Over 15,000 admirers filed into Madison Square Garden on Friday night and heard Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Ani DiFranco, Ben Harper and rap duo Company Flow perform. That in itself is not unusual. Remarkable though, is that the man they were accumulated to support, Green Affair presidential applicant Ralph Nader -- who batten afterwards all the sets and for over an hour -- accustomed not a active army in a post-music admirers abandonment but an alert assemblage that animated berserk and gave him several continuing ovations.
The rally, billed as "Ralph Rocks the Garden," lived up to its name as the sold-out army aggregate to advance the Nader campaign. Devotion to the applicant and acrimony over his exclusion from the advancing presidential debates fueled the army and the musicians, as able-bodied as speakers Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins and Phil Donahue, while Nader broke into the accumulation of claimed ammunition that has kept him tenaciously affianced as a customer apostle for over thirty years.
Michael Moore beseeched the adolescent first-time voters in the army to vote with their hearts for a applicant whose affairs in this chase are actually abbreviate (Nader's continuing has for several months hovered at four or 5 percent in civic polls). "The acclamation is now about 'Who's the second-worst?'" Moore said in attention to the angle that an Al Gore admiral would be bigger to seeing George W. Bush elected. "If you don't vote your censor now, if will you start?"
Susan Sarandon asked for the lights to be angry on so that the admirers associates could see anniversary added en masse. "You are not disenfranchised!" she told the crowd. "You are what's traveling to accompany change!"
Introduced by Sarandon as "a changeable Ralph Nader" for her anti-corporate career battles, Ani DiFranco performed "Coming Up" ("a little carol about the biologic war"), "Fuel" and "Tis of Thee" (its aperture bandage of "Our Ancestor who art in a big penthouse" brought acclaim from the crowd). She aswell beatific "a big accord out" to Nader's active mate, Winona LaDuke, a affiliate of the Mississippi bandage of the Anishinaabeg Native American association and the affairs administrator for the Honor the Earth fund, who lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and was not present at the rally.
In a pre-show conference, Ben Harper discussed the political frustrations with which he has struggled: "I am one of those who hasn't voted in the past, and it has been out of protest. I've been affected to vote for the alone I abhor less. Now, I'd rather vote with my affection and go down swinging." Onstage, he gave the army "Excuse Me Mister" and a soulful awning of Patty Griffin's "Mary" as able-bodied as a solid, bluesy adaptation of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" (although the closing song's attendance at this accurate accident larboard abounding in the army mystified).
Taking the stage, Patti Smith acclaimed that her backward ancestor was aswell an agog Nader supporter. Smith, backed by guitarist Oliver Ray, began her set with the aggressive song best of "Over the Rainbow." "What bigger way to sing in Madison Square Garden than for free, and to chargeless our future?" she asked afore continuing into an animated "One Voice."
Bill Murray's accent reflected the affecting spirit of the rally. Responding to the abstraction that a vote for Nader about will not count, he said, "You acquaint the applicant that you're traveling to vote for to appear up to me and acquaint me, to my face, that my vote is a ashen vote. I don't anticipate anyone who could say that, to my face or to your face, should be in charge." If he assured with "I'm gonna cry now. I've gotta go," it was bright that the actor was alone partly joking.
"Now this is a garden party!" said Eddie Vedder if Murray alleged him to the stage. "Best affair I've anytime been to." With a glance against his career with Pearl Jam, he continued, "I've had the acceptable affluence to play to places that were full, and even this place. But tonight is actually different, and I anticipate it's the a lot of admirable affair I've anytime seen." Vedder offered two covers: "I Am a Patriot" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" ("being played," he noted, "with permission of the author"), which became a apart sing-a-long for the audience.
After Nader's speech, which mapped out affairs apropos ecology preservation, accepted bloom care, an end to accumulated abundance and added goals he holds dear, the musicians and presenters abutting the applicant onstage. DiFranco accepted Nader, while Smith was actually leaping up and down. Calm they all affable into Smith's "People Have the Power;" the song was traveling to be the additional in Smith's own set, but if Vedder heard it, he appropriate that it be adapt as an ensemble afterpiece and concluded up abetment Smith for it on guitar. Even Nader, whose attentive but black attendance doesn't usually accommodate itself to this blazon of festivity, was abiding to sing along. A carol of "Let Ralph Debate" was tacked assimilate the song abreast its end.
Backstage, Smith's thoughts were of the future. "We can appear calm again," she said. "It's not all over, they didn't do it all in the Sixties, it's not nostalgia. We can accost the adeptness and the appropriate to use our aggregate voice." Sarandon bidding awe at the night's events. "I'm so appreciative to be allotment of this process," she said. "They anticipation we could get bisected of a baby amphitheater filled, and again we had this."
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