Ahead of the upcoming Concert for Bangladesh, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar held a press conference in New York City on July 27, 1971. Photo by UPI, footage courtesy of AP.
The following day, “Bangla Desh” was released as a single in the USA. It was recorded on July 4 and 5, 1971, and all proceeds went to the George Harrison-Ravi Shankar Special Emergency Relief Fund, in care of UNICEF.
“The war had been going on for a bit, and I had hardly even heard of it, so he fed me a lot of newspaper articles about it. He was saying, “I’m going to have to do something to help. Attract a bit of attention to it, raise a bit of money, much more than I could make doing my own concert, maybe like ten or twenty thousand dollars.’That for him was like doing a big one. And so I got involved. The priority was to attract world attention to what was going on. It wasn’t so much the money because you can feed somebody today and tomorrow they will still be hungry, but if they are getting massacred you’ve got to try and stop that first of all. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go on the show and I’ll get some other people to come and help. We’ll try and make it into a big show, and maybe we can make a million dollars instead of a few thousand.’ So I got on the telephone trying to round people up. We pinpointed the days which were astrologically good, and we found Madison Square Garden was open on one of those days — 1st August.” - George Harrison, Raga Mala “We felt the magnitude of this act of private individuals reached so many people and moved the whole Bangladesh tragedy into the public consciousness before even the governments were willing to face up to it. The world was looking on in stunned horror, not doing anything about it, when Ravi and George drove it into their minds, particularly the young people’s. Why, they even inspired us to get… to work. You should have seen how what they did affected even the people at UNICEF.“ - Paul B. Edwards, New York Post, June 2, 1972, via UNICEF Archives (x)
