Breaking News: Al Gore Announces "Live Earth" Mega-Concert

Al Gore is teaming up with the organizers of Live 8 and a slew of music biggest stars for a twenty-four hour concert across seven continents (yes, including Antarctica) on July 7th (7/7/07) to raise awareness of environmental issues. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Foo Fighters, Snoop Dogg, John Mayer, Akon, A.F.I., Fall Out Boy, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill are among the participating artists being announced at a press conference in Los Angeles today.

Though not all of the locations have been confirmed, organizer Kevin Wall, who spearheaded the Live 8 concerts in 2005, has a possible plan: "We'll start in Shanghai, and go to Sydney and Rio De Janeiro and Washington D.C. and London and Johannesburg and finish the show in Kyoto at the old Buddhist temple where we would do an acoustic show and ask the world to take a breath."

The concerts, which will include short films and presentations designed to educate the world on the climate crisis and advocate for specific changes, will be broadcast in over 120 countries — on NBC and seven cable networks in the U.S. — and webcast on MSN (revenues from ticket sales will go towards various environmental groups). "Our success, I hope, is to act like a tipping point for a lot of movements that are already happening," says Wall, who approached Gore with the idea after seeing his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "I told Al, 'Two million people have seen this movie — two billion people will watch this event. We'll give you the microphone. Let's make a change here.'"

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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