A Conspiracy of Hope, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ, 6-15-1986, Part 1 - John Eddie, Third World, the Hooters, and Peter, Paul & Mary

I've recently had a focus on posting big festival concerts, since those often seem to be overlooked. The next one up is the "A Conspiracy of Hope" concert from 1986. 

There actually was a short tour of six concerts across the United States in June 1986. But this one in East Rutherford, New Jersey (near New York City), the last one of the tour, was special. The six shows featured U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, and the Neville Brothers, with occasional additions or reductions in the line-up from show to show. But this final show of the tour was much longer, with many more big names. It was almost like a lesser version of Live Aid, which took place the year earlier. 

The cause this time was the non-profit group Amnesty International, which supports human rights across the world, with an emphasis on using public pressure to get governments to release political prisoners. The concerts had more of a focus on raising awareness than raising money. You can read the Wikipedia page about the Conspiracy of Hope tour here:

A Conspiracy of Hope - Wikipedia

And the Wikipedia page on Amnesty International here:

Amnesty International - Wikipedia 

Luckily for us, the entire concert (from noon to 11 P.M.) was professionally recorded and broadcast on MTV at the time. The last three hours were also broadcast on network TV. Furthermore, the Westwood One radio network broadcast it live. That's why bootlegs of the entire show exist. (I don't know of any good ones from the other five shows on the tour. I actually attended the first one, in San Francisco, as one of my first concerts.)

I'm presenting all of it in chronological order. There's enough for seven hours of music, which I've broken into five albums. I believe it includes all the songs that were played. However, there was a lot of dead air between acts, as well as introductions and speeches that got cut. For instance, I learned from the Wikipedia article above that there were speeches by Senator Bill Bradley, Robert de Niro, Christopher Reeve, Michael J. Fox, Daryl Hannah, and Muhammad Ali that are not included here (they weren't on the bootleg either).

Not surprisingly, the concert started with some lesser known acts and worked up to the better known ones. The ones on this first album make up a very diverse group. John Eddie had just released his debut album, and had one hit on it, "Jungle Boy." That turned out to be his only hit. (I didn't include his first song because the first half of it was missing.) Third World is a Jamaican reggae band that is still in existence as I write this in 2023. They'd had some poppy crossover hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Hooters, an American rock band, just had two hits in the US the year before, "All You Zombies" and "And We Danced." They wouldn't have much more success in the US, but they'd have more hits in Europe. Finally, there's Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk music trio that found their greatest fame in the 1960s.

I did a lot of editing to improve the sound quality. Most importantly, I thought the lead vocals were consistently low in the mix, so I boosted them for ALL the songs in the entire concert using the audio editing program UVR5. On this album, the song "No Easy Walk to Freedom" had a major glitch that I fixed, which is why it's the only one here with "[Edit]" in the title.

This album is an hour and 17 minutes long.

001 Waste Me (John Eddie)
002 Pretty Little Rebel (John Eddie)
003 Jungle Boy (John Eddie)
004 Now That We Found Love (Third World)
005 96 Degrees in the Shade (Third World)
006 You're Playing Us Too Close (Third World)
007 Try Jah Love (Third World)
008 Jah, Jah Children Moving Up (Third World)
009 talk (Third World)
010 Day by Day (Hooters)
011 Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Hooters)
012 Where Do the Children Go (Hooters)
013 Blood from a Stone (Hooters)
014 talk (Hooters)
015 All You Zombies (Hooters)
016 And We Danced (Hooters)
017 If I Had a Hammer (Peter, Paul & Mary)
018 El Salvador (Peter, Paul & Mary)
019 No Easy Walk to Freedom [Edit] (Peter, Paul & Mary)
020 Blowin' in the Wind (Peter, Paul & Mary)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15655793/ConspircyofHpeGiantsStdiumEastRutherfrdNJ__6-15-1986_Part_1.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. Since the artists on this volume aren't big names, I decided to show a photo of the big crowd of over 50,000 people instead.