The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 30, 2018

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music may be one of the best remembered American rock festivals in history, but how many folks who can recount which band played when during those epochal days and nights in 1969 can also recount how the festival actually came to be? Are the producers of Woodstock at the tip of every music fan’s tongue, even to this day? Of course not (at least, not for this music fan), but the situation is a bit different with regard to the US Festivals, which came along for a couple of years in the early eighties. None other than Apple icon Steve Wozniak funded the US Festivals out of his own pocket, according to one talking head on this rather fascinating documentary spending over $20 million over the course of the two years. There’s an anecdote with one of the talent wranglers in this piece where he states that Wozniak just whipped out a checkbook and wrote a check for a cool $2 million one day, saying “That ought to cover you for a while”.

“Woz” himself is on hand here in a number of rather delightful interviews, where he talks about hearing some “Americana” music on the radio one day and deciding what the world needed was a music festival devoted to such a genre. What the US Festivals turned out to be was considerably more eclectic, part of which was due to promoter Bill Graham, and in fact even the musicians seemed to be aware of it, as evidenced by a brief archival interview with Carlos Santana (with none other than Herbie Hancock sitting there, listening) where Santana asks, “Who wants to hear three bands that sound like each other?”, to which Hancock nods approvingly. The US Festivals offered everyone from the B-52s to Dave Edmunds to The Police to The Talking Heads. If there’s one thing to complain about with regard to this documentary, it’s that too few of these performances are seen in their entirety, though the raggedness of the archival video that is included may hint that acceptable quality video for both concerts simply wasn’t available.

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 720p transfer in 1.78:1 (with the archival video of the concert hovering closer to Academy Ratio). I was frankly surprised to see the documentary is in 720p, since the included supplemental interviews are presented in 1080p, but I wonder if perhaps the raggedness of the archival video was deemed problematic enough that a "full" high definition upscale would offer even more issues than are already on display. As it stands, the archival video is certainly watchable, but it suffers from a lot of aliasing, occasional ghosting and/or fringing, and at times pretty debilitating fuzziness and murkiness (especially for the acts performing in darkness, as in some of the Fleetwood Mac material). That said, the contemporary interview sequences all look fine, if not exactly at "wow" levels, with a natural appearing palette and good detail levels.

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation continues what I personally find to be the head scratching decision by some labels to release music- centric product with lossy audio. In this case, insult is arguably added to injury by having only a Dolby Digital 2.0 track available. While there are long "talking heads" sequences in this documentary, and "snippets" of performances where a lossy stereo track is perhaps not that objectionable, there are also a number of longer segments documenting complete songs by various bands, and it's here that I kept wishing the release had at least included a lossless stereo track. What's here sounds okay, but hardly inspiring, and at this point in the Blu-ray format, I just can't see how a release of this type was not granted lossless audio, even if that revealed some sonic "warts" in the live performances.

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Director's Commentary features Glenn Aveni, who calls it a "making of" commentary.


• Interview - Steve Wozniak (1080p; 16:29)


• Interview - Mick Fleetwood (1080p; 6:22)


• Interview - Stewart Copeland (1080p; 19:30)

The US Festival 1982: The US Generation Documentary Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One kind of funny thing that struck me during the closing credits of this piece was a long list of Kickstarter contributors. Is Wozniak's checkbook no longer available? (That's a joke, of course.) This is a really interesting piece of history that should appeal to fans, but some may question why more full performances weren't included, while also wondering why the documentary is presented in 720p and with lossy audio.