iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

  At some point, I guess a week or two later, I was finally released and allowed to go home. I didn’t go to Apple to work, I presume because I thought every day was a weekend. That’s the only explanation I can think of now as to why I didn’t go to work, and also why I didn’t notice my dog was missing. (He’d been checked into a kennel.)

  For a few weeks after, I was living in my house in Scotts Valley in this weird, not-fully-functional state. I mean, people later told me I seemed hazy. They say I was driving around on my motorcycle, but people really had to direct me to do things. Like: “You go here. You have to do this now. Now you have to do this.” I was apparently functioning, but I hardly have any memories of it. I was living this halfway weird life. I didn’t realize that my dog had been boarded for five weeks away from me, for instance. It just seemed like every day was the same day. I didn’t

  even realize I was missing a tooth for five weeks—one of my front teeth! How do you not spot something like that? I don’t know, I can’t explain it.

  Now, Candi and her brother, I found out much later, were also injured in the crash. She even had to get some plastic surgery afterward. But I was the one who was the hardest hit. As I said, I ended up having what is known as anterograde amnesia, even though the doctors didn’t know it at first. Anterograde amnesia means that you don’t lose memories; you just lose the ability to form new ones.

  But I guess, when I think about it now, it was actually a good thing because in my mind, I never had a plane crash to get over. It just isn’t there. I underwent hypnosis to see if I could come up with any recollection of what happened to cause the crash. I really would’ve liked to know. But nothing came to me.

  So in those five weeks—the weeks of my amnesia—I remembered everything from before that. I had all my old skills and memories, and those memories are still there up till that point. But during that five-week period, whatever I was doing, I wasn’t remembering it.

  And then suddenly I came out of it.

  The first, the very first, memory I had was that I was somehow at the Macintosh building talking to associates I’d been working with on the Macintosh. And they were telling me something about how the project was going. And I don’t remember exactly who, but I think it was Andy Hertzfeld (designer of the Macintosh graphical user interface) who mentioned something about a plane crash. A plane crash? And the instant he said the words “plane crash,” I knew there was this thing about a plane crash in this dream I’d been having.

  So I said to myself, Oh, this is a dream I’m having right now. And in a dream, I can always tell myself that I can just turn around and walk the other way. You can go any which way and a

  dream follows you. But this time I thought, No, I’ll play by the rules of this dream and 111 keep talking to Andy. So I sat there talking to him, and that’s my very first memory. But it was a very weak memory.

  That night, I remember Candi and I went to see the movie Ordinary People. I don’t remember a single detail of that movie, only that we saw it. Then we got home and we were in bed. I was lying on my back and thinking, Wait, did I have a plane crash that I heard about and kept dreaming about, or didn’t I? I mean, I didn’t have any memories of such a crash, and it seems like you would remember such a thing, wouldn’t you?

  Is it possible I had a plane crash and didn’t remember it?

  So I turned over and asked Candi, “Did I have a plane crash or was it a dream?”

  I guess she thought I was joking, because she said, “It was a dream, Steve.” That’s what she said. That it was a dream. She wasn’t playing with my head. She just had no idea that I had no idea I’d been in a plane crash.

  This was a mental dilemma because I was struggling to prove in my head that it could be true.

  So now I’m sitting there wondering if I’m ever going to get anybody to tell me if I had a plane crash or not. I suppose if I’d been smart, I would have looked in the newspaper or asked other people, but this was actually the first time I was starting to think that maybe I had in fact had a plane crash and it wasn’t a dream.

  So I sat there that night, feeling my body. And my body didn’t have any broken bones or signs of a plane crash. Ha. I didn’t think to look for a missing tooth!

  So I kept thinking. I kept trying to pin it down. How do you figure out if something didn’t happen? I could remember every single detail of that day up to the point of reaching for the throttle, but I couldn’t remember pushing it. And then I thought of something logical. I thought, Wait a minute. I don’t remember landing

  in Santa Catalina. If I had landed the plane, there’s absolutely no way I would’ve forgotten that landing.

  As soon as I thought that thought, I realized that my brain had been working very strangely. I realized that I’d been in a plane crash and it was real. And I just jerked my head up right away and realized that everything I was starting to suspect was real. My head started working immediately and retrieving and forming memories, I could feel it. And what was strange was, I could feel both states of mind. I had just come from a state where I wasn’t forming memories, and now I was moving into this different state where I was forming memories. I could feel both states of mind at the same time, which was so strange.

  Then I looked at the bed stand next to me, and there were something like a hundred cards from people I had received while I was in the hospital. They were sending me best wishes, saying get well and all that. And I read them. They were all from my very closest friends and associates.

  And I said, Oh my god, I didn’t even know they were there.

  But I must have seen them every single night. Because they were there every single night. So it was like coming out of a very strange state and realizing that your head has not been forming any memories. That’s what I deduced.

  The very next day, my father called to remind me that I was supposed to show up for an appointment with the psychologist I’d been seeing. I had no memories of ever seeing a psychologist. But I went up to Stanford to see that psychologist and I kind of excitedly started explaining to him that I hadn’t been forming memories or remembering the plane crash, and suddenly I’d come out of it. My head just switched over, I told him. It was amazing.

  And would you believe it? He didn’t believe me! I suppose I was so excited when I told him about this that he kept telling me I was a manic-depressive. I was stunned, and told him that I

  didn’t have big highs or big lows like a manic-depressive would. I told him I was a very stable person. He said, “Well, manic depres sion usually starts when you’re thirty.” I was thirty. He had inter preted my excitement about my memory returning as beinj’, manic. What a quack.

  Well, those five weeks after the plane crash, when I was finally and fully out of the amnesia, I decided this was a lucky opportunity. I should finish college, and not go back to Apple right away.

  I realized it had been ten years since my third year of college, and if I didn’t go back to finish up now, I probably never would. And it was that important to me. I wanted to finish. And I had already been out of Apple for a while anyway—five weeks without knowing it, actually—so that made it easier to just go back to school and not go back to Apple right away. I decided that life is short, right? So I decided.

  I applied and got accepted and registered under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark. (Rocky Raccoon was the name of my dog, and Clark was my fiancee Candi’s soon-to-be maiden name.)

  And soon after I made that decision, Candi and I set the date to get married: June 13, 1981. It was an amazing party. We had the Apple hot-air balloon there in the front yard of Candi’s parents’ house. It was a spectacular party. Emmylou Harris, the famous folksinger, sang at the reception.

  • o •

  The day after the wedding, I got an apartment in Berkeley to get ready to begin my fourth year of college. And on the weekend, the plan was that I would go back to this house we had bought on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was amazing. Just a huge castle of a place.
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  It had a lot of flat land, which is unusual, so I had tennis courts built. And Candi turned a little pond into a nice little lake. I also bought an adjoining property, making twenty-six acres in

  .ill. It was a paradise. (Candi, now my ex-wife, still lives in that paradise.)

  Candi stayed there working on the house while I spent the week in this college apartment a couple of hours north, in Berkeley. It was a great year, and a fun year. Because I was going under I lie name Rocky Raccoon Clark, no one knew who I was. I had fun posing as a nineteen-year-old college student, and the engineering classes were so easy for me. Every weekend, I went back home to the castle.

  One of the first things I did at Berkeley, in addition to taking engineering courses for my degree, was to enroll in both psychology courses (for majors) and two courses specifically about human memory. After my accident and amnesia, I was intrigued by such strange aspects of memory, and I wanted to understand it more.

  As far as my own condition went, it turned out to be relatively well known. It happens frequently to people after car and plane accidents, and it’s associated with damage near the hippocampus section of the brain. It was a typical condition. There is no excuse for why my doctors—especially my psychologist—didn’t figure this out.

  Chapter 17

  Have I Mentioned I Have the Voice of an Angel?

  After the plane crash in 1981 and after I decided to go back and finish my degree at Berkeley, something else happened that I never would have expected.

  It was during that first quarter at summer school when I was taking a class in statistics so I could enroll the following year. I was driving around in my car listening to a radio station—KFAT out of Gilroy, California—a station that had heavily influenced me during the Apple days. You see, I’d changed my music tastes from normal rock and roll to a type of really progressive country by then.

  This was a new and strange type of music I’d never been exposed to before—a lot of folk, a lot of country, and a lot of comedy. It wasn’t some dumb old countryish beat and song and themes; these songs were a lot about life. They very much reminded me of the sort of thinking Bob Dylan did, being as familiar with his lyrics as I was. And these songs went as deep— they pointed out what was right and wrong in life. The way they were written and the way I experienced them brought out a lot of emotion in me. I mean, there was a real meaning attached to these songs, and I was heavily influenced by this station.

  At around this time, I recall seeing the movie Woodstock.

  There was a meaning attached to that movie, too. A meaning that had to do with young people growing up and trying to find alternative ways of living. And so much of that was brought up in the words of these new progressive country songs I was listening to, like a music revolution was starting all over again.

  And it hit me. I thought: Why not? Why not try to do a kind of Woodstock for my generation? I realized at this point that I had so much more money than I could ever dream of spending. I was thirty at the time and probably worth a hundred million dollars or more. I thought: My god, why not put on a big progressive country concert with these groups I loved? A lot of people might come.

  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 o
n 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.