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Released by: MVD Visual
Released on: December 3rd, 2013.
Director: Glenn Aveni
Cast: Various
Year: 1983
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The Movie:
Financed entirely by former Apple bigwig Steve Wozniak, the US Festival (the US stood for "Unite Us In Song" - it wasn't any sort of nationalist rallying cry) was held over four days during the Memorial Day weekend in 1983. Wozniak's intent was "to throw a big party in the middle of nowhere" and the end result was that a whole lot of people (over 670,000 by some accounts) travelled out to California for three days of music and partying in one massive collision of pop culture and technology.
Out of those three days came a lot of great live material from a lot of great bands, and a very small portion of that has now made its way to legitimate DVD. Though rights issues are almost certainly a factor here, this release is very far from complete and it's hard to talk about it without zeroing in on some fairly lofty omissions. But let's talk about what's here before we talk about what's missing.
The complete list of performances included on this DVD is:
INXS - The One Thing
Divinyls - Boys in Town
English Beat - Jeanette
Stray Cats - Rock This Town / Please Make Up Your Mind
Men At Work - It's A Mistake / Who Can It Be Now
The Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go
Judas Priest - Breaking The Law / You've Got Another Thing Comin'
Triumph - Magic Power / Fight The Good Fight / Lay It On The Line / A World Of Fantasy
Scorpions - The Zoo / Can't Get Enough
Berlin - Sex
Quarterflash - Find Another Fool
U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday / The Electric Co.
Missing Persons - Words
Stevie Nicks - Stand Back / Outside The Rain
There's some good stuff there, right? Right. INXS lead the way with a decent performance and The Divinyls and English Beat are both fun to watch. The Stray Cats two tracks are excellent and Men At Work, well, if you're a fan you'll dig this and if you're not you won't. The one Clash song we get is a pretty high energy performance from the only band that mattered (this would be Mick Jones' last appearance with the band) and the two Judas Priest tracks find Halford and company in fine form. Do we really need more tracks from Triumph than any other artist represented here? No we do not but that's what we get. The Scorpions and Berlin? Ok. Definitely products of the era in which this concert was shot but no less deserving of their place here than anyone else. Quarterflash are pretty easy to look past but the U2 footage is solid, proving that before they got into massive stage shows and random phone calls to idiot Presidents that they were, at one point, a good band. Oddly enough the disc closes out with a track from Missing Persons and two tracks from the goat voiced Fleetwood Mac songstress, Stevie Nick. We don't exactly go out on a high note here, but chronology if important so we can let that slide.
So yeah, some good stuff there… but we don't get any representation from Wall Of Voodoo, Oingo Boingo, A Flock Of Seagulls, Quiet Riot, Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, The Pretenders, Joe Walsh, David Bowie, Hank Williams Jr. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson (or any of the country artists featured on day four) and quite a few others. On top of that, the sets from the artists who are represented are incomplete. There are other DVD releases out there representing complete sets from The English Beat, Triumph, Quiet Riot, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings but so much of what went down on stage remains either poorly represented or completely unrepresented on legitimately released DVD. Again…rights HAD to be a factor, but you can't help but be disappointed by what was left off.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The technical limitations of the source material are hard to miss here but overall the three decade old tape sourced fullframe transfers are fine so long as you keep your expectations in check. Some compression artifacts pop up here and there and the image is soft, but it's all completely watchable and picture quality is definitely better than the various bootlegs of the various performances that have made the rounds over the years.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix, in English, is also fine. Levels are well balanced and there's no hiss or distortion. You can easily understand the lyrics and the occasional bit of stage banter that happens and the various instruments used by the different acts are easy to pick out. There are no subtitles or alternate language tracks, but it'd be unrealistic to expect them for something like this.
There are no extras on the disc but the menus do offer song selection.
The Final Word:
It's a shame that the complete concert couldn't be released. There's some great material included here to be sure, but so too is there just as much, if not more great material missing. There's some good stuff here to be sure, even if it's all very much a product of its time, and it's nice to get 'something' official after all these years, but the definitive release of some of the better material to have come out of the festival still awaits us - though sadly, with all of the rights issues involved, it's not likely to surface any time soon.
Unless you're a Triumph fan