A new documentary film, ‘The US Generation,’ is the story of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s 1982 US Festival
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, center, at a recent screening of “US Festival ’82: The US Generation,” a documentary on the music festival Wozniak founded. He’s seen here with, left to right, director-executive producer Glenn Aveni, Bruce Gibb, executive producer, Wozniak, Jay Cederholm, co-director-editor, and Carlos Harvey, Wozniak’s finance guy for the US Festival, who is also interviewed in the film. (Photo by Joy Daunis)
A lot of big numbers get tossed around in any conversation about the inaugural US Festival held Labor Day weekend in 1982 at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino.
Fans numbered 425,000 or so, many of whom camped on the grounds in the dusty, summer heat of early September.
There were 19 top-flight acts – everyone from Talking Heads, the Police and Tom Petty to Fleetwood Mac, Santana and the Grateful Dead – nearly half of which are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The budget, which started at $10 million ended up in the neighborhood of $13 million, the equivalent of $33 million today.
And then there’s a singular man, with a large and generous dream, who didn’t care so much about the millions of dollars he was spending to create the US Festival as he did about how much everyone who was there, fans and musicians and staff alike, enjoyed the experience.
“None of us would be here if it wasn’t for one man,” said Glenn Aveni, director and executive producer of “US Festival 1982: The US Generation,” a new documentary on the iconic yet often under-appreciated music festival. As he spoke Aveni nodded at the man in question, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, who with maybe 100 or so invited guests was in the Charlie Chaplin Theater at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood for the world premiere of the documentary.
“Woz puts up $10 million of his own money, with no expectation of seeing any return, and says, ‘I paid to see 10 million smiles,'” Aveni said.
Now, as “US Festival 1982: The US Generation” is set to premiere Tuesday, Nov. 28, on the AXS TV cable network, there’s a chance to relive those smiles, or discover them for the first time, in the strangely beautiful story of a man and his festival and the legacy it left.
“What you did was revolutionize the large festival industry,” Aveni said, still addressing the man everyone, friends and strangers alike, refers to as Woz. “Live Aid took their cue from the US Festival. Bonnaroo, Coachella, all of them did.”
The film, which mixes current-day interviews with Wozniak, musicians who performed there, and others who were part of the fest with performance segments and archival footage from the days before and during the festival, is the most comprehensive look yet at the US Festival, which after a sequel over Memorial Day weekend in 1983 was never held again.
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The film takes viewers through the planning of the festival from Woz’ initial inspiration – “I’ve got way more money than I need for life,” he says in one soundbite early on – to his recruiting of a team to help him realize that dream.
Attorney John Collins, who handled legal work for US Festival and was also in the audience at the screening, recalls how he and Peter Ellis were invited to Wozniak’s apartment in Berkeley where they recall he was living under the pseudonym of Rocky Clark after returning to college to finish his degree. Ellis says they really didn’t know what to make of Woz or his big plans for a music festival, but when he took out his checkbook and wrote out a check for $2 million they were in business.
Unlike today, when you conceivably could find a music festival practically every weekend of the year, in 1982 there really weren’t many, if any, being held in the United States. Woodstock had been huge, but also had huge problems cramming half a million people into a farm in upstate New York. A few months later, Altamont with its bad trip vibes and the murder of a fan by Hell’s Angels just feet from where the Rolling Stones were playing, effectively ended the first wave of American festivals.
There are great clips of the search for a venue for the US Festival, including one in which organizers are meeting with residents to persuade them to get on board behind the US Festival. “You’ve got nothing but punk rockers, who are probably the most dangerous people in this country!” one angry man shouts in the clip.
After finding Glen Helen and getting the county to sign off on a festival there, the US Festival organizers brought on famed concert promoter Bill Graham, whose team included Gregg Perloff, who is filmed recalling how he came to the park a few months before the festival and saw a vast open space that was completely unprepared to host a massive concert. “I’m thinking, ‘These guys are out of their minds,'” he says in the documentary.
But the US Festival team had money to throw at any problem, and within a few months the park had been bulldozed and landscaped and whipped into shape, Perloff says.
Carlos Harvey, who was Wozniak’s financial guy at the time and attended the screening wearing his original US Festival satin jacket, was the one who worried as Wozniak signed check after check after check.
“Everybody got the biggest payday they’d ever had,” he says in the film of the deals struck to sign all the acts. “It was just money flying around like confetti.”
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The bands Graham booked represented the best of the era, whether they were established acts such as Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band or Jackson Browne, or still slightly underground acts such as the Ramones and Gang of Four. Interspersed between the interviews on creating the US Festival is the proof of that quality in clips of nearly every act on the bill.
Not every act agreed to let Aveni use their performances in the documentary, but there are by my count seven full performances seen in the film, from the B-52s “Strobe Light” to Eddie Money’s “Gimme Some Water,” the Cars’ “Bye Bye Love” to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
The headliners on each night also agreed to let the film use a full song for the film, and they’re among the most thrilling moments in the documentary. The Police getting a crowd of 100,000 or more on Friday to sing along to “Can’t Stand Losing You,” Fleetwood Mac delivering a blazing take on “The Chain” on Sunday, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers inducing chills in the Chaplin theater as they tear through “Refugee.”
A handful of musicians who played that weekend are also interviewed for the documentary, including Marky Ramone, Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, Kate Pierson of the B-52s, and Stewart Copeland of the Police.
“Like the kid in the toy shop, Woz was like, ‘I can do this, I can do that,'” says Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. “It was wonderfully child-like.”
Adds Woz a few minutes later in the film: “I just wanted to make it as awesome as possible.”
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After the screening, which was attended in large part by backers of a Kickstarter campaign that helped fund the finishing touches on the film, Aveni and Wozniak took questions from the crowd, which elicited unexpected nuggets including:
Wozniak would have liked to have booked John Mellencamp, then still known as John Cougar, and the Go-Go’s for the US Festival.
He and his team thought about doing a movie of the festival and met with future Disney chief Michael Eisner, then at Universal, though the project never came to fruition.
His first child, Jesse John Wozniak, was born a day before the festival – two months early – which left him disoriented and tired throughout the weekend.
Mostly, though, the post-movie conversation made clear what the film already had – this was a labor of love, and though he lost millions of his own money, he has no regrets.
“It was a full moon when the Police came on,” Wozniak said. “Bill Graham came up to me and put his arm around me and said, ‘Look at that audience. That doesn’t happen but once every 10 years.'”
People come up to him all the time and thank him for one thing or another, an Apple product, a philanthropic endeavor, but there’s one thing that always makes him happiest to hear
“When they say the US Festival I have to shake their hand a little longer,” Wozniak said.
‘The US Festival 1982: The US Generation’
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 28
Where: AXS TV cable network
For more: facebook.com/usfestmovie
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