The Woz stages his own Woodstock at the US Festival

Features

Music

Liam Lacey
The Globe and Mail

May 30, 1983

San Bernardino, Calif. -- Coming in from Los Angeles through the eye-watering smog and 31-degree heat, a garrulous, bona fide 17-year-old San Fernando Valley Girl talked about the event that is being promoted as the "Woodstock Of The Eighties."

"I can't wait to see David Bowie," she said. "He is so-o-o-o sophisticated. I love the way English people talk, don't you? I'm not going to even go on metal day. I'm just going to find a pool somewhere and work on my tan. Do you like Van Halen? I used to be sort of friends with Valerie Bertinelli, but I think David Lee Roth is the grossest."

Whatever else it may mean, the second US (United in Song) Festival, at Glen Halen Park 100 kilometres east of Los Angeles, is the biggest rock extravaganza of the last decade. What's more, it owes its existence almost entirely to the success of the personal home computer. The whole event is a gigantic fantasy for one man, rock 'n' roll's answer to Walt Disney, 32- year-old Steve Wozniak, the Silicon-Valley whiz kid who invented the Apple Computer in 1976, became a multi-millionaire, and turned into a high-tech hippy.

Saturday morning, standing under the press shed in his Bermuda shorts and polo shirt, Wozniak said, without so much as blinking: "I can lose $10-million here of my personal money. But if we can create the finest show on earth, and some of that spirit of togetherness that we lost in the sixties, that's a success, isn't it?"

Not surprisingly, Bill Graham, the legendary rock promoter who helped organize last year's first US Festival, has since called Wozniak "a naive putz," and Wozniak agreed on Saturday that "in many ways, what Bill says is true." The first festival lost Wozniak about $5-million. This year, the bankroll was $18-million for the four days of the Festival (new music on day one, heavy metal on day two, mainstream rock on day three, and country music on June 4).

Two acts, David Bowie and the Van Halen group, will earn mega-bucks: $1.5-million each for two-hour performances. Every one of the 40 acts will be paid at least 40 per cent more than it has ever been paid before. "With Bowie, we had to convince him to cancel a European tour to come here," Wozniak said. "Van Halen has a clause that doesn't allow them to earn less than any other act on the bill. But if we don't draw well this year, we couldn't really justify holding another festival. Realistically, I might as well go to every one of these kids' homes and hand them a $100 bill."

Judging by the first day at least, The Woz, as he is known around the site, is in for another loss. Only 140,000 people showed up on Saturday. (At least 600,000 ticket sales, at $20 each, are needed for the Festival to break even.) But there's no doubt that those who showed are getting their money's worth.

The theme of the Festival is supposed to be "unity in the eighties," but in fact it is closer to a rock 'n' roll Disney World. Brightly colored balloons are attached to everything they can be attached to. Off the main field, the 350-acre site is divided into separate areas - Woz Land, The Van Halen Compound, Press Island - framed by water courses with little wooden bridges crossing them. A couple of 25-foot plastic bottles of Miller Lite stand on either end of the field, and the sky hums day and night with helicopters bringing in VIP guests to the on-site heliport.

In the technical-fair portion of the grounds, there are dozens of exhibits praising the wonders of computer and satellite technology. In a small, striped circus tent, speakers as diverse as Bianca Jagger, Ray Bradbury (who agreed to speak only if Bowie was signed to perform) and Dick Gregory talked to small crowds about Third World politics and the future. At 10:30 a.m. Saturday, there was a direct satellite hook-up to Moscow, and for an astonishing half-hour, Soviet and American TV studio audiences quizzed each other through translators about life in each other's countries. The event ended with each group giving the other a standing ovation. That performance, and an even more trenchant political statement at the end of the show by the English headlining group, The Clash, were the only things that approached historical importance, though, in a Festival that is embarrassingly conscious of its historical importance.

Most of the audience, who ranged from their late teens to early 30s, were stripped to as few clothes as possible, and took turns squirting each other with plastic bottles of water. Concession stands sold everything from bikinis to gauze face masks to protect people from the smog, which wreathed the San Bernardino Mountains in a shimmering mist for most of the day. Although 400 deputy sheriffs toured the site, the mood was relaxed: there was almost no visible drug use, and most people seemed as intent on working on their tans as watching the stage.

Part of the reason for the crowd's calmness was the almost stupefying sophistication of the technology. A 400,000-watt system created such good sound that even half a mile away, the acoustics were better than in most people's homes. Between acts, the video screen showed promotional rock videos. At night, there was a total of three screens beaming the acts over the site, so that even during the hottest live performances, most people watched the screens instead of the stage, creating the disconcerting sense of 100,000 people watching television by moonlight.

The technology made the music almost secondary. A pair of hot young bands from Sidney, Australia, The Divinyls and Inxs, barely made an impression on the audience Saturday morning. ("It's difficult to be exciting when your wake-up coffee and croissants are growing cold on the amplifier," said Inxs singer Michael Hutchence after his set.) For California favorites Wall Of Voodoo and Oingo Boingo, the reaction was mild. Finally, the English pop-ska band The English Beat broke it open by urging the crowd to dance along to its jumping, infectious rhythms. The Stray Cats drew a predictably enthusiastic reaction with their slick combination of rhythm and blues and rockabilly. Men At Work, the Australian band that topped the American charts for three months last year with its debut album, was a pleasant surprise; the band has been weak in past live performances, but the Saturday night show was masterful in its pacing and control. Old songs were reworked superbly, and the new material was played with more confidence and style than the band has previously shown.

Men At Work had good reason to be on its best behavior. Its show was broadcast by satellite to an enthusiastic Moscow studio audience (Soviets will dance to anything.) And that is where The Clash came in in a bizarre last-minute power move that brought the opening day to a rousing finish.

The Clash is probably the most exciting live rock band in the world, but it has had difficulty maintaining its high rock profile with its egalitarian politics. Throughout the day, The Clash repeatedly threatened not to play, and the band's so-called fifth member, the flamboyant press agent Kosmo Vinyl, made repeated visits to the Press Island to complain about Wozniak's "cheeseburger mentality." The Clash argued that it should have been broadcast to Moscow instead of Men At Work. When asked why The Clash hadn't been chosen, Wozniak answered lamely that "Men At Work is a more predictable band, and we didn't want any hitches." He also said The Clash was angry because he was getting more publicity than the band was. The Clash continued to threaten not to play, and according to Wozniak "used extortion" to get him to pay $38,000 to a local camp for poor boys on top of its $500,000 salary.

In the middle of Men At Work's set, The Clash called a press conference to announce it would give its fee to the support of other English groups and to hold its own Los Angeles area festival in the next three weeks "with Hispanic musicians and other ethnic groups." Vinyl also described all the other acts on the bill as "moronic or irrelevant," before the band turned and left to go on stage.

The band members, especially lead singer Joe Strummer, had managed to work themselves into something close to a rage by the time they hit the stage. The result was a fascinating 60-minute snarl at the audience in "the decadence capital of the world," as Strummer dubbed California. "I want some bloody reaction," he said. "How about a little hostility or something?"

The band played ferociously, insulted Americans repeatedly, and put on a magnificently intense performance. It may not have fitted Wozniak's fantasy of recreating the love generation through the miracle of technology, but for the first time all day, the audience knew it wasn't watching television.