The Us Festivals were two early 1980s music festivals operated and sponsored by former of Apple employee Steve Wozniak. Steve pretty much paid for all the expenses of the two show held on Labor Day weekend in September 1982 and the second was Memorial Day weekend in May 1983. The expenses includes the bulldozing and construction of a new open-air field venue and the construction of an tremendous state-of-the-art temporary stage at Glen Helen Regional Park near Devore, San Bernardino, California. (Later on known as the Block Buster headquarter) The festival stage has resided at the Disneyland theme park in California since 1985 and has operated under various names and functions as the Videopolis dance club, the Videopolis Theatre, and the Fantasyland Theatre.
The plane accident that Woz got into made him rethink his priorities and he decided that he wanted to go back to college to earn his undergraduate degree. He enrolled in the engineering program at UC Berkeley. In the summer of 1981, Woz was listening to his favorite radio station KFAT and had an inspiration about putting together a music festival, a "Woodstock West" featuring his favorite progressive country music performers. He realized that while he had the financial wherewithal, he didn't know the first thing about the music industry and filed the idea away, after mentioning it to a few friends.
Woz, being the epitome of geek cool, didn't need to be rich to be happy. He didn't like to be surrounded with a personal entourage of financial counselors and wheeler dealers bent on turning his fortune into a mega-fortune.he wanted, instead, to throw a party that reflected the world that he saw craving our future. Woz wanted to diplay a world just starting to swirl with cross-currents between the arts and sciences, a mix that was giving birth to a cultural climate of innovation not seen since the Renaissance. He wanted to capture the moment that reflected the cultural movement from the selfish focus of 'me' to the social focus on 'us'.
This "personal party" of Woz was a great success. Big bands like The Police, Santana, Pat Benatar and Jimmy Buffet appeared on the 1983 "Us" and The Clash, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue and U2 played on the 1984 "Us". The concert failed to continue due to the commercial failures and Woz lost over 20 million dollars over the festival.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=US_Festival.txt&characters=Steve%20Wozniak&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date
Parts of this are not proofread, and other parts seem like unattributed quotes. Good topic, but not a well written post.
ReplyDeleteNice job, Steven. You provide a lot of personal and emotional reaction to the festivals and concerts of the 1980's, thus appealing to the reader here. You also uniquely related these concerts to the rise of technology and the work of Steve Wozniak, something I never knew before.
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