iWoz (33 page)

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 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.

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
Leaving Apple,Moving to Cloud Nine

After the US Festivals and graduating from Berkeley, I went back to Apple to work as an engineer again. I didn't want to manage people or be an executive or anything like that. I wanted just to be there and design new circuits and come up with clever ideas and apply them.

But once I got there, it was weird, because I was already in the media mainstream and had so much other stuff to do. A ton of stuff. I was being called by a lot of people—the press, computer groups I had to speak to—and I was working on these philanthropic projects like the San Jose Ballet and a local computer museum. I was sort of splattered all over the world and in all these countries and in all these different areas—beyond just working on circuits.

So I could get the engineering sort of started and come up with an architecture idea. For instance, it could be something that might speed up the processor five times, but the other engineers had to do most of the actual designing of the chips and the connections and the laying out of the printed circuit boards. So truly I felt it wasn't critical for me to be there, even though I loved Apple still.

I was working in the Apple II division. This was after the Apple III project was closed down, so the engineers from that depart

ment became Apple II engineers. A lot of them just gravitated around me. It was fun. And there were some cool people with some cool projects starting up in my building at the time. For instance, just as I got there, on the next floor down from me, they were finishing up the Apple II C computer. This was the small Apple II—a really small one—as small as today's laptops except you had to plug it into a wall. I thought it was just a beautiful computer, my favorite one to this day. I really think it was one of the best projects ever done at Apple.