iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

  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 exclusives 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.

  For doing things like the first space bridges between the US Festival and the USSR and this concert, I became pretty well known in the USSR. But you know what? The U.S. press didn’t care one whit. There was almost no coverage.

  In 1990 I sponsored two-week trips for 240 regular people—teachers, for instance—to tour the U.S. and stay in the homes of Rotary Club members here.

  So I had done the first three space bridges in the Soviet Union. Somewhere around this time, maybe 1989, ABC put on a national TV show purporting to be the first space bridge ever. I actually paid for the connections of this hookup, but ABC never even mentioned my name and took credit for being first. Actually, they were fourth!

  But he was certain that the Soviet signal was a hoax and coming from a studio in Southern California. He said, “No way would the Soviets permit a link like this.”

  But I knew the truth. So I went to the microphone and announced to the crowd that this was a historic transmission from Russia. There was some booing—remember, they were Cold War Enemy No. 1—but I knew we were making history.

  To the USSR, we transmitted Eddie Money. They loved it.

  • o •

  The US Festival was also the first huge concert where anyone got to hear me sing! Have I mentioned I have the voice of an angel? I got up and sang with Jerry Jeff Walker, the singer known for the 1960s song “Mr. Bojangles.” The song we sang was “Up Against the Wall You Redneck Mother.” Good thing they didn’t give me a microphone! Walker was actually the only country guy we ended up getting that year. Remember, I originally wanted the whole concert to be country.

  I also got to meet some
of the other musicians! I was sticking around with my new baby, Jesse; I mostly avoided meeting the celebrities. I did meet Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders—she had a baby, an infant, with her, too. And I remember how Jackson Browne came up and introduced himself to me. I was nearly tongue-tied—I was pretty intimidated talking to such a great performer.

  The main thing for me was the audience.

  I remember riding around with my friend Dan Sokol on little scooters and being just blown away by how much fun people were having.

  • o •

  And I was exhausted. I’d been up practically all of the last two nights, because Jesse was being born. He was two weeks early! It was September 1, two days before the concert began, we’d just finished the sound check, and at about 2 a.m. Candi woke up with labor pains. So, yikes, we hadn’t made any plans for the delivery, none at all.

  I mean, we’d been taking birthing lessons and all that up in Northern California. I called the midwife, and she recommended a natural birthing center over in Culver City, which was more than an hour and a half away. We borrowed one of the cars at the house we were renting and drove to the birthing center. But we didn’t tell anyone.

  I’m sure that the next morning, the morning before the day of the concert, eveiyone was wondering where the heck I was. But it wasn’t until that afternoon that Jesse was born. He was a beautiful baby.

  When Candi and I were discussing what to name the baby, I’d gotten the idea that we might have trouble agreeing on a name. I proposed a simple, conflict-free solution: if it was a boy, I’d name it; and if it was a girl, she’d name it. Candi thought this was fine. So when the baby was born, I named him Jesse, a name I’d already planned. First I’d thought Jesse James, but then I settled on Jesse John.

  The name Jesse sounded funny with Wozniak, though. So I decided that if the baby was a boy, I would name him Jesse John Clark. So when the baby came out, I exclaimed loudly, “It’s a boy!” But no, it was the umbilical cord I was seeing.

  But then it turned out the baby really was a boy, and I simply announced, “Jesse John Clark.”

  • o •

  I was so tired, walking around the concert when it started, and there was a doctor who kept injecting me with something to keep me up—vitamins, he said. But I had to do all these interviews— one with Peter Jennings, for instance, and one with Sting beside me. And they were asking me questions about this enormous crowd, and I just did a horrible job because I was so tired.

  But there is a wonderful picture—my favorite picture ever. It’s a picture showing the moment when I got up on stage on the first

  day of the concert with one-day-old Jesse in my arms. I told everyone that this was the birth of something great. I meant Jesse, of course, but also the concert. People went wild, cheering and everything.

  I will never forget that moment.

  • o •

  I loved that first US Festival concert, and I knew I’d made so many people happy doing it. We thought from press reports that enough people—nearly half a million—had shown up. So we thought that would make us money. But we lost money, nearly $12 million, because it turned out we didn’t sell as many tickets as there were people.

  A Big 8 accounting firm we hired explained to me that the reason was that people had been sneaking in. And I believed them.

  So I decided to do it again. I said to everyone involved, “Let’s do another show. We got such great publicity the first time around. We’re hot, it’s a sure go.” And it was hot. So I thought, This time we’ll just have to have supertight controls and make sure everybody has a ticket.

  This time, in 1983, we did it over Memorial Day weekend. (We had a country music day the following Saturday.) This time we tried to stick with more of the new-wave music at the time—the alternative stuff. We had the Clash, Men at Work, Oingo Boingo, the Stray Cats, INXS, and a bunch of other bands. That was the first day. And on the second day, we did heavy-metal day.

  We did the Soviet satellite link again. We had two more space bridges with the USSR. But we didn’t transmit music shows this time. Instead we transmitted groups of us in tents speaking to groups of them, person to person. U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts were involved, too. It was a very big deal. What struck me emotionally was how similar our values were. Those exchanges dissolved forever in me the effects of a lifetime of propaganda about the Soviet people being our enemies.

  • o •

  But even though we were more careful in counting the tickets this time, we still lost money.

  Another $12 million! You know, I was overpaying bands like crazy. I mean, with Van Halen, I paid a million and a half for its one appearance. I later heard that was the single highest amount paid for a band. And David Lee Roth, though he was nice and cordial when I met him, was practically falling down onstage. He was so drunk, slurring and forgetting lyrics and everything.

  But this time we had installed very tight controls, collecting ticket stubs and keeping them. We had turnstiles to count everyone who came in. We also had aerial photographers to get an accurate head count. Plus we knew how many tickets we had sold, making sure people didn’t slip in like the last time.

  But it turned out that the Big 8 accounting firm was full of crock. The problem hadn’t been that people were getting in for free. It was that press estimates of attendance were greatly exaggerated. Both times. So we lost the money because not as many people came as we thought. We didn’t sell enough tickets to cover costs.

  Still, I think of the US Festival as the biggest, hugest success. I’d do it again in a minute, I really would. It was a tremendous experience for me. Everyone had fun! Smiles everywhere. But on the economic side, well, not so hot. I lost a lot of money, and that was a big disappointment.

  One of the most memorable moments for me was when concert promoter Bill Graham came up to me near the end of the concert the first year. There was a huge full moon, and Sting and the Police were onstage. And Bill put his arm around me and said, “Look at this, Steve, just look at it. You’re not going to see this but once in a decade. This is so rare.”

  He told me that afterward, everybody was going to be doing these US Festivals because it was so popular, so fun, and so rare.

  Later on, he was right in a way, there were all these huge con—

  Paranoia?

  On my first trip to the USSR, I decided to bring a number of friends with me.

  One afternoon my friend Dan Sokol was trying to take a nap, but he was bothered by some Russian music in his room. I guess Dan was too tired to find the little music knob near the door. That’s all you needed to turn the in-room music down.

  Instead he propped open a ceiling tile near where the sound was coming from. He saw some wires and yanked them hard. They came loose but the music continued. So Dan got up on a chair and found another speaker in the ceiling. He yanked the wire off that one but the sound continued. He probed until he found another speaker, part of an intercom.

  Hey, he thought, this is how they listen to you! When he ripped that one out, the sound stopped. Dan took credit for finding the USSR surveillance system. Like they were spying on him. Ha. I laughed because I thought, Well, that’s Dan for you, paranoid and into conspiracy theories.

  We told this story about the Russian surveillance device to some of our friends who went to the USSR later. The next year, a friend of Jim Valentine’s went to St. Petersburg to install some sound equipment in a disco. Thinking of Dan’s story, he scoured his room looking for the hidden surveillance device Dan had described. Under the rug he found some lumps. He lifted the rug and saw a brass plate secured by four large screws. He undid the four screws with a screwdriver.

  When the last screw came out, a chandelier crashed on the floor below.

  Also, around this time I met a girl (I was separated from Candi by this time), a Russian girl—Masha. She was to become a longdistance girlfriend for the next half year. She was an interpreter.

  In Russia, my friends would point out several s
igns that I myself was being “watched.” They thought certain Russian officials—car drivers and the like—were KGB agents staying extra close by me at all times.

  One time, to get some time alone with Masha, I actually

  pulled a stunt to ditch the concert in a way that might lose the people who might be tailing me. So instead of leaving the concert in my own Soviet-provided car, I got someone else’s driver to take Masha and me back to my hotel, where we had about twenty minutes alone to talk.

  The next day, Masha and I toured an art museum at the Kremlin. Inside, she told me matter-of-factly, without even a raised

  eyebrow, that I was being followed by the KGB. I pooh-poohed this, but Masha pointed to a youngish man in a nice suit standing in the hall we were in. She said, “He’s KGB.”

  She said she could always identify the KGB because she knew a bunch of guys in the KGB school, and she could always spot them by the way they stood and the way they looked. I decided to call Masha’s bluff. I said, “You mean, if we backtrack through a couple of halls, he’ll follow us?” She said, matter-of-factly and with total confidence, “Yes.”

  So we went back through a couple of rooms, and we were

  talking about things and admiring an icon on the wall when I glanced sideways. And there he was. The same guy, across the hall, looking into a glass enclosure.

  I lost that bet.

  certs: Live Aid, Farm Aid, all of those. They were concerts in stadiums, though, that were all in prebuilt places. Who else in history ever went out and actually built a facility like this, really a pretty good facility to support and maintain that many people?

  For them and for me, it was the highlight of my life. Making money, losing money, that’s important. But putting on a fine show is most important of all!

  Chapter 18