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 ran a nightclub in Santa Cruz. 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 owned a nightclub in Santa Cruz called the Albatross, a strange name for a place like that. He 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 on 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.
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 trying to get some bucks off the top. 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 Al 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. 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.”
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 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.
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 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.
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, everyone 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.”
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.
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.
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 concerts: 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?
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 long-distance girlfriend for the next half year. She was an interpreter.
In Russia, my friends would point out several signs 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.
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!