (or the related Concert for Nuclear Disarmament), please share it. 

This album is an hour and 33 minutes long. 

01 One Love (Rita Marley)
02 The Pretender (Jackson Browne & Gary U.S. Bonds)
03 talk (Joan Baez)
04 Imagine (Joan Baez)
05 Promised Land (Bruce Springsteen with Jackson Browne)
06 talk (Jackson Browne)
07 Running on Empty (Jackson Browne with Bruce Springsteen)
08 talk (Jackson Browne)
09 Tumbling Dice (Linda Ronstadt)
10 Blue Bayou (Linda Ronstadt)
11 talk (Linda Ronstadt)
12 The Shoop Shoop Song [It's in His Kiss] (Linda Ronstadt with Rosemary Butler & Nicolette Larson)
13 Desperado (Linda Ronstadt)
14 Heat Wave (Linda Ronstadt)
15 Living in the U.S.A. (Linda Ronstadt)
16 That Lonesome Road (James Taylor)
17 You've Got a Friend (James Taylor)
18 talk (James Taylor)
19 Up on the Roof (James Taylor)
20 Stand and Fight (James Taylor)
21 talk (James Taylor & Chaka Khan)
22 It's Growing (James Taylor & Chaka Khan)
23 talk (James Taylor)
24 Children's Cry (James Taylor & John Hall)
25 talk (Joy Ryder & Avis Davis)
26 No More Nukes (Joy Ryder & Avis Davis)
27 talk (John Hall)
28 Plutonium Is Forever (John Hall)
29 talk (John Hall)
30 talk (Jackson Browne & Graham Nash)
31 Power (John Hall, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash & Carly Simon)
32 talk (John Hall)
33 Let's Get Together (Jesse Colin Young & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/hjST8tt6

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/NVjT1WCkPe1RhvJ/file

The cover photo shows Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. I would bet this was taken during the duet they did, "I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine," which unfortunately is not included here. The original was in black and white. But I used the "Kolorize" program to colorize it.

Various Artists - Peace Sunday, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA, 6-6-1982, Part 5: Linda Ronstadt & Nicolette Larson, Bette Midler, Jackson Browne, Gary U.S. Bonds, and Tom Petty

Here's the fifth out of five albums that make up the "Peace Sunday" concert in 1982.

I'll just paste in a paragraph I wrote in my post for Part 2, since it still applies here:

If you want a full explanation of what the concert was about, please read my write-up for Part 1. In that, I also explained about the sound quality issue. In short, the only known source for the whole concert is an audience bootleg. It didn't sound very good, so this concert recording hasn't been shared that much. But I could tell there was potential there, if I could get rid of most of the much. As I explained in detail in my write-up, I think I did get rid of most of it. It still doesn't have excellent sound, but it's pretty good, and worthy of being posted at my blog, where I have pretty high sound quality standards.

This big concert ended with a bunch of star performers. Linda Ronstadt dominated the first half of this part of the concert. During her set, she let her friend Nicolette Larson sing one song, while Larson and Rosemary Butler sang back-up on another song. Then Bette Midler just sang one song, acappella style, and also made a lot of funny comments.

Jackson Browne dominated the second half of this part of the concert. After performing three songs, he had Gary U.S. Bonds sing one song, "This Little Girl," which was a hit in 1981. Then Browne and Bonds sang a song together, "The Pretender." The song was written by Browne and released by him in 1975. But Bonds did a version on his 1981 album. After that, Tom Petty showed up to sing two songs, with Browne backing him up. Curiously, he sang two cover versions instead of any of his own songs. Perhaps that was because he was backed by Browne's band instead of the Heartbreakers, like he was used to.

At the very end, all the stars from earlier in the concert came back to sing two songs. First, Graham Nash led the others on his song "Teach Your Children." Then everyone sang "Give Peace a Chance," originally by John Lennon. But this version skipped the verses (with very hard to remember lyrics) and just repeated the chorus over and over again. 

Two songs, "Blue Bayou" and "I Only Want to Be with You," have "[Edit]" in their titles. As I mentioned in my Part 1 write-up, I did a lot of editing on all the songs. But those two needed even more work on top of that. For instance, with "Blue Bayou" the first verse had the sound of some person near the taper talking through it. But luckily the verse was repeated later, so I patched in sections of that to get rid of that person's voice. 

This album is an hour and eight minutes long.

Note that, for all the parts, the track numbers continue from the numbers in the previous part. That way, you can put all the songs together and listen to the whole thing at once if you want.  

61 Blue Bayou [Edit] (Linda Ronstadt)
62 talk (Linda Ronstadt)
63 The Shoop Shoop Song [It's in His Kiss] (Linda Ronstadt with Rosemary Butler & Nicolette Larson)
64 talk (Linda Ronstadt & Nicolette Larson)
65 I Only Want to Be with You [Edit] (Nicolette Larson with Linda Ronstadt)
66 Get Closer (Linda Ronstadt)
67 talk (Linda Ronstadt)
68 Back in the U.S.A. (Linda Ronstadt)
69 talk (Bette Midler)
70 You Must Ask the Heart (Bette Midler)
71 talk (Bette Midler)
72 talk (Jackson Browne)
73 Crow on the Cradle (Jackson Browne)
74 talk (Jackson Browne)
75 Running on Empty (Jackson Browne)
76 Doctor My Eyes (Jackson Browne)
77 talk (Gary U.S. Bonds & Jackson Browne)
78 This Little Girl (Gary U.S. Bonds with Jackson Browne)
79 The Pretender (Gary U.S. Bonds & Jackson Browne)
80 talk (Jackson Browne)
81 Well... Alright (Tom Petty with Jackson Browne)
82 Not Fade Away (Tom Petty with Jackson Browne)
83 talk (Everyone)
84 Teach Your Children (Graham Nash & Everyone)
85 Give Peace a Chance (Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/tBipmuXn

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/g4QkgU1zmITJigf/file

I got really lucky when it comes to this concert. I only found a handful of photos from the whole thing, but that was just enough to find good ones for four out of the five parts. This one shows Tom Petty (in front) and Jackson Browne during this part of the concert. 

Various Artists - Lowell George Tribute Concert, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA, 8-4-1979

Lowell George was the lead guitarist and a key songwriter for the band Little Feat throughout the 1970s. In 1979, the band split up due to creative differences, and George released a solo album. He announced plans to restart the band with a slightly different line-up. But on June 29, 1979, while on tour to support his solo album, he died of a heart attack related to an accidental heroin overdose. He was only 34 years old. Only a couple of months after his death, a tribute concert was held in Los Angeles to celebrate his life and his music. Here is what remains available from that concert.

I'm posting this album almost entirely due to the efforts of musical friend Lil Panda. A couple of days ago (as I write this in August 2025), he sent me this concert out of the blue. He'd found a video from the concert on YouTube. The sound quality was fundamentally good, but had issues. I asked him what he did to fix it, and this was his reply: "Phase correction, azimuth adjustment, de-clicking, music rebalance (different for almost every song... trial and error), the repair assistant (vocal work), and spectral repair." So, thanks to his work, this should sound much better than ever before.

Furthermore, I made some additional changes, since I'm more willing to make changes to bootlegs if I think it improves the overall recording. I noticed some minor drop-outs here and there, usually only a second or less of silence. I patched those up when I found them. That's why three of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. 

In addition, the video did something strange with the songs "Running on Empty" and "All That You Dream." If you watch the video, they're edited to seem complete, but in fact both of them were edited way down, to less than two minutes long each. By sheer luck, the only officially released performance from this concert is "All That You Dream," from the Little Feat album "Hoy Hoy," and it's the entire song. So I used that instead. For "Running on Empty," most of the song except for the first verse and some of the end was missing. I used a different live version of this song, from the 1979 No Nukes concerts that I've posted elsewhere on this blog, to fill in the missing part of the song. But there are some differences between the versions, so you might notice the edits. Still, I prefer that over having a weirdly short version. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title too.

In addition, I made another edit to all the songs. That's because the video usually cut the cheering at the ends of the songs short, to just a couple of seconds. It didn't sound right to me. So I did some copying and pasting of cheering from one song to another until all the songs had a decent amount of applause. 

I found a 1979 New York Times article about the concert, so I know a little bit about it. Here's the article link (though it may not work for you if you don't have a subscription):

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/06/archives/pop-coast-tribute-to-lowell-george.html 

According to the concert, the proceeds from the concert were given to George's family. The concert lasted almost three hours. In addition to the big names included in this album, some others also took part, like Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, Eric Kaz, Craig Fuller, J. D. Souther, Ted Tempelman, and the Tower of Power. But the video here is less than an hour long, and a lot got cut out. Either their roles were cut entirely or they only had minor roles. For instance, Michael McDonald sang back up on one song here, and the Tower of Power horns played on a few of the songs. Generally speaking, Little Feat was the backing band. But I didn't include them in most of the song credits because that would have made the song names longer and I didn't know for sure who played on which song.

The article states that some big musical stars, like Bob Dylan and the Eagles, wanted to perform at the concert as well. However, the surviving Little Feat band members who organized the concert decided to keep it to just the other musicians who knew George well. There also was pressure to have more than one concert, since interest was extremely high, but they decided not to go that route either.

The concert was filmed and recorded with the idea of later releasing an album or film of it. But so far, only that one song mentioned above has been officially released, on a Little Feat album. I've read on social media that it is believed the rest of the film footage has been lost. So this is probably all we're ever going to get. I couldn't even find any information about what other songs were performed, though there must have been many since this is only about one-third of the entire concert.

Thanks again to Lil Panda for digging this up, improving it, and sending it to me. 

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 Tears, Tears and More Tears (Nicolette Larson)
02 Rhumba Girl (Nicolette Larson & Linda Ronstadt)
03 Oh Atlanta [Edit] (Little Feat with Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt & Nicolette Larson)
04 Runaway [Edit] (Bonnie Raitt with Michael McDonald)
05 Here, There and Everywhere (Emmylou Harris)
06 For a Dancer [Edit] (Jackson Browne)
07 Running on Empty [Edit] (Jackson Browne)
08 talk (Jackson Browne)
09 Your Bright Baby Blues (Jackson Browne)
10 Poor, Poor Pitiful Me (Linda Ronstadt with Nicolette Larson)
11 Blowin' Away (Linda Ronstadt & Bonnie Raitt)
12 All That You Dream (Linda Ronstadt with Nicolette Larson & Rosemary Butler)
13 Willin' (Linda Ronstadt with Emmylou Harris, Rosemary Butler & Nicolette Larson)
14 Dixie Chicken (Little Feat & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bLDhuADx

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/dwuvGZGMKED7Jiy/file

I had difficulty finding any decent photographs from this concert. There's an entire video of it on YouTube, as mentioned above, but the image quality is very low-res. I eventually found one image I was okay with, which I used as the cover. From right to left, it shows Nicolette Larson, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, and Linda Ronstadt. Souther's prominent role is a bit ironic, since he doesn't feature in the actual music here, due to whatever songs he was in not making it to the video. It kind of looks like I edited the photo to squish everyone close together, but in fact that's how it was in the original.

The image was still in pretty poor shape, so I tried to use the Krea AI program to improve it. But I could only do so much, so it's still rough. I also couldn't change the lighting that turned most everything orange, though I tried to make it more colorful.