Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [167]
The suburban shopping-center pharmacy also moved in. The thousands of concertgoers could buy toothpaste, soap, sunglasses, insect repellent, and sunscreen from the back of rental trucks. It took sunscreen to conjure up the ghost of another decade. For when the rock producer urged the crowd to be generous, he resorted to that deft friendly phrase of the sixties: “If you’ve got some sunscreen, share it with your brother and sister.”
There was also a bumpy pyramid of law and order. Signs at the entrance gates were darn right upright: NO DRUGS, BOTTLES, CANS, WEAPONS OR PETS ALLOWED. NO TENTS, SLEEPING BAGS OR LAWN CHAIRS. ALL PERSONS SUBJECT TO SEARCH. Dozens of men from the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department (in helicopters and patrol cars and on horseback and motorcycles) kept an eye on things. One of a team of policemen from Southern Pacific explained that he was “here to protect the railroad.” Scores of hastily recruited blue-shirted security guards, the neighborhood vigilante gang, enforced their own amateur brand of justice and guarded the strategic gates in miles of chain-link fences. All the emphasis on security had its drawbacks—a shifting, baffling collection of carefully colored and painfully coded security badges and laminated passes. The passes Wozniak programmed on his computer for his friends weren’t even recognized.
There was more lavish treatment for the rock bands and the press than for the teeming masses. The bands—over twenty by the time all the contracts were signed—had quibbled about terms and demanded extraordinary sums when word trickled out that Wozniak’s pocket was well-nigh bottomless. Most said that it was another date, another gig, another day, and giggled at the mention of the US decade. Behind the stage the bands stayed in air-conditioned trailers hidden by varnished lattice fences. Their names were carved in Gothic script on wooden nameplates that hung on each door, and their needs were catered to by a squad of runners working out of another trailer marked AMBIENCE CONTROL which was a glorified room service. Outside the trailers, crowds of press agents, managers, business managers, personal managers—every sort of manager—fussed, complained, and argued.
Even the sky was for sale. A makeshift air-traffic-control tower ordered an eclectic collection of aerial objects to fly in counterclockwise circles. Some ultragliders putt-putted like underpowered motor scooters with wings. A couple of parachutists dropped in. At noon on the opening day of the festival five Mosquitoes ripped five white tubular trails across the sky. Little planes coughed and towed banners touting automobile insurance, sweat shirts, and cheap air fares to Honolulu. Below the busy air lanes a sheriff radioed to his pal in a helicopter, “There’s a low-flying fixed wing in the bowl area. Just want to make sure you’re aware of it.” At night the Goodyear blimp, in a mosaic of lights, winked WHAT A BIG TIME, THANKS WOZ. Twenty-four hours a day helicopters officiously ferried the rock stars and their groupies from a soft, steaming patch of blacktop to hotels that lay west of Rancho Cucamonga and Cucamonga.
The technology fair fell victim to the heat and the dust. It was no traveling Homebrew Club or West Coast Computer Faire. Some exhibitors failed to show; others found that their machines weren’t designed to cope with the full might of Southland weather. Many of the visitors seemed to be as interested in the heaving air conditioners that struggled to cool the marquees as in the exhibition. There were some cheap examples of the power of