Biography | Steve Wozniak — The Glen Helen Festival That Tried to Unite Music and Technology

On 30 May 1983, the second US Festival reached its Rock Day at Glen Helen Regional Park near Devore, California.

U2, the Pretenders, Joe Walsh, Stevie Nicks, and David Bowie were among the acts scheduled for that Monday.

The day belonged to a four-part festival weekend that Steve Wozniak financed and produced through UNUSON, a company whose name expressed his hope of uniting people through music.

This was a striking use of the fortune and public standing Wozniak had gained as Apple’s engineering cofounder.

After a 1981 plane crash, he had stepped back from day-to-day work at Apple and turned part of his attention toward an experiment in mass culture.

The Computer History Museum describes the US Festival as an outdoor concert and technology exposition, and records that Wozniak began the event during this leave from Apple.

The first edition opened in September 1982 with technology tents beside an unusually ambitious concert operation.

Los Angeles Magazine’s history of the festival reports that the grounds combined computers, video games, large video screens, powerful sound, food, water, and other infrastructure intended for a crowd measured in the hundreds of thousands.

The second edition returned over Memorial Day weekend in 1983, dividing its program into New Wave, heavy metal, and rock days, with a country program following on 4 June.

Wozniak’s experiment was not a solo achievement: promoters, production crews, performers, technicians, vendors, public agencies, and the audience made the temporary city function.

Nor was it a financial triumph.

Contemporary UPI reporting before the 1983 opening described Wozniak’s multimillion-dollar personal investment, while later accounts placed the combined losses from the two festivals above $20 million.

The losses ended the project, but they do not erase its unusual premise — that a computer engineer might apply technological optimism to the design of a shared cultural experience.

The pin marks the public amphitheater area within Glen Helen Regional Park, not an entrance, backstage zone, temporary stage position, or travel route.

The attached photograph was made by James LaMantia at this venue on 30 May 1983 and shows U2 performing during Rock Day.

For Wozniak, Glen Helen became the place where his public identity expanded beyond circuit boards and personal computers into a costly, imperfect attempt to bring music, technology, and people into one field.

Photo: James LaMantia, 1983, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.