Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [168]
But the triumph of technology was displayed late one night when three men were setting up a demonstration of a television satellite dish. They used a microcomputer to calculate the pitch and tilt needed to find a satellite floating twenty-five thousand miles high and monitored the results of their efforts on a color television. They adjusted the dish, skipping from one invisible satellite to another, until they found what they wanted: a Los Angeles porn television channel bouncing a signal more than fifty thousand miles so that three men in the California desert could watch a naked black woman perform cunnilingus on her equally bare, white, female partner. It was, at least, a marriage of community and technology and the festival organizers would not have been surprised to learn that the women worked well together.
Many of the two hundred thousand or so people (nobody was all that sure of the numbers) who spilled into the beer gardens, soaked under outdoor showers, sprayed each other with plastic mister-bottles, and wallowed in the drenching drafts of a water cannon, seemed to enjoy themselves. Those who had a way with words called the US Festival one big party, though they made it sound like purdee. Those who liked adjectives thought it one big, fuggin purdee. Many said they had come to purdee, to have a good time, a ball, and a blast. The US Festival was: Neat. Great. Incredible. Fantastic. Unbelievable. Amazing. Like Wow.
The altar of this vast affair was a stage cast in empyreal proportions that would have done justice to Cecil B. De Mille. A pair of three-story-high video screens served as the outer panels of the tryptych. The crowning glory was another screen, the sort used for instant replays in baseball stadiums, perched half a skyscraper high above the well of the stage. In the bowels of the stage roadhands and stage crew operated elevators and movable platforms and bounced up steep flights of steps tugging racks of guitars, portable wardrobes, and steel trunks crammed with the paraphernalia of rock groups. Out in the desert bowl, black banks of loudspeakers sent four hundred thousand watts bouncing around the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, and cameras filmed the action for cable television syndication. Laser beams struck across the night sky, arrogantly sketching electronic patterns across sleepy black clouds. All the gadgetry and noise seemed like cosmographic versions of the videotape recorders, wide-screen televisions, stereo systems and video games that had crept into Wozniak’s own home. Wobbling alongside the stage was the Apple balloon that in the hubbub looked strangely innocent and quietly forgotten.
Presiding over the entire concert was Bill Graham, a San Francisco rock promoter: a chunk of irascible threats who, dressed in denim cutoffs, T-shirt, and basketball boots, yelled until the veins in his neck bulged and the spittle in his throat dried but comandeered the festival. He jabbed the air with his fists, flexed his muscles, and later said that Wozniak was a tragic figure. When he slipped on stage between acts he asked for a big welcome for a grrrrade, grrrrade band, for a grrrrade artist, a grrrrade rock ‘n’ roller and hailed these three grrrade days of grrrade, grrade rock ‘n’ roll.
All the virtues Wozniak had combined in the Apple Computer were absent. This was sledgehammer action and there was no hint of obscurity, no sense of subtlety and little discrimination. Perhaps the festival sprang from some desire to amuse and entertain; perhaps it was nothing more than a spectacularly conspicuous expression of vanity. It was certainly a freeze frame of celebrity-riddled America. In a white press tent two hundred reporters, photographers, and television cameramen waited for Wozniak. There were journalists from the television networks, cable television stations, dozens of radio stations, daily newspapers, weekly magazines,