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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to the first episode of season 12 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. 3 thank you so very much for tuning in in this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. We kick off season 12 with a very special guest, none other than Grateful Dead sound wizard Dan Healy. Announcing the Grateful Dead Blues for all of 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition arriving September 12th, this 3 CD set features the newly remastered album with unreleased sound check and concert recordings. Check this out. The set features almost two hours of unreleased recordings. Among the highlights are rehearsals from the band's August 12, 1975 soundcheck at San Francisco's Great American Music hall, including the album track Sage and Spirit Help on the Way, Slipknot and Franklin's Tower. The collection continues with performances from the June 21, 1976 show at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania spotlighting five blues for all the songs alongside favorites like Eyes of the World and rounding out the set are selections from Bill Graham's snack benefit at Kesar Stadium on March 23, 1975. There are also vinyl variants of the original album available, including a picture disc, a Midnight Fire red vinyl edition and and 180 gram black vinyl edition. Very cool looking blues for all of 50th anniversary merch is also now available and all of these great offerings are over@dead.net you can pre order the music now, you can buy merch now and over@rhino.com you can pre order the Dolby Atmos mixes of Blues for Allah on Blu ray disc. They were mixed by Steven Wilson and they are ready to blow your mind. All of these fine releases will be out on September 12th via dead.net and rhino.com head on over to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes. Catch up on the ones you missed. Re Listen to favorites. We've got the complete seasons 1 through 11 and you can link there from your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, when and where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media hitting that like button leaving a review thank you very much. We appreciate the help. Do you have a great story about any of the songs from Blues for Allah? Were you lucky enough to catch the band at one of their two shows in San Francisco in 1975? Then we need to hear from you. Head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling us all about it. You just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. Well, we know you like to listen to the podcast, but if you are an avid reader, we have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead Cast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out the 2025 meet up at the Movies featuring the Grateful Dead movie is happening this August 14th in theaters across the country, and this time around it's been remastered in 4K and will be available at IMAX theaters. For the very first make sure to grab your friends and grab tickets@meetupatthemovies.com make sure to stay until the very end. Catch a special performance from those Winterland shows that didn't make the movie originally. And in celebration of the band's 60th anniversary, Grateful Dead has partnered with Apple Maps to create a new guide highlighting pivotal locations in the band's history in San Francisco. The guide features 11 key locations across San Francisco, including venues like the Fillmore west, the Polo Field at Golden Gate park, and local San Francisco landmarks like the Haight Ashbury neighborhood where the band lived in the mid-60s, and the recording studios where the band's legendary albums such as American Beauty and Working Man's Dead were recorded. Head over to dead.net and link from there to start your Apple Maps tour now. If you're like me, you remember Dan Healy as the man behind the soundboard at Grateful Dead shows we attended in the 80s and early 90s, but his history with the band goes back a lot further than that, and Dan's role in the San Francisco music scene is a story that needs to be told, and you've come to the right place to hear it. Ladies and gentlemen, here's my co host and our friend Jesse Jarno.
- [05:40]
Jerry Garcia
Spanish lady come to me she lays.
- [05:42]
Jesse Jarno
Under this road.
- [05:47]
Jerry Garcia
It rainbows my round around a tremble and explode Left a smoking crater in My mind I like.
- [05:57]
Dan Healy
To blow the wind with a He.
- [06:01]
Jerry Garcia
Come round and busted me for smiling on the cloudy.
- [06:10]
Jesse Jarno
During their 30 year career, the grateful Dead were synonymous with innovation in live sound. And within the Grateful Dead, there was no name more synonymous with that than Dan Healy. We are thrilled beyond all audible frequencies at long last to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Dan Healy.
- [06:27]
Dan Healy
My dream model was that I wanted you to be able to walk into a show, sit down, and it's almost like stepping into a spaceship. I wanted you to sit down, strap in and be ready to hear the greatest sound system in the world. A fabulous, fabulous sound experience. I wanted you to be able to hear every nuance of everything. And I gotta say that I was supported by the Grateful Dead totally. Jerry Garcia completely believed in me. He supported me. Anything I wanted, he supported me.
- [06:55]
Jesse Jarno
Once Healy answered the call, he stayed busy.
- [06:58]
Dan Healy
When you're looking back over years, a lot happened in a short period of time. In the 60s and 70s, things moved very, very fast and there was a lot going on. Everybody was really ambitious. I spent, oh, 10, 15 years without taking a day off. Every day something was going on and I was somewhere doing something with somebody. And it had something to do with music. Either playing music or recording music, or designing equipment, doing sound work and stuff like that.
- [07:24]
Jesse Jarno
Here's how Mickey Hart described Dan Healy to WBCN in 1978.
- [07:29]
Dan Healy
Dan Healy is our sound wizard. He's our sound man. He does our PA and makes the records and is generally the man that develops the goodies, the stuff. When we want this, he does. He makes it happen. Dan make it happen.
- [07:43]
Jesse Jarno
And he's always been with us for years. Many Deadheads can probably conjure an image of Dan Healy at work at the soundboard, stationed in the middle of the venue floor with a taper section sprawled out behind him, another innovation he had a part in. But just like it took the Grateful Dead decades to transmogrify into the band that filled arenas and stadiums in the 80s and 90s, it took a long time for Dan Healy to go from being the band's in house sound whiz in the 60s to becoming what you'd call a modern front of house engineer, a job he virtually invented. But if you've ever slipped on a pair of headphones and listened to a soundboard from the late 70s, 1980s or 90s and wondered why it sounded like a fully mixed studio recording, that's Dan Healy. We've been listening to the other one from November 21, 1985, at the Kaiser in Oakland. Now on Enjoying the ride. Dan Healy was born in Northern California on May 14, 1945. A big happy 80th to Dan. He's Californian through and through. Growing up just north of Garberville in what's now known as the Emerald Triangle.
- [09:11]
Dan Healy
The town I lived in was a population of 220 people. It was in Northern California. It was on the Eel river, the little teeny town called Wiatt. And the town is still there, but there's not much of it left because the river flooded and washed most of the town away.
- [09:25]
Jesse Jarno
But the dead, and Healy especially, would earn a reputation for taking apart off the shelf gear and turning it into something better. It was a practice that Dan learned early.
- [09:35]
Dan Healy
When I was in the sixth grade, I think fifth or sixth grade, I had a friend, a schoolmate, whose brother was in the Air Force, and he did electronics in the Air Force. And his brother showed me how to take an old radio and make a transmitter out of it. So I took an old radio and made a transmitter out of it. And where I was living at the time, outside my bedroom window, was a redwood tree that was really, really tin. So I climbed to the top of that tree and put a wire all the way up to the top of the tree, and that became the antenna. Lady.
- [10:07]
Jerry Garcia
Honey, is that you? Oh, lady, honey, where are you?
- [10:16]
Dan Healy
And we lived up on the hill. And so we would. After school, I had a little turned phone, a little phonograph that I hooked into this radio, and I had a microphone that I made out of an old earphones. And so what we would do is we would play radio after school and stuff, and we would talk and interview and play records and stuff. And it turned out that this little town, which is about, oh, maybe three blocks long and three blocks wide, it was built on the side of a hill leading down to the Eel River. And everybody in town could pick up my station. And people in town used to listen to us. They would turn on after school every day when we would go and listen to us and play music and stuff. And that was my start in radio.
- [11:01]
Jesse Jarno
Just like a musician learning new techniques, Dan began building an understanding of sound that would play out in the Grateful Dead's music from the 60s through the 90s.
- [11:10]
Dan Healy
We were never part of the Rebel Without a Cause generation. We always had a cause. I know we were considered rebels, but our rebellion was seeking music, which we somehow felt we were ordained to do. And so we pursued our music. And I lived in the studio. I lived for the studio. The studio is like church to me. I mean, the first time I walked in a control room and saw all that equipment, it was an epiphany. It changed me forever. I knew I was home. I knew that's where I belong.
- [11:39]
Jesse Jarno
Through a job at KSFO Radio, Healy landed a gig at a studio that produced audio for local sports teams, among other clients.
- [11:47]
Jerry Garcia
Listen to the broadcasts on ksfo, turn up the volume, and here and go with the San Francisco Giants, it's Bye Bye Baby.
- [12:02]
Dan Healy
The place I got my start was a little recording studio in San Francisco called Commercial Recorders. It's no longer there, but the guy that owned it was a jazz musician, and he was a Downbeat magazine Bass Player of the Year in the early 50s. And he had. He played in the Paige Kavanaugh Trio. He was a bass player in the Page Cavanaugh Trio, which was a very well known cabaret group after World War II. And all through the late forties and early fifties.
- [12:30]
Jerry Garcia
You say the nicest things, baby.
- [12:36]
Dan Healy
Who.
- [12:36]
Jerry Garcia
Could help but fall in love with you? You say the nicest things, baby.
- [12:48]
Dan Healy
I'm.
- [12:48]
Jerry Garcia
Afraid they're too good to be true.
- [12:51]
Dan Healy
He had designed and built a studio, and he was kind of my mentor, and. And I was really the gopher and the janitor guy and the guy that made the coffee and all that and swept the floors. But I got to hang out and.
- [13:03]
Jesse Jarno
I learned when Dan says he lived for the studio, he really meant it.
- [13:07]
Dan Healy
When I first started working in the studio, when I. When I was a golfer early on, I was sleeping, living in my car. I had it down, so I had a different place every night of the week to park and sleep without being molested by the cops. I probably did that for, oh, you know, six months or so. Wintertime was a little bit weird because it got really cold at night. So I can start my engine, turn on the heater for a few minutes and thaw out. Then that whole studio thing happened for me.
- [13:34]
Jesse Jarno
Dan made a few other fortuitous connections in the mid-60s, too.
- [13:37]
Dan Healy
I was living on a houseboat in Marin county in a little town called Larkspur. The houseboat next door to the houseboat I lived in was owned by a guy that was producing rock and roll shows. The guy's name was Bobby Collins. He produced the very first shows ever at the old Fillmore Auditorium. He was one of the first guys to produce shows there. So he was an entrepreneur, promoter kind of a guy.
- [13:59]
Jesse Jarno
Bobby Collins was the original bassist in the SOP with Camel, though apparently never gigged publicly with them. And to Amend, one of the first white hippies to produce shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, which already had a long history with black gospel and R and D bands.
- [14:14]
Dan Healy
And he had a band crashing at his house called Quicksilver Messenger Service. When you live on a houseboat on a long boardwalk out to where these houseboats were, you kind of get to know people. It's a very small, tight little community. You get to know people. And I got to know those guys. And the Quicksilver was crashing his house, and I got to know John Cipollina really, really well. We became lifelong friends and really close friends. So when they found out that I knew how to fix equipment and do stuff like that, it was like, hey, Dan, come on, man, give me a break here. Yeah, I need some help. When the San Francisco music scene began to explode, record companies sent emissaries to San Francisco as talent scouts to look for bands to sign for bands. These talent scouts were wanted to buy blocks of cheap time on weekends in the studios to bring bands in to do these demo tapes. And the guy that owned the studio, my mentor, he was a golfer. And the studio that I worked at, commercial recorders, did commercial jingles and stuff for radio and television broadcasts. And. And so it was closed on the weekends, and he liked to go play golf. He didn't want to work, but the record companies were hitting on him to do it. And once Capitol Records, they wanted to do some sessions, and he had some big golf tournament and he didn't want to miss. So he said, hey, kid, you want to take a shot at this? You think you're ready? And I said, yeah, I'm ready. He gave me a key to the studio, and I did a demo tape for a guy named Herb Handler, who was. I guess he was a talent scout for Capitol Records at the time. He had an independent production company called Beechwood Music. That was sort of my first contact with the actual record, the real serious record industry.
- [16:31]
Jerry Garcia
I need no shackles to remind me I'm just a prisoner of love.
- [16:46]
Dan Healy
That.
- [16:46]
Jesse Jarno
Was Perry Como's Prisoner of Love, produced by herb Hendler from 1946. A veteran songwriter, producer, and publisher, by the early 1960s, Hendler was on the prowl for rock music.
- [16:58]
Dan Healy
So I did this demo tape, and it worked really well. And so as soon as that happened, then I was stuck there forever. The guy that owned the studio is like, okay, I'm out of here, you know, and so I want to be in the guy that did them. Well, then what happened is when these bands began signing contracts with the record companies, they would go into the studio and to make a little bit of thumbnail of it.
- [17:21]
Jesse Jarno
Dan also began to get his buddies into the studio, too. Gonna assume that Quicksilver Messenger Service were among the first.
- [17:30]
Jerry Garcia
I walk 47 miles of barbed wire I wear a cobra stick for a necktie Got a brand new house by the roadside Made out of rattlesnake hide.
- [17:39]
Dan Healy
That'S what I was doing when I ran into the Grateful Dead.
- [17:42]
Jesse Jarno
We have Quicksilver guitarist John Cipollina to thank for that.
- [17:46]
Dan Healy
I was busy in the studio, and he wasn't paying a lot of attention to the live music scene, going to shows and stuff. I just. I was busy doing the studio doing stuff. And he was always, oh, man, you got to hear us play. You got to hear us play. So I go to the show one night with him. It was at the old Fillmore, and Quicksilver was a headline band, and the opening band was the Grateful Dead. And that's how I ran into the Grateful Dead. On the far left, on lead guitar and vocals, the Charles Atlas of the psychedelic set, the Grateful Dead.
- [18:34]
Jesse Jarno
That was the Dead at The Fillmore in November 1966, perhaps the same weekend they first met Dan Healy. Though there are several other possibilities for when it might have happened. Whenever it was mid show, Phil Lesh's bass amp blew out, and Cipollina volunteered Healy to fix it.
- [18:49]
Dan Healy
This was right after Owsley blew out one of Garcia's ears with his sound equipment. The Grateful Dead just completely threw out all that equipment, and they just wanted to play like a regular band. I kind of intersected with that event, and the sound equipment was really, really, really limited in those days. And Pigpen would be singing, and you couldn't even tell. They had these little speakers, one on each side of the stage. They're almost like home hi Fi bookshelf speakers. But when a full rock and roll band is whaling away, you can imagine. You can't even. You could barely tell there was sound coming out of them.
- [19:21]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead had parted ways with owsley in midsummer 1966, and the remains of his original voice at the theater hi Fi wound up as part of the Fillmore Auditorium sound system, for a bit of which may have been what Healy was hearing.
- [19:33]
Dan Healy
I had been working in the studio, and I was used to hearing everything clear. And if I wanted to hear more vocal, I could turn it up on the mix console and stuff. And so. And I had fabulous monitor speakers overhead in the studios that I worked at. And so it was all really strange to me. Because it's like, man, you guys, you're missing out on what it really can sound like. I got challenged by Jerry to come up with a new idea because I was challenged to see if I could make it sound that way at a concert. It took me years, took me up through the 80s to get there, but I actually made it. I actually got there.
- [20:09]
Jesse Jarno
There were many steps. The first was selling drugs. Dan needed some startup funds with a quickness and so he participated in what's called the hip economy. He invested some money in wholesale amounts of weed and acid and did a small amount of business. With the proceeds, Dan rented some gear from local sound companies, Swanson Sound in the East Bay and McCune in the city, and assembled a few weeks later for another show at the Fillmore.
- [20:33]
Dan Healy
I had these little four channel mixers. They were portable mixers and they had like suitcase handles on them. They were a little box. Each one of them would mix four microphones, but there was a way that you could jump them together so you could put four of them together, six of them together, and jump them all together so that you could mix a bunch more microphones and they would all come out to go into the sound system. And it was made by Altek and they were tubes. I had, I think, six of these four channel mixers and I was stack them up on a table. And he used to be started out mixing from the side of the stage.
- [21:09]
Jesse Jarno
It did the trick, at least for that one show. The gear was rented and the bands couldn't quite afford their own just yet. Dan Healy became the band's full time soundman, probably starting in late 1967 and early 1968, when the band headed up the west coast with Quicksilver messenger service, a tour known as the Quick and the Dead, highlights of which can be heard on road trips. Volume two, number two, the stacked up Ampex MX10 units became the standard for the Dead sound system for the next half dozen years or so.
- [22:09]
Dan Healy
They were kind of bare bones minimum microphone mixers. They just had volume control so you couldn't change the sound quality of the sound or anything.
- [22:18]
Jesse Jarno
They learned to manipulate them pretty well in the next few years. During that same window in early 1968, the dead, the Airplane and Quicksilver opened their own venue, the Carousel Ballroom.
- [22:28]
Dan Healy
We found all of these abandoned dormant ballrooms like the Avalon Ballroom and the Carousel Ballroom and the Fillmore Ballroom, and you could rent them. And so we rent them and play our music there. There wasn't any mix boards yet, but we'd do Stereo radio broadcasts from the carousel. This is KMPX 107 FM in San Francisco. We're listening to the live remote with the Grateful Dead down in the Carousel Ballroom.
- [22:50]
Jesse Jarno
That was from Valentine's Day 1968 at the carousel, a double broadcast by KPFA and the new freeform kmpx. There'd been live rock on the radio before, starting with Elvis on the Louisiana Hayride. But the rise of FM allowed for new possibilities, and the broadcast from the Carousel kicked off the new age of live radio, rock in stereo. We've posted a link to Lost Live Dead's meticulous history of dead Broadcast@dead.net deadcast the tapes from the Carousel and the Quick and the Dead tour became source material for the Dead's album in progress, Dan Healy's first official time in the studio with the band. And that was the Anthem of the sun version of the Other One, in which Healy's technical know how helped the band sync together multiple live tapes, including the version from the Carousel. On the final album, he's credited as executive engineer with perhaps a bit of a wink.
- [24:44]
Dan Healy
We were mixing down Anthem of the sun, and I couldn't mix it because it was a reunion studio and I didn't belong to their fucking union mixing it. And it was Phil and Jerry and me, we were mixing it. When that happens is when you play a song and you start mixing it and then you pause and you go like. And you talk, you discuss about, well, how about we do this or do this? So it came to a point, we wanted to pause, and I just inadvertently, I was so used to being in the studio, inadvertently reach around and hit the stop button on a tape machine. And this engineer freaked out. And you can't do that. Get out of here. But, yeah, we got thrown out. You got to go right now. You're out of here, you know? So we took our tapes and left. And then we went to a place called Olmsted and worked on it some more, and then we finally finished mixing it down in Miami. Criteria was the name of the studio in Miami.
- [25:59]
Jesse Jarno
By that point, Dan Healy was unquestionably the most experienced member of the Grateful Dead sound team, but his expertise was mostly in the studio, and he mostly disappeared from the Dead's world for the next few years, at least as a collaborator, receiving a consulting engineer credit on Oxamoxoa. Usually the shorthand version of the story is that Healy went to work for Quicksilver Messenger Service, which he did. But the fuller version of the story is much cooler. That was The Sir Douglas Quintet Stone Classic Mendocino released as a single in fall 1968. Our friend Joju Peale did some amazing work about a decade back, which we'll draw on now going through San Francisco's studio union paperwork from the late 1960s. We've posted links@dead.net Deadcast the Sessions Dan describes all pretty much pick up in the later spring and summer of 1968 and into 1969, just after the completion.
- [27:13]
Dan Healy
Of Anthem of the sun did the Sir Douglas Quintet. Doug Somme I did the Sir Douglas. I did all of his records. That song, Mendocino, I did that one. I signed a one year contract with Mercury Records to produce records for them and during that time I did the Tracy Nelson Mother Earth Records.
- [27:54]
Jerry Garcia
When it all comes down, you've got to Grow Go Back to Mother.
- [28:12]
Dan Healy
That.
- [28:12]
Jesse Jarno
Featured Michael Bloomfield playing under the assumed name of Mackle Blumfeld.
- [28:17]
Dan Healy
Record companies have that thing of if you have a hit record, I think it's a superstition that if you went to a studio and recorded a song and it became a hit record, then by osmosis, if you send one of your other talents there, same lucky thing will happen and they'll have a hit record too. It makes absolutely no sense at all. But for what it's worth, they brought a lot of their signed artists to San Francisco and I got assigned them as their producers. Junior Parker.
- [28:50]
Jerry Garcia
When you and your girlfriends get together no, you ain't talking about the weather Talking how good my love is when you gonna get it out? Got a loving man on your hand baby Got a loving man on your hand Outside.
- [29:09]
Dan Healy
It'S also where I ran into and met and got to know Mac Rebenak. He was a producer also for Mercury Records.
- [29:17]
Jesse Jarno
Mack Rebenak had just released his first Dr. John album in January 1968, when he played on this May 68 session for Wayne Talborn, the Melting Pot, also featuring Doug Somme and Martin Fierro.
- [29:41]
Dan Healy
I met the fabulous Martin Fierro, who he was too, just a teenager then, but he had that magic. He could play horns, just a sound that I've never heard before. And I fell in love with him and we became lifelong friends until he passed away here a couple years ago.
- [29:59]
Jesse Jarno
Jerry Garcia's collaborator throughout the early 70s, Martin Fierro was a regular at Healy's sessions in the era becoming a member of the Sir Douglas Quintet. In fact, Martine played on virtually every single one of the sessions just mentioned. Another interesting storyline emerges here, which is that Healy's own musical career Ramped up a bit.
- [30:19]
Jerry Garcia
There comes a time you'll find someday when you can sit and watch your thirsty now with something to say and the days go on and on and.
- [30:42]
Dan Healy
On.
- [30:45]
Jerry Garcia
And the days go on.
- [30:49]
Dan Healy
I had a band called the Bicycle with the wonderful Richard Treece.
- [30:54]
Jesse Jarno
Healy played bass in a band first known as Hoffman's Bicycle, named of course after Dr. Albert Hoffman, the chemist who first synthesized LSD.
- [31:03]
Dan Healy
The story was Hoffman invented LSD and he inadvertently took some LSD and he was riding home on his bicycle when he came onto the ass and he got stoned and he fell off and crashed his bicycle.
- [31:16]
Jesse Jarno
The facts of Albert Hoffman's adventures On Bicycle Day, April 19, 1943 in Basel, Switzerland, were slightly more folkloric back then. Brian Blomworth's graphic novel Bicycle Day is a great telling of the story. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast the band changed their name to the Bicycle, spelled by C Y C L E and then the regular spelling of Bicycle. Our correspondent Cory Arnold has put together a preliminary chronology for the Bicycle, which we've also linked to@dead.net deadcast beginning with the benefit for the Freedom Party in November 1968, headlined by the Santana Blues Band. That was a live track of the Bicycle doing Stormy Monday, I think, recorded in February 1969 at the Londonside Tavern in Glen Ellyn. Thanks immensely to Dan for all the never heard bicycle sounds we're able to share today.
- [32:33]
Dan Healy
And that band worked really well. It was really wonderful and I'm, to this day I'm heartbroken over that. We were doing really well. We had a kind of a tragic event. We were playing, we had sort of almost made it. We were at the Whiskey a Go Go in Hollywood when all the record companies were there scoping us out. We had five nights there and our drummer had a heart attack and died after the third night. And he was a wonderful friend and a wonderful, wonderful drummer.
- [33:01]
Jesse Jarno
Peace to the late Butch Giannani.
- [33:04]
Dan Healy
If you believe in a bigger picture of things, which I do, somehow in the bigger picture I was taken out of that. You're not going to do this. You're going to go someplace else.
- [33:11]
Jesse Jarno
The Bicycle never released any recordings in their brief span as a band, though that's not to say they didn't record.
- [33:17]
Dan Healy
As a matter of fact, just yesterday I was mixing down some old tapes that we had done in the studio. I took my band in the studio, sat, there comes a time.
- [33:57]
Jesse Jarno
Keep your eyes out for some kind of release from the Bicycle in the maybe near future. It was after the end of the bicycle in mid-1969 that Dan Healy really began his intense period with Quicksilver Messenger Service. Thanks to Cory Arnold, who notes that back in 2001, Quicksilver messenger service mega fan Farren Miller posted her teenage diaries to a John Cipollina Yahoo Group. And a few notes indicate that soundwiz Dan Healy was playing with the band on second guitar and sometimes bass during a period when Gary Duncan wasn't in the group in the summer of 1969. Unfortunately, no tapes of this period seemed to survive, or at least circulate while in the employ of Quicksilver. Though no longer playing, Healy headed to Hawaii.
- [34:41]
Dan Healy
In Hawaii, when I was doing Quicksilver albums, I took a portable recording studio over there and set it up on top of a mountain in this big plantation inn called the Opiola Lodge.
- [35:17]
Jesse Jarno
That's what from Quicksilver messenger services, Just For Love, released in the summer of 1970, one of two albums they recorded there, or at least basic tracks.
- [35:26]
Dan Healy
When I did the Hawaii records, I recorded them all and did all the overdubs. But then I didn't have any way to mix it down, so I came back and mixed it down to Capitol Records in Hollywood. In the big round building in the basement there is the studio where Frank Sinatra recording. When you see all the pictures of him in the studio, that's the studio. I booked echo chambers so that I could have echo, because Dino Valenti was one of those guys that wanted tons of echo on his. When you hear old records with like Sinatra and people like that singing, when you hear echo on their voice, reverb on their voice, that's how that came from. It came from an actual acoustic room.
- [36:01]
Jesse Jarno
Echo chambers aren't just for social media. If you ever have access to the legendary echo chambers of the Capitol tower, you should avail yourself of the opportunity. It was an experience Healy got to call on soon. Mickey Hart had started to build out his Barnes studio in Nevada in late 1970, beginning work on the album that became 1972's Rolling Thunder.
- [36:42]
Dan Healy
After I finished Quicksilver in Hawaii, then I did Hart's barn for a while. And that was actually a really nice studio. It was a barn. The control room was the milking shed. The studio part was the barn part, where all the hay was. But it was turned into. It was really nice studio. It was all carpeted. It was nice. I mean, and the control room was really nice. It was really well built.
- [37:05]
Jesse Jarno
The barn would be the site of numerous Dead World projects in the next few years, and Healy received engineering credits on Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners, Ned Legend's Seastones and the Good Old Boys Pistol Packing Mama, among others. With Mickey egging on Healy, the barn was a site of great experimentation, and.
- [37:24]
Dan Healy
We also built a live echo chamber. I designed this little room based on what I had learned because I've been studying acoustics a lot. This carpenter guy that worked for Mickey built it, built this room, and it was all solid. There were no two parallel walls.
- [37:39]
Jesse Jarno
And Healy invented an analog delay.
- [37:42]
Dan Healy
It was true analog delay in the most basic, true sense. You could buy these tubes called sonotubes. They were used for concrete forms, and they come from all sizes, from, like, about 3 inches in diameter up to 3ft in diameter. We had some, like 5 inch, I think, diameter sonotubes, but we had at least 50ft of it. You put a microphone in one end and a speaker in the other. Have you ever talked down a garden hose and listen to it? This is one for everybody listening. Find an old empty garden hose and talk into one end. Put the other end up to your ear and hear you, and it delays the sound for the length. The longer the hose, the more delay it comes. And it's a great experiment, and it's a fun trip to do.
- [38:23]
Jesse Jarno
Unlike many of the stories we tell on this podcast. You can totally try this one at home.
- [38:28]
Dan Healy
I wanted to be able to dial in the length of time of delay on this sonotube, so I got some model airplane wheels, and I built this little cart, and on that cart, I mounted the microphone, and then I put a pulley at the end with the speaker on it. And I had a line that went all the way through it down to the other end. And I could roll this microphone all the way back and forth down this tube. And the farther away from the speaker it got, the longer the delay was.
- [38:54]
Jesse Jarno
After being in Hawaii, Healey picked up his own musical career, too.
- [38:58]
Dan Healy
I came back and I was playing music with a lady named Darlene Di Domenico. The Dan and Darlene, we played, like, kind of folky music. And we were tour, and I was in New York with Darlene, and we were singing. And the Grateful Dead were coming to New York, and they were going to play at the Felt Forum, which is a little small theater attached to Madison Square Garden, and they were doing a show there. And so Ramrod, I talked to Ramrod on the phone, and he said, yeah, come on. Come on down here and hang out, man. So we weren't playing that night. So we drove into the city. I was staying with a friend of mine out in Mamaroneck. And so we drove into town and I went to the show that night. And the sound was just abysmal. I mean, abysmal. And the band was feeling it too. So Chrysler and Garcia came to me and said, man, you gotta come back. And that's when I did.
- [40:10]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead finished their December 1971 tour, the first with both Pigpen and Keith Godshow. Dan Healy concluded his gigs with Dan and Darlene and headed back west. He did a brief stint doing sound for the new riders of the Purple Sage on their first real gigs without the Dead.
- [40:29]
Jerry Garcia
I don't know you, you.
- [40:32]
Dan Healy
You'Ve been.
- [40:33]
Jerry Garcia
Lately on my mind.
- [40:46]
Jesse Jarno
By the time the Dead headed east again and then further east to Europe, Dan Healy was on the payroll. He's credited with technical assistance on Europe 72 and, among other tasks, oversaw the conversion of power from local currents to the recording gear, thus ensuring the tape ran at consistent speeds. From then on, Dan Healy was back on the growing sound team, once again making himself indispensable back in the touring party. It was in the early 70s that Dan began his now infamous and half accidental T shirt collection, which we don't have time to fully dive into today, but we've posted a link to my story about it for gq style@dead.net deadcast it was around 1972 that the soundboard started to become a visible point in the middle of the venue floor at big outdoor gigs like the Springfield Creamery Benefit. And at Folsom Field in Colorado, a.
- [41:38]
Dan Healy
Guy that I knew that worked for McCune Sound Service, their head engineer guy, he found this wire, this cable that would have like a dozen microphones, cords worth of wire in one little small cable. And that's when the first microphone snakes came out. And then we build the snakes. I had this 200 foot long snake. One end of it would be on the stage, and all the microphones on the stage would plug into this into a box on the end of this wire. And the other end of the wire would come out to the mix board and it had all the plugs on the end of that, and that would plug into all my little mixes. So I had all the microphones plugged into the mixers.
- [42:14]
Jesse Jarno
I think this story takes place in the fall of 1972, just after Dan Healy returned to the Dead Sound crew, as the band's alembic PA began its slow transformation into the wall of sound.
- [42:25]
Dan Healy
I went to a stereo sound system. I wanted to be able to do a stereo mix like I do in the studio. And these little mixes, you couldn't do stereo with them. They only had one channel. So the new mixboards, they were designed and built with the ability to generate a stereo mix out of it, go back through the sake and go back into the amplifiers and run the sound system. So I went from little teeny mixers backstage to mix boards out in the audience.
- [42:51]
Jesse Jarno
The Dead had used stacked up Ampex MX10, four channel mixers up through the point. When the Alembic system began to evolve into the Wall of Sound. Alembic had tried to create a studio style live board, but it hadn't quite worked. Once again, McCune Sound, who provided the impetus for Giant Microphone Snakes, provided a solution a little more accidentally this time.
- [43:11]
Dan Healy
McCune was a sound company that I worked for for a while. Harry McCune was kind of a mentor to me and a really nice guy, and I worked for him for a while. They had a mixboard there. They had a portable studio that they had built by then. I was making them enough money that I could pretty much do what I wanted to do. So I took this mixboard that they had and I took it to a show and I set it up. And that was like the first real studio mixboard that was at a live rock and roll show.
- [43:41]
Jesse Jarno
Whenever the story took place. That soundboard didn't last in the Dead setup. The same way you can parse out the history of the Grateful Dead sound through keyboardists or which guitar Jerry Garcia was using, you can do the same with their sound systems in lining them up in order. One thing I didn't understand about the Wall of Sound until kind of just now is that it wasn't a rejection of normal soundboard setups. Those setups didn't really exist yet in the early 1970s. Owsley Stanley returned from prison in the summer of 1972 as well. And with Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner from Alembic and a cast of dozens of the Wall of Sound began to grow.
- [44:20]
Dan Healy
No matter how much you hot rodded that equipment, you could only get so much out of it. So it became time to start an entire new paradigm with sound. And actually the Wall of Sound, I gotta say, changed the audio industry forever. The people that make amplifiers, the people that make speakers, it changed it all through the innovation of it.
- [44:40]
Jesse Jarno
We talked considerably about the growth of the Wall of Sound with Bryan Anderson during our from the Mars Hotel episodes, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast, along with Brian's fab new bestseller, Loud and Clear.
- [44:52]
Dan Healy
We built this wall of sound and it was monumentally complicated to set up. There were so many pieces in this Tinkertoy set. When it works, it works really well.
- [45:28]
Jesse Jarno
That's from one of the great audience tapes of the Wall of Sound, the Hollywood bowl on July 21, 1974, recorded by Robertrondo. As we've well covered, there was no central soundboard for the Wall of sound, though this was the era when sound booths could occasionally be seen in the crowd to monitor the delay towers at Watkins Glen and other large scale events. While Healy was part of the team that operated the wall, there was no front of house engineer. The music was the house. But as we've covered, it was untenable. During the band's time off the road, Healy kept busy in his natural environment.
- [46:02]
Jerry Garcia
Even a rainy Ann way. The needle sigh is thin the ships of state sail on we rush and drown in sand.
- [46:26]
Jesse Jarno
We'll be tunneling under the sands of Blues for Allah on this podcast very soon. Stay tuned for our next episode. In fact, Dan Healy was behind the board of the 16 track at Ace's studio in Mill Valley.
- [46:39]
Dan Healy
When we finished the Blues for All album, we went to the Great American Music hall and we performed it live, the entire album. Performed it live in the order that it was on the record and stuff. Exact replica of it. And we recorded it too, and it's on one from the vault. You're welcome. Please. The Grateful Pitch.
- [47:21]
Jesse Jarno
We'Ll be revisiting this story soon, but thanks to Mickey Hart, Healy was party to one of the show's more legendary stories.
- [47:28]
Dan Healy
On the Blues Ferala album. There's crickets. And he went to some pet food store or something, I think. I think they feed crickets to some. You know, if you have an iguana, pet iguana or something, they eat crickets or what some dumbass animal eats. Eats crickets. So he bought. He had this box and it was a cardboard box. It was about 2ft long and a foot and a half high and a foot and a half wide. Huge box full, full of fucking crickets, man. And so he said, man, you gotta mic this, man, gotta mic this. And so I cut a hole on the top of the box, I stuck the microphone in it.
- [48:17]
Jerry Garcia
The ships of state sail on new washing drown.
- [48:29]
Dan Healy
That was Hart's brainstorm. Now it was. Mickey brought the fucking crickets in there. And those people said there was crickets plaguing that joint forever.
- [48:36]
Jesse Jarno
Another project during the road hiatus was the Grateful Dead movie When it was finally released in 1977, it toured movie theaters with a special sound system designed by Healy.
- [48:46]
Dan Healy
He wanted to bring a sound system into the theaters, show the movie and play it through. Not movies, theater sound system, but one of our prescribed sound systems.
- [48:55]
Jesse Jarno
Surround sound had existed since Fantasia in 1940. But of course the Dead wanted to do it their own way.
- [49:02]
Dan Healy
Surround was a mono surround speaker, one speaker in the back. The back speakers would come on in the middle of a movie. When something. They wanted to make some big point about it instead of it being mono in the back. I said, well, if we're gonna be that, let's have a stereo in the back and make a real true ambient, real quadraphonic ambient. So I decided to invent a way to make this mono back channel be a stereo channel, two channels. So I got together with a guy named Jeff Cook, who was a mathematician and selectronics designer guy.
- [49:36]
Jesse Jarno
The short version is that Dan Healy and Jeff Cook invented their own version of Five Point Sound in 1977, a few years before Hollywood got into the act. And a full decade before 5.1 sound became a known term.
- [49:48]
Dan Healy
He wanted enough equipment to do two theaters at once. So I built two systems. It had to have this decoder that we designed and invented. So I hired sound companies to do sound systems. They come and set it up in a theater. And then I built these packages that went into the the.
- [50:25]
Jesse Jarno
During the band's 18 month road hiatus, they entertained a number of alternatives to traditional touring, such as the Grateful Dead movie. But there were some roads not taken. Like a floating venue designed for them in 1975 by none other than R. Buckminster Fuller.
- [50:40]
Dan Healy
I gotta credit Lesh with that one. It was gonna be, I guess you would say, the final resting place for the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead theater. And everybody would come from all around the world to watch us there, to see it, to come to our shows there.
- [50:53]
Jesse Jarno
It somehow led to an even more far out concept.
- [50:56]
Dan Healy
One of Buckminster Fuller's proteges, one of his followers, was designing a spaceship that wanted to take on Deadheads. And we would all go out into space somewhere and just play music. He wanted to do a spaceship biosphere. And I actually have the drawings for it somewhere in my archives. It was like these huge, huge architectural drawings. I have a roll of them that's like three, four inches around, is rolled up tight. Like there's dozens of pages of it.
- [51:23]
Jesse Jarno
In 1975, Healy produced back to back albums at Bob Weir's Aces studio in Mill Valley. The Grateful Deads blues For Allah, followed by Kingfish's self titled debut a few months later.
- [51:35]
Jerry Garcia
Jump Jump or Jump o you right on time.
- [51:46]
Jesse Jarno
And though Aces was a fun place to hang out, the Grateful Dead still needed a permanent home.
- [51:51]
Dan Healy
When I first got involved with the Grateful Dead, we were practicing at the heliport in Sausalito. Then we went to Potrero Theater in the Potrero district in San Francisco.
- [52:01]
Jesse Jarno
We've posted a link to lost Live Dead's extensive chronology of Grateful Dead rehearsal halls at dead.net deadcast in 1973 though, the band got a new equipment warehouse in San Rafael.
- [52:12]
Dan Healy
Club Front was a warehouse and that's where we did several records. And it became a practice hall. It was like a huge, huge warehouse and it was kind of divided in half. And half of it was like the practice hall area that became the studio. And then the other half was the equipment storage, all the shops and stuff like that. I had my own segment there that had my own office and with all my test equipment. I had electronic shops there and stuff like that. Set up. Some of the road guys had little shops there too. Ramrod had a shop there because he was in charge of the drums for a long time. He would work and build stuff and work on, maintain the equipment. We maintain our own equipment. Every lick of it we did ourselves.
- [52:50]
Jesse Jarno
Front street became a full blown studio during the making of the Jerry Garcia bands Cats under the Stars in 1977. By 1978 it was the Dead's turn to make an album there. Dan Healy received a co production credit on Shakedown street with Littlefeet's Lowell George.
- [53:22]
Dan Healy
Me and Little George. Lil George was a really good guy. I really liked him. We got to be really good friends. And I wound up actually finishing the album. Making an album with the grave of Dead is not easy. And more than one person has tapped out on that one. And he tapped out on it finally. And I wound up finishing the album. This was on the way to Egypt because we were under the gun for the record company. Come on. We want our master. We want our master. We want our master. You know, because we were always late turning an album. Always.
- [53:54]
Jesse Jarno
One of the most famous photos of the Grateful Dead in the late 1970s, taken during Brent Midland's first rehearsals, features the band hanging out under a marquee reading welcome Grateful Dead. The photo was shot a few blocks from Club Front.
- [54:08]
Dan Healy
It was behind the Bermuda Palms, which is now a national landmark. It was a restaurant, bar and motel that was very, very famous in this in the late 50s, like 1957, I think the Guinness broke records for staying underwater for the maximum amount of time. Was set in the swimming pool there. And anyway, it had become rather seedy and run down and old and had become used by ladies of the evening.
- [54:43]
Jerry Garcia
The sunny side of the street is dark.
- [54:52]
Dan Healy
When we were making Shakedown street album, we rented a room there because it had a kitchen to make food. When you're making a record, you don't let people leave the studio because you do. They straggle off and wander off and never come back. So that means that bringing food in, because there was a part of Club Front that we had these big banquet tables set up. It was like a big buffet restaurant. And so some of the wives and some of the friends of the wives volunteered to do the cooking. They would cook in this kitchen across the street at the Bermuda Palms and then bring the food over and serve everybody. And one of the girls was bringing a big pot of chili out of the room across the street and the cops busing her. And I had to get. I got stuck right in the middle of it, and I had to. I had to get the cops off of her, and they wouldn't leave her alone.
- [55:41]
Jesse Jarno
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and for one of the rare times in Grateful Dead history, someone was unbusted.
- [55:48]
Dan Healy
That's where the album got its name, Shakedown Street. Okay? It was a shakedown mother shaken on.
- [55:53]
Jerry Garcia
Shakedown Street Used to be the hometown old comedist still ain't got no one.
- [56:05]
Jesse Jarno
Just gotta poke around it certainly wasn't obvious on the ground at the time, but Dan Healy's job description with the Grateful Dead was in the process of changing in the later 1970s. He remains, what's lovingly called in the biz, a studio rat. But it was after the band's road hiatus from October 1974 through June 1976, that Healy truly took on the role that most people remember him for. The anchor point and the geographical center of a Grateful Dead show. The Wall of Sound had been a team effort, largely conceived by Owsley Stanley. In the years after the band's hiatus, the Dead's live sound remained a team effort, but largely driven by Dan Healy.
- [56:45]
Dan Healy
One of the things that happens that happened in the Wall of Sound was that when the Grateful Dead was personally responsible for the building and maintenance of it all, it became almost impossible to have any kind of handle on the expenditures and the expense and stuff. After we retired the Wall of Sound, we spent a couple of years using Rena Soundcous, and that's when we used Claire Brothers, whom I really love. And we use Showco out of Texas, and we use Bill Graham Productions, the BGP sound system.
- [57:13]
Jesse Jarno
As I hope we've made abundantly clear on this podcast, there was constant continuous experimentation at every level of the Grateful Dead, from the musicians to the management office. And no two Grateful Dead shows were alike as above. So below is one way to put it. Jerry Garcia and Dan Healy were peas in a pod.
- [57:31]
Dan Healy
Every time Jerry changed something is because it was missing something in his sound that he wanted to try to get to. And I totally understand. I mean, that's me. That's my story too. He was doing the same thing I was doing. We were both trying to get the sound we wanted to hear. We both had an idea of what we wanted it to sound like. And we were both striving for that goal. He was always changing stuff because he was never satisfied with the equipment he had. And it wasn't until he got this final generation of guitars that that he finally had guitars that he liked. He was always having me change, put different pickups in his guitar. I mean, every tour like, oh Dan here, someone would come to him with some new design of a pickup. Oh Dan, would you put this in my guitar? So I would do that, you know. So he got his guitar rewired like once a month sort of, you know, with all these stuffed guts in it.
- [58:16]
Jesse Jarno
The mishmash of rented sound systems led to the next development. This next story takes place over the New Year's eve run from 1979 going into 1980 in Oakland. We'll illustrate it with a bit of Dix picks five from December 26, 1979. The same new Year's run when parking lot camping was officially allowed for the first time.
- [58:54]
Dan Healy
When I had decided I no longer wanted to use Rena sound systems. But it was before John Meyer had this. Had enough of his stuff together to cough up a system for me. And so when we did the Kaiser shows, that was a one time only sound system that we contrived. Don Pearson and I create. We marshaled all of the best equipment we could get our hands on from everybody around the Bay Area and everybody around the state that we knew who had equipment and amplifiers and speakers and stuff up. And we built a one time only five way sound system to do those shows. And it was fabulous sound system.
- [59:45]
Jesse Jarno
Even the Wall of Sound's old vocal system made an appearance.
- [59:49]
Dan Healy
I might have used part of the old center cluster. I might have, but I don't know. The problem with that is it wasn't loud enough.
- [59:55]
Jesse Jarno
Healy's new collaborators co founded the new company Ultrasound in the late 1970s, more or less to service the Grateful Dead's needs without being part of the Grateful Dead organization.
- [60:05]
Dan Healy
Well, the rent assistant people, they had their own sound crew guys. Well, it obviously had to have a sound crew because this equipment doesn't move itself around and set itself up and transport itself. So I had to have a sound crew. And that was the forming of Ultrasound. But the object of it was is rather than being a Grateful Dead entity, it was its own independent entity. Because I for one believe that the autonomy was an important part.
- [60:29]
Jesse Jarno
When Dan Healy estimated before that he was busy for 10 or 15 years without a break, I think he might have actually been underestimating himself. Though ensconced with a reliable gig as the Dead's front of house wizard, Healy had all kinds of other sonic adventures too.
- [60:43]
Dan Healy
Richard Treece and I had a band called the Bicycle back in the 60s, and that had a tragic ending. But we always remained friends. And then we started playing together, just the two of us, and people wanted us to play some more. So then Billy Kreussman agreed to play drums with us. And so then we got him. And then. And Keith Gotcho for a while played keyboard with us. And then Mike Larshe, a guy named Mike Larchide played bass with us. Us.
- [61:08]
Jesse Jarno
This is the Post Keith lineup doing John Prine's paradise in 1981. Healy had long been the Dead's point person with radio, and in the early 1980s he even owned his own radio station in his hometown, where he'd run a pirate station in his youth in the 1950s.
- [61:44]
Dan Healy
In those days there was no radio, there was no television, nothing. There was either jukeboxes. You could play jukeboxes, or there was live music. There was a few places that there'd be live bands play occasionally on weekends. And it was mostly big band music left over from the World War II generation, or it would be hillbilly country music. I always said, someday I'm going to come back here and build a radio station so everybody has a radio station to listen to. I later on wound up owning my own radio stations. The Mighty Urge, K E R G, which stood for Eel River. Garberville. The town is Garberville. I had a stereo FM station there that I built. I had it all through the 80s. That was another really great trip too. Your attention, please. The Kerg Express is now boarding for Windy Gap, Crooked Prairie, Fort Seward, Salmon Creek, Whale Gulch and all points in between.
- [62:53]
Jerry Garcia
Hold the book.
- [63:04]
Jesse Jarno
Thanks to the FM Radio Archive Project for pointing us towards Bob Alonghi and this KERG aircheck.
- [63:10]
Dan Healy
We went from San Francisco to the Oregon border. It was high up on a mountaintop and it had immense covering, and ships out at sea would listen to it, and they would call in their ships ashore phones and request music and stuff like that. It was really. It was a wonderful organization.
- [63:27]
Jesse Jarno
The radio station led to another fun Grateful Dead innovation.
- [63:30]
Dan Healy
In the 80s. I had a transmitter for my radio station that was a standby transmitter, but it was a full gone, professional piece of gear that I had in Iraq that traveled with me. And so when we would play places like the Oakland Coliseum or big sports arenas, there would be thousands of people that couldn't get in. So I used to broadcast the show. If you didn't get in, everybody had all their car radios and you could just tune it in. I broadcast on 100.1 megacycles. It was a stereo broadcast of my board mix. I did that hundreds of times, and it sort of took the pressure off.
- [64:06]
Jesse Jarno
The wall of sound was almost certainly the greatest system heads had ever seen. But the systems that Dan Healy evolved in the late 1970s and early 1980s could rival it in terms of clarity. We spoke with John and Helen Meyer during our in and out of the Garden episodes, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [64:24]
Dan Healy
We went to JBL once and complained about the speakers. And they basically said, you know what? Fuck you. We're selling speakers faster than we can make them, so why should we bother to listen to what you're saying? And that's literally what those assholes said, okay. And enter John Meyer. That's when he said, okay, I'm making my own speakers. Fuck you. You know, and he did. And they're fabulously better. He corrected all that stuff. He went to Switzerland and spent a couple of years there studying Fourier Transfer math and stuff like that. That's really complicated calculus and stuff. He really went down into it and he came back with incredible ideas. Not only that, but he turned it into reality. And his stuff is. It just sounds like there's nothing sounds that good. I mean, I've. I've been listening to sound equipment all my life. And you can blindfold me and I can tell you what speakers I'm listening to. He built me a sound system that I had all through the 80s and 90s that I considered a Stradivarius. I could say anything I wanted musically through that. That in. In a place the size of Madison Square Garden. I could make Madison Square Garden sound like you were sitting in your living room in front of a stereo for a sports arena. That's saying something.
- [66:00]
Jesse Jarno
That was for Madison Square Garden, 1983. On the in and out of the.
- [66:03]
Dan Healy
Garden box, there's some recordings floating around from when we used to play the Spectrum in Philadelphia. We call them hockey halls because that's what they were. They were notoriously not that good sounding, but the Spectrum, for some reason, had a really lot of soul and it was a decent sounding place. There's a version from the 1980s of Garcia doing an encore tune, Baby Blue, that just is a perfect example of the Grateful Dead. I mean, it says the Grateful Dead in every letter, in every way. It was from early spring in the early 80s, and I would encourage someone to listen to it.
- [66:44]
Jerry Garcia
You think we'll land whatever you wish to keep, you better grab a face.
- [66:56]
Jesse Jarno
I'm pretty sure Healy's referring to the April 6, 1982 performance. Now on road trips, volume four, number four.
- [67:12]
Jerry Garcia
He's crying like a fire in the.
- [67:16]
Dan Healy
Sun.
- [67:21]
Jerry Garcia
Look out all those things are coming through and it's all over now.
- [67:34]
Dan Healy
Baby Blue.
- [67:38]
Jesse Jarno
In the summer of 1984, Healy got a new digital soundboard and his mixes became even more studio.
- [67:44]
Dan Healy
Like I had. Jim Gamble made a console. I think he made it for the Grateful Dead, but. But since I was the guy that mixed with Grateful Dead, I. I guess I can say he made it for me. But he made the world class definitive audio console. Designed and built it, and it was fabulous. It had the cleanest, nicest sound you ever could possibly imagine hearing. So I had two of his. There were 24 input boards, and I had two of them, one in front of me that had like the vocal mics and the instrument mics and stuff, and then one to my left side that had all the drum mics and stuff in it. And then that was part of. I used that in the drums and space stuff.
- [68:26]
Jesse Jarno
These segments are from the November 1985 Kaiser shows on the Enjoying the Ride box.
- [68:47]
Dan Healy
The minute I heard the board and mixed a show on it, I went, that's it. This is my board from now on. And so then he went on to make two more boards. I'm told that they're still in the ultrasound. Ultrasound has a kind of a museum area. And my two Grateful Dead boards are there now, my two Grateful Dead Gamble boards, but they were made by. Jim Gamble made them for me, to my specifications and just for me.
- [69:11]
Jesse Jarno
Combined with the Myers speakers, it was the system of Healy's dreams.
- [69:15]
Dan Healy
So I had that and I had John Myers equipment. And when you put all that together, that is just one fabulous dream sound system. That's the Stradivarius that Meyer made for me, okay? It was badass. I mean, really, bottom line, definitive quality. Nothing came close to it. Not even. Nobody, nowhere in the industry came even close to it. I would go apeshit with that thing. And I get moving around the room and stuff. And it was actually hair raising.
- [69:42]
Jesse Jarno
And Healey wasn't kidding about playing the soundboard like an instrument. A 1985 profile from the San Clemente sun tailed him during a Dead show and described his work during the space segment, with settings on the board marked for Echotron, multi effect and vibrato, plus at least three different foot pedals. Like many musicians, his pedal collection grew over the years.
- [70:03]
Dan Healy
I had at least six or eight foot pedals on the floor. I stood and mixed. I never sit down and mix. When you're mixing and music is so good, you can't sit down, man. You gotta stand. And I can move the sound around the room and change the. Change the sound of stuff. Mickey had that awful thing called the beam. He had a piece of I beam from the frame of a truck that got cut out of the gut from a junkyard. And he had these piano strings strung on it. And then we made these pickups for it. It wasn't tuned like piano notes. It was tuned to this roaring noise and stuff, low frequencies and stuff. And he would bang it with a piece of water pip.
- [71:26]
Jesse Jarno
During the 1980s and 1990s, Mickey Hart was a great instigator of sound experiments in the Grateful Dead, as you may.
- [71:33]
Dan Healy
Be shocked to learn, Hart fucking bless his pointed head, he was that guy that always had the craziest fucking ideas to do shit, you know? And he would always drag me into his shit. Oh, man, you gotta do this with me. You gotta do this with me. And I go, what the fuck are you doing now, man? Well, you gotta. Can we wire this for sound? And he would bring. God knows he'd bring a fucking mousetrap in. Hey, can we wire this for sound, man? You know? Okay, okay. He was always. I mean, there was never a moment that he wasn't dragging something in there and saying, come on, man, we got. We got to do this. We got to get. He got, you got to help me do this, man. And so I did. The sound system that I had could reproduce the sound coming out of it. I mean, man, I'm telling you, it would shake your body when the low frequencies. My sound system, for all you audio freaks out there, would go down flat to 10 cycles. Now put that in your stereo and smoke it. A lot of years I hung speakers in the back of the room, and I had joysticks on the board, and I can move down all the way around the room and stuff. And it was fabulous. I mean, you know, anybody that went to Madison Square Garden heard that. You heard some really outrageous stuff.
- [73:17]
Jesse Jarno
Healy was a friend to Tapers most of the time.
- [73:20]
Dan Healy
And some of the people had better microphones than I had, that's for sure. Some of the Tapers and they would put up these arrays, and I would show them how to array their microphones and capture the audience and in a good place on a good night. The Tapers tapes were just incredible.
- [73:35]
Jesse Jarno
This is from the legendary Rango keshavan tape of October 9, 1982, at the Frost in Palo Alto.
- [74:08]
Dan Healy
I built this thing that my board, stereo board mechs would go into, and it was isolated, so even if they chopped the cable up or did anything to it, it wouldn't disrupt my sound. It was called a buffered feed for all you audiophiles out there. I built this buffered feed that was totally clean, and I had a little box on a stereo cable. It would go out, oh, maybe 20, 30ft from the back of my mixboard once in a while, just because I knew it would piss somebody off. I would throw a cable out and let the Tapers plug in and just record my board mix.
- [74:40]
Jesse Jarno
As the most visible audiophile in the Grateful Dead world, Healy became a magnet for Tapers. If you can imagine, a magnet that's safe to put in your audio tape.
- [74:48]
Dan Healy
I was always perpetually in trouble because of the Tapers, because there were audio files. And I was an audiophile when I was a kid and I knew what it was like. And I was sympathetic with the Tapers. And they were the scourge of the earth to a lot of people. And even some of the band members, and particularly the management record companies, they always said their position was, if you let people record your concerts, they're not going to buy your album. Actually, it turns out that it's just the opposite. The Tapers were the first ones in line to buy the album because they, too, are music files and audio files, and they wanted to be the first ones to be there and hear it.
- [75:25]
Jesse Jarno
We do love the Tapers, but despite their laissez faire approach, occasionally the Dead's crew did battle with them. And there are even a few ads from the 1980s, with explicit no taping warnings.
- [75:36]
Dan Healy
Some of the band members and the management stuff, they were on me all. And the promoters just on me all the time about it, you know, it's all I ever heard is tapers, tapers, tapers. And I just wanted to scream. The tapirs were enthusiastic people, and bless their pointed little heads. I love them all, you know, and I have a warm place in my heart. But what happened is that. That the tapers got a little too much. They wanted to be in stereo center and stuff like that. They wanted a night vanity place for their microphones, so they would start pushing people out. And one time I had this little kid. They must have been maybe 13, 14 years old. They came to me in tears, crying. In those days, this is probably in the 80s. This is when you had this oftentimes stand in line for a day to get tickets, right? And so they stood in line. We waited. We're here all night. We got our tickets, we came in and this guy told me I had to leave because he wanted to record, put his equipment in my seat. And so that. That did it for me. I said, okay, you can't do that.
- [76:55]
Jesse Jarno
What happened next changed live audio history.
- [76:58]
Dan Healy
We tried for a while stopping it, but you can't confiscate equipment, and it just doesn't work that way. You can't go around bashing people up in the audience. You just can't do that. You know, that's not what I'm there for anyway. So what I thought of is I created the taper section, and they had to be behind me and on the confines of the width of my mix board. So I created tapers rights. If you were in the designated area, then you had a right to be there, and no one had a right to prevent you from doing it. But if I cut you outside of that area recording, then you were subject to whatever I meted out and. And I could be very uncomfortable.
- [77:33]
Jesse Jarno
And from what I've heard, one really didn't want to get caught taping in front of the soundboard. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, of course, but tapers had to learn new methods of not rippling the waters or evading capture if they did. One of Healy's peaks came during what turned out to be one of his last years with the band. This comes from May 1992.
- [77:52]
Dan Healy
Once we played in Las Vegas at the football stadium University of Nevada. And I got a person, one of the casino owners. I got them to bring slot machines to the show, and they Brought them to my mix board, and I opened them up and I put microphones all in them and stuff. And I miced the slot machines. So when it came to the drum, then space part. And I had people playing these slot machines, you know, one arm bandit kind of things, playing the slot. And they make a clink, clink, clink, bang, bang, and all that stuff. And I had that. I could move that all around the place. And I mixed that in with the space. And that was pretty far out too.
- [78:46]
Jesse Jarno
If you'd like to try this at home, I'll note that slot machines are traditionally all tuned to the key of C.
- [79:12]
Dan Healy
There were so many times I say, hey, you guys, I want to try this. It'll be something really outside. And they go, yeah, come on, go ahead and do it. You know. And sometimes I fell flat on my face. But a lot of times I survived. You know, I succeeded. It was really about the excellence in music and excellence in sound, excellence in production. Jerry was in it for the same reason I was in it. We were in it for the music. Not for the money, not for the fame, not for anything. We were in it for the music. And it always was that way. And until he got sick and became somebody else, it remained that way.
- [79:45]
Jesse Jarno
Addiction is a horrible disease.
- [79:47]
Dan Healy
By the middle of the 90s, Jerry was really getting out there. He was in a different world, kind of, you know. He wasn't a Jerry that I knew. Sad to say that, but it's like a family member, you know, a family member gets Alzheimer's or something. I haven't ever witnessed it, but I've been told that people become people that you don't know. And Jerhead was kind of like another person. He was someone I didn't really know in the end. And that's sad to say that, because it's such a wonderful. Such a wonderful contributor to the spirit of music to go that way. We played around with that kind of stuff all the time. Every show was some gimmick that somebody had. Or some idea that somebody had of something, and we wanted to try it. In the process of continuing to reinvent what you're doing, you have to audition every possible idea.
- [80:34]
Jesse Jarno
In the early part of the 1990s, Dan Healy was experimenting with some of the first wireless mixing systems. To be able to walk around a venue and both check and adjust the sound from anywhere.
- [80:44]
Dan Healy
We played around with that kind of stuff all the time. Every show was some gimmick that somebody had. Or some idea that somebody had of something. And we wanted to Try it. In the process of continuing to reinvent what you're doing, you have to audition every possible idea.
- [80:59]
Jesse Jarno
Dan Healy was the dad's front of house engineer until nearly the end of the band's touring career, parting ways in the spring of 1994. There are different accounts of Healy's dismissal, including some dissatisfaction with some of his mixing choices. But there were other issues at play. Things inside the Grateful Dead world were rarely peaches and cream. But Jerry Garcia's health was only one of the stress points in the early 1990s, with years of accumulated internal politics and tensions that often had very little to do with the music itself. After Healy's illustrious three decade career, sound innovator with the Grateful Dead, he turned his ears and accumulated knowledge to a different cause. Let's flash back just slightly. It seems that in the 60s, Dan was something of a fashionista.
- [81:42]
Dan Healy
I had a denim vest, like a Levi vest. And what I started doing is I discovered that in all those Goodwill kind of stores, secondhand stores, the World War I soldiers were dying and their stuff was floating through the store and world. Some of the World War II guys were getting to die and their stuff was flexible. And so there was all these medals and badges and like Purple Heart medals and stars and all that stuff. And they were. They would be in these junk stores and they would. There would be like a. Usually a rack of some kind near the checkout counter. And you could buy these things for like 25 cents, 50 cents and stuff, you know. And so I just had this vest that was encrusted. I mean, it was so heavy, it was hard to wear. It weighed like 10, 15 pounds, but it was encrusted with all of these metals and stuff. And so I collected them. And I had more than one. I had one that was so full I couldn't put anything else on it. So then I was starting another one. And one day I was at a Goodwill store in downtown San Francisco. On. It was between second and third on Howard street and there was a Goodwill store and I was buying some of these metals. And I got to the checkout stand and I had change coming back and. And I. And sitting on the side of the counter was this beautiful little table. RADIO it was just mint. There wasn't a scratch on it. It looked brand new, but it didn't work, obviously. And someone had given it to Goodwill and it had a price tag of 25 cents on it. Radio so then the next time I went to one of those stores, the same thing happened to me. And so then I started noticing that everywhere you look, I hadn't been looking for them before, but I noticed everywhere. There's these beautiful little old radios everywhere. And they were all under a dollar, you know, maybe somewhere between a quarter and a dollar. And so I started buying them radio. Radio, ra. Pretty soon I had hundreds of them, you know, and now I have a couple thousand of them. When I did my whole radio station thing, I had a whole other building up there with a huge warehouse up there. So then I started even collecting more. Radio, radio, radio, radio. Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. There was something about them. These little old radios are just sitting there looking sad. And after a while, I started tinkering with them and learning how to make them play and stuff and learn how to restore them. They speak to you. There's radios that families grew up listening to, and somehow they exude that. You know, there's something about where they've been and what they've done that's really, really humanly emotional to me.
- [84:42]
Jesse Jarno
From being at the absolute front edge of live and studio sound for over three decades, Healey flipped back to some of the most analog audio technology in existence.
- [84:51]
Dan Healy
So then people started buying radios and then hitting on me to restore their radios for them. So then I hired some people, and I had a little side shop going. I did an airport exhibit with my old radios at San Francisco International Airport, and it was so well received and so popular that after that, the whole thing just blew up.
- [85:10]
Jesse Jarno
Dan Healy was and is a total pro.
- [85:13]
Dan Healy
And so I formed this little company, and it restores radios. And now I'm a member of the California Historical Radio Society, and I do mentoring over there a couple of times a month. On Saturdays, we have a radio class, because they have a radio shop there. They have a radio class, and so you can bring your old radio and get assigned one of us.
- [85:34]
Jesse Jarno
If you're looking for instruction in the arcane arts of vintage radio or someone to fix a seemingly unfixable unit, look up Dan Healy's Classic Radio Service, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [85:46]
Dan Healy
I'm a good teacher. Somehow I eventually discovered that that's a knack that I have that I never knew I had. You know, I blew it, huh? I pissed away my life in a dumbass rock and roll band. That's who I used to tell my parents. Radio. No, no, no. Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope.
- [86:47]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Friends, we are glad you are here. As we kick off season 12, we'd like to thank our special guest in this episode, Dan Healy. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.