On May 30, 1990, Australian rock band Midnight Oil staged a protest concert directly in front of the Exxon building in New York City. The guerrilla set was launched as a direct response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill that occurred the previous year and destroyed much of Prince William Sound in Alaska.
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That particular oil spill was a huge deal in the early 1990s. Especially because the company itself didn’t accept responsibility for the disaster. For those who are unfamiliar, the oil spill took place when one of Exxon’s oil tankers crashed into a reef. It leaked what we now believe is about 11 million gallons of crude oil directly into the ocean, as well as the Alaskan coastline.
“We can’t treat the world like a garbage dump, and there’s more to life than profit and loss,” Peter Garrett, the band’s frontman, famously said of the incident.
Midnight Oil’s Exxon Concert Went Down in History
The band was angered by the blatant destruction of Alaska’s coastline and the surrounding ocean waters. So, the “Beds Are Burning” hitmakers decided to show up at Exxon’s building on this day in 1990. They showed up with music equipment and a large banner that read “Midnight Oil Makes You Dance, Exxon Oil Makes Us Sick.” The band pulled up on the back of a truck and shredded through an eight-song set. Passersby, as well as Exxon employees, got to experience the madness around lunchtime.
The band performed songs like “River Runs Red” and a cover of “Instant Karma” by John Lennon. The whole debacle would make international news.
According to the band’s keyboardist Jim Moginie in a print interview with Blurt Magazine, the day was “completely chaotic.” It wasn’t meant to be, considering the band planned the whole thing as precisely as possible. Allegedly, the police wanted to shut the whole thing down due to backed-up traffic. However, the band’s label (Sony) negotiated with the New York City mayor’s office and the NYPD to keep the space open for the band.
“We played ‘Instant Karma’ for the first time, which summed up matters pretty well about the oil spill,” Mogine continued. “It felt good to make the point that needed to be made about Exxon. It was only afterwards [that] I realized the event was front-page news all around the world. I’m so glad it was filmed and recorded. Everybody heard about it in the mainstream media world. So in that sense it put us in front of more people.”
Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
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