JASON MIKLIAN AND SCOTT CARNEY

Ravi Shankar methodically plucked the seven top strings onhis sitar, drawing twanged melodies out of the four-footlonginstrument. Surrounded by marigolds and burningincense, Shankar paired the heavy top strings with notes from theairy twelve bottom strings, making complex sounds that a guitarcould never attain. Barefoot, sitting cross-legged on a large antiquerug, and draped in an exquisite white kurta, he was the world’s best knownsitar player and a musical deity in his home of India.

Shankar paused for a moment; the packed Madison SquareGarden crowd cheered wildly. He smirked like he was remembering ajoke. He’d toured the United States for a few years now and gottenused to the flower-power hippie crowd trying to find God by mixinghis live music with drugs.

He finished adjusting his instrument and took the microphone.“If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you’ll enjoy the playingmore.”

To be fair, a sports arena was a pretty odd place to showcase aninstrument best suited for intimate rooms or beneath banyan trees.Still, Shankar couldn’t resist gently mocking their musical ignorance.They cheered again, their marijuana haze easily deflecting his barb.Shankar played on as his sharp, lingering notes reverberated throughthe cavernous steel rafters and echoed away into oblivion. Backstage,George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr waited their turns toperform.

This was the birth of a new phenomenon in American music: therock-and-roll charity benefit concert. The idea was as simple as it wasunorthodox: leverage the power of celebrity musicians to draw attentionto an under-recognized human rights issue and raise money fororganizations working in the field.

Two months earlier, Shankar paced around his Spanish-style villain the heart of Hollywood. He’d followed the horrors in Pakistan,like every other overseas Bengali, and felt a kinship with the PakistaniBengalis from just across the border of his own home in Calcutta. Asthe most famous living Bengali in the world, friends, gurus, andcountrymen all asked him to help. Could he play a benefit at the localtemple? And one at a high school too? Shankar agreed time andagain, but the pitiful handfuls of money, one three-hour show at atime, couldn’t possibly move the needle when ten million werestarving to death.

Then Shankar’s friend George Harrison called. He was coming toLos Angeles to work on a film score and would love to get in a sitarlesson or two. Shankar and Harrison had been friends ever since theBeatles ventured to India in 1966. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, andRingo Starr soaked in the subcontinent like typical tourists, hittingup spiritual hotspots to taste transcendent religious bliss, only tohave it evaporate by the time their plane touched down in London.But Harrison was different. He spent the next four years divingever deeper into Indian mysticism. He flew around the world to seekout temples and ashrams, rereading the Bhagavad Gita and Autobiography of a Yogi , and studying at the feet of gurus, babas, and swamis.With music part and parcel of his spiritual journey (not to mentioncopious amounts of LSD, weed, and cocaine), he’d sought out India’smost famous musician.

The moment Harrison heard Shankar play, he said, “I felt Iwanted to walk out of my home that day and buy a one-way ticket toCalcutta. I would even have left my wife behind.”The feeling wasn’t exactly mutual. Shankar had never heard aBeatles song in his life. Harrison told the Bengali musician he playedsitar on their megahit “Norwegian Wood.” When Shankar listened toit later, he told a Rolling Stone journalist: “To tell you the truth, I hadto keep my mouth shut. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded so terrible.”Still, Shankar loved Harrison’s earnestness. Harrison loved thatShankar was one of the only people who never asked him foranything. They became fast friends.

And when Harrison came by Shankar’s house that summer day in1971, Shankar asked his first-ever favor. “George, this is the situation, Iknow it doesn’t concern you, I know you can’t possibly identify . . . butwould you help me?”

Shankar mailed Harrison newspaper clippings of the atrocitiesthat had been written by journalists who snuck back into Dacca todocument Yahya and Tikka’s genocidal path, but he didn’t know ifHarrison cared enough to read them. Shankar hoped they could doa fund-raiser together. With luck they might get $25,000.Harrison sat back and squinted, calculating the request.Maybe I went too far, Shankar thought. Now he looked like justanother hanger-on hoping to milk a Beatle. Harrison had endedfriendships for less.

Harrison snapped back to attention. No, a fund-raiser was nogood. They needed something bigger, another Woodstock, but onewhere every artist would play for free and every penny would helpEast Pakistan’s refugees. They’d make an album and a movie. They’draise millions.

A musical revolution was born. They called it The Concert forBangla Desh.

Harrison rang up his friends: the world’s biggest rock stars.Getting a visa for Mick Jagger would be tricky after he’d been bustedfor marijuana possession. Bob Dylan was Harrison’s idol, but he’dstopped performing live in 1966. The Beatles broke up two yearsback, and they were barely on speaking terms. And Eric Clapton wasa heroin junkie, madly in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie. Harrisonasked them all anyway—and dozens more. He made the calls on hisrotary phone, from dawn until dusk, for six straight weeks.For the show, Harrison and Shankar agreed they’d start with atraditional Bengali music set, then bring on the rock. Harrison hiredan Indian astrologer, who picked out the most auspicious date:August 1, 1971. Conveniently, it was also the only open date on theGarden’s calendar on such short notice.

Shankar reached a blistering crescendo under the hot amberlights. Tabla, sarod, and tamboura players matched him, beat forbeat, and doubled their tempo. Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash,The Who, and Grand Funk Railroad swayed along in the front row.Behind them, 19,500 fans itched for Shankar’s long set to wrap whilethey waited for the main event.

Shankar tore through the last few dozen notes at 140 beats perminute, grinning from ear to ear. The crowd broke into wildapplause. Then Shankar bowed, picked up his ten-pound sitar, andstrolled backstage as the audio-visual team flicked on a documentary.The movie aimed to shock. Thousands of screaming fans hushedthemselves to silence while absorbing nauseating images of crowspicking at rotting corpses on the outskirts of Calcutta, Bengalimothers wiping biting flies off toddlers too weak to protest, andcholera victims dying in ditches.

The film’s credits rolled with a plea to give to UNICEF andHarrison took the stage. He scanned the crowd nervously, white electricguitar in hand. The cord got wrapped around his foot.16 He hadno idea if the show was going to be legendary—or just a legendarydebacle. He wore a white suit with a red Om embroidered on thelapel in Sanskrit, a red button-up shirt, and a full Jesus beard andhair. He shook off the cord and strummed the opening bars of one ofhis biggest post-Beatles hits, “Wah-Wah.” Ringo delivered drumsright on cue.

Emotions rose as they played a series of massive hits, one afteranother, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to honor Mick Jagger, as wellas some Beatles’ tunes sung live by a Beatle for the first time inseveral years. A mustachioed Clapton floated his way onstage,dressed in a navy blue sports coat and jeans. He accessorized theoutfit with a bloodstream packed to the gills with opioids.Clapton wedged his lit cigarette into his guitar’s headstock andlaunched into a duet with Harrison. Together, they did the first everlive performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Clapton latersaid he was ashamed because he was so high he could barely walk,let alone play. The crowd was too enthralled at the sight of GeorgeHarrison and Eric Clapton riffing together to care.Now they were rolling. Harrison wrapped up “Here Comes theSun,” then took a quick sip from a Coca-Cola can resting on themonitor. He glanced offstage and breathed a sigh of relief. A manwith a simple guitar at his side and a harmonica strapped to his neckwaited for his turn onstage. He’d just biked into the arena, appearinglike a divine apparition.

“I’d like to bring out a friend to us all, Mr. Bob Dylan!”

The crowd erupted. Dylan had gone recluse at the height of hispopularity five years earlier and wasn’t listed on the roster. Hebrought tender soul to his renditions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” channeling the Great Bhola Cyclonethrough his song selections.

The concert was just one of dozens of public outpourings insupport of the Bengali cause during that summer and fall. WestPakistan imprisoned a pregnant woman from Philadelphia for illegallycrossing from India to East Pakistan to deliver saris. A Dutchman stole a famous Vermeer painting and tried to fence it formillions of dollars in order to give the sum in relief aid. Children inthirty thousand schools across America fasted for a day so that theycould donate their lunch money to the cause. Activists built arefugee camp out of sewer pipes in front of the UN, about a mile anda half northeast of Madison Square Garden. They tried to shock thediplomats and ate the same single daily meal of rice and lentils thatrefugees did, while Allen Ginsberg read poetry.

In Paris, a former French special forces officer took a pistol and abriefcase bursting with colorful wires up to the cockpit of a PakistanInternational Airways plane bound for Karachi. He hijacked it,demanding twenty tons of medical supplies for the Calcutta refugeecamps. During the tense standoff, the French Red Cross brought thesupplies as requested. Commandos disguised as airport workersloaded the crates, then captured the skyjacker. Though he onlycarried a toy gun and some wires, he still got five years in jail for thestunt. Nevertheless, the French Red Cross delivered the goods to therefugee camps as promised.

Yet none of those protests captured the imagination quite like theConcert for Bangladesh. It launched a geopolitical issue into America’scollective psyche in a way that no concert ever had before.Harrison closed the show with a brand-new song. He called it“Bangla Desh.” The lyrics were a simple plea to his millions of fans tohelp a suffering people. Harrison and the rest of rock’s biggest starsleft the stage, pumping their fists to raucous whistles and whoops.Clapton said, “This will always be remembered as a time that wecould be proud of being musicians. We just weren’t thinking ofourselves for five minutes.”

Shankar agreed: “It was a miracle, really.”

At the after-party, Keith Moon demolished a drum set and hotelroom in celebration, as they all reveled in a job well done. The liveconcert album sold millions of copies and won a Grammy.

Jason Miklian ,  Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo (Norway).

Scott Carney ,  is an investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author. 

The above-mentioned writers are the authors of the book, titled The Vortex:  The True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm and the Liberation of Bangladesh, HarperCollins India(2022). This article is an excerpt from the book.