IWoz_ Computer Geek to Cult Icon Part 2

That was a night Randy and I will never forget. It was our first time seeing the lights of Las Vegas. We were stunned by it. It was a much different and smaller strip than today, with much smaller hotels. There weren't even as many of them as there are now, and many were old and tiny. But it was impressive. We'd never seen anything so lit up, that is for sure!Our motel was the cheapest place in town, the Villa Roma. It was near Circus Circus and we learned the route from there to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Randy and I did a lot of walking that night. I showed Randy, who was seventeen at the time, how to play c.r.a.ps and he won something like $35. At the convention center, we watched the late-night setup of all the booths. We set up in our booth and worked until about 6 a.m., finally getting everything working.At that point I did one very smart thing. I was so tired and wanted some sleep but knew it was worth backing up our one good floppy disk, with all the right data.I had some short programs that allowed me to read and write entire tracks. The floppy disk had thirty-six tracks. I decided to make a copy of this one floppy disk we had worked so long and hard to prepare. I only had two floppy disks with me so I decided to copy the good one to the blank. I inserted the good floppy and entered some data into memory to cause it to read track 0. Then I put in the blank floppy and used that data to write "track 0" on it. I did the same sequence for all thirty-six tracks. Backing up is smart, I always say.But when I finished this backup, I looked at the two unlabeled floppy disks and got a sinking feeling that I'd followed a rote pattern but accidentally copied the bad floppy to the good one, erasing all the good data. A quick test determined that this is what happened. You do things like that when you are extremely tired. So my smart idea had led to a dumb and unfortunate result.It meant that we would not, due to our tired state, have the floppy ready to show when the CES started in a few hours. What a b.u.mmer.We went back to the Villa Roma motel and slept. At about 10 a.m. I woke up and got to work. I wanted to try to rebuild the whole thing. The code was all in my head, anyway. I managed to get the good program reestablished by noon and took it to our booth. There we attached the floppy and started showing it.I can't tell you how successful and noted it was at this show, particularly in comparison to the Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80, which were at the CES as well.

The floppy disk made the computer fast, but it was a program named VisiCalc that made it powerful.Two guys in Boston, Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, worked closely with Mike Markkula to design it. And boy, was this the right product at the right time! And it was definitely the right program for the right machine.VisiCalc was a software product for business forecasting-it was designed to answer "what-if" scenarios. For instance, if we sell $100,000 worth of product X, how much revenue will we get? What if we sell half that? It was the earliest software program for doing spreadsheets on a personal computer, so that regular people working in business really had a high-tech tool.And VisiCalc was so powerful it could only run on the Apple II. Only our computer had enough RAM to run it. The Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET definitely weren't powerful enough. But we had the RAM, we had graphics on-screen and a two-dimensional display, and we were easy to use out of the box. And VisiCalc came out not on ca.s.sette, but on floppy disk. What a match.Our business just exploded when VisiCalc came out. And the Apple II market suddenly moved from hobbyist people playing games who didn't mind waiting a few minutes for the program to load from tape, to business-type people who could load VisiCalc instantly.After a couple of months, the businesspeople were something like 90 percent of the market. We had totally missed this audience, we never thought of it. But it took Apple in a whole new direction.From 1,000 units a month, suddenly we went to 10,000 a month. Good G.o.d, it happened so fast. Through 1978 and 1979 we just got more and more successful.By 1980 we were the first company to sell a million computers. We were the biggest initial public offering since Ford. And we made the most millionaires in a single day in history up to that point.I believe the whole reason for this was the combination of the Apple II, VisiCalc, and the floppy disk.

* O *

Remember when I told you Mike had us copyright the software? Well, what a good move.After the CES, we found out about a new computer from a company called Franklin. It supposedly looked a lot like ours. It arrived at our building, and it looked so much like the Apple III was very interested.I thought, Hey, great. They copied my design. I wonder how much of it they copied. I didn't expect they would've copied much of it. I figured engineers are trained to invent and design their own things. An engineer would never look at another person's design and copy it, would they? No, that's what they go to school for. They go to learn how to design their own things.I walked over to the main building to look at it. There it was, and I was shocked. The printed circuit board inside was exactly the same size as ours. And every single trace and wire was the same as ours. It was like they'd taken our Apple II board and Xeroxed it. It was like they'd just Xeroxed a blank Apple II board and put in the exact same chips. This company had done something no honorable engineer would've done in their effort to make their own computer.I couldn't believe it.Well, at the next computer show I attended, I immediately went up to their booth and told the president, who was in the booth, "Hey, this is just a copy of ours." I was all upset."This is ridiculous," I told him. "You copied our board. You just copied it. Which means I am your chief engineer, and you don't even give me credit for being your chief engineer."The president looked at me and said, "Okay. You're our chief engineer."And I was happy and walked away, but now that I think of it, I should've asked him for a salary!We did sue them later, and I found out their argument for doing it. They claimed there were legal reasons that gave them the right to copy the Apple II. They were arguing that because there was such a huge software base of programs for the Apple II, it was unfair to exclude them. They claimed they had a right to build a computer that could run that software base, but that argument sure didn't make sense to me.The case took a couple of years. They lost, and we did get money from them. Just a few hundred thousand dollars, not the millions I thought it was worth. But it was enough to stop them.More About the Floppy DiskThe floppy disk was invented by Alan Shugart in 1967, when he was working at IBM. The first floppies were 8 inches across-and they were called floppies because they were on a thin, bendable piece of magnetic material. Later, floppies went to a smaller format, the 5.25-inch format.Later on, when they were in an even smaller 3.5-inch format and in a nonbendable plastic cover, people started calling floppies "diskettes."

Chapter 15.

The Woz Plan Just before we went public in late 1980, a guy called me and asked whether he could buy some shares of my stock at $5 a share. He wanted to buy 10 percent of it.I loved the idea, because it meant I could afford to buy Alice and myself a house. We were still living in the Park Holiday Apartments in San Jose, paying a rent of $150 a month.But I like to do things different. I valued the employees at Apple-there were more than a hundred by then-as a community. I'd had that philosophy about a company being like a community since my first job, and maybe even earlier.So I decided it would be better to sell some of my stock to employees and let them benefit, rather than some outside investor.It was apparent to a lot of people at this point that Apple was going to have a very successful IPO-that, reasonably, the stock was going to be worth a whole lot more than $5, at any rate. And top executives and founders at Apple had a lot of stock. We were all likely to make millions. But a lot of other employees were left out, the majority of them.I decided I was going to offer to sell some stock really cheap to people who deserved it. Regular employees didn't get all thestock options the executives got. Which wasn't fair. So I came up with something I called the Woz Plan. Any engineer or marketing person could buy 2,000 shares from me at a really low price of $5.Almost everybody who partic.i.p.ated in the Woz Plan ended up being able to buy a house and become relatively comfortable. I'm glad of that. But at first our lawyers told me I wasn't going to be allowed to sell stock to all these people. They told me they had to be sophisticated investors or something. But finally our attorney, A1 Eisenstat, said, "Okay, Steve, you can do it."Then there was the matter of some of our earliest employees who didn't get stock at all. Randy Wiggington, who'd helped me do the floppy disk, had been there before we started Apple even. Chris Espinoza, Dan Kottke, and my old neighbor Bill Fernandez were other examples. These employees weren't just around, they offered the inspiration that really allowed me to do the great stuff. I thought of them as part of the family, part of the family that had helped me design the Apple I and Apple II computers.I gave each of them stock worth about a million dollars.In those days, giving stock away to people you thought deserved it was just unheard of. Companies at the time just didn't give stock to all the workers. They were like, "Why should we give these people stock? They did what they did for what they got paid and they didn't have stock." Never would any company go back and say, "Okay, well, you were real nice. So now I'll give you some stock." So this was different because I was giving them my own stock-like a gift-it wasn't coming from the company.

I think behind the scenes Steve thought I was weak because of this-sort of ditching the company a little bit in kind of a sellout. But I sold that stock at about $5 a share to forty people in the Woz Plan-2,000 shares a pop-and then I was able to buy a really nice house for me and Alice. I bought it in cash. I figured, once you own a house, it's great. All you have to worry about isthe maintenance of the house if you don't have a job or anything. So I bought it and owned it outright.It wasn't a very big house, but it was a nice house. It was probably the very favorite house of my life. It was just beautiful- located in the middle of the Santa Cruz Mountains, in Scotts Valley. It was an all-wood house-knotty pine with the holes in the wood. There was a big master bedroom upstairs. And I remember I could walk upstairs through the bedroom and walk out onto a balcony and look down into the family room and a little aviary with a bunch of windows. I had a gate out front with a wooden mural I had done of dogs. I got my first huskies there. I loved everything about that house.Alice and I didn't stay together in that house very long, though. Even though we now had money like we'd never dreamed of, it wasn't enough to make up for the fact that we had different interests. She wanted to go out every night with her friends. I wasn't into that. I wanted to stay home and work. I didn't want to get divorced-I never wanted to get a divorce, ever. I'm the kind of guy who always wanted to get married to someone forever, and I wanted that with Alice.But what could I do? I mean, by then the Apple stock was worth so many hundreds of millions of dollars, and she just told the counselor we were seeing that she wanted to see who she was without me and be on her own in life. She never once said to the counselor that I worked too hard, which is kind of a myth about my divorce that got in the press later. No, that's not what she said. She said she wanted to be on her own.Let me tell you that I opposed that divorce as strongly as I could. I never wanted to get divorced in my life. But finally I realized there was no way to stop it. So I just took Alice to a park in Cupertino and wished her well and said goodbye. I walked back to Apple feeling really different. Different like it was time to move on. Alice was gone.

By this time Apple had its own building on Bandley Drive. By 1981 computers all of a sudden became the happening thing in life. There were articles in newspapers and magazines and TV shows talking about computers; it was just immense. Computers, personal computers, and home computers-suddenly everyone was wondering if they were going to make our lives better in the future, lead to better education systems, cause us to be more efficient and more productive. It looked like computers were going to enlighten us, improve our brains, let us think less and get correct answers sooner.There was also a constant stream of articles in the trade press comparing our product with others on the market, and because we were the best technically, we were always rated as the best product. We were the one everyone wanted the most.There were also stories about how we were just two people, Steve and I, and how we'd started with nothing and suddenly were so successful. We got all this publicity and all the benefits from it. Sales. Fame. We were just the hot, s.h.i.+ning star.In December of 1980, Apple's stock went public on the NASDAQ exchange.

It was the most successful IPO up to that time. It was on the front page of every major newspaper and magazine. Suddenly we were legendary. And rich. Really rich.This was a pretty amazing accomplishment. After all, we had started from virtually nothing. It turned out Mike Markulla was right. We really were going to be a Fortune 500 company in five years.Just a year later, we were going head to head with IBM's first personal computer, the IBM PC. Nonetheless, we had this major, major IPO. We also had the Apple III, a machine targeted to business, coming out-there were just rumors of it-and I think thatwas part of the reason the timing was right. (Another reason was that because so many people had received shares, the reporting ha.s.sle to the SEC was harder than going public!)That computer, the Apple III, was a strong, strong statement to the business world. It was like, after this incredible Apple II phenomenon, we were suddenly going to be able to compete with the then-new IBM PC.

The Apple III had some terrible problems, though. It was nothing like the Apple II, which was reliable all the time. I'm serious. You could buy an Apple II on eBay today, and it'll work. There is no modern product that is as reliable. In every speech I give, I talk to people who are still running Apple lis, and they say those machines are still running after this many years.No, the Apple III had hardware problems, serious ones. It would get to a store, for instance, boot up a couple of times, and then it would crash. Sometimes it wouldn't even boot up at all. My brother had a computer store by this time in Sunnyvale, and he told me Apple engineers would come down to fix it, but they could never get a machine that worked. Never. The first few months of the Apple III went by, and many of the stores had the same experience. Every Apple III came back not working. And what do you do when you're a computer dealer and this happens? Well, you stop selling it and you keep selling the original machine, the Apple II. That's why the Apple II was going to be the largest-selling computer in the world for at least three more years. In fact, by 1983 it would hit a huge milestone-it was the first computer to sell a million units!So why did the Apple III have so many problems, despite the fact that all of our other products had worked so great? I can answer that. It's because the Apple III was not developed by a single engineer or a couple of engineers working together. It was developed by committee, by the marketing department. Thesewere executives in the company who could take a lot of their power and decide to put all their money and resources in the direction of their own ideas. Their own ideas as to what a computer should be.Marketing saw that the business community would be the bigger market. They saw that the typical small businessman went into a computer store, bought an Apple II, a printer, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, and two plug-in cards. One was a memory card, which allowed them to rim larger spreadsheets. And the other was an eighty-column card, which allowed them to present eighty columns of characters across the video display, instead of the normal forty. Forty columns was the limit of American TVs.So they came up with the idea that this should all be built into a single machine: the Apple III. And it was built.Initially there was virtually no software designed for the Apple III. Yet there were hundreds of software programs you could buy for the Apple II. So to have a lot of software right away, Apple built the Apple III as a dual computer-there was a switch that let you select whether the computer started up as an Apple II or as an Apple III. (The Apple III hardware was designed to be extremely compatible with the Apple II, which was hard to improve on.) It couldn't be both at once.And it was here they did something very wrong. They wanted to set the public perception of the Apple III as a business computer and position the Apple II as the so-called home hobby machine. The little brother of the family. But get this. Marketing had us add chips-and therefore expense and complexity-to the Apple III in order to disable disable the extra memory and eighty- column modes if you booted it up as an Apple II. the extra memory and eighty- column modes if you booted it up as an Apple II.This is what killed the Apple Ill's chances from the get-go. Here's why. A businessman buying an Apple II for his work could easily say, "I'll buy an Apple III, and use it in the Apple II mode since I'm used to it, but I'll still have the more modern machine."But Apple killed the product that businessman would want by- disabling the very Apple II features (extra memory and eighty- column mode) he was buying the computer for.Out of the chute, the Apple III got a lot of publicity, but there was almost nothing you could run on it. As I said, it wasn't reliable. And in Apple II mode, it was crippled.To this day, it boggles my mind. It's just not the way an engineer-or any rational person, for that matter-would think. It disillusioned me that big companies could work this way.

Finally, finally, about a year after Apple was able to make the Apple III reliable enough so it wouldn't break constantly, the computer still wouldn't sell. Because by then it had such a bad rep as a terrible, unreliable machine. You see, first impressions matter. When a computer pa.s.ses by its period of acceptance, you just aren't going to get people jumping on the bandwagon by fixing the problem.My feeling was, Hey, try to forget about it, and just change the name of the Apple III to the Apple IV and make it look different on the outside, and maybe then you could sell some.

From the years 1980 to 1983, Apple made the Apple III its highest priority. It's fair to say that Apple became the Apple III company. An Apple III company that just happens to sell Apple lis.By 1983 everybody at Apple was forced to have an Apple III on their desk. Suddenly, whenever I walked into the company, they'd be talking like, "Oh my G.o.d, did you see such and such new piece of software running on the Apple III?" And it was like, Who cares? I would go around the country in those days and give speeches to computer groups. I would talk to computer groups all over the place, and everywhere I went there would be ninety people with Apple lis and three people with Apple Ills.Why would Apple pretend it was an Apple III company when it wasn't? That was my question.After all, during these years the Apple II was the largest- selling computer in the world. The Apple II was carrying us. In those days, almost every ad Apple ran in major magazines like Time Time and and Newsweek Newsweek showed an Apple III. They never showed an Apple II. The executive staff cut plans for all Apple II products. Totally. There were only a couple of education-related products left. showed an Apple III. They never showed an Apple II. The executive staff cut plans for all Apple II products. Totally. There were only a couple of education-related products left.Despite all this, the Apple II was still paying everyone's salaries and making a huge profit for the company. And it wasn't even being advertised. About the only salary Apple spent on the Apple II during that period-1980 to 1983-was on the guy who printed the price lists.

It was terrible. I mean, we had everybody at Apple-all the employees and all the money-going into the Apple III and nothing was coming out. And accounting didn't account for it that way. The company lost so much money on the Apple III in those days-in today's money, it would be at least a billion. I calculated at the time that we lost about $300 million. That's just my own estimate.And not only was the Apple II carrying the whole company and carrying a debacle like the Apple III, it was hiding the Apple Ill's real deficiencies from the world. n.o.body in the real world, but n.o.body, treated the Apple III as if it was significant.All of our users had no idea, I'm telling you. Because if you opened up a computer magazine, all you saw were fifty ads for the Apple II-not by Apple, but by resellers and small mom-and- pop shops who were building all those games and add-ons for the Apple II.As for the computer magazines, in their reviews of the Apple III, almost every one of them acknowledged it was a failure in the marketplace. Never did they acknowledge that it was a prominent part of Apple's business. They gave consumers the impression that we were largely an Apple II company-with this hugely successful product-and that there was this big group still working on the flawed Apple III for some reason.

Now, I accept that Apple had to work the way a company has to. There are a lot of people who operate the company, and there are a lot of people on the board who run things. So the reasoning is very difficult to see. I mean, this was a time when the company had one reputation but it was totally different on the inside. It very much bothered me that you can get away with all kinds of things when you are successful. For example, a bad person can get away with a lot of things if they have a lot of money. And a bad person can hide it-hide behind the money-and keep on being a bad person.In this case, we had a bad computer, the Apple III, even though the Apple II was selling like hotcakes. It had taken over the world. The IBM PC didn't overtake it until 1983. So it was a leader.I still don't understand it.

To be fair, the Apple III had some serious compet.i.tion. In about 1981, IBM finally came out with its answer to the Apple II. It was selling great almost right away. It was truly becoming a huge success really rapidly. So we had some serious compet.i.tion all of a sudden, and we'd never had that before.All those big companies with big IBM mainframe and other large computers were already IBM customers, and it didn't take much for the IBM rep to sell them an IBM PC to go with it all. As a matter of fact, there used to be a saying that "you can't get fired for buying IBM."When the IBM PC first came out, we were kind of c.o.c.ky aboul it. We took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal thai said, "Welcome IBM. Seriously." thai said, "Welcome IBM. Seriously."And like I said, the PC pa.s.sed by the Apple II, the largest- selling computer in the world, in 1983.

* o By this time, I should point out, Mike Scott-our president who took us public and the guy who took us through the phenomenally successful IPO-was gone. During the time the Apple III was being developed, he thought we'd grown a bit too large. There were good engineers, sure, but there were also a lot of lousy engineers floating around. That happens in any big company.It's not necessarily the lousy engineer's fault, by the way. There's always going to be some mismatch between an engineer's interests and the job he's doing.Anyway, Scotty had told Tom Whitney, our engineering manager, to take a vacation for a week. And meanwhile he did some research. He went around and talked to every engineer in the company and found out who was doing what and who was working and who wasn't doing much of anything.Then he fired a whole bunch of people. That was called b.l.o.o.d.y Monday. Or, at least, that's what it ended up being called in the Apple history books. I thought that, pretty much, he fired all the right ones. The laggards, I mean.And then Mike Scott himself was fired. The board was just very p.i.s.sed that he'd done this without a lot of backing and enough due process, the kind of procedure you're supposed to follow at a big company.Also, Mike Markkula told me Mike Scott had been making a lot of rash decisions and decisions that just weren't right. Mike thought Scotty wasn't really capable of handling the company given the point and size it had gotten to.I did not like this one bit. I liked Scotty very, very much as a person. I liked his way of thinking. I liked his way of being able to joke and be serious. With Scotty, I didn't see many things fallthrough the cracks. And I felt that he respected the good work that I did-the engineering work. He came from engineering.And as I said, Scotty had been our president, our leader from day one of incorporation until we'd gone public in one of the biggest IPOs in U.S. history. And now, all of a sudden, he was just pushed aside and forgotten.I think it's sad that none of the books today even seem to recall him. n.o.body knows his name. Yet Mike Scott was the president that took us through the earliest days.

I learned a lot of things at Apple those first few years. I learned right away that in a company, you can have different ideas about what ads look like or what the logo looks like, even different ideas about the name of the company or a product it has. People have different and often conflicting ideas about all these things.One thing I've learned directly from this new experience of creating and working at a company with so many different people is: Hey, never pretend you can do someone's job better than someone who's been doing it for years.I was much better keeping quiet and just focusing on my particular talent of engineering. That guaranteed that I would be productive at what I do and could let other people be productive at what they did best.So few companies were like this. But companies don't always evolve the way you want them to. After all, when we first started Apple, Steve and I really had this engineering-centric model in mind. We wanted Apple to have the amazing employee morale we think HP got as a result of treating its engineers like upper- cla.s.s citizens, you know?But we knew what were getting into because Mike Markulla told us. He said, "This is going to be a marketing company." The product is going to be driven, in other words, by demands that the marketing department finds in customers. This is just theopposite of a place where engineers just build whatever they love, and marketing comes up with ways to market them. I knew this was going to be a challenge for me.

Back in high school, I read a book called The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. It just grabbed me. It was about a criminal going through this big mental discussion. It really showed how he was thinking very independently-it showed the way people in general who are inwardly driven think-and he's trying to decide whether he should win this big footrace while he's in jail. The bad governor will become famous if the criminal wins. by Alan Sillitoe. It just grabbed me. It was about a criminal going through this big mental discussion. It really showed how he was thinking very independently-it showed the way people in general who are inwardly driven think-and he's trying to decide whether he should win this big footrace while he's in jail. The bad governor will become famous if the criminal wins.And he's trying to decide, Should he win the race, or shouldn't he? Should he let the governor have all the fame? Or should he try to run away, and keep running, and just escape?The whole thing had a huge impact on my own thinking. In life, there is an "us" and a "them." A "we" and a "they." And the "they" is the administration, the authorities. And sometimes they're on the wrong side and we're on the right side.

Chapter 16.

Crash Landing Before Alice and I were divorced, Alice told me about a friend of hers, Sherry, who was interested in buying a movie theater. A real running theater. It was the Mayfair Theater in San Jose. Alice thought I should buy it, and I could never turn Alice down when it came to anything she wanted to do.So I bought it.Sherry and Alice had gotten involved with a group called Eastern Star, a group of women who had relatives in the Freemasons. Because she was in Eastern Star, she was spending a lot of time there, a lot of nights away there. In order to have more time with her, I decided that I would become a Freemason. Freemasons, after all, regularly have joint events with Eastern Star. So I went down to the Masonic lodge and did a lot of training, and after some period of time and three big events, I became a third- degree Mason. Then I got more time with Alice. I eventually became an officer and everything.I should tell you that although I am a lifetime Freemason, I'm not like the other people who are Freemasons. My personality is very, very unlike theirs. To get in, you have to say all this stuff about G.o.d, the Bible, words that sound a little bit like they come from the Const.i.tution, and none of this ritual stuff is the way Ithink, you know? But I did it, and I did it well. If I'm going to do something, I always try to do it well. And I did this for one reason, as I said: to see Alice more. I wanted to save the marriage. I would go so far as to join the Freemasons if that's what it took. That's how I was.So anyway, pretty much near the end of the marriage, I was a Freemason and I bought that theater. Alice's friend Sherry and Sherry's boyfriend, Howard, would run it. It had been their idea from the start, to run a theater. They'd gotten to Alice, as a friend, so she got to me. And now I owned it.The Mayfair Theater was in kind of a low-income area of town. I remember we had to paint the bathroom black because of all the graffiti, and even afterward, people would still put graffiti in it, only in white paint. At least we could wash the walls.I felt like making it into something special. I never had the idea that it was going to make a lot of money, but I wanted it to be kind of special and I put in nice seats and a good sound system. I had a couple of guys running it, and they sc.r.a.ped off a wall one day and found there was this beautiful natural wood artwork underneath this blah wall someone had tacked up on top of it. So we actually brought in some experts who sanded everything down, and they were able to recover the original artwork. I loved that theater.But then Alice and I got divorced, and I was stuck with the theater. I went there every day after work at Apple. I drove down there, set up my computer so I could get some work done, saw what movies were playing, and said hi to everybody. The theater was this fun group of people, a really small operation. It was neat to see how it operated. I mean, it was a small, low-budget theater. We didn't get that many customers. And we only got pretty low- rate movies. For instance, we had Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th. That was probably the biggest movie we ever showed, and we only got it long after it opened. That was probably the biggest movie we ever showed, and we only got it long after it opened.Actually, the only movies we ever sold out on were gang movies, like The Warriors. The Warriors. That made sense, considering what part of town we were in! That made sense, considering what part of town we were in!I'd only been single a few weeks when I asked out the woman who would be my second wife, Candi Clark. I knew her because once, when I bought a bunch of advance tickets to a Star Trek Star Trek movie and offered them half price to Apple employees, she'd asked for a bunch because she had a lot of brothers. I thought she was pretty cute, so I asked her to come to one of those low-budget science fiction movies we were showing at my theater, and she did. The next day, we raced b.u.mper cars at the Malibu Grand Prix track near the San Francisco airport and I beat her really well. movie and offered them half price to Apple employees, she'd asked for a bunch because she had a lot of brothers. I thought she was pretty cute, so I asked her to come to one of those low-budget science fiction movies we were showing at my theater, and she did. The next day, we raced b.u.mper cars at the Malibu Grand Prix track near the San Francisco airport and I beat her really well.I thought she was just super pretty. She was blonde, medium build, and it turned out she had been an Olympic kayaker. (I found that out when I saw a picture of her and Ronald Reagan on the wall of her apartment after our second date.) She worked at Apple creating database reports for managers, that sort of stuff.So now I had a girlfriend and that was it. It was all really quick.

It wasn't very long after I'd divorced Alice and met Candi that we decided to get married. She had an uncle down in San Diego who made jewelry, and I had this idea. Let's get a ring for me, I said, that has the diamond on the inside so n.o.body can see it. I thought that would be more special than a normal ring. We would know there was a diamond, but the world wouldn't.So we decided to fly down on a plane, on my V-tail Beechcraft, which I'd bought right after getting my pilot's license six months before. I think today that it was the most beautiful and unorthodox single-engine plane there is. It was so distinctive, the shape of its tail was so unique, and I was so proud to fly it. I had it painted-by a painter named Bill Kelly, he'd done PR for Apple- in the nicest earth tones.The first time in my life that I was able to take a pa.s.sengeralone, it was with Candi. I took her down to San Jose one night, and it was raining. Of course, I had never flown in the rain at night, but I did and we got back safely. I think that might have been my best landing ever.But no, I wasn't at all c.o.c.ky about my flying. I knew how to do a flight plan and how to do flights. I knew the rules to follow. But still, I was a beginner pilot. I was still a pretty rough new trainee. But anyway, Candi and I took a few trips in the new plane, and then one day we decided to fly down to San Diego where Candi's uncle could design that wedding ring with the diamond on the inside.Candi and I flew from San Jose to a small airport in Scotts Valley to pick up Candi's brother Jack and Jack's girlfriend, Claris. Usually I would just taxi around and then take off, you know? So I'm going around, and suddenly I notice I'm blocked by another plane that's just sitting there, stalled on the taxiway. I'm thinking, Great. Great. I can't even get out of there.So I looked around-I think we turned the airplane around- and I go off some other side way. By then the stalled airplane was gone and finally I got to the start of the runway. And I did all the little start-up procedures and reached for the throttle and you know what?I remember reaching for the throttle at the start of the runway, and that's it. I can remember every other detail of the airport and everything that day up to that point. But I can remember absolutely nothing about what happened after that point. I have no memoiy of what happened next. (Later, I figured out that maybe Candi, who was sitting in the front, accidentally leaned on one of the controls, but we'll never know exactly what caused that accident.)I woke up in the hospital, so they tell me, but it wasn't until five weeks later that I was able to remember that I was in a plane crash.My friend Dan Sokol later told me that he saw news of the accident on TV. He said he turned on the TV and clicked onto the news channel when he heard something about an executive of a Silicon Valley computer company cras.h.i.+ng his plane in Scotts Valley. And he immediately turned around just in time to see about two seconds of the Beechcraft upside down. I had crashed in the parking lot of a skating rink.Of course, as I told you, I remember absolutely nothing about what happened, not even about being in the hospital or anything. It was some head injury! Dan told me my room was filled with gifts and toys and stuff from people at Apple. Handmade cards, off-the-shelf cards, and junk food. It was all there, Dan said, but I have no memory of it. Zero memory. Dan even told me that I asked him to smuggle in a milk shake and pizza for me, which sounds exactly like me, so at least I know that I was really in there. I mean, people took pictures of me in there playing computer games, which is what I would do, but I have no memory of that. No memory at all.At some point, I guess a week or two later, I was finally released and allowed to go home. I didn't go to Apple to work, I presume because I thought every day was a weekend. That's the only explanation I can think of now as to why I didn't go to work, and also why I didn't notice my dog was missing. (He'd been checked into a kennel.)For a few weeks after, I was living in my house in Scotts Valley in this weird, not-fully-functional state. I mean, people later told me I seemed hazy. They say I was driving around on my motorcycle, but people really had to direct me to do things. Like: "You go here. You have to do this now. Now you have to do this." I was apparently functioning, but I hardly have any memories of it. I was living this halfway weird life. I didn't realize that my dog had been boarded for five weeks away from me, for instance. It just seemed like every day was the same day. I didn'teven realize I was missing a tooth for five weeks-one of my front teeth! How do you not spot something like that? I don't know, I can't explain it.Now, Candi and her brother, I found out much later, were also injured in the crash. She even had to get some plastic surgery afterward. But I was the one who was the hardest hit. As I said, I ended up having what is known as anterograde amnesia, even though the doctors didn't know it at first. Anterograde amnesia means that you don't lose memories; you just lose the ability to form new ones.But I guess, when I think about it now, it was actually a good thing because in my mind, I never had a plane crash to get over. It just isn't there. I underwent hypnosis to see if I could come up with any recollection of what happened to cause the crash. I really would've liked to know. But nothing came to me.So in those five weeks-the weeks of my amnesia-I remembered everything from before that. I had all my old skills and memories, and those memories are still there up till that point. But during that five-week period, whatever I was doing, I wasn't remembering it.And then suddenly I came out of it.The first, the very first, memory I had was that I was somehow at the Macintosh building talking to a.s.sociates I'd been working with on the Macintosh. And they were telling me something about how the project was going. And I don't remember exactly who, but I think it was Andy Hertzfeld (designer of the Macintosh graphical user interface) who mentioned something about a plane crash. A plane crash? And the instant he said the words "plane crash," I knew there was this thing about a plane crash in this dream I'd been having.So I said to myself, Oh, this is a dream I'm having right now. And in a dream, I can always tell myself that I can just turn around and walk the other way. You can go any which way and adream follows you. But this time I thought, No, I'll play by the rules of this dream and 111 keep talking to Andy. So I sat there talking to him, and that's my very first memory. But it was a very weak memory.That night, I remember Candi and I went to see the movie Ordinary People. Ordinary People. I don't remember a single detail of that movie, only that we saw it. Then we got home and we were in bed. I was lying on my back and thinking, Wait, did I have a plane crash that I heard about and kept dreaming about, or didn't I? I mean, I didn't have any memories of such a crash, and it seems like you would remember such a thing, wouldn't you? I don't remember a single detail of that movie, only that we saw it. Then we got home and we were in bed. I was lying on my back and thinking, Wait, did I have a plane crash that I heard about and kept dreaming about, or didn't I? I mean, I didn't have any memories of such a crash, and it seems like you would remember such a thing, wouldn't you?Is it possible I had a plane crash and didn't remember it?So I turned over and asked Candi, "Did I have a plane crash or was it a dream?"I guess she thought I was joking, because she said, "It was a dream, Steve." That's what she said. That it was a dream. She wasn't playing with my head. She just had no idea that I had no idea I'd been in a plane crash.This was a mental dilemma because I was struggling to prove in my head that it could be true.So now I'm sitting there wondering if I'm ever going to get anybody to tell me if I had a plane crash or not. I suppose if I'd been smart, I would have looked in the newspaper or asked other people, but this was actually the first time I was starting to think that maybe I had in fact had a plane crash and it wasn't a dream.So I sat there that night, feeling my body. And my body didn't have any broken bones or signs of a plane crash. Ha. I didn't think to look for a missing tooth!So I kept thinking. I kept trying to pin it down. How do you figure out if something didn't happen? I could remember every single detail of that day up to the point of reaching for the throttle, but I couldn't remember pus.h.i.+ng it. And then I thought of something logical. I thought, Wait a minute. I don't remember landingin Santa Catalina. If I had landed the plane, there's absolutely no way I would've forgotten that landing.As soon as I thought that thought, I realized that my brain had been working very strangely. I realized that I'd been in a plane crash and it was real. And I just jerked my head up right away and realized that everything I was starting to suspect was real. My head started working immediately and retrieving and forming memories, I could feel it. And what was strange was, I could feel both states of mind. I had just come from a state where I wasn't forming memories, and now I was moving into this different state where I was forming memories. I could feel both states of mind at the same time, which was so strange.Then I looked at the bed stand next to me, and there were something like a hundred cards from people I had received while I was in the hospital. They were sending me best wishes, saying get well and all that. And I read them. They were all from my very closest friends and a.s.sociates.And I said, Oh my G.o.d, I didn't even know they were there.But I must have seen them every single night. Because they were there every single night. So it was like coming out of a very strange state and realizing that your head has not been forming any memories. That's what I deduced.The very next day, my father called to remind me that I was supposed to show up for an appointment with the psychologist I'd been seeing. I had no memories of ever seeing a psychologist. But I went up to Stanford to see that psychologist and I kind of excitedly started explaining to him that I hadn't been forming memories or remembering the plane crash, and suddenly I'd come out of it. My head just switched over, I told him. It was amazing.And would you believe it? He didn't believe me! I suppose I was so excited when I told him about this that he kept telling me I was a manic-depressive. I was stunned, and told him that Ididn't have big highs or big lows like a manic-depressive would. I told him I was a very stable person. He said, "Well, manic depres sion usually starts when you're thirty." I was thirty. He had inter preted my excitement about my memory returning as beinj', manic. What a quack.Well, those five weeks after the plane crash, when I was finally and fully out of the amnesia, I decided this was a lucky opportunity. I should finish college, and not go back to Apple right away.I realized it had been ten years since my third year of college, and if I didn't go back to finish up now, I probably never would. And it was that important to me. I wanted to finish. And I had already been out of Apple for a while anyway-five weeks without knowing it, actually-so that made it easier to just go back to school and not go back to Apple right away. I decided that life is short, right? So I decided.I applied and got accepted and registered under the name Rocky Racc.o.o.n Clark. (Rocky Racc.o.o.n was the name of my dog, and Clark was my fiancee Candi's soon-to-be maiden name.)And soon after I made that decision, Candi and I set the date to get married: June 13, 1981. It was an amazing party. We had the Apple hot-air balloon there in the front yard of Candi's parents' house. It was a spectacular party. Emmylou Harris, the famous folksinger, sang at the reception.

The day after the wedding, I got an apartment in Berkeley to get ready to begin my fourth year of college. And on the weekend, the plan was that I would go back to this house we had bought on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was amazing. Just a huge castle of a place.It had a lot of flat land, which is unusual, so I had tennis courts built. And Candi turned a little pond into a nice little lake. I also bought an adjoining property, making twenty-six acres in.ill. It was a paradise. (Candi, now my ex-wife, still lives in that paradise.)Candi stayed there working on the house while I spent the week in this college apartment a couple of hours north, in Berkeley. It was a great year, and a fun year. Because I was going under I lie name Rocky Racc.o.o.n Clark, no one knew who I was. I had fun posing as a nineteen-year-old college student, and the engineering cla.s.ses were so easy for me. Every weekend, I went back home to the castle.One of the first things I did at Berkeley, in addition to taking engineering courses for my degree, was to enroll in both psychology courses (for majors) and two courses specifically about human memory. After my accident and amnesia, I was intrigued by such strange aspects of memory, and I wanted to understand it more.As far as my own condition went, it turned out to be relatively well known. It happens frequently to people after car and plane accidents, and it's a.s.sociated with damage near the hippocampus section of the brain. It was a typical condition. There is no excuse for why my doctors-especially my psychologist-didn't figure this out.

Chapter 17.

Have I Mentioned I Have the Voice of an Angel?

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 cla.s.s 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. 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 G.o.d, 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 owned a nightclub in Santa Cruz called the Albatross, a strange name for a place like that. 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, who owned that nightclub in Santa Cruz, also 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 Francis...o...b..ll 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 runmany 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Racc.o.o.n 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 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, overcomingpolitical 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 G.o.d, 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 justall 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 Sh.o.r.eline Amphitheater in Mountain View holds. (I built Sh.o.r.eline 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 gra.s.s sod to create sort of a gra.s.s 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 incrediblesound 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 exclu- sives 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 was trying to make bucks off this. 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 talkedto 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 s.p.a.ce bridge connecting our concert to some musicians in the then Soviet Union. We had Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, involved in the s.p.a.ce 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 A1 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 (s.p.a.ce 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.

Me and the USSRDoing 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce bridges in the Soviet Union. Somewhere around this time, maybe 1989, ABC put on a national TV show purporting to be the first s.p.a.ce 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.

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