Grandstanding

I’ve been to exactly one rodeo. Calgary Stampede, July 13, 1985. I was 15, between sophomore and junior year, on the obligatory summer visit to my father’s.

I hated it – the visit and the rodeo – and spent the entire time locked on the Saddledome jumbotron. I don’t remember the horses or cows, or anything happening in the arena beyond the screen. CBC was broadcasting Live Aid from JFK Stadium in South Philly – back home.

Neil Young walked onstage for a surprise reunion with his CSNY bandmates. They opened with “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”

That’s Track 3.

The “After the Gold Rush” album is my first memory of music, fused to a memory of my father before he left for good. Watching out the window from the green corduroy chesterfield (that’s Canadian for “couch”), I waited for him to come home.

I always associated that music with him, and I’ve only now realized it was my mother playing that record on repeat as she waited too.

After we moved into her parents’ home in Pennsylvania, summer visits back to Canada were strange and strained. And that summer, while all my friends were at the historic benefit concert in our backyard, I was stuck at the world’s largest rodeo. From there I witnessed music history: 16 hours, 75 performers between Wembley in London and JFK. Maybe you saw it, too.

A famine in Ethiopia had killed about a million people, with millions more on the brink.

Organizers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure (“Do They Know it’s Christmas?”) saw a humanitarian catastrophe triggered by drought and crop failure. But also, Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was burning the crops, destroying food and blockading rebel-held territories to starve the people into submission. His regime was weaponizing the famine to crush the rebels in this civil war, and it was using food distribution as bait.

Bob of the Boomtown Rats was reportedly warned that the system was compromised, but he believed that pure intentions could overpower political violence. Bureaucracy was too slow, he said; the goal was to raise urgent cash and flood the region with emergency food.

Live Aid tried to treat a complex, violent political war with a massive influx of cash – about $100 million. In doing so, it inadvertently helped the wrong people. Additionally, critics accused Bob of white saviourism and of portraying Africa as dependent on charity.

Then Bob Geldof took aim at Bob Dylan.

In his 1986 memoir, Boomtown Bob wrote that Bobby D’s performance was the biggest disappointment of the evening, a catastrophe, and that the troubadour did not understand the mission of the event.

Between songs, Dylan had said: “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it – maybe one or two million, maybe – and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks.”

And that’s how Farm Aid was born from Live Aid.

Enter Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and my guy, Neil, and in a few months, they held the first concert to save the family farmers of America from corporate conglomerates. And thus continued the Band-aid tradition.

Now in its 41st year, Farm Aid has raised more than $90 million to support independent farmers. To me, it’s just been greasing the revolving door of breeding, suffering and slaughter.

Farm Aid 2026 arrives September 26 from Virginia Beach. Via livestream, it will be everywhere – including the Stockyards Championship Rodeo at the Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth, Texas, the world’s only year-round rodeo, running every Friday and Saturday night. Can you fucking imagine? Twenty-four rodeos are listed for that day on RodeoGuide. There’s even one in my county. I’m not sure why I googled this.

Farming and rodeo have had four decades to evolve – but they still operate on the same principles: animal commodification and corporate exploitation. Farm Aid is challenging the Trump administration, but both entities are fighting to keep a failing livestock industry on life support. The real solution isn't regulatory reform or federal checkbooks. The solution is abolition.

It’s insulting that the White House considers ground beef the ultimate inflation indicator of the American working class, and Trump says he has to waive tariffs on foreign beef because American factory farms cannot meet the demand for basic hamburgers. Extreme droughts and feed costs have dropped the number of cows and calves to a 75-year low.

To me, this sounds like the perfect moment to pivot to a cow-free food supply.

But people reduce a cow to a commodity at the store just like they reduce a horse to a prop in the rodeo ring. And like Live Aid, you cannot fix a fundamentally exploitative system by throwing money at its symptoms. You cannot build justice on the foundation of violence.

Take the cows first. Ranchers – a majority of whom voted for Trump, twice – are furious that a president they trusted is undercutting their livelihood with cheap imports. Dylan's 1985 complaint was about farmers losing to banks while celebrities threw a concert for a famine overseas. Forty years later, ranchers are losing to a policy from their own president, aimed at their own market.

Then the horses. Helicopters have been rounding up wild horses all summer in the American West because cattle ranchers need more land. A New York Times investigation found the BLM selling federally protected wild mustangs for $25 each. Some ended up in a Canadian slaughterhouse. Read that again.

And so the arena never really closes. The machinery keeps running. Aid doesn't remove the root cause; it moves money into an existing structure of violence. Live Aid tried to buy its way out of a war. Farm Aid tried to buy a farmer more time. Trump is trying to buy votes with “cheap beef.”

These characters – the cowboy, the rancher, the farmer, the foreign dictator, the dictator at home, the white saviour, the old rockstar. And the child of divorce, watching. These tropes are worn out, and the animals are still stuck in the chute.

That summer of 1985, I was a bystander – to the rodeo, to the screen, to my own life split between two countries and two families – but I stopped being one a long time ago.

There’s tradition, there’s evolution, and then there’s the vegan revolution. Anything short of that is grandstanding.

Want more? Read about how my proposed rodeo ban is sorting sides and about wild horses and the cost of consumption.