Today In Alternative Music History: May 30, 1990

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the infamous “special guerrilla action” on the streets in front of the towering Exxon building in New York City by Alt Rock act Midnight Oil.

On May 30, 1990, the Aussie rockers — who were in New York to play three nights at Radio City Music Hall during the Blue Sky Mining tour — pulled up in front of Exxon’s Sixth Avenue headquarters on a flatbed truck, unfurled a banner that read “Midnight Oil makes you dance, Exxon oil makes us sick” and proceeded to play a 30-minute lunch-hour set. (”I love it when the suits clap,” frontman Peter Garrett famously said.)

According to a New York Times account of the brief streetside concert, Garrett chastised Exxon for not doing more to clean up the oil that remained in Alaska’s Prince William Sound following the March 24, 1989, spill. Garrett told the crowd: ”We can’t treat the world like a garbage dump, and there’s more to life than profit and loss.”