iWoz (32 page)

At the time, I thought of it as kind of an unplanned event that would just happen.

Of course, I knew I didn't know enough to manage a concert or put one on. I didn't know the first thing about it. So I talked to a friend of mine, a friend who owned a nightclub in Santa Cruz called the Albatross, a strange name for a place like that. His name was Jim Valentine. I told him about my idea and convinced him that the kind of concert I had in mind would really draw a lot of people. Jim agreed, and man, it was nice to have one person agree with me. Most people didn't think progressive country could draw a crowd.

Now Jim, who owned that nightclub in Santa Cruz, also ran it. He had comedians on his stage, he had singers and songwriters come in, he had musicians play. And he had some connections to the early big music concerts—things like Altamont in 1969 and the early San Francisco Bill Graham days. So even though I had these connections, I thought, Well, maybe in a few years. I'll finish at Berkeley and then do it.

But then Jim called me and said he had a guy who could put this thing on. He said he'd found the one guy he knew who could organize and manage a project this large. But it was going to run

many millions of dollars to create. That guy's name was Pete Ellis.

After talking about this to Jim, I realized this concert was going to be huge. Huge. We were envisioning a huge outdoor space where people could just drive up and camp out for three days, like a Woodstock thing. But maybe better.

By the time we'd gotten to this point, I'd already started going back to school. (And at school, remember, I'd tricked everyone into thinking I was a student named Rocky Raccoon Clark.) I'd also just gotten married to Candi, and we'd just bought that castle of a house—with the house number of 21435. (I liked that number mathematically because it had all the first five digits appear exactly once.)

Candi was also supportive of the idea of a concert, probably because her background was kind of a hippieish Grateful Dead thing. I told her I thought if enough people came, it would make money. I wasn't sure enough people would come, but I didn't care. I knew I could afford it. I didn't know how much money would come back, exactly, but I was willing to take the risk. And after I was introduced to Peter Ellis, he put out that it would take a budget of $2 million to get started, and I was willing to pay that.

For that money, the starting amount needed, I could basically form a corporation (the UNUSON Corporation, short for UNite Us in SONg), hire people, do the planning, get the site, and put the whole thing together.

I remember when he came up to my apartment in Berkeley on Euclid Avenue one evening. I presented him with a check for $2 million. Then he knew it was for real.

Well, I should mention here that two weeks after I wrote that $2 million check, I read a book called
Barefoot in Babylon
, by Bob Spitz, which was about the entire progression of creating Woodstock from day one. It was about finding staff, getting permission for sites, publicity, getting groups signed up, overcoming

political hurdles, changing sites at the last minute, inadequate preparations for the numbers of people who would show up, and more mishaps. Every chapter took my breath away and had me thinking, Oh my god, what a disaster. That book really chilled me. I thought, What have I gotten myself into?

Let me tell you, if I had read that book two weeks earlier, I never would have done it. Period. I absolutely wouldn't have done it.

I mean, according to that book, Woodstock broke even only because of the movie. Also, the expenses involved in putting on Woodstock were small enough because they didn't do an adequate job of setting up for and handling a large audience. Had they spent that money, they would've lost everything. And Woodstock was a rainy, swampy mess. It wasn't what we all imagined after seeing the movie. In fact, in putting together the US Festival, I later did talk to one of the two guys who'd created Woodstock, and he didn't want to work with us. He'd consult, that's it. He didn't want to do it again. He said he was just a music company executive and it was kind of like they got started on this thing and ended up captives to it.

In a way, that happened to me. The US Festival was exactly the opposite of the Apple experience for me. It didn't come easily. It involved having plans to get certain groups, and having those groups cancel. It involved having plans for sites, and having those sites cancel. It involved having plans for equipment, and having the equipment not come through. It was a costly battle to do all the right things, but we did them anyway.

I'd written a check. I had confidence in my people. I'd already taken a stand, and when you take a stand, you don't back away from it. Sometimes this has been a big problem in my life—especially marriage-wise—but if I'm in, I'm in. I don't back out. And by the time I could see this was a disaster, I had this guy, Pete Ellis, and all the people he'd hired, counting on me. I couldn't just

all of a sudden pull the rug out. And we'd already planned the date: the first US Festival would be the Labor Day weekend of 1982, right after my first year back at school.

We finally secured a site, a county park near San Bernardino. It was in kind of a depressed area. The county park needed money, and they saw us as a way to get those funds.

There were some great things about this site. For one thing, it was an enormous area which would let us bring lots of trucks and stuff into the amphitheater. This place had the capacity to easily hold about 400,000 people, and hopefully as many as a million. That's twenty times what the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View holds. (I built Shoreline years later with concert promoter Bill Graham and heiress Ann Getty. I put in $3 million of the $7 million total.)

We didn't want to use a preexisting arena or stadium, we wanted more of a campout-style setup. And they had a lake and a big area. We had to groom it with all these trucks going day after day after day digging up dirt and getting the right shape. And then we had to quickly plant some fast-growing grass sod to create sort of a grass liner that would span many, many acres.

We of course had to plan for the huge number of people we thought would come. We actually even got a temporary freeway exit, and we got some top highway patrol people who were on our side. They got things approved. The sheriffs of San Bernardino County were behind us, too. We were given this kind of support because we were sending out a good message of people working together, cooperating, getting things done, and putting education and technology shows in tent after tent we set up. So it was obvious to them that we weren't just rowdy concertgoers, but sort of good guys. In fact, the sheriffs were so behind us they even gave me an honorary sheriff's badge.

We started contracting with companies that put up sound systems and stages and artwork. We also had the most incredible

sound system ever done. Not only did we have speakers at the main stage, but we also had extra speakers deep into the audience. This meant the sound in the back was delayed exactly to the point where it would match the front ones. So everyone could hear the music at the same time.

We also had groups to set up lots of concessions. We set up a technology fair with companies like Apple in air-conditioned tents, where they could show off computers and other products. We even had carnival rides planned. I ended up paying a total of about $10 million to complete that amphitheater. That was the biggest expense.

There were also very high payments to the artists to get exclu- sives for all of Southern California for that year—so bands we signed like Oingo Boingo and Fleetwood Mac, for instance, couldn't play anywhere else in Southern California that summer.

What I'm trying to get to is this: if I compare the US Festival to starting Apple, there's a huge difference. With Apple, I designed those computers alone. I could make every decision by myself and there were very few little changes and trade-offs. It was like I had total autonomy and total control, and that's how I was able to make everything work.

But with the US Festival, I had to deal with all kinds of people and lawyers. And let me tell you, in my experience, the music industry is the worst of all. And then I had to deal with all the construction and costs and funding. Everybody was trying to make bucks off this. So the US Festivals were a much larger business to start than when I designed computers. In fact, it was the opposite. It was much better funded, it had many more people, and it was a trial, a real trial, from the start.

And I was the only one writing checks. This was my show, from that standpoint. But I felt that in booking groups, I just didn't have the experience. And none of my people did, either. They knew how to organize a company but not book groups. I talked

to the concert promoter Bill Graham and signed him up. Now, if you've heard any of the legends surrounding Bill Graham, you know that he normally likes to run the whole show. But he'd been in Europe with the Rolling Stones, and we'd already been doing the engineering, coming up with what the stage would look like, the signs, the companies that would be hired, the sound system, the video. It was the first time ever that a big Diamond Vision display would be used at a concert in the United States.

But Bill had some definite ideas. For one thing, he totally nixed my progressive country idea, and he pretty much laid it out like this: You can't have that kind of music. He said, "If you want the kinds of numbers of people you're after, it's going to have to be a modern rock concert." If I really must, he said, I could add some country in.

He also said you have to have what kids in the high schools are listening to. So I actually went to some high schools and talked to kids. And when they threw out lists of the groups they wanted, all they were doing was relaying what the radio and MTV were playing. It was like all they wanted was two performers: Bruce Springsteen and Men at Work. It wasn't as if they had any special knowledge we didn't have. That was disappointing.

But we put the US Festival together anyway, and soon we were there. In 1982, over the Labor Day weekend. Candi was almost nine months pregnant, and we rented a house overlooking this huge venue. I mean, it was kind of scary to look down one day and see the hugest crowd down there. But we were going to pull it off, I knew it.

And we did, we really did. Though I lost money, that was not the biggest thing. The biggest thing was that people had a good time—and that facilities like the food stalls and bathrooms worked without a hitch. It was over 105 degrees that summer, and we set up a huge row of sprinklers people could run through all day to keep cool.

I still get emails and letters from people who say it was the greatest concert event of their lives. I just wanted everyone to smile, and I think everyone did. And we had a lot of firsts, that's for sure. We were the first non-charity concert ever of that size. We were the first to combine music and technology. We were the first to use that huge Diamond Vision video screen to bring the concert to people sitting way in the back, as well as to people at home watching on MTV, and we also had a satellite space bridge connecting our concert to some musicians in the then Soviet Union. We had Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, involved in the space bridge, too, and we had him talking to a cosmonaut!

This was still during the Cold War. Back then, people in the Soviet Union, mainly Russians, were much more feared than A1 Qaeda is today. The fear at the time was that the communist regime of the USSR would annihilate us with their weapons. Some of our UNUSON group had peace-oriented contacts with people in the USSR, though, including technicians who proposed the first- ever satellite linkup (space bridge) between the two countries.

I liked being the first at things—I always have—so I approved this instantly. Here's how we decided it would work: we would transmit live shows from our stage to a group in Russia. They would transmit a live show back to us on the Diamond Vision. The key to making it possible was that before the U.S. pulled out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, NBC had left a lot of satellite equipment behind. So all that equipment was still in a warehouse in Moscow.

Our technician friends in the USSR pulled this equipment out of its boxes and set up a satellite link on the specified date of the US Festival. There was no way we could know if it would even work. Back then, it took two weeks sometimes just to get a phone call into the USSR. We had to get the president of GTE to approve a constant phone call on the date of the transmission just so parties in both countries could talk to each other and make sure it was working.

On the date of the transmission, we weren't even sure it would work. Right up to the second their transmission appeared on our screen—the first day of the US Festival—we weren't sure. But then it came up.

Bill Graham was supposed to announce what was happening to the giant crowd. But he didn't. I ran across the stage to where Bill was viewing some TV monitors and told him to announce it.

Me and the USSR

Doing the satellite bridge to the Soviet Union at the US Festival led me to devote more than a million dollars over the next ten years to U.S./USSR peace efforts. The idea was personal diplomacy. I tried to get normal people, not officials, from each country to meet each other.

In 1988, on July 4, I sponsored the first big stadium concert in the USSR, just outside Moscow, with major Soviet and U.S. groups on the stage. The U.S. groups included the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Santana, and Bonnie Raitt. I found a cheap $25 guitar at a store in Russia, and got all the groups to sign it. I still have it. That concert was at the end of a great peace march there.