Over the past six years, the Love Rocks benefit concert has helped nonprofit God’s Love We Deliver prepare and deliver more than 2 million meals to people too sick to shop or cook for themselves, each nutritionally tailored to the person’s specific needs. The annual event has seen the likes of Jon Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews, Robert Plant, Joe Walsh, Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow, Sara Bareilles, Nathaniel Rateliff and more volunteer their time and talent to the cause, and on Thursday night, Keith Richards & The X-Pensive Winos, Mavis Staples and Hozier added their names to the roster.
The star-studded events have been inarguably successful – raising more than $20 million since 2017 – but early on not everyone believed that real estate agent Greg Williamson and event producer Nicole Rechter could pull it off without a big-name artist at the forefront calling in favors, like Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid or Sting’s Rainforest Fund.
“There were so many naysayers … we had never done this before,” says Rechter. “Everybody told Greg, ‘You’re a nice guy, but no way.’”
The duo’s naivety, says Williamson, was what led them to relentlessly forge ahead. “Anybody with half a brain who knows what it takes to put on one of these, wouldn’t go forward,” he adds.
Williamson was relentless in his efforts to put together the first Love Rocks concert in 2017 when the founders assembled a lineup that included Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Aaron Neville, Gary Clark Jr., Michael McDonald and Mavis Staples. To land that lineup, Rechter and Williamson, along with Love Rocks cofounder and fashion designer John Varvatos (whose clout in the music industry brought in top-tier talent), first hired a world-class backing band led by Will Lee — a 30-year veteran of the CBS Orchestra for The Late Show With David Letterman – who also reached out to all of the top-tier musicians they knew to join the benefit.
An additional key to Williamson and Rechter’s success over the years has been finding just the right combination of artists who want to play together, along with co-producer Varvatos. “The artists love it,” says Williamson. “They love it because we take exceptional care of them and they get to see all their friends that they don’t get to see while they are on tour.”
Most important Love Rocks’ success is its support of a cause everyone can get behind. God’s Love We Deliver was founded more than 35 years ago during the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, when most individuals feared interacting with AIDS patients. It was started by hospice nurse Ganga Stone, who began delivering nutritionally-tailored meals to people living with AIDS in Manhattan. To date, the organization has delivered nearly 30 million meals to individuals suffering from a range of diagnoses including AIDS, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Williamson and Rechter — who continue to work their days jobs in addition to running the annual festival — have parlayed the success of Love Rocks into RWE Partners, a production company that has raised $30 million for charities through events like CBS primetime special Play On hosted by Kevin Bacon and Eve, which brought in more than $8 million for transformational racial, social and food justice in 2020.
Williamson “makes us all do things we never thought we would do,” says Rechter. “They are scary and they’re outside your comfort zone, but at the end of the day you’ve done something really special and you keep signing on for the next one.”