US Festival '83, Glen Helen Regional Park, San Bernardino, CA, 5-28-1983 - Day 1, Part 1: Divinyls

I haven't been posting much recently, for two main reasons. One, I wanted to see if the recent spate of over a dozen albums being taken down for copyright reasons would continue or not. I'm happy to say that since my last announcement about that on July 30, 2024, I believe there's only been one more take down (David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust - Acoustic Mixes). So let's that one big flurry of taken downs was a unique event.

The other reason is that I've been working hard posting another epic music festival. This time, it's the 1983 US Festival. There actually were two US Festivals, one in 1982 and the other in 1983. Both of them happened due to Steve Wozniak, one of cofounders of the Apple Computer company. He already had made a ton of money by 1981, but early that year he was in an airplane crash that changed the course of his life. He survived with only relatively minor injuries, but that included brain trauma as well as amnesia. While recovering, he took leave from Apple and went back to college under an alias. 

Around that same time, he conceived of the US Festivals. As a very rich person (his current net worth is estimated to be $140 million, even after donating much of his fortune to charity), these were basically vanity projects where he was able to put on a couple of the greatest concerts of all time, featuring most of the big names in music from those years. It's estimated he lost about $5 million on the first festival and about $10 million on the second one. He decided against doing another one in 1984 or after, probably because he got involved in running businesses instead, including returning to Apple for a time. Apparently, he took part in an effort to stage another one around 2010, and spent about a million dollars on it, but it ran into too many difficulties and he gave up.

The US Festivals were some of the biggest and most important rock festivals of all time. In fact, I believe this 1983 one had the largest attendance of any rock concert up until that point. But they seem strangely forgotten today. I found a 2012 article in the Orange County Register looking back of the festivals, and that article made that same point: "The US Festivals, fondly remembered by Gen-X’ers who witnessed it live or on cable television, now seem mostly forgotten... There’s little awareness of how they bridged the storied events of the '60s and '70s (like Woodstock) with first the outpouring of generosity that was Live Aid in 1985 and then the multi-stage festivals that launched in the '90s, whether touring productions like Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. caravans or stationary shindigs like Woodstock '94 and '99."

I really wanted to post these festivals on my blog because of their importance and all the great music played at both. However, I thought that wasn't possible due to the lack of worthy recordings from them. Very little has been officially released from either (though there are some exceptions I will discuss with later albums from the festival). Long ago, I looked for bootlegs, and most of them were audience recordings that sounded pretty bad. So I had basically given up. 

But recently, I discovered that, for the 1983 US Festival especially, there were lots of professionally recorded videos of entire performances that had soundboard-worthy sound quality, but only existed in video form. So I gave myself the challenge of presenting as much of the festival as possible, all with worthy sound quality. I'm happy to say that I was able to find about 90 percent of what I wanted, which is way more than what I expected when I started this. But it was a lot of work, first converting videos to audio, and then editing the sound files to make improvements. 

I don't think anyone has ever come close to publicly presenting the music from this festival like I'm going to present it now. (That's probably a big reason why the festivals have slipped from public consciousness, because there aren't widely available recordings from them.)

The 1983 US Festival took place over four days, all at the same location (the Glen Helen Regional Park, with a concert venue newly created for the US festivals). Each day had a different musical theme. May 28th was "New Wave Day," May 29th was "Heavy Metal Day," May 30th was "Rock Day," and June 4th was "Country Day." (Note the several day gap between Country Day and the rest, since it was assumed the country audience would be almost entirely different from the rest.)

Nine musical acts performed on the first day, New Wave Day. I will be posting albums from all nine. I have the full sets of most of them. Unfortunately, for the first act, Divinyls, I only have a partial set. In addition to the four songs here, it is known they played "I'll Make You Happy" (an Easybeats cover), "Only You," "Only Lonely," and "Siren." What I have comes from a video of their performance. If anyone has more, please let me know and I'll add it in.

Divinyls were an Australian group. They're best known in the U.S. for their 1990 hit "I Touch Myself." At the time of this festival, they were just starting to get famous. They had formed in 1980, and put out one album by the time of the festival. They'd had two hits in Australia only, "Science Fiction" and "Boys in Town."

Here's their Wikipedia page in you want to know more:

Divinyls - Wikipedia

This album is 19 minutes long.

001 talk (Divinyls)
002 Elsie (Divinyls)
003 Science Fiction (Divinyls)
004 talk (Divinyls)
005 Boys in Town (Divinyls)
006 Don't You Go Walking (Divinyls)
007 talk (Divinyls)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17009031/VA-1983USFstvlDay0101Dvnyls_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/42kY7A41

I could have used a photo of the Divinyls on stage in the festival for the album cover, but I wanted one cover showing the sheer size of the festival, so I picked this, the very first act. It's estimated about 700,000 people attended, making it slightly larger than previous huge festivals like the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. But the maximum at any one time was probably around 350,000, on Heavy Metal Day.