NEW YORK: Rock music royalty, including the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and Paul McCartney, joined in a stellar line-up Wednesday to raise money for victims of super storm Sandy.The "12-12-12" concert at Madison Square Garden in New York brought a Who's Who of rockers under one roof for the event which was broadcast live across 37 US television networks and a multitude of Internet live stream sites, as well as radio. Organizers expected two billion people to tune in worldwide.
Musicians also included The Who, Jon Bon Jovi, Eric Clapton, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Chris Martin, and rappers Sean Combs and Kanye West.
While music stars strutted their stuff, movie and TV performers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Rock, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, and political humorist Jon Stewart, fronted a telethon drive or appeared in the arena to appeal for funds.
The phone bank was literally wall-to-wall with celebrities, among them Chelsea Clinton, the increasingly high-profile only child of former president Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Mega-stars with New York and New Jersey roots said the October 29 hurricane-strength storm, which killed about 120 people in the United States, had humbled them.
"I've never seen anything remotely close to what Hurricane Sandy was," Bon Jovi said ahead of being joined by the even bigger New Jersey star, Springsteen. "This storm lasted a day. The effects of it are going to last a lifetime."
Between the high-powered rock anthems, comedian Adam Sandler played a more unusual song with a cheekily rewritten version of Leonard Cohen's ballad "Hallelujah."
"Hallelujah, Sandy screw ya, we'll always rule ya, cause we're New Yorkers," ran the chorus to the feisty homage to the Big Apple and neighboring New Jersey that had some in the crowd in tears of laughter.
But even the funnymen showed their serious side at the event.
"The Daily Show's" Stewart recalled his boyhood on the Jersey shore and praised the area's "working-class" heroes. He then called on the crowd of 13,000 to give a standing ovation to the police officers of Seaside Heights, a beach community that was torn apart in Sandy.
Demand for seats quickly turned tickets into gold dust. The StubHub site listed one ticket at $10,400 earlier Wednesday and already before the first note played, tickets and other sales had raised $32 million for the fund-raising drive.
Sandy hit New Jersey as a hurricane, then continued up through New York City, leaving massive flooding and ruined infrastructure in its wake. Even now, tens of thousands of people remain without electricity, hot water or heating in the New York area.
Many people in the hardest-hit beach communities have lost their entire homes, just as winter strengthens.
The White House has asked Congress to send $60.4 billion dollars to aid the post-Sandy rebuild effort, but the money has yet to be approved. The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have estimated the costs to be as high as $82 billion.
The storm killed 120 people in the United States after sweeping an earlier deadly path through the Caribbean.
