In situations of dire crisis, even those who openly proclaim that they do not ascribe to a religious creed may find themselves helplessly invoking deities to whom they have given little thought in easier times. Such reluctant atavism was a reasonable response to the recent SARS crisis in Toronto, during which one of the most stable cities in the world took on the pariah-like qualities of a medieval plague town in the eyes of both the international community and the rest of Canada.

Federal Liberal MP Dennis Mills, searching for something to help bolster Toronto’s faltering tourist industry and entice people back to the city, conceived the idea of an all-day concert headlined by the Rolling Stones in Toronto’s vast and barren Downsview Park. With financial support from municipal, provincial and federal levels of government to help keep ticket prices down, the concert also featured both up-and-coming and established Canadian performers, as well as other internationally renowned rock groups. Almost half a million people attended the event, making it one of the largest open-air concerts in North American history. Media reports confirmed a successful spike in the local economy, and potential U.S. tourists were presumably reassured that 45,000 of their fellow citizens made it to Toronto and back without contracting a fatal disease.

The event received little coverage in the U.S. or international media, but spirits were high during the day, there were no major crowd-control or safety problems, and a general air of easygoing friendliness pervaded the gathering, which exceeded the size of many Canadian cities. For Torontonians, accustomed to being shunned by the rest of Canada for reasons other than the fear of disease, it was a heartening show of support from both performers and audience alike.

It is not surprising that a rock music concert was the chosen means to draw a large number of people to Toronto. The act of attending a concert is a form of worship for the ostensibly secular bourgeois concertgoer, and one’s taste in musical styles has the moral seriousness of a creed. Debate over the merits of different styles of music in the twentieth century has taken on the heated rhetoric of fundamentalist belief, as proponents of the European tradition of composition, jazz historians and critics, and rock journalists heap both praise on their chosen idols and vituperation on the heretics that dare diverge from perceived standards.

Rock has emerged as the most widespread musical object of mass veneration, and the Rolling Stones in particular are well situated to function as the foremost demi-gods of world culture. Their mixture of longevity, commercial success, and genuine artistic achievement have made them a comfortable, even reassuring international institution, not unlike a well established orchestra or ballet company. Those who doubted or ignored Toronto’s predicament may well have been convinced of the gravity of the situation by the participation of the Stones. Symbolically, that which had been rejected – the afflicted city of Toronto, along with supposedly disease-tainted Alberta beef, which was sold at the site throughout the day – was purified and healed by the metaphysical energies generated by a large group of people communing in the live presence of celebrity musicians.

While Canada has yet to produce rock bands that can claim the restorative powers of the Stones and AC/DC, the two headline acts of the show, the well-established Canadian bands that performed earlier in the evening (the Guess Who, Rush, and Blue Rodeo) might be accorded the status of Canadian national saints. Weighing in as respected local deities were the central Canadian acts that performed earlier that day: Kathleen Edwards (Ottawa) Sam Roberts (Pointe Claire, Quebec), La Chicane (Val d’Or, Quebec) Tea Party (Windsor, Ont., now based in Montreal) Sass Jordan and Jeff Healy (Montreal and Toronto). These groups met with reactions ranging from enthusiasm to indifference, but musical nationalists can be assured that there was a genuinely Canadian character to the event, within the context of mass-market rock and roll.

One irritated correspondent to Toronto’s Globe and Mail scorned the whole concert, and suggested that a performance of a few Healey Willan motets would have been of superior value. While the idea of having Willan’s Gloria Deo Per Immensa Saecula blasted through a bank of speakers to half a million people has a certain appeal, any attempt to judge this event on musical merits alone is probably missing the point. In his cultural history of the early twentieth century, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins states that ‘Modernism [is] above all a culture of the sensational event, through which life and art both become a matter of energy and are fused as one’ (p.16). In an ostensibily postmodern world, we retain a primitive belief in the magic power of music. Whether Mick Jagger can still sing (or Geddy Lee could ever sing) is secondary to the audience’s faith in the very basics of tone, timbre and rhythm. The reward for such faith is a brief moment of collective fulfillment, as the tiny figures onstage bless and are blessed by the gargantuan throng.