Rock in Rio

The first Rock in Rio was held from January 11–20, 1985. Queen, George Benson, Rod Stewart, AC/DC and Yes were the headliners, each occupying top spot for two nights (Benson, however, ceded it to James Taylor for their second night in the same bill, due to the huge delay Taylor's extended performance had caused to his concert two days before). About 1.4 million people attended the 10-day-long festival.

Rock in Rio in numbers The full list of artists who performed at Rock in Rio:
 * The City of Rock, which was built for the festival, covered an area of 250,000 m² (around 2.7 million square feet)
 * 1,600,000 liters of beverages were served, using 4 million plastic cups.
 * 900,000 hamburgers.
 * 500,000 pizza slices.
 * McDonald's sold 58,000 hamburgers in a single day, which was a Guinness World Recorduntil the fourth edition in 2011, where 79,000 hamburgers were sold by Bob's.[2]
 * Both Queen shows were filmed (on January 11 and January 18) and broadcast throughout Brazil by Globo. Each show was watched by nearly 200 million people in over 60 countries and in front of 350,000–500,000 people for each night setting a world record for the biggest paying audience ever at the time. It was later broadcast in the United States on MTV as "Queen: Live in Rio".
 * Iron Maiden was the only non-Brazilian act to play just one concert at the festival (on its opening night, headlined by Queen), due to other bookings, while every other international act performed twice. During the song "Revelations", lead singer Bruce Dickinson hit himself accidentally with a guitar and cut his eyebrow. Dickinson continued to sing in spite of heavy bleeding. They performed in front of a crowd of 350,000 people too.
 * The Go-Go's broke up after their two Rock in Rio performances, (headlined by Queen and Rod Stewart) though they would later reunite in the 1990s. The two Rock in Rio shows were the debut and swansong for short-tenured Go-Go's member Paula Jean Brown, who had replaced Jane Wiedlin. (Wiedlin would return to the reunited 1990s lineup.)
 * Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, at the time Talking Heads drummer and bass player, respectively, took part at the B-52's concerts. They joined the band from the third song on and played along with them for the remainder of the performance.
 * The January 20 appearance of the B-52's would turn out to be their last with guitarist Ricky Wilson, who died from AIDS in October of that year as the band was finishing their next album.
 * Initially, Def Leppard was scheduled to play at the festival. However, they dropped out about two months before the event, due to delays on the recording process of the album Hysteria. They were replaced by Whitesnake. Eleven days before the date Def Leppard would have played at the festival, drummer Rick Allen suffered an accident that cost him his left arm.