← Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Getting Loud And Clear About The Grateful Dead’s Wall Of Sound with Author Brian Anderson
00:47:16
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- [00:02]
A
I'm Mike King from the podcast Profiling Evil, a place where true crime meets behavioral science. I spent my career investigating serial predators and studying the psychology behind them. Here, we don't just talk about what criminals did. We explore why they do what they do. We expose manipulation and control, look at how offenders select their victims, and uncover the ways that they try to avoid det. You can find Profiling Evil on your favorite podcast platform. Welcome to the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda.
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B
Just keep chugging.
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C
In this bonus episode of the behind the Song podcast, I'm joined by Brian Anderson, author of Loud and Clear, the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, and the For Audio Perfection. Welcome, Brian.
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B
Thanks for having me. This rocks.
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C
Fascinating book about the wall of sound, which I'll just give a little History was invented by the Grateful Dead's immediate circle. It was an unprecedented sound system that traveled with the band and grew to an immense size in the late 60s to mid-70s, say, until it became so costly to cart around that it had to be retired, which in turn caused a little hiatus for the band. The idea behind building this speaker system was that it should be loud, but not distorted. Right. Loud and clear to the point that you could actually be in the audience and have a conversation with someone while the band played on, which just seems like such a remarkable thing. And I know that the Grateful Dead is sort of close to home for you because you growing up in Chicago, your parents actually worked for a promoter that put on Dead shows, right?
- [02:12]
B
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I was raised by two hardcore Deadheads. Shout out to my parents, Mark and Marianne. Yep. And beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, they were kind of orbiting each other and the band at Dead shows throughout the Tri State area, Chicago, Madison, Des Moines. And my mother, when she was still just a teenager, she got hooked up with a rising east coast rock and roll promoter. At the time, his name was Howard Stein, and he had a concert promotion business that was expanding into the Midwest. And Howard Stein partnered with Flipside Records, the now defunct Chicagoland record store chain. And my mother was associated with Flipside Records. So when she was 17, 18 years old, she was doing day of production odd jobs at not only Grateful Dead shows, but shows basically every other band you could think of that was going back in this era. She was working all their shows as they would come through at the Auditorium Theater.
- [03:27]
C
Wow.
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B
The old International Amphitheater, the kinetic playground. So you know the Dead, obviously, but Black Sabbath, the who, Hawkwind, the Kinks, Mahavishnu Orchestra show, go down the list. She saved all of her passes from all of these shows. So she was working, you know, backstage, and, you know, she would also bring baked goods for all of these bands.
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C
The Cookie Lady.
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B
The Cookie lady, yes. So that's the reputation earned her the nickname Cookie lady, which I just. I love. And, you know, she has some stories, some run ins with a lot of these bands, but the Dead specifically, there was a show in 1973 with like a prototype wall of sound up in Madison that was put on by Howard Stein. And she brought some cookies up there. And, you know, before the show, she's like wandering around the drafty backstage area and she comes upon this guy in a, you know, black turtleneck and jeans and cowboy boots and a big nimbus of hair. And she's like, oh, that's. That's Garcia hanging out. And she gave him some cookies, and I guess he was just very tickled and they just kind of had a moment hanging out. So she has all these crazy stories like that kind of like behind the scenes. And then at the same time, my dad was just going to all of these same shows just as a fan, just like as a head out in the crowd having a great time. And it wasn't until the late 70s that they actually met each other and put all of this together that, like, oh, we were at all of these same shows together, kind of passing each other like ships in the night. Right. But later on into the 80s, my dad would get hooked up with the Grateful Dead's Midwest local crew as a stagehand. So he would, you know, he would like, roll out the, like, Afghan style stage rugs that the band was performing on at the time and helping the Dead's crew, like, rig up the sound system as it was configured at that point in time, which was much different than the wall of sound. But it owed a lot to all of the groundbreaking work that the Dead were doing in the late 60s, early 70s. So all of that to say I grew up in the Grateful Dead household. This music has just been with me my entire life. I'm going on 40 years old, to give you an idea. And really my earliest flashes of memory are seeing the Grateful Dead perform up at Alpine Valley in the late 80s. My dad was still doing stagehand stuff, and my parents would take my sister and I up to the shows up there. So if I think as far back as I can, my earliest memories, the flashes are, you know, watching the Dead perform specifically, like A balloon ending up on stage because we were, like, sat really close, and Garcia, like, gently kicking the balloon off stage, that's, like, seared in my memory, but also, like, being, like, kind of freaked out by the sound because, like, what they were doing at that point was, like, so kind of crazy. And what they were doing with sound throughout their whole career was really crazy. But, you know, have always been captivated by the Dead sound. And listening to my folks talk about seeing this band perform through this mountain of speakers that just kept growing throughout the early 70s, and it was called the Wall of Sound, and it blew everyone's mind. This just took hold of me from a very, very young age, and I've just kind of been fascinated with it my entire life. And here we are, and there's a book that I'm staring at right now that came out a couple months ago.
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C
It's really a fascinating read, and it's a fascinating thought that here's a band. Like, if you think about the Grateful Dead as a casual listener, you might think of. Okay, you know, great imagery. You know, I know they're famous for the live concerts. You know, obviously, Jerry's no longer with us, but you know who the Grateful Dead are, if you're just a casual fan, sure. But you don't realize necessarily, that they were so innovative, in particular with their sound. And the idea being. And you get this across in the book, is that Jerry Garcia had a type of sound that he wanted to get out of his head. And then there were a couple of players in their immediate circle that were smart enough, crazy enough, willing to do the work, to band together to make this pristine, loud, but clear, pristine sound happen. So there were many people and always kind of have been in Dead World, so many different players. But we can distill it down to maybe just one or two. Right. That could really launch this thing, this wall of sound that could project the sound from behind the band. Totally. Not a monitor in front, a wall of speakers that could make this type of pristine, clear sound. There's one or two people, right?
- [08:28]
B
Yeah, for sure. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And. Yeah, and to sort of, like, get into that, to your point exactly. Like, there is this perception of the Grateful Dead, the casual listener, as, you know, Jerry Garcia specifically, you know, wearing, like, a drug rug, kind of poncho, sitting by the riverside, playing an acoustic guitar. And sure, there's that. But they were always at the cutting edge of, like, of technology, of running a business. All of it. Very kind of like a very futuristic sort of band in A way, yeah. And they were always welcoming people into their fold. And when it came to the sound system, they always had this ethic from the very beginning of the band when they were still in like this communal sort of era of funneling money back into better gear and just in furthering the sound. Right. And yeah, there's a great sort of titular line from an interview that Garcia gave, I think, in like 1967. And he talks about, like a loud and clear sound specifically. That's like, what they were going for. And, right. They had this whole cast of characters who, you know, were coming to the table, rolling up their sleeves to work with the band. All sorts of like, you know, like formally trained audio engineer types that they were poaching from Ampex, but also like high school dropout roadies who were like, getting a schooling from all of these, like, audiophile types who were working with the band. But, yes, there's like, a couple of people that you can really kind of narrow in on as, like, kind of catalytic forces without which the wall of sound would never have come to be. Owsley. Stanley. Augustus Owsley. Stanley III was his full name, AKA the Bear. AKA the Bear. Yes. He was very, very hirsute, and that earned him the nickname the Bear. And Owsley was totally crucial to this whole project. And he entered the picture in late 1965. That's when he first saw the band. So that's very early days. The band formed in 1965, right. And Owsley saw the Dead for the first time and really had like, his first transformative Dead experience at one of the early acid tests. So these were these psychedelic fueled audio visual happenings that took place along the west coast over just a couple of months in like, late 1965, early 1966. But the acid Test really kind of like set the model that the Dead would follow for the rest of their career. Which is to say, you know, everyone at the Acid Test was as much like, performer as audience member. So, like, everyone was in the same sort of sonic envelope, like, traveling together, as it were. But Owsley saw the band and was so moved and really terrified by their sound in sort of like a sublime sense that he had a couple of thoughts to himself. He thought, this band is gonna be bigger than the Beatles and I need to basically follow them to the ends of the earth and contribute to their project in whatever way that I can.
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C
Right.
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B
So Owsley had a lot. He had a lot going on that enabled him to do this. He was in the process of spinning up a massive underground LSD manufacturing empire. Legendary, legendary. He produced millions of hits of acid and made a lot of money from that and could kind of like funnel that money back into the Grateful Dead sound gear. Because he was, he, Owsley was obsessed with sound. He had prior experience in service related ham radio and he had his own really sick like home hi fi system that would actually be sort of like the Grateful dead sound system 2.0. When Auzi kind of came around as their first official sound man in early 1966, he was like, look, I have this sweet Altec Lansing voice of the theater home hi fi system. Why don't you guys just take this as your own sound system and I'll soup it up and we can add onto it and iterate. And they were off to the races from there, right? But yeah, Owsley had this vision very early on of these LSD enhanced visions, I should say, of all of the sound emanating from one point from. From behind the band. So this is the acoustical concept of point source. And he had this vision in early 1966 and it really kind of took hold of him and over really the next, better part of the next decade, building up to the full wall of sound in 1974, they would sort of realize this vision that he had. And part of that vision was also to eliminate intermodulation distortion, which is another kind of technical term that I kind of had to school myself in as I was writing this book. But the way to eliminate intermodulation distortion so that no two signals were running through the same output as it were, is Owsley decided to give each band member their own, like their own stack, their own pa. So if you look at the wall of sound, it's actually six individual PAs. Each musician had their own rig that they could control right there from the stage, sort of responding note by note and beat by beat to what the audience was doing. But Owsley, yeah, to your point exactly. He was sort of the force of ideas behind what became the wall of Sound. But he needed people with hands on expertise to actualize his ideas. So there's a whole number of people who would sort of, you know, take his ideas and like apply them to the actual gear and the hardware and sort of like figuring it all out. But yeah, there's a couple folks, you know, I can shout out. Ron Wickersham was an audio engineer type who started Alembic, which was like an in house. They sort of became like the Dead's in house custom electronics and sound system provider in the late 60s and early 70s, they were a separate company, but they became so intertwined with the Dead in building the Wall of Sound that they were kind of like inseparable for a moment. But Ron Wickersham founded Alembic with Bear. Rick Turner of Alembic is another crucial character in the sort of audio wizard realm. John Curl is another sort of sound consultant type. And I talk with all these people in the book and the list goes on. There's this whole crazy cast of characters. But, you know, it was really like, it was a group project. It took all of these different people from all of these different walks of life to come to the table and work toward this shared goal. But it's sort of funny, like, when I was interviewing people who were there back in this day, here and there, like, it would sort of start to come out that, like, people would kind of low key and sometimes not really low key, kind of like, take credit for the Wall of Sound. Sure, they'd be like, oh. And like, you know, they'd be given some long winded explanation and they'd be like. And that's what led me to invent the Wall of Sound. Or, like, that's what led me to, like, you know, whatever. Like, you know, people kind of lay claim to it, understandably, when really it was this group project. However, though, like, if there's one person who you could point back to without whom the Wall of Sound would never have been, it was Owsley, for sure.
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C
For sure.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And the thing about it's interesting, a couple of things that you just said is, I just want to respond to. Owsley was a brilliant, kind of a raconteur type. And the Dead collected people like this who were very forward thinking. Owsley had a very entrepreneurial streak, let's just say, with illicit substances, which he then fed back into building this totally unique sound system. And he did so much more than that, too. And then you mentioned the business affairs of the Grateful Dead people in their camp. They had to basically create their own travel agency, for example. And this was a group of people that were just touring around with them. And then they decided that, oh, let's organize this. And they basically became the model for touring bands, travel itineraries and getting them to and fro.
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B
Totally. Yeah, absolutely.
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C
It's so much of that with the Grateful Dead. And to your point, there was Owsley in the beginning, but then you had these other really brilliant players that made the Wall of Sound happen. But all of these people were willing to throw down their talents, their time, you know, their Very lives, basically, you know, behind this band, this most American of bands, you know, to get it done, to get this sound happening, to get these people fed and moved across, you know, the country. And then, you know, the world is really amazing. And it's a testament to something. I don't know what. You know, it's this unknowable thing about the Grateful Dead that I think will carry on forever, for sure.
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B
Yeah, it is. It's amazing because, like, you know, before the Dead came around, certainly, like, in, like, the sound world, you know, it's not even like the sound was an afterthought. It wasn't even a thought yet. Like.
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C
Right.
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B
Like, you know, no one had put any thought into, like, live sound reinforcement and just, like, the presentation of bands. If you look back at, like, you know, the late 50s, certainly early 60s sound at, like, live concert spaces was atrocious.
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C
It was terrible, definitely.
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B
And it was only after the Dead came around, they sort of, like, instill just kind of like a general awareness and appreciation for, like, you know, what you owe to your fans who come to see you. That like, suddenly, like, post, you know, not really like, post Dead, but, like, once the Dead were kind of going and people were taking notice, like, everyone sort of started to up their game.
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C
They're up their game.
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B
But, like, to that point, before the Dead, it was like the, you know, sound was atrocious. You know, just the infrastructure of a touring operation, like you mentioned, just did not exist before the Dead. And like, in. In the book, in telling the story of the sound system, I found myself kind of, like, telling the story of this band. And this band is really like this huge world building project. That's kind of how I think of them. That's right. And, like. And, you know, in. In the late 60s, early 70s, it's like they started their own. Their own travel agency, their own booking agency. Like, all. All kind of in house. That's a lot of people on the payroll. Right, right. But I think all of it embodied this kind of. This, like, why not Spirit that kind of always, like, propelled the Dead. And so much of what they did, they, like, lost money, but they just had the spirit that was like, who cares if this is gonna, like, further the sound? Like, then it's worth it.
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C
Like, the mythos of Jerry kind of, you know, Jerry's question always being first and foremost, is it fun?
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B
Exactly.
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C
Right.
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B
Yeah. That was like, so much. So much of, like, the ethic of the Dead, right, Was like, is it fun? And that's kind of like what they came to realize early in 1974, like, when the wall of sand was reaching its full peak, you know, pushing 80 tons of gear. And I can, you know, I can sort of, like, track the, like, the evolution of how that all kind of started to stack up. But by, like, 1974, you know, the writing was kind of on the wall, if you can forgive the pun there. And the writing on the wall was that, like, this isn't fun anymore. And, you know, to that point, that's always what it was about, like, having. Having fun. But there was a series of band meetings in the summer of 1974, and a grateful Dead band meeting. It wasn't just the band members. It was everyone. There'd be, like, dozens of people, tons of people, just kind of hanging out, and there was, like, kind of. No, there would be, like, a loose agenda, you know, some items to discuss at some of these meetings. But it was like, everyone. It was the road crew. It was like family members, you know, folks working at Fly By Night, the travel agency or whatever. Everyone was in the room. But it was becoming clear by 1974 that, like, everyone was burnt out. And Danny Rifkin, an early Dead co manager who sort of, like, shifted into, like, a roadie mode, he was the one who first stood up and was like. He was really nervous and he was, like, shaking, and he was like, and this just, like, isn't fun anymore. And that sort of, like, broke the tension. Then everyone was like, yeah, like, we're kind of happy. Someone said this because, like, it's stood up and said it totally.
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C
This thing is unwieldy. Well, I mean, going back to what you said, I mean, by the time this. This thing grew to such immense proportions, you know, you had. So you had the ability for each person in the band to alter their sound to get this thing together. That's why. That's why some of the. The audience tapes from the Wall of Sound era sound so great, because it was all about the sound in the audience. You know, the Bootleggers got the best tapes. Oh, yeah, you know, God bless Betty Kantor, of course.
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B
Of course.
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C
You know, everybody knows that Betty, the sound engineer for the Dead, has the best board tapes of their shows that she worked on, or among the best, we should say. But those audience tapes were just amazing because of this wall of Sound, because each member of the band could be so specific with their own instrument that you could have, again, this sound that was loud but clear, but getting there became just a behemoth. So, yeah, I know like walk us through the stuff and the sheer manpower that it took to get from the beginning of the Wall of Sound to the end when Rifkin stood up and said, you know what? We can't do this anymore.
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B
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And yeah, one thing that I really try to illuminate in the book is that, you know, the wall of sound as we know it did not just fall from the clear blue sky fully formed in 1974 like that peak Wall of Sound year. It was really this years long progression that began at the very beginning of the band. So in the book, I sort of like track. You know, there's a lot of numbers in the book as I'm sort of like tracking just like the growth and evolution of the Grateful Dead sound system as it's morphing into the Wall of sound. So to give you an idea of like just the physicality of the Grateful Dead sound system from the very like 1.0 all the way up to the Wall of Sound in 1965, which is when the band formed the Grateful Dead's rig, it weighed 800 pounds in total. And it was transported in drummer Bill Kreutzman's station wagon. So like, they were a scrappy, very punk, you know, operation back in those days.
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C
Certainly DIY.
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B
Super DIY. Yep. So Billy station wagon carting around their 800 pounds worth of gear. By 1967, just two years later, the dead's rig weighed 1300 pounds.
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C
Okay, two years.
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B
Two years later, yeah, 1,300 pounds. And it was then being carted around in a van that was owned by the band's very first roadie, a childhood friend of Jerry Garcia's by the name of Laird Grant.
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C
Okay.
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B
By 68, just a year later, the Grateful Deads rig was coming in at £6,000.
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C
So from 1300 to 6600 a year later.
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B
So that's a jump there. And by that point, all of this was being schlepped around in a Metro van. By 1970, two years later, their rig weighed 10,000 pounds and it was being moved around in their own 18 foot box truck.
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C
Okay, moved up to the box truck.
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B
Moving up to the box truck. Yeah, we're getting bigger. And by this point, you know, we've got like, you know, the road crew is expanding. You know, there's at least, by 70, there's at least like a dozen like solid crew members who are there like touring with them every show. But by 73, when the grateful Dead sound system had clearly taken the shape of a prototype wall of sound, Yep. The whole rig weighed 30,000 pounds and was being transported in a 40 foot truck.
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C
Right.
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B
And the Dead's lighting rig was carried in its own 18 foot truck. They also had their own power supply that was being carted around in another truck. So that's something that they sort of realized as the years were going on. That they couldn't rely on venues to supply enough juice to run all of this stuff.
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C
Isn't that fascinating?
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B
Yeah. Especially when they, like on Europe 72, for example, a very famous tour, when they were playing these, like, kind of crumbling old theaters, the electricity was just like. It was so weak that they actually. It's kind of crazy. They devised a way. And this was like bears doom. They devised a way to basically, like, drill into the municipal electric line and.
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C
Clamp onto it in like, some European city.
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B
In some European city. And like, amazingly, like, nobody got electrocuted throughout all of this. It's crazy. But so they. They were carrying all of, like, all of these generators just for their own power supply. And they were carrying enough power that Dan Healy, another really crucial character in this book, he told me that they could light up six blocks of tracked homes with all of the power that they were carrying. Yes. Which is just like, insane. They had their own power plant with them, basically.
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C
Basically, yeah.
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B
So. But then by 73, £30,000 to 74, which is like peak wall of sound, the Dead system, including all of these custom speaker cabinets, dozens of heavy duty Macintosh amplifiers, custom staging and scaffolding clocked in at 75 tons. Wow. By that summer, it was actually pushing like 80 tons worth of gear. And all of that was being carted around in their own small fleet of semi trucks.
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C
Sure. At this point, yeah.
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B
It's like it was a massive operation. And, you know, like, really no other band was approaching the scale of what the Dead were up to. Basically, like carrying this thing around from city to city at a time, I should add, when there was a fuel crisis going. So, like, the cost of the fuel, like gas alone was astronomical. But the Dead also frequently had to pay rent at two venues simultaneously because they had one set of gear. There was like one wall of sound, but they had two identical sets of staging and all of the scaffolding. So if you look at a photo of the wall of sound, all of the gear is, like, set inside this, like, lattice work of scaffolding. It's really kind of like an amazing work of, like, engineering the bracing of this whole thing. But they had two identical sets of that stuff. So that when, you know Crew A would roll into a given venue. Crew B would have already set up the scaffolding and the staging so that Crew A could just like load everything right into it and get going. From, like the second they load into a venue at 9am or whatever, they would switch places and just sort of like kind of leapfrog across the country or even, you know, across Europe, because they brought the damn thing to Europe in 1974.
- [29:51]
C
That's crazy.
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B
So it was just. It was a massive operation by the Full Wall of Sound, 1974. If you look at their tour itinerary, all of the people who were on these tours, dozens of people, it was insane. And again, all these people had to be fed. They were all relying on getting a paycheck and housed and all of this stuff.
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C
It's wild too, we think today, some of these really, really big concerts, just to put it into a modern framework, when Taylor Swift, for example, goes on the road with all of the people and it's multiple semis, that was nothing compared to what the Grateful Dead were doing at a time when they truly were the only people that had the technology to even do what they were doing. Like, if they got to a city where something was faulty, needed new cabling or something like that, they basically had to suss that out for themselves. They didn't have a bank of people, oh, we're in Luxembourg, we better call our guy here that we've known for 30 years. No, this was all brand new stuff right off the jump that they had to. They had to figure out. Not bad for. For a bunch of hippies.
- [31:00]
B
Not bad, right? I mean, yeah, that's the thing. It's like they. Again, going back to like this kind of this perception that a lot of people have of the Grateful that is just this sort of like very kind of woolly, like, you know, kind of laid back operation. And. And they were. And also though, like, they were like, very serious about what they were doing and everyone who was working for them, it was like the show had to go on. So, like, if they were in Des Moines, Iowa, and they like, they're like, oh, shit, we are missing, like, we need to source a certain type of cable or whatever. Like, they had to go out and find it. So figure it out. Just like, figure it out, right? Yeah, it's just. It's amazing that they pulled any of this off, but it's also amazing, quite frankly, that no one died as a direct result of working on the Wall of Sound. You know, this was like before OSHA standards were enforced.
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C
I was gonna mention that. Yeah.
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B
And, like, it's like, today you would not be able to do what the dead were doing if you. If, you know, if you're, like, working for the union, like, setting up sound at, you know, Soldier Field or something for, like, a massive operate. Like, sure, you could not do what the dead were doing. Like, you would be called out immediately, but. But no one, you know, no one was crushed under a huge stack of speakers. Nobody fell off the top scaffolding. And this scaffolding, mind you, the top of it was, like, four stories up in the air.
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C
Right.
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B
And they weren't using harnesses. Nobody fell. No one got electrocuted to death. It's just. It's amazing that nobody bit it. There were some very close calls, and I talk about some of those in the book where it was like, whoa. Like, you know, kid, one of the roadies, like, oh, kid, like, almost got crushed, but he came away unscathed, amazingly. Yeah.
- [32:47]
C
You aren't thinking about, oh, maybe I better put a harness on before I climb up here on this. If you invert a football field and I'm gonna climb up on top of that. No, I'm just gonna get up there and get it done.
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B
Just gonna get up there and do it.
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C
It's amazing that nobody did died, frankly. I mean, people were electrocuted on stage at Woodstock. So, I mean, this was not a time when those kinds of safety considerations were at the forefront.
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B
So.
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C
And then, of course, it did. It did kind of finally peter out, you know, because at some point, you have to kind of look at the thing and go, is this fun, you know, to cart all this stuff around in the spirit of Jerry? So when that happened and then the wall was put to rest and they decided that they would go on, and obviously they did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shows after the Wall of Sound. But it must have been a sigh of relief for everybody, especially all the roadies and the engineers involved. And for the rest of us, it gave us people that could think about these things and invent from there a template to move forward with. And so that's why we have some of these cool innovations in live music today.
- [34:06]
B
Yeah, we can trace back so many sort of, like, sonic developments that remain like a blueprint for experiencing live music today. We can trace a direct line back to the Grateful Dead and what they were up to, you know, certainly, like, with the Wall of Sound proper, but, like, there were a lot of other, like, little, like, adjacent developments or, like, sonic firsts. That they were notching along the way as they were building up the wall of sound. So, you know, the whole idea of using monitor speakers, you know, positioned at the, you know, musicians feet to kind of fold back the sound back to the musician so that they can hear what they're playing. The Dead. It was the Dead and Blue Cheer, which were like a sort of a contemporary Bay Area band. The Dead and Blue Cheer shared a couple bills together at shows in like, 67, 68. It was the Dead and Blue Cheer that were the first to use monitor speakers, which is like, today it's like, that's such a. Like, you know, we kind of take that sort of stuff for granted. But they were the first to use monitors. Like, think about that. That's so crazy. And like, that goes back to, you know, 1966, when Bear was having these visions of what this, like, giant, like, point source sound system could be. He had, you know, one of the early Grateful Dead text this guy, Tim Scully, basically, like, fashioning early monitor speakers. So, like, monitor speakers, you know, the Dead were right there at the forefront. And it's funny because what happened with the wall of sound is that all of those monitors that were at the musicians feet went behind the band, right? So in effect, this wall of sound was their monitors, and it was the pa, like the public address system as well. So all of that stuff was behind the band. And I think sort of a main reason why they did that is going back to the acid tests, which I mentioned, where everyone was sort of in the same sonic envelope, traveling together. And by moving all of the monitor speakers behind the band in the wall of sound, that eliminated any barriers between the band and the crowd. So it was like, we're all together, we're all hearing the same thing. That idea there is like, simultaneously just like, very kind of basic, like, oh, yeah, of course. But it's like it just opened up this, like, world of possibilities. But one development that came out of that is if you look at photos from the Wall of sound era, 73, 74, you see that the microphones that the band members use.
- [36:49]
C
The microphones, yes, were like. That was a little riddle to figure out, right?
- [36:53]
B
Totally. Yeah. Like. Like you have this giant wall of speaker cabinets behind the band. And to give you an idea, like, you know, Phil Lesh, the bass player, the Grateful Dead, his stacks were 32ft tall, 32ft being the height of a standing bass wave.
- [37:11]
C
Right.
- [37:11]
B
So, you know, by design. By design, yeah. Like, you know, Garcia talked about the wall of sound being like a Physical model of the sound that they were after. And if Phil Lesh was going to achieve, like, you know, optimal bass tones, they had to build his stack 32ft tall, right? So it was this massive stack of speakers behind the band. But what do you do about feedback? Like, when an output is fed back into an input, so, like the sound of the wall basically feeding back into the vocal mics, like, which is pointing at the wall. Which is pointing at the wall.
- [37:44]
C
Right.
- [37:45]
B
So, like, how do you eliminate feedback? So what they did is they devised this really kind of like, ingenious, slightly harebrained, dual capsule phase canceling, feedback eliminating microphone system where no big deal. No big deal, right? So if you look at photos, there's, you know, each singer is singing into the little top mic and then like 3 or so inches below that, there's another mic that's like picking up the sound of the wall sound. And the signal would be fed into a differential summing amplifier in such a way that, you know, the only, like, the sort of. The only sound that would be coming out of the microphones would be the vocals.
- [38:28]
C
Amazing.
- [38:29]
B
It was amazing. Yeah. And, like, I'm sort of glossing over, like, some of the technical nitty gritty there, but that's essentially how it worked. And you can see that a lot of, like, the technological underpinnings of the phase canceling microphones, you can see that today in noise canceling headphones.
- [38:47]
C
Isn't that miraculous?
- [38:48]
B
Which is crazy. Or like, in the same sort of thing as applied in assistive hearing devices like hearing aids. That technology was refined through the wall of sound, which is just, like, so crazy to think about so many firsts.
- [39:02]
C
Again, this technology, this approach to. It had never been done before.
- [39:07]
B
It had never been done before. And sort of at the same time, too, if you go to a massive concert today, you go to see Taylor sw, you go to see, like, you know, any gigantic rock band at, like, Wrigley Field or Soldier Field here in Chicago, AC dc. Yeah, you go see AC dc, right? You're gonna see out in the crowd, there's gonna be rings of delay towers, right? To account for the distance that the sound has to cover to reach, like, the furthest, furthest seats in the house. Right? And the Dead were at the. Right at the forefront of developing delay. Right at, like, right as the kind of early digital revolution. Like, the. The delay towers that they were working with were still, like, mostly analog, but they kind of had, like, an early digital component too, which is crazy. But there were a series of Shows in. In the summer of 1973, where the grateful Dead basically figured out how to use delay. So they were playing massive concerts. One of them, the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, a very famous concert. 600,000 people. Wow. Outdoors. So they have, like. There's three concentric rings of circles that you can. If you look at photos from the Summer Jam, you see that. But, you know, any big concert today, you see. You see delay towers implemented, right? And that's like another direct line back to the wall of sound. So, like, you know, in sort of teasing out all of those sort of, like, sonic firsts in the book, that was sort of a way for me to get across this idea that independent of how one feels about the Grateful Dead's music per se, you can still appreciate what they were up to back in this era. Like, if you enjoy live music, you sort of owe thanks to the Grateful Dead and what they were up to. And with this book, I didn't want to just write another book about the Grateful Dead. I didn't want to pander to Deadheads or just write fanfare. I wanted to reach an audience, sort of a crossover audience, of folks who might think they have no interest or familiarity with the Dead, but they can actually appreciate what the Dead were up to. They just kind of needed someone to hold their hand through this, like, very inscrutable, impenetrable world of the Dead, you know, that can be, like, very overwhelming for people who, like, aren't super familiar with it. Like, where do I even start with this thing? Yeah. You know, it's also just like, a crazy, fun, entertaining, psychedelic romp, too. So, like.
- [41:41]
C
Well, some of the cast of characters.
- [41:43]
B
You know, it's a crazy.
- [41:44]
C
It's larger than life. Funny as hell.
- [41:48]
B
It's crazy.
- [41:48]
C
You know, I mean, it's just the people around the Grateful Dead, the people that made things happen around the Grateful Dead, were truly fascinating characters.
- [41:58]
B
Yeah. And, like, getting to. Like, getting to know some of these people and interview them, some of whom have never given interviews about their time with the band, was like. I took it very seriously, and it was like, a huge honor when someone would be like, yeah, man, I've never spoken to anyone about this, but, like, I'll talk to you. Like, it was really kind of a special thing to, like, just sort of talk to all of the people who were in the room writing the book. It was a matter of, like, striking the right balance between just enough of the technical nitty gritty, but not so much that it just became, like, a technical paper or Like a gearbook. Like, this isn't really a gearbook, per se. Like, it gets into, like, all of the mind bending acoustics, but I had to balance that with just, like a compelling character driven narrative, which is what it is. Yeah. And that's. Thank you. Yeah. And that's like, what really excited me is, like, I just want to know from the people who were there, like, what it was like, just like, building this stuff and traveling with it, going from city to city, setting it all up, tearing it down. Like, what was that like? Just all the behind the scenes shenanigans.
- [43:07]
C
Of which there are many.
- [43:08]
B
There's a lot. Yeah.
- [43:09]
C
Well, and that's what you accomplished with this book. You know, I myself am not a, you know, technical audio whiz.
- [43:15]
B
Same.
- [43:16]
C
Right.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah.
- [43:17]
C
But I know and love live music, and I have more than just a passing interest in the Grateful Dead. I would call myself a fan. Yeah, but even if you weren't, even if you only knew a few songs and were kind of like, oh, cool, they had the best logos or whatever, you know, read this book because it is a romp. It is a factual, very well researched. I know this started out as a Vice article when you were a writer for Vice.
- [43:48]
B
That's right.
- [43:48]
C
And then grew from there. But there's a lot of good information, but it's not ever over your head. If you love live music of any kind, I think you'll find something in this book. If you're more than a casual fan of the Grateful Dead, you'll be pleased. And frankly, there's surprise and delight in here all along the way that I think is really a testament to how much work you put into putting this book together. Bryan.
- [44:21]
B
Well, thank you so much. Yeah. I mean, and as a journalist, you want to be additive. You want to push the story forward. And again, like, I didn't want to just rehash a lot of the, like, well, trodden Grateful Dead lore. What can I say here that's new? Or, like, how can I, like, cast a new light on this massive cultural juggernaut that just kind of keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger?
- [44:43]
C
Right.
- [44:43]
B
But, yeah, as a journalist, it was like I knew I had to go in really deep and speak with everyone who's basically still alive who is willing to talk to me? And this was such a long journey, putting it together that, yeah, there were a number of individuals who are characters in the book who. Who passed away as I was working on it. And some of these people, you know, the last interviews they ever gave were to me for this book. So it, like, I had this, like, duty to really kind of, like, kind of immortalize, like, all of their contributions, you know, and you can see in the book, like, the main characters are the main. The musicians themselves are there, but they kind of flit in and out of the narrative. And it's like the principal characters are really the crew, the sound consultants, these crazy audio wizards, all of those sorts of people are kind of the main characters in the book. But, yeah, exactly to your point, I myself am also not. I'm not a gearhead. I'm not an audio engineer. And so as I was writing this book, it's like, how do I frame and, like, break down and explain all of this stuff in a way that, like, I could comprehend.
- [45:57]
C
Right.
- [45:58]
B
You know, it's like. So it was like, some of it. It really took, like, some wrestling with it. But, you know, I think it. I think it's. I think it's readable. I think it's digestible for people who, you know, if you're likewise not like a. Like a gearhead, I think you're going to be able to understand everything that's going on in here and also just have, like, a wild time kind of going on the road with the band. Like, that's kind of how I tried to model the book is like, get in the van.
- [46:24]
C
Get in the van, man.
- [46:24]
B
We're going on the road with the Grateful Dead.
- [46:26]
C
Like, it's also really great knowing your personal backstory with your parents and how this music has been not only a part of your life, but a part of both of their livelihoods, you know, at certain points in their lives, then for you to take this tack with a band like this that has such a rich history, you know, and then sort of kind of give it back to the roadies and the techies and the engineers. Those people always deserve a glow up. If you turn the pages, you'll learn something else that you will then remember the next time that you go to see a live show, you'll be like, okay. That's what Brian was writing about in his book.
- [47:06]
B
Yeah. Thank you, Grateful Dead.
- [47:07]
C
Thank you, thank you.
- [47:09]
B
Even if you aren't a Deadhead. Like, thank you. Absolutely, yes. Well, I mean, it's crazy, man.
- [47:15]
C
And that's the thing. You never know where the road will take you. Which is basically the sentiment in many a Grateful Dead song.
- [47:23]
B
That's right.
- [47:23]
C
Brian Anderson, thank you for coming and joining me on this wonderful chat. I really appreciate it. The book is called Loud and Clear. The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection by Brian Anderson. Pick it up.
- [47:39]
B
That's right. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
- [47:41]
C
I'm Janda. This has been behind the song. As always. Let us know what you think in the comments. And on the way, much more classic rock and roll.