Return to the Little Kingdom (47 page)

From the start the concert was a tribute to Wozniak’s generous innocence and his steadfast belief in the pleasures of the more abundant life. He had drifted away from Apple, enrolled again at Berkeley, and remarried. He puttered about the Berkeley campus or his shingled home in the Santa Cruz mountains, with its psuedowooden turrets and glorious view of Monterey Bay, that he shared with his second wife, four llamas, two donkeys, three Siberian huskies, four mutts, an Australian shepherd and a red-tailed hawk. He equipped the house, which his friends took to calling Woz’s Castle, with the amenities of life: a video-game room, wide-screen television, ceiling-high stereo system, and what seemed like an example of every personal computer and peripheral ever made.

Nevertheless, he was bored. The idea for an enormous rock festival offered some distraction. He said that he first thought of it while driving around in his car and listening to a parade of hit records from major rock groups. “I wanted to do something good. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if all these groups could be in one place and play together?’” But he also explained this new venture to his family as a moneymaking enterprise and predicted to his sister that the rock festival would turn a $50-million profit. So Wozniak chose to abandon the comfortable certainty of El Camino Real for the reptilian world of Hollywood Boulevard.

Wozniak rented a plush office suite in a glass building in San Jose and recruited an unlikely team. The man he chose to organize the festival offered credentials that included some references to management consultancy and experience of
est
. Before long they were spitting out press releases announcing the formation of the UNUSON Corporation, an acronym for “Unite Us in Song,” and took to preaching a loosely woven gospel that sounded as if it had been lifted from some freshman papers turned in for Mod Psych 101. They said the purpose of the festival was to “refocus national attention on the power of working together.” For this, they observed, marked the change from the Me decade to the Us decade. They promised a large technology fair that would show how man and machine could work together.

Wozniak took a small office for himself where he installed an Apple II and some game paddles. Every now and again his hired hands appeared and addressed him in the tones of older brothers arranging a birthday treat for the youngest, slightly spoiled member of the family. He invariably nodded or agreed to their requests. As the US Festival organizers started to place orders for equipment, the only numbers they seemed familiar with ended in strings of zeros. The concert soon turned into a sump for—depending on the month and the mood of the speaker—$8 million, $10 million, or $12 million of Wozniak’s Apple fortune.

The people who knew Wozniak treated the US Festival with everything from sadness to alarm. Jobs, who was fond of repeating that it was easier to make a dollar than to give away a dollar, talked about setting up a charitable foundation and did little to conceal his contempt for the enterprise. Jerry Wozniak watched some of his son’s television interviews and said that the figure on the screen struck him as “manic.” Mark Wozniak treated the shenanigans skeptically: “My brother gets attracted to people who play up to him. People are using him. He’ll get screwed over and over. It’s the story of his life. Most of the people he gets involved with wind up screwing him.” Wozniak’s friend Chris Espinosa thought, “As a child and student he was innocent and isolated from the ways of the world. As an adult and millionaire he’s still isolated.”

For months yellow bulldozers and earthmovers scraped and crushed the mesquite near Devore into a gentle hill. A couple of streams were diverted and underground pipes turned part of the desert bowl into green palmetto. Landfill for parking lots was poured onto the laterite riverbed. Nearby canyons were organized into 100,000 campsites. Scores of turquoise-colored portable toilets were trucked in to serve as mobile sewers. Shower trucks, with boiling water and little shelves for the shampoo, were brought in for the press.

Tiger-striped marquees crammed with army cots housed security guards and the concession-stand workers. By the time the festival got under way and thousands of cars and buses began to peel off the specially constructed freeway exits, there was an example of every means of locomotion that had ever been seen on El Camino Real. Apart from automobiles—heavy on the Hondas, Datsuns (the official car of the US Festival), and Toyotas—there were motorcycles, sidecars, two-wheel dirt bikes, three-wheel dirt bikes, Cushman golf carts, flat bed trucks, Winnebagos, six-pak vans, Airstream caravans, bulldozers, backhoes, tractors, forklift trucks, semis and water dumpsters.

From the start Wozniak wanted to make sure that nobody had to wait more than five minutes for food. So the grounds were turned into an outdoor suburban shopping center. Beer gardens were stacked with brown bags of ice and canisters of bottled air. There was an official domestic beer and an official imported beer. Concession stands had munchies: M&M’s, granola bars, trail mix, gum, and smokes. There were watermelons, pineapples, strawberries, nuts, cookies, New York-style pizza, hamburgers, chili dogs, hot dogs, Polish dogs, burritos, tacos, soda, lemonade, 7-Up, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. “Paradise,” as Jimmy Buffet, one of the performers, observed, “is a cheeseburger.”

The suburban shopping-center pharmacy also moved in. The thousands of concertgoers could buy toothpaste, soap, sunglasses, insect repellent, and sunscreen from the back of rental trucks. It took sunscreen to conjure up the ghost of another decade. For when the rock producer urged the crowd to be generous, he resorted to that deft friendly phrase of the sixties: “If you’ve got some sunscreen, share it with your brother and sister.”

There was also a bumpy pyramid of law and order. Signs at the entrance gates were darn right upright: NO DRUGS, BOTTLES, CANS, WEAPONS OR PETS ALLOWED. NO TENTS, SLEEPING BAGS OR LAWN CHAIRS. ALL PERSONS SUBJECT TO SEARCH. Dozens of men from the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department (in helicopters and patrol cars and on horseback and motorcycles) kept an eye on things. One of a team of policemen from Southern Pacific explained that he was “here to protect the railroad.” Scores of hastily recruited blue-shirted security guards, the neighborhood vigilante gang, enforced their own amateur brand of justice and guarded the strategic gates in miles of chain-link fences. All the emphasis on security had its drawbacks—a shifting, baffling collection of carefully colored and painfully coded security badges and laminated passes. The passes Wozniak programmed on his computer for his friends weren’t even recognized.

There was more lavish treatment for the rock bands and the press than for the teeming masses. The bands—over twenty by the time all the contracts were signed—had quibbled about terms and demanded extraordinary sums when word trickled out that Wozniak’s pocket was well-nigh bottomless. Most said that it was another date, another gig, another day, and giggled at the mention of the US decade. Behind the stage the bands stayed in air-conditioned trailers hidden by varnished lattice fences. Their names were carved in Gothic script on wooden nameplates that hung on each door, and their needs were catered to by a squad of runners working out of another trailer marked AMBIENCE CONTROL which was a glorified room service. Outside the trailers, crowds of press agents, managers, business managers, personal managers—every sort of manager—fussed, complained, and argued.

Even the sky was for sale. A makeshift air-traffic-control tower ordered an eclectic collection of aerial objects to fly in counterclockwise circles. Some ultragliders putt-putted like underpowered motor scooters with wings. A couple of parachutists dropped in. At noon on the opening day of the festival five Mosquitoes ripped five white tubular trails across the sky. Little planes coughed and towed banners touting automobile insurance, sweat shirts, and cheap air fares to Honolulu. Below the busy air lanes a sheriff radioed to his pal in a helicopter, “There’s a low-flying fixed wing in the bowl area. Just want to make sure you’re aware of it.” At night the Goodyear blimp, in a mosaic of lights, winked WHAT A BIG TIME, THANKS WOZ. Twenty-four hours a day helicopters officiously ferried the rock stars and their groupies from a soft, steaming patch of blacktop to hotels that lay west of Rancho Cucamonga and Cucamonga.

The technology fair fell victim to the heat and the dust. It was no traveling Homebrew Club or West Coast Computer Faire. Some exhibitors failed to show; others found that their machines weren’t designed to cope with the full might of Southland weather. Many of the visitors seemed to be as interested in the heaving air conditioners that struggled to cool the marquees as in the exhibition. There were some cheap examples of the power of technology, like the banks of telephones and the Walkmans and the women plugging their curling tongs into the electric cables that ran inside some of the theater-sized marquees.

But the triumph of technology was displayed late one night when three men were setting up a demonstration of a television satellite dish. They used a microcomputer to calculate the pitch and tilt needed to find a satellite floating twenty-five thousand miles high and monitored the results of their efforts on a color television. They adjusted the dish, skipping from one invisible satellite to another, until they found what they wanted: a Los Angeles porn television channel bouncing a signal more than fifty thousand miles so that three men in the California desert could watch a naked black woman perform cunnilingus on her equally bare, white, female partner. It was, at least, a marriage of community and technology and the festival organizers would not have been surprised to learn that the women worked well together.

Many of the two hundred thousand or so people (nobody was all that sure of the numbers) who spilled into the beer gardens, soaked under outdoor showers, sprayed each other with plastic mister-bottles, and wallowed in the drenching drafts of a water cannon, seemed to enjoy themselves. Those who had a way with words called the US Festival one big party, though they made it sound like
purdee
. Those who liked adjectives thought it one big, fuggin purdee. Many said they had come to purdee, to have a good time, a ball, and a blast. The US Festival was: Neat. Great. Incredible. Fantastic. Unbelievable. Amazing. Like Wow.

The altar of this vast affair was a stage cast in empyreal proportions that would have done justice to Cecil B. De Mille. A pair of three-story-high video screens served as the outer panels of the tryptych. The crowning glory was another screen, the sort used for instant replays in baseball stadiums, perched half a skyscraper high above the well of the stage. In the bowels of the stage roadhands and stage crew operated elevators and movable platforms and bounced up steep flights of steps tugging racks of guitars, portable wardrobes, and steel trunks crammed with the paraphernalia of rock groups. Out in the desert bowl, black banks of loudspeakers sent four hundred thousand watts bouncing around the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, and cameras filmed the action for cable television syndication. Laser beams struck across the night sky, arrogantly sketching electronic patterns across sleepy black clouds. All the gadgetry and noise seemed like cosmographic versions of the videotape recorders, wide-screen televisions, stereo systems and video games that had crept into Wozniak’s own home. Wobbling alongside the stage was the Apple balloon that in the hubbub looked strangely innocent and quietly forgotten.

Presiding over the entire concert was Bill Graham, a San Francisco rock promoter: a chunk of irascible threats who, dressed in denim cutoffs, T-shirt, and basketball boots, yelled until the veins in his neck bulged and the spittle in his throat dried but comandeered the festival. He jabbed the air with his fists, flexed his muscles, and later said that Wozniak was a tragic figure. When he slipped on stage between acts he asked for a big welcome for a grrrrade, grrrrade band, for a grrrrade artist, a grrrrade rock ‘n’ roller and hailed these three grrrade days of grrrade, grrade rock ‘n’ roll.

All the virtues Wozniak had combined in the Apple Computer were absent. This was sledgehammer action and there was no hint of obscurity, no sense of subtlety and little discrimination. Perhaps the festival sprang from some desire to amuse and entertain; perhaps it was nothing more than a spectacularly conspicuous expression of vanity. It was certainly a freeze frame of celebrity-riddled America. In a white press tent two hundred reporters, photographers, and television cameramen waited for Wozniak. There were journalists from the television networks, cable television stations, dozens of radio stations, daily newspapers, weekly magazines, rock ‘n’ roll journals, and the computer trade press. They represented a mad welter of well-known names, and while they waited for a press conference they poked at trays of food, phoned reports to friends and editors, and swatted at the wasps that hovered around soft-drink cans, garbage pails, and trays of half-eaten food.

They waited for Wozniak to descend from a house that he had rented on a hill overlooking the festival grounds and used as a base for excursions in a long, black limousine. The journalists all waited for a line, a quote, a picture, or a close-up. They ruffled through steno pads, tightened tripods and monopods, and fiddled with cassette and microcassette recorders. A stream of leads led to a hedge of microphones and tape recorders, and when Wozniak arrived, ducking under a canvas flap, the tent ballooned to life. A bowl of Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes snapped and clicked. There was pushing and jostling and elbowing. The curved wall of cameras slid forward. A table collapsed and there were loud shrieks. The motor drives whirred, slapping image after image onto roll after roll of film. There were shouts and whistles. “Keep it down. . . . For chrissake, shuddup. . . . Quiet. . . . Quiet. . . . Woz! . . . Woz! . . .”—and all the while there was pushing and elbowing to get better pictures and angles. Sitting behind a table between the rock promoter and the graduate of Erhard Seminars Training, Wozniak wore a baseball cap that was set at a cockeyed angle, a T-shirt, shorts, and socks and grinned like an admonished schoolboy. He was spattered with a sad, repetitive, empty loop of questions: “How much money you lost? . . . How many people are here? . . . Why d’you do this?”