SNACK Benefit, Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, CA, 3-23-1975, Part 1: Graham Central Station

It's time for me to post another big rock festival. This one is the SNACK Benefit in San Francisco in 1975. SNACK stood for "Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks." This concert was a charity benefit organized by rock promoter Bill Graham after he found out the San Francisco school district was going to make drastic budget cuts, including eliminating all after school sports and other extracurricular activities. 

Since this is the first of eight albums containing the sets from the SNACK concert, here's where I'll give some background to the concert as a whole. If you want to know more, here's the Wikipedia entry about it:

SNACK Benefit Concert - Wikipedia

You can also read an interesting Rolling Stones Magazine article about it here:

Dylan, Brando and Co. Work for Snack (rollingstone.com)

Bill Graham called up famous musicians he knew and convinced them to perform at this concert. He later told the media, "The children will not have musical instruments. There will be no football practices. There will be no cheerleaders. No after-school tutoring. ... We make our living from the youth of San Francisco. This is one way we hope to thank them." The school district was facing a two million dollar shortfall. The concert didn't raise that much money, considerably less than a million dollars. However, the date before the concert, the district announced they had "found" two million dollars in the budget due to an accounting error, eliminating most of the shortage and saving the cuts from happening. I'm sure the district was embarrassed into doing this due to bad publicity, so the concert was successful in its goal.

The concert was held in a huge sports stadium, resulting in an audience of 60,000 people. That made it the largest benefit concert in rock history up until that point. In addition to a bunch of famous music acts, some famous celebrities gave speeches between the music sets, including Willie Mays, Marlon Brando, and Jesse Owens.

Now let me discuss this exact album. The albums in this concert are sorted chronologically by the times the acts went on stage. The American funk band Graham Central Station was the first major act to perform. (Latin jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri actually went on first, but I don't have that set.) In 1974, Graham Central Station released their first two albums. They had a minor hit with the song "Can You Handle It."

The band has only ever released one live album, and that's from way later, a 1992 album by a reunited version of the band. So it's good to get a live recording of the band in the mid-1970's prime. Their commercial peak was actually be 1975, when they had their biggest hit, "Your Love," later in the year.

This album is 51 minutes long.

01 The Jam (Graham Central Station)
02 Feel the Need (Graham Central Station)
03 We've Been Waiting (Graham Central Station)
04 Release Yourself (Graham Central Station)
05 Can You Handle It (Graham Central Station)
06 People (Graham Central Station)
07 It Ain't No Fun to Me (Graham Central Station)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16603879/VA-SNCKBnefitKzarStdumSnFrncscoCA__3-23-1975_01GrhmCntrlStaton_atse.zip.html

I was able to find photos from this exact concert for the cover art for all the acts except two. One of those two was Graham Central Station. Instead, I found a photo of the band at Munich TV Studios in Munich, Germany, on January 23, 1975. Using Photoshop, I removed the band from their background and put in a background that would match all the other covers from this concert. The end result isn't great, but hopefully it's good enough to get the job done. 

The logo at the top left was taken unchanged from promotional materials for the concert.