US Festival '82, Glen Helen Regional Park, San Bernardino, CA, 9-3-1982 - Day 1, Part 1: The Ramones

Back in August 2024, I posted the entire 1983 US Festival. Now, a few months later, I'm ready to post the 1982 US Festival. I know that's kind of backwards, I probably should have posted the 1982 one first. But I was able to find most of the music to the 1983 festival with worthy sound quality. I didn't think I'd be able to post the 1982 one at all. But after digging deeper, I was able to determine that I had enough to post the 1982 festival as well. I didn't get every major performer, but I did nearly all of them. And the sound quality isn't as good as the 1983 festival overall, but everything I'm posting here I think is worthy of hearing.

I already explained a lot about both US Festivals in general when I posted the 1983 one, but I'll repeat the general gist here too for those who are new to this. The two festivals would never have happened had it not been for Steve Wozniak, co-founder of the Apple Computer company. 1982 was very early days in the history of that company. Apple was just starting to really hit it big with their Apple II personal computer. But that was so successful that Wozniak suddenly found himself making tens of millions of dollars in profits. He decided to celebrate his success with a big rock music festival strongly reminiscent of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. 

He called it the "US Festival" because by 1982 the 1970s got the nickname "The Me Decade," and he was hopeful that the 1980s would be "The Us Decade." (Sadly, that didn't happen. In retrospect, I think one could call it the "Greed Is Good" Decade, after a famous quote in a 1980s movie.)

Wozniak took a "spare no expenses" approach to the festival. He basically took a year out of his life to get the 1982 festival going. He had a lot of time on his hands due to being on sabbatical from Apple after getting in a plane crash that left him shaken and gave him troubles forming long term memories for many months. I'm guessing the festivals would never have happened had it not been for his injuries from that crash. He linked up with Bill Graham, the top rock concert promoter of the era. Graham and his team did most of the hard work for the 1982 festival, but he butted heads with Wozniak enough so that he wasn't involved with the 1983 one.

Wozniak called the 1982 festival "the Super Bowl of rock." He spent about $13 million on the festival, most of that paying for the stars to perform. Here's a quote from Rolling Stone Magazine: "The biggest dollars were offered to acts that declined: the Who turned down an offer of $1 million; Bruce Springsteen passed on an offer of $850,000. But a reported $500,000 did the trick for Fleetwood Mac; Pat Benatar and Tom Petty... each picked up approximately $250,000, while the Police took home about $350,000."

Rolling Stone Magazine later commented about the 1982 festival as whole: "It wasn’t a wild lost weekend by any standards, or even a large-scale frat party, but a remarkably sedate soiree - a well-run, impeccably professional outing. To say that it was a triumph of logistics more than art is not to disparage the musicians who performed generally decent but unspectacular sets; it's just that most of the music was eclipsed by the fact that Wozniak and Graham pulled off this mammoth event as... well, as uneventfully as possible."

The audio was crisp and clear, thanks to 400,000 watts of speakers. Attendees could see the stage from anywhere, thanks to strategically placed massive, fifty-foot-high video screens. That's pretty standard at concerts today, but it was innovative at the time. Bob Barsotti, who was one of the chief organizers of the festival, later commented, "If you went to Watkins Glen or Woodstock and you were the 148,000th person, the chances that you would hear or see the show were actually pretty slim. But if you’re the last person at the US Festival, you could hear it, you could see it, you could buy some food at a concession stand; there was a toilet that wasn't overflowing, and there were water spigots to get clean water out of, and it was all within walking distance from where you were. That had never been done before." 

That's not to say there weren't problems, however. The main ones related to the location and the weather. The festival was held in an open area fifty-seven acres in size on the outskirts of Los Angeles, with the stage and all the facilities built just for this concert. (It would remain and be the site of many other concerts, including the 1983 US Festival.) The main problem though was that early September was just about the hottest time of the year there, and it got very, very hot. Each day had highs between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit! Furthermore, the crowds kicked up dust, lots and lots of dust, which led to the nickname "The Dust Festival." Luckily, the organizers were prepared and had some methods to deal with the heat, mainly by frequently squirting the crowd with giant water hoses. But still, the heat almost certainly drained the energy of the crowd. There was a noticeably better crowd reaction after dark, when the heat eased up.

Here's the Wikipedia link to the US Festivals, but it doesn't say much, and it lumps the 1982 and 1983 ones together:

US Festival - Wikipedia 

This Rolling Stone Magazine article from shortly after the 1982 festival is a lot more informative:

Backstage at the Us Festival: It's Only Rock & Roll

Before I get to the music on this album, note that one of the few acts I couldn't find the music for was the festival's opening act, the Gang of Four. One can find video footage to part of one of their songs from the festival, but I couldn't find any more than that. I would very much like to hear the Gang of Four set, as I like their music a lot. But according to Rolling Stone Magazine, "the fans didn’t have a lot of patience with the Gang of Four, a quirky English band most of them hadn't heard of before."

So that takes us to the second act of the festival, the Ramones. The Ramones are very critically acclaimed as one of the pioneering musical acts for punk rock. However, their record sales were never big, and they didn't get a lot of radio airplay, so probably many in the crowd of 100,000 plus weren't familiar with their music. They were still close to their commercial peak, but that peak wasn't very high. Their best selling album in the U.S., 1980's "End of the Century," only reached Number 44 in the U.S. album chart.

Unfortunately, for many of the acts in the 1982 US Festival, my only source was an audience bootleg. That's the case here. Luckily, due to the high quality sound system, the bootleg sounds pretty good, compared to most. But still, an audience bootleg is a step down from a soundboard bootleg or FM radio broadcast, so be warned. The sound quality suffers a little more with the Ramones set, since their style of raucous rock and roll sounds muddy with less than ideal recordings.

That said, I did what I could to improve the sound quality. In this case, I found that boosting the lead vocals relative to the instruments (using the UVR5 audio editing program) helped some.

And the set definitely was raucous. The band played 19 songs during a fairly short set, so each song was only a little more than two minutes long. There was very little to no breaks between the songs as well. Pretty much all the songs are from their six albums released prior to this concert. Most songs were originals, but there were a few covers, like "Chinese Rocks" and "Surfin' Bird."

This album is 43 minutes long.

001 talk (Ramones)
002 Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio (Ramones)
003 Do You Wanna Dance (Ramones)
004 talk (Ramones)
005 Blitzkrieg Bop (Ramones)
006 talk (Ramones)
007 This Business Is Killing Me (Ramones)
008 All's Quiet on the Eastern Front (Ramones)
009 Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment (Ramones)
010 Rock 'n' Roll High School (Ramones)
011 I Wanna Be Sedated (Ramones)
012 Beat on the Brat (Ramones)
013 talk (Ramones)
014 The KKK Took My Baby Away (Ramones)
015 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (Ramones)
016 Chinese Rocks (Ramones)
017 Rockaway Beach (Ramones)
018 Teenage Lobotomy (Ramones)
019 Surfin' Bird (Ramones)
020 Cretin Hop (Ramones)
021 California Sun (Ramones)
022 Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World (Ramones)
023 Pinhead (Ramones)
024 talk (Ramones)

NOTE: I'm posting three different download links for the first that. Don't expect that to last long. It's because I'm experimenting with a different download file service, Bestfile, after getting supposedly permanently banned from using Pixeldrain. In fact, Pixeldrain seems to be working for now, so I'm including that link, but who knows how long that'll last. Please try the Bestfile download link if you can and let me know how that goes. 

https://www.upload.ee/files/17467849/VA-1982USFstvlDay0101TRmnes_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/pshy4xzX

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/bYqBmlSu2wxmuwc/file

The cover photo shows the Ramones in concert at this very festival. However, the picture was rather low-res, so I used the Krea AI program to sharpen it up.