Earlier tonight, I met my parents as I often do on Friday night for dinner at the local pizza place. And, as is equally often the case, they were a few minutes late — allowing me a chance to browse through the bins at the little record shop a few doors down that sells bootleg DVDs.
It's not my favorite record shop in the neighborhood or anything. But every once in awhile they'll have a gem sitting there ripe for the picking — and tonight was just such an occasion. Because sitting there in the middle of the bootleg concert DVDs was a copy of U2's performance at the 1983 US Festival.
Be still my beating heart, I thought to myself — because you see, I was actually there.
It was my second time seeing U2. The first was actually the night before in Seattle, but I had to cut that one short in order to make my plane to California to get to — you guessed it — the US Festival. This was my very first honest-to-God rock festival. And if there ever was a final rite of passage for a rock geek like me who came up in the sixties and seventies, by God this was it.
As a kid, I'd read the stories. And I'd seen the movies. Sly and the Family Stone and Santana at Woodstock. Janis and Jimi at Monterrey. Oh yeah, and lots of naked hippies taking lots of drugs and wallowing about in the mud. But that wasn't what interested me most — it was the music, and the fact that even as a pre-teen I knew that history was often made at these things.
I wanted to be there. Dammit I wanted to be there. But as a thirteen year old living in Hawaii, my parents simply weren't having it. It was all I could do to get them to even allow me to go to a Jefferson Airplane concert back then (accompanied by my grandma).
There was just no way I'd be going to the 1969 rock festival at Diamond Head (where Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles ended up recording a live album).
Flash forward to 1983.
As a then twenty-something-year-old record store manager in Tacoma, Washington, I was free at last, free at last! And come hell or high water, as soon as I heard about it, I was going to the US Festival at Glen Helen Park in San Bernadino County, Southern California.
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
"Joe Strummer berated the crowd for selling out by attending the Apple sponsored US Festival"
Berated them from the stage? What a jackass. It obviously didn't bother him enough to not accept the job. But then everyone knew what posers they were when at the same festival Dimaond Dave pointed out "The only people who put iced tea in Jack Daniels bottles is The Clash, baby."
2 - Glen Boyd
Yeah, Strummer could be a bit of a poser when it came to the politics...and you could tell it was pissing Jones off too. People were literally streaming out of the place during the Clash;s set too. We were pretty far back for the Clash but you could see all the fans leaving on the big screen. They literally broke up right there onstage that day. But the Clash still made one hell of a great racket in their day...
-Glen
3 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
Speaking of Halen... Nothing in that festival beat the "Heavy Metal Day" with exception to Oingo Boingo's set. Pure Brilliance. Oingo Boingo should have gotten the brass ring as well but then we probably wouldn't have had the cool music for Beetlejuice.
4 - Glen Boyd
Metal day is kind of a blur, but I do remember Diamond Dave inviting the whole crowd over to the hotel for a drink afterwards. That dude was freakin' hilarious. I kinda miss Boingo too, but obviously Danny Elfman went on to far bigger and better things.
-Glen
5 - Clarence Yu
This is the concert I only hear about as legend, mostly about the story of Van Halen being paid a million dollars for their performance, which I believe broke some kind of record. Thanks to YouTube I am able to see the clips. I never did know that U2 played and this is really eye-opening.
6 - Glen Boyd
As memory serves me, U2 also did a really cool cover of Echo & The Bunnymen's song "The Cutter" at the US Festival which doesn't show up on the bootleg DVD which more or less inspired me to write this article. If you find that one on YouTube let me know...
The US Festival doesn't live on in the history books the way that Woodstock did. But it break the attendance record for rock festivals at the time. And if witnessing the Clash break up onstage isn't historic, I just don't know what is...
-Glen
7 - Glen Boyd
meant to say Broke the record above...
-Glen
8 - Clarence Yu
Echo and the Bunnymen! Now that's a band I hadn't heard about in a long time. I dabbled in New Wave for a while in my High School years. This would really be interesting to see...
-Clarence