Long Strange Tech, part 1

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST

Episode Title: Long Strange Tech, Part 1
Date: November 10, 2022
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow

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Overview: Exploring the Grateful Dead’s Entanglement with California Tech and Internet Culture

This episode of the Deadcast dives deep into the unique, intertwined history between the Grateful Dead, the Bay Area technology boom, and the very architecture of the modern Internet. Tracing roots from the acid tests and sound innovation of the 1960s through to the earliest days of Silicon Valley, hosts Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow are joined by musicians, engineers, and technologists—including Ned Lagin, Daniel Kotke, Andy Moorer, Ron Wickersham, and more—to recount how Deadhead imagination and technological invention fueled one another for decades. It’s a story about obsession, community, feedback loops, and the drive for “just exactly perfect sound,” with the Dead always at the bleeding edge.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Grateful Dead and the Digital Record (04:13–05:57)

• The hosts open with a participatory exercise: if you Google a Grateful Dead show date, the top results are usually about that show—demonstrating the Dead’s deep digital footprint.
• The origins of this phenomenon extend from the Dead community’s long-time obsession with dates and archiving, shaping the structure of online music fandom.

2. Psychedelia Meets Technology in 1960s California (05:57–11:39)

• Steve Silberman discusses how much of the Bay Area’s counterculture was sci-fi-obsessed, with direct links between musicians like Paul Kantner and Phil Lesh and the earliest tech innovators.
  • “Phil Lesh...convinced Owsley or Bear to get into being a sound man. Phil encouraged Bear to take up sound technology, and that came from Phil's feeling that being with Bear was like being in a science fiction story.” (06:29)
• Owsley “Bear” Stanley, LSD chemist and sound pioneer, describes building primitive early sound systems and the drive for better technology.
  • “The guitars in 1966 were identical...basically the guitars, they still had magnet with a coil of wire around it, six screws in the top of the magnet... It seemed like it was holding the music back that we could go to another level if we had better instruments.” (09:16–10:34)
• Bear’s synesthetic (sound-visual blending) experiences at acid tests prompted a new approach to audio that would define Dead concerts for years to come.
  • “I actually saw sound coming out of the speakers.” (10:39)

3. The LSD–Tech Industry Feedback Loop (11:39–16:34)

• Bay Area psychology and tech (Frank Barron, Myron Stolaroff) had psychedelic roots; engineers and future counterculture heroes participated in LSD sessions designed to spark creativity.
• The Whole Earth Catalog and foundational cybernetic ideas emerged, fostering a spirit where “media and particularly layering, infusing different elements of media, is a way of organizing human collectivity.”

4. The Feedback Loop as a Countercultural and Technical Principle (16:34–19:50)

• Eric Davis and John Markoff explain how cybernetics—a science born partly from WWII technology—suffused both the counterculture and the mainstream, providing theoretical grounding for psychedelic feedback loops at the Dead’s acid tests.

5. Sound and Recording Innovation: Alembic, Live Dead, and More (19:50–24:43)

• Ron Wickersham (Alembic founder): Born out of TV engineering, he was pulled into the Dead’s circle and, with his wife Susan, helped design the band’s legendary live and studio gear.
  • “At Ampex, they pretty much didn't hire anybody with a degree. They hired people from the field. So if you wanted to be an engineer there, you came from broadcasting.” (21:28)
• Contemporary comparison: The Beatles’ Magic Alex vs. the Dead—where Apple Electronics failed, Alembic flourished.

6. Silicon Valley and Deadheads: Tech as “Fantasy Amplifiers” (24:43–28:10)

• John Markoff: Early computer hobbyists on the peninsula saw computers as “fantasy amplifiers,” akin to LSD as mind expansion tools.
  • “There were a whole set of different paths to augmenting the human mind...All of that was swirling right at the same time.” (25:19)

7. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, and Utopian Tech Community (27:39–29:36)

• Stewart Brand bridges counterculture and high tech, inspiring both commune-living hippies and future tech moguls.
• Proximity between the Whole Earth Access store and pioneering sound designers like John and Helen Meyer led to innovations later key to the Dead's live sound.

8. Stanford AI Lab and the First Grateful Dead Tech Community (32:58–36:48)

• Paul Martin (Stanford AI grad): The Dead's '73 show at Stanford turned many at the AI Lab into Deadheads.
  • “It was just amazing, amazing transition. The big switch in my brain flipped.” (31:10)
• At the “Sail” AI Lab, people had their own computers and formed the first digital Deadhead community, complete with mailing lists (“Deadis”), lyric collaborations, and the invention of “Finger”—the first online status update.

Notable Quote

“It was the invention of the status update, the world’s first digital away messages, and now the basic unit of social media in daily life around the planet.”
— Narrator/Host (36:48)

9. Early Computer Music and Biotech Fusion: Ned Lagin and “Seastones” (46:58–55:32)

• Ned Lagin became the Dead’s deepest link to computer music, combining computers, biofeedback, and improvisation.
  • “One of the key things in Seastones was that you could extract signals from one musician...and then use them to modulate or affect other musicians’ sound...it changed the hearability...of musicians from their personality being directly identified by their musical or vocal sound into their idiosyncratic personalities independent of their musical instruments.” (53:26)
• Lagin and Phil Lesh visited the AI Lab, tried out quadraphonic sound, and experimented with controlling sound in space—decades ahead of their time.

10. Garage Startups, Homebrew Computing, and Open Source Deadheads (58:30–61:47)

• Daniel Kotke, Apple employee #12: Recounts meeting Steve Jobs, Jobs’ obsession with reel-to-reel taping and Dylan bootlegs—tracing a straight line from Deadhead tape culture to the ethos of open source computing.
  • “He was so proud of his hours and hours and hours of bootleg [Dylan].” (58:30)
• Kotke, Jobs, and Wozniak’s early hacking (via the Homebrew Computer Club) closely overlapped with Deadhead circles.

Notable Quote

“Was he was completely in favor of open... The schematic for the Apple 1 was freely given away, the code for the Apple 1 was freely given away. The Apple II was not secret...Woz was and still is in favor of open source.”
— Daniel Kotke (63:30)

11. Digital Archiving and Spreading the Dead’s Gospel Online (64:05–69:21)

• Daniel Kotke describes the conversion of the Dead’s lyric files from Usenet to Apple floppies, then into the hands of lyricist John Perry Barlow—a proto-Internet moment for the community.
  • “Barlow was a very smart guy, very inquiring mind, very interested in all aspects of technology.” (69:21)

12. The Dead as Sound Tech R&D Lab in the ’80s (69:21–70:13)

• The Dead’s live shows became testing grounds for new PA systems and digital sound—Meyer Sound’s involvement provided demo opportunities for top engineers worldwide.
  • “We turned on the whole [Meyer] system and did this amazing demo...we went from this very, very low level sound to shaking Madison Square Garden at full power.” (69:48)

13. The Digital Echo: The Deep Note & Next Episode Teaser (71:18–END)

• The show closes with mention of Andy Moorer’s “Deep Note”—a signature digital sound later used by THX—tying the Dead’s influence into modern digital pop culture and movie sound.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Owsley Stanley on early instruments:
  “I knew we had to do something because the technology was so primitive. It seemed like it was holding the music back…” (09:16)

• Paul Martin after discovering the Dead at Stanford:
  “It was just amazing, amazing transition. The big switch in my brain flipped.” (31:10)

• On ‘Finger’ and status updates:
  “It was the invention of the status update, the world’s first digital away messages, and now the basic unit of social media…” (36:48)

• Ned Lagin on digital music collaboration:
  “You could have the personality imprinted by one or more parameters...it changed the hearability of musicians from their personality being directly identified by their sound into their idiosyncratic personalities independent of their musical instruments.” (53:26)

• Daniel Kotke on open source at Apple:
  “Was he was completely in favor of open... Woz was and still is in favor of open source.” (63:30)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Grateful Dead’s digital dominance: 04:13
• Owsley, LSD, and early tech: 06:29–11:08
• Cybernetics and counterculture: 14:30–19:01
• Alembic and Bay Area sound engineers: 19:50–23:32
• Whole Earth Catalog and community: 27:39–29:36
• Stanford AI Lab Deadheads: 32:58–36:48
• First Deadhead mailing lists/status updates: 36:10–41:11
• Grateful Dead lyric file origins: 42:05–44:49
• Ned Lagin’s Seastones & quadraphonic innovation: 46:58–55:32
• Early Apple/Deadhead crossover (Kotke/Jobs/Woz): 58:30–64:01
• Lyric files meet John Perry Barlow: 67:59–69:21
• Meyer Sound at Madison Square Garden: 69:48–70:13

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Conclusion & Tone

This dense, lively episode is a testament to the Grateful Dead’s central (and surprising) role in the history of music technology and internet culture. The tone is a mix of reverent geek-out, wry historical reflection, and the beloved Deadcast flavor: accessible for newcomers, rich for lifers. With firsthand stories from both legendary techies and Dead insiders, it’s a journey across decades and disciplines, tracing how the feedback loops between art, engineering, mind expansion, and community built our digital future.
Stay tuned for Part 2!

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For full interviews, audio, and links—visit the show notes at dead.net.

Transcript

[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.

[Daniel Kotke]

Foreign.

[Rich Mahan]

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 season six of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. As always, thanks thank you very much for tuning in. This Dead Cast explores the Grateful Dead's long term cosmic entanglement with the California technology world and the architecture of the Internet itself. Featuring bio music pioneer Ned Lagin, Deadheads at the Stanford AI Lab and Apple, Sonic heroes from Alembic and Meyer Sound and more. In fact, there's so much good stuff this episode is number one of a two parter. Pop on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through five and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing. Hit that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review and tell a friend. Very kind of you. Thank you very much. Have you checked out the transcripts we now have for most of our episodes? Well, head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and click the transcript link on the episode you'd like to explore. Well, just announced is the 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Bobby Weir's first solo album Ace, and there are a few configurations you need to know about for this new collection. Bobby remixed the original album and he pairs that with a new live version by Bobby Ware and Wolf Brothers recorded earlier this year at Radio City Music hall featuring the Wolf Pack with special guests Tyler Childers and Britney Spencer. Our own Jesse Jarno even wrote the liner notes. There will be a 2 CD version as well as a custom High roller Pearl White vinyl release available exclusively from dead.net both with a release date of January 13, 2023. A black vinyl version will follow on February 3rd and you can pre order any and all of the ACE releases and merch [e-mail] hey, thanks to everyone who has left their stories [e-mail] we're now asking you to share your stories of serendipity miracles and the most unbelievable, craziest Dead stories ever told. Share those stories [e-mail] and you just may hear yourself in a future Dead cast. Well, there's a lot that went into making the Grateful Dead what they were, and a lot of the technical aspects aren't obvious on the surface, but they definitely became part of the sound and the scene. In fact, the Dead were always on the cutting edge of musical technology, and they incorporated new tech into their gear whenever they could, pushing not only the boundaries of their music, but music related tech as well. Time to hand this Dead cast over to Jesse Jarno.

[Narrator/Host]

Today's Deadcast begins with a participatory activity. Go to Google and type in a date the Grateful Dead performed. Very likely the top 10 search results you see will be dominated by links to pages about the Dead show that was played on that date in history, outweighing all other world events that might have occurred.

[Daniel Kotke]

Mosquitoes on the river.

[Narrator/Host]

Fish are rising up like birds.

[Rich Mahan]

It's been hot for seven weeks.

[Narrator/Host]

That was the music never stopped from June 7, 1977 on the Winterland June 1977 box and 6777 is one of the dates that definitely works. Okay, to be fair, Bing downranks the Dead a bit, and this doesn't work on Baidu. But for the most part, the Grateful Dead's concert history is deeply baked into the way the Internet is indexed. In some ways, the reasons for this are pretty obvious. The Grateful Dead are one of history's most influential bands, and and Dead freaks are pretty obsessed with dates. But the story goes much deeper than that and goes beyond just the Dead's concert history and into the makeup of both the Dead and the Internet itself. In the summer of 1966, the BBC show Panorama, hosted by John Morgan, sent a crew to California to survey the burgeoning technology scene. The shape of things to come has arrived in California. The astonishing moonwalking products of its technology.

[Rich Mahan]

Remain a science fiction for Britain and Europe.

[Narrator/Host]

In the Far west, the wildest dream populates the landscape. Journalist Don Hoefler would coin the term Silicon Valley in 1971, but Northern California was the center of tech long before that. The scale of investment is beyond anything ever seen before, or anything this country could conceive, and the youth of Northern California were ready for it. Longtime Wired journalist and author of Neurotribes Steve Silberman.

[Rich Mahan]

So many of the original psychedelic San Francisco proto jam band performers were into science fiction. Paul Kantner, who I talked with at length in an interview that's online. David Crosby. Wooden Ships was, of course, a science fiction song in a sense. And one of those people who was into science fiction that much was Phil Lesh. And everybody thinks that Owsley must have sort of arrived fully formed and everything, but that's into the sound systems and the acid, but that's not true. It was actually Phil Lesh who convinced Owsley or Baer to get into being a sound man. Phil encouraged Bear to take up sound technology, and that came from Phil's feeling that being with Bear was like being in a science fiction story.

[Narrator/Host]

Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, introduced himself to the grateful dead in January 1966 at the Fillmore Acid Test. He'd already studied electronics in the Air Force and moved on to psychedelic science by 1965, becoming the world's preeminent underground manufacturer of LSD. But if anything, that only amplified Behr's interest in technology. Striking a keynote for the next three decades of the Dead's career and beyond, the psychedelic dance halls of San Francisco offer other, more peculiar, peculiar insights into a possible future. The city's known as Psychedelphia Tripsville. Props to whichever head fed that one to the BBC. Maybe the same one that told them they should head to the Fillmore Auditorium. The group is known as the Grateful Dead. THEY SING THE Mind Benders. That was the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore auditorium in early June 1966, performing Mindbender. Unbeknownst to the BBC film crew, they were witnessing one of the most peculiar intersections of California technologies. On stage, the Dead were playing through their new experimental sound system, built from repurposed voice of the theater speakers. And operating that sound system was Owsley Baer Stanley. Over the three years of this podcast, we've discussed many of the technological innovations that surrounded the Dead. We'll have plenty of fresh interviews today, but we're also going to shout back to a few previous episodes. Our special bear drops LA66 delved deeply into Owsley and the Dead's first forays into live sound. Drawing on David Ganz's great 1991 interview with Bear, featured in Conversations with the dead. Link dead.net deadcast yeah, I knew nothing when I started.

[Owsley Stanley]

I just said, hey, sure, I'll be the sound man and we can use my hi fi. I did notice one thing straight away, and that was that the instruments that they were Using looked like somebody built them in their garage. When you opened them up, they looked like they had parts that looked like they came out of a 1932 radio. And in fact it was about right. That was about right. I think it was Les Paul who took apart a radio and put the parts in his guitar. Basically the guitars in 1966 were identical. They still had magnet with a coil of wire around it, six screws in the top of the magnet, and sometimes not even the screws, but often the screws. They had a wax capacitor and a cheap potentiometer. That was it. I knew we had to do something because the technology was so primitive. It seemed like it was holding the music back that we could go to another level if we had better instruments. Half the time they'd crackle and pop and hum and there would be distortion out of the speakers. It wouldn't be controllable and the guys would make a sound not what they wanted. So we went wholly the other way.

[Narrator/Host]

It was the beginning of a long quest for just exactly perfect sound that continues to this day.

[Owsley Stanley]

At one of the acid tests, I don't know which one it was. It might have been Watts. Actually it was a very strange experience where all of a sudden I was looking at sound coming out of the speakers. This happened on several occasions. Also happened in the house that we were staying in Watts, where I actually saw sound coming out of the speakers.

[Rich Mahan]

I just wanted to have that happen.

[Owsley Stanley]

What's that called? Kinesthesia?

[Ned Lagin]

Yeah, synesthesia.

[Owsley Stanley]

Synesthesia.

[Narrator/Host]

Bayer's synesthetic experience would become foundational to his understanding of sound and how he would work with the dead. The alchemist responsible for the LSD explosion was also very much part of the California technology boom. Or perhaps they were one in the same mindbender. Indeed, BBC host John Morgan was surely one of the first to draw out this connection. How close was the connection between psychedelphia's self absorption, the prevalence of drugs and the new technology? Dr. Frank Barron, a psychologist at Berkeley.

[Owsley Stanley]

I think that the rate of social change, which itself has been accelerating rapidly.

[Narrator/Host]

And sparked by the technological and scientific.

[Paul Martin]

Revolution, is closely related to the use of LSD.

[Narrator/Host]

In 1964, Frank Barron presented his study the Creative Process and the Psychedelic Experience, published the following year. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast someone who shared Barron's ideas was colleague Myron Stolarov, who in 1948 had helped invent the Ampex Model 200A reel to reel tape recorder revolutionizing the music industry. A few years later, stalarov came across lsd, still legal and still considered a miracle drug of sorts. We've also posted a link to the first rate scholarly book Acid Hype about what happened to LSD between Albert Hoffman's 1943 synthesis and when it achieved illegality in 1966. By the early 1960s, Stalarov led at least one LSD retreat for Ampex engineers before founding the International foundation for Advanced Studies in Menlo Park, a for profit enterprise that led people on their first trips at fairly top dollar. One of those was Future Merry prankster Stuart Brand. Another was Future Dead archivist Dick Lotvalla. One way of putting that is to say that the company that manufactured the Dead's preferred brand of recording tape had deep psychedelic roots themselves. Another way of saying that is that LSD was everywhere on the San Francisco peninsula even before Owsley Stanley set up shop and began to manufacture his own. And it was already deeply entwined with the technology world as the space age transitioned to the computer age, I like.

[Eric Davis]

To think, and the sooner the better of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching.

[Narrator/Host]

Poet Richard Braudigan was a Haight Ashbury neighbor of the Grateful Dead and first published his evocative poem All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace as a hand distributed broadsheet via the communication company, it was passed around and hung on telephone poles in the Haight I like.

[Eric Davis]

To think right now, please, of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics, where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

[Narrator/Host]

The poem set the tone for a countercultural approach to technology that was at once radical, symbolic and deeply complicated.

[Rich Mahan]

Of the American defense budget, nearly 40%.

[Narrator/Host]

Has gone to California. For the heads in computer science, the goal is perhaps occupation and eventual liberation. That's not exactly how the deal went down. Eric Davis is the author of several far out books which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast most relevantly today, Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information Cybernetics.

[John Markoff]

Is kind of like the big Idea and it ends up influencing the mainstream and the counterculture. The idea of a feedback loop is a very key sort of post war development, because cybernetics as we know it emerge really from both technological practices and theoretical insights that come out of World War II. It's like a basic way of thinking about both how we learn and how systems learn, but also how the individual or individual agents interact with a larger environment. There's a form of cybernetics that goes into communication and control in command economies and military industrial complex and the organization of consumerism and surveillance and all the kind of mainline oppressive system stuff. And there's a sort of softer, gentler kind of cybernetics or system science that goes into cultural software, that goes into ecology and particularly goes into the idea that we don't look at individuals as standing alone making their own decisions, but as embedded in these larger systems of flows which could be ecological situations. Like you're in nature and you're immersed with the flows of energy and matter and even consciousness that move between the individual human and the larger ecology.

[Eric Davis]

I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and join back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

[John Markoff]

Let's take the example of a freak drinking some Kool Aid at an acid test. What's happening there? Well, it's actually a very cybernetic situation where you're breaking down the boundaries of your kind of individual consciousness, where there's stuff that's inside you and stuff that's outside you. And that boundary dissolves. And what does it dissolve into? It dissolves into this immense sort of invocation of the feedback loop as a kind of principle of cultural ecstasy. Because there's all of these loops going on, literally microphones over here at one side of the hall and they're going through some sort of feedback mechanism or they're getting doubled up and then they're coming out on the other side of the hall. The idea of the feedback loop, which is really a key figure of cybernetics, where something goes out of something, changes and comes back in and changes the function of that person. What's really important to recognize is that kind of multimedia environment already is becoming part of the post war mode of organizing culture and consciousness. And there's like a great book by, by Fred Turner, who also wrote the classic Absolutely Necessary book From Counterculture to Cyber Culture. He wrote another book called the Democratic Surround. And it traces the origins of the multimedia environment as this key element of post war ideology and cultural production. And in a way the acid tests are just a crazy bohemian, psychedelic expression of. Of a larger sense that media, and particularly layering, infusing different elements of media, is a way of organizing human collectivity and human identity and human cultural expression in this kind of expanding technological environment of the post war world.

[Narrator/Host]

Some of that high powered rocket fuel. Well, let me take a sip.

[Daniel Kotke]

Yeah.

[John Markoff]

You can see the way that that influenced how the Dead saw what they were doing once they started to really roll. And particularly how they integrated the fans, how they integrated people, or allowed a space for the Deadhead to develop. Because they were willing to give the environment, let's say, the world of fans and people who come to your shows, some kind of agency. Because it makes the feedback loop more interesting, more crazy. Where's this gonna go?

[Narrator/Host]

By 1967, there was already a developing feedback loop between the freak underground and the technology world. A feedback loop to which the Dead were well attuned. Please welcome to the Deadcast, the sound wizard of Alembic, Ron Wickersham.

[Ron Wickersham]

I was what you call consulting engineer building radio stations. I got to work at the first UHF TV station in the country. This was before videotapes, so everything was live on tv. That's a different experience. I was attracted to live performances rather than studio work because there's some excitement that you get.

[Narrator/Host]

Ron would get plenty of that in the future.

[Ron Wickersham]

I ended up seeing an article for the Fillmore Auditorium. It was in Newsweek magazine. He opened it up and there was this centerfold of the light shows and all that kind of stuff. And so a friend of mine that was working at the TV station, we decided to migrate to California and become a hippie, all that. I came out Summer of Love, whatever year that is. And then I found it was pretty boring watching the grass grow stuff. So a couple weeks later I just migrated down to Ampex and said, I'm bored. Do you have anything to do?

[Narrator/Host]

Though LSD fueled creative retreats hadn't become part of the corporate plan at Ampex, the tape company was one of the most progressive and open minded of the new technology companies on the peninsula.

[Ron Wickersham]

Yeah, it was totally experimental. In fact, they pretty much didn't hire anybody with the degree. They hired people from the field. So if you wanted to be an engineer there, you came from broadcasting. And so they built equipment that could be maintained and maintained. At peak, it wasn't people doing theoretical stuff. But then around the outside wall of the office areas, they had the guys from Stanford and Berkeley that wrote the textbooks. And they would show up one or two days a week. So you got to talk to the real guys.

[Narrator/Host]

Through a chain of events, Ampex sent Ron Wickersham to Pacific Recording to work on their new multi track recorder. And straight into the claws of the Grateful Dead.

[Ron Wickersham]

Well, I guess Housley kind of invited me to do it. At that point he was saying I should not only work in the studio, but toward their live stuff and work on the instruments as well.

[Narrator/Host]

At Pacific, Ron had met his future wife and business partner Susan Fraitz, over and over again.

[Ron Wickersham]

Yeah, so I don't know if that's poached, hounded, you know, or just drafted.

[Rich Mahan]

Eventual assimilation.

[Narrator/Host]

By 1969, Ron and Susan Wickersham founded Alembic, the company that provided audio support for the Dead for the next half decade and beyond, developing the instruments, amplifiers and live sound reinforcement for which the Dead would become rightly famous. By the late 1960s, it was pretty hip for bands to have their own in house electronic geniuses. Hello, I'm Alexis from Apple Electronics. I would like to say hello to.

[Daniel Kotke]

All my brothers around the world and.

[Paul Martin]

To all the girls around the world.

[Ron Wickersham]

And to all the electronic people around the world.

[Narrator/Host]

And that is Apple Electronics. That was Magic Alex from Apple Electronics. The Beatles. Apple, not Steve Jobs, Apple, but we'll get back to that one. Magic Alex didn't quite pan out with the Beatles. The Dead did better with Ron Wickersham. For comparison's sake, if you've seen the Beatles documentary, get back. The same week in January 1969 that Glyn Johns was building an eight track studio in the basement of Apple Records by lashing together a pair of four tracks. The Dead Sound team was lugging their own Ampex 16 track up the stairs at the Avalon Ballroom to start making Live Dead within the next year. They'd build their own monitor system too. But it wasn't luck. The Bay Area was positively wired with electronics heads. Another was Bob Cohen, who did sound at the family dog's Avalon Ballroom and helped develop noise canceling headphone technology that he'd eventually sell to NASA. John Markoff covered technology at the New York Times for nearly three decades and I recommend his books what the Dormouse said how the 60s counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, as well as his new biography of Stuart Brand titled the Whole Earth. We've linked to [e-mail] deadcast welcome to the Deadcast, John.

[Rich Mahan]

There was a whole range of ideas and all that coalesced on the peninsula circa 65 to 75 during that same period that the Grateful Dead was forming. The advent of the microprocessor meant that you could have your own computer. And then you had this group of mostly young men on the mid peninsula in the early 70s to mid-70s who had a hunger for computing. They wanted to get access to their own computers. They weren't even sure what they were going to do with them. They thought of them as Fantasy Amplifiers.

[Narrator/Host]

Which sounds a lot like LSD actually, in the very clinical sense that a half century of studies have subsequently shown.

[Rich Mahan]

There were a whole set of different paths to augmenting the human mind going on on the Mid Peninsula at the same time. There was the Esalen stuff happening, the personal growth stuff. There was the psychedelic stuff happening. There was Engelbart's Intelligent Amplification, you know, IA stuff happening. And all of that was swirling right at the same time. Stuart Brand set himself down right in the middle of that, right at the right time.

[Daniel Kotke]

For me, baby Are you lonely for me, baby?

[Narrator/Host]

That was the Grateful Dead at the Academy of Music in New York on March 26, 1972. Now Dix picks 30 the Hell's Angels party that we talked about in both our Donna Jean episode and our Europe 72 prelude. One person who was backstage that night was Stuart Brand, who'd organized the trips Festival in 1966 with the Merry Pranksters, the Dead's first big San Francisco show. They weren't exactly best bras, but they remained colleagues in the new world. Brand was on his way to the United Nations Environmental Conference in Stockholm, one of the world's very first set for early June 1972, where he'd meet up with Wavy Gravy in the Hog Farm. We discussed it a bit in our Europe 72 episode about the Netherlands. Stewart Brand's journal contains some stray notes that indicate that the Dead were actually considering heading to Stockholm after the conclusion of the Europe 72 tour to play at the Alternative Life Forum. It would have put the Dead on a bill with both the Holy Modal Rounders and Swedish psych legends Trodgrass Ochstenar. But alas, it wasn't to be. And maybe for the best, the life form was a bit chaotic, with the Swedish environmentalists a bit suspicious of the Americans. But it would have been an inspired pairing by Stewart Brand, who is fast becoming one of the most critical bridges from the counterculture to the dawning computer age. In 1968, two years after the Trips Festival, Stewart Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth catalog.

[Rich Mahan]

The Whole Earth catalog was a pivot. What he set out to do was take books and tools to his friends who were working on the communes. He didn't want to live on the commune. He spent a couple of weeks on Llama Commune and decided it was boring. He wanted to live in the city, but he thought he could go out there and give them the tools that would help them build their communities, that they were these utopian communities. And then he found out, like, within two Trips that none of them had any money and that wasn't going to work. The idea of a truck store was a nice idea and he pivoted to the catalog.

[Narrator/Host]

Though Commune Arts would certainly be among the Whole Earth Catalog's readership over the next half decade, the Whole Earth Catalog would become a backbone of the countercultural technology scene.

[Rich Mahan]

Information was hard to come by and he curated it. The really striking thing about the impact that the catalog had in that first five year period, it was, it was on people like me, People who were interested in, in, you know, who would stumble across something in that catalog and their life would go off in some different direction. The serendipity of finding interesting things, not people who were going back to the land.

[Paul Martin]

Print, you know, there were, there were.

[Rich Mahan]

3 million copies sold in that first period. It was the bible of a generation.

[Narrator/Host]

Access to tools is one of the catalog's mottos. But its eclectic assortment of far out things engendered a kind of community of its own. Even more so when they opened their own Whole Earth Access store in Menlo Park. Some of the nearby neighbors were John and Helen Mayer, a young couple involved in sound amplification. John devised a new kind of speaker in their living room.

[Daniel Kotke]

The store was around the corner and we put a brochure in the store.

[Rich Mahan]

We gave a demo for Stuart Brand.

[Daniel Kotke]

Outside and he put it in his catalog. Said, well, if you want something to take your head off, here it is.

[Narrator/Host]

It was called the Glyph, the first loud sound I've heard that didn't make me want to run. Brann wrote in the last Whole Earth catalog. I wanted to stay and shake.

[Rich Mahan]

If Stewart found it interesting, it showed up in the catalog.

[Daniel Kotke]

So we built the eight foot horns and we and Pepperland started to happen.

[Narrator/Host]

The Myers moved in and out of the Grateful Dead's orbit in the 1970s before building the Dead's PAs through the 80s and 90s on behalf of ultrasound. From the moment the Dead had any money to spend, they spent it on gear. And their budgets for audio gear, modified guitars, amplifiers and PA systems became an enormous driver for technology for three decades. In the years 1971 to 1974 especially, the band was deeply involved in what was first known as the alembic pa, eventually morphing into what's remembered as the Wall of sound. In February 1973, the band booked a show at the Maples Pavilion on the Stanford campus to test the system's latest iteration. Their first hometown show since the Palo Alto beIN. They couldn't have picked a More symbolic spot to try out the latest technology. Wavy Gravy introduced the second set.

[Paul Martin]

And now the Rainbow Makers.

[Narrator/Host]

Right here they are. One person who saw the Rainbow Makers at the Maples Pavilion was Stanford graduate student Paul Martin. His origin story is similar to many Deadheads. He saw the band at Woodstock, but he saw lots of bands at Woodstock.

[Paul Martin]

I came out to Stanford in 1972 after finishing college in North Carolina. And in I think it was January, maybe February of 73, the Dead played their only ever indoor concert at Stanford in the basketball stadium. And it was fairly easy to get tickets. And a bunch of friends that I watched other sort of psychedelic music without that way said, oh wow, the Dead are playing at Stanford. And so even though there was a big party I wanted to go to, I said, okay, great, let's go. And I joined them and I was totally blown away. It's a legendary show. And I came away from it going, if I don't have to break too many laws to do it and the Dead are anywhere within shooting range, I'm going. And that was my, that was my. In fact, I came after the show, which was over a bit after midnight. I went to the party that was that I was missing. And folks were whooping it up into the wee hours there and talked to them about the show. And a bunch of them ended up going to all the shows after that. It was just. Was amazing, amazing transition. The big switch in my brain flipped.

[Narrator/Host]

But Paul differed from many Deadheads because as a Stanford graduate student, his base of operations was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence.

[Paul Martin]

Lab, known as sail, the Stanford AI lab that was miles away from campus. I didn't have to spend a lot of time down on campus. And it was a building donated by the telephone company surrounded by horse pastures up in rolling grazing area owned by Stanford. So once you got up there, the influence of all the bureaucrats of a university down on the main campus was very weak.

[Narrator/Host]

And at sail, Paul had something that virtually nobody else anywhere had in 1973. His own office with a computer keyboard and access to local and national computer networks.

[Paul Martin]

When you showed up was your own private office with black and white, or actually a black and green because it was persistent phosphor TV, fairly modest sized screen, probably probably less than 15 inches diagonal and a keyboard. And that was hardwired through coax cables to a disk that was as big as a large coffee table for each platter and had a half a dozen platters. It was sold by a company called Data Disc. But because it was so flaky we called it Data Risk and it produced channels of black and white tv and you would be looking at a screen display that basically just echoed your characters when you typed, but could also display something like, for instance, if you used three of the channels together to get grayscale, you could see what the camera view was from one of the robot cameras that we had. The lab had Big Arm doing robotics and it also had a mobile cart that we're studying, rolling around with one or two video views of the world, trying to figure out how to make, you know, a cart that could drive itself without getting in trouble. So those were all things you could see on your display and you Basically, it was, it was back to being like the Mod 33 teletype, but you had a much more instantaneous connection to a much more powerful machine that was the local network. So you could do things like there were simple commands to just see who was who was currently logged in on all the slots on the machine.

[Narrator/Host]

As it turned out, there were a lot of Deadheads at sale. When I spoke with the lab director, Les Earnest, for my book Heads, he clarified that he wasn't a deadhead. He only saw them a few times a year. Here's what Les told me about how he invented a crucial piece of online infrastructure.

[Paul Martin]

People were working around the clock and.

[Eric Davis]

I needed to intersect with them for a time.

[Narrator/Host]

I tried.

[Eric Davis]

I lived 25 hour days. Each day I would go to bed one hour later and get up one hour later. That way, over 25 days, I would intersect with everyone.

[Narrator/Host]

That didn't quite work. So Les wrote a new command for the system called Finger, so people at the lab could post updates about where they were or what they were working on.

[Eric Davis]

Finger had a plan file so that people could tell what they were planning to do.

[Paul Martin]

Either go on vacation or come back.

[Eric Davis]

At some particular time or whatever. And it got flipped into blogging. Before that term came into existence, people could state any given position, political or technical or whatever. So that became surprisingly popular.

[Paul Martin]

It wasn't my intention.

[Narrator/Host]

It was the invention of the status update, the world's first digital away messages, and now the basic unit of social media in daily life around the planet. In some ways, Paul Martin was late to the party. There'd been Deadheads at sale for years. One of them was James Andrew Moorer. I interviewed Andy at length for my book, A Biography of Psychedelic America, and only got to use a few small bits. He'd started at the lab a few years before Paul and was and is a serious hero of electronic music.

[Eric Davis]

Groups of us would go to concerts. The Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Ballroom were operating full time. There were free concerts out in Golden Gate Park.

[Ned Lagin]

We would go to.

[Eric Davis]

It just permeated the air. And we had actually at the AI lab, the computer music group was working on modern music, but it was also working on different kinds of music synthesis, synthesizing sounds. How do you use a computer to synthesize sound? What's the point of having a computer synthesize sounds? We were struggling with all these questions. The work of John Chowning, which I was quite heavily involved in, ended up as the DX7 synthesizer room Yamaha, which to this day was the largest selling single model. I personally come from the pop and folk music background so I really wanted to push technology in that direction. The fellows at Stanford, Chowning and Rush were classical. Well, what do you say? Modern classical composers, you know, the Philip Glass vintage, you know, the music school graduates, they wanted to push it into that direction. I did go up to the San Francisco Tate Music center several times, went to Mills several times, visited. I connected up with some of the local composers, Terry Riley.

[Narrator/Host]

They were working on early iterations of some very heady stuff that wouldn't come into common use until the early 21st century.

[Eric Davis]

I can make a claim to have actually invented what could be called the audio workstation back at Stanford on this great honking machine, partly inspired by problems that were coming up in performance and making music. It wasn't what you call real practical at the time, but if you looked at the screen back in what, 1972 and looked at today's modern digital audio workstation, you can see the similarities. I mean there's the waveform display, there's the toolbar and the operations are related.

[Narrator/Host]

Of course the sail PDP10 had internal emails too.

[Eric Davis]

I was one of the first programmers on the arpanet, which later became the Internet. Mind you, I can guarantee you that nobody, nobody had a clue as to what it would turn out to be. I can claim one of the longer continuous email addresses around. When I went to Stanford, we chose three character names for our email address as JAM is what I chose because those are my initials, J A M. And just coincidentally, you know, if you want to free associate on jam, you can think of JAM Session. I like that association. And now what is this? 50 years later, 40 some odd years later, I still use the email address jam.

[Narrator/Host]

Another thing the sail PDP10 had was in addition to its mail program.

[Paul Martin]

As Paul Martin discovered the mailing list was just an extension. Somebody added to the mail program. If what you put in was actually a file name, then the mail system would read that file and pretend you had typed in whatever was in it. So a mailing list was just a bunch of lines that you had put people's local or in the case that they were on a different machine, remote addresses. Once you had mailing list that you could just make up a name for one, put it in a common directory, or you could have the mailing list just on your own directory and have your own private. You know, who are my housemates?

[Daniel Kotke]

And.

[Paul Martin]

Except none of my housemates were on email anywhere. Email was rare enough, and just sitting in front of a computer all day was rare enough that most people didn't have a big circle of friends doing it. It was more of a colleagues from work.

[Narrator/Host]

One thing that Paul and many of his work colleagues had in common outside of work was the Grateful Dead. And so, not long after the show at Stanford, Paul established the very first Grateful Dead email list. If you had an account at Sale, you sent a message to Deadis short for distribution, no domain name needed.

[Paul Martin]

It was initially just a way to say things like, hey, so and so got a recording of the show. You know, ping him if you want to make a copy or wow, that was an amazing. What was that new song they did in the second set? That sort of thing. And of course, announcements of shows and tickets and rides.

[Eric Davis]

Andy Moorer Every time the Grateful Dead were playing somewhere, you'd get a notice that said, say they're out in Stockton, so everyone show up at 4pm for a smoke can or something on that order.

[Narrator/Host]

Another early piece of tech they developed was the news alert at Stanford.

[Eric Davis]

We had the AP wire service teletype feed coming into the computer, and we had a demon running in the background that indexed the daylights out of it so you can put an automatic filter on it that would pick out all stories related to, you know, music or Grateful Dead or whatever, and they would pop up in your email.

[Narrator/Host]

Paul and computer chess researcher Dave Wilkins invented something that's now found commonly on the Internet, crowdsourced lyrics.

[Paul Martin]

The lyric thing was something that Dave Wilkins and I just started on our own. We puzzled over what the lyrics to tunes were, and if it was based on just your memory, it was pretty flaky, especially if it was tunes that had only been performed a couple of times or that you had only heard a couple of times. So we tried to get tapes from people that we could play more than one performance of a particular tune that we were trying to puzzle out the lyrics and write them down. And because we had shared computer files, we could just keep a. Keep a file that had our best guess in it. And we could have alternates that weren't quite so sorted out yet. Or we're pretty sure about the first. The whole first round of this. But the second and third rounds, we're not real sure what, especially the Bobby songs, because he would do them without quite knowing what the lyrics were too. And sometimes loop back and do a different chorus. Not a different chorus, but a different verse in the wrong place and things like that. So anyhow, that was our impetus. And we had computer printers too, so we could make printouts and give them to friends who weren't on the computer. And if they had firm opinions about what the lyrics were, they could mark them up and hand them back to us. And we could decide whether to correct them the way they said or not, because it's a little hard to figure out the lyrics sometimes.

[Narrator/Host]

The machine itself was also connected to.

[Paul Martin]

Arpanet darpanet, the real span of the country data connection. And with that you could log on to any other machine that was connected to it across the country and shortly thereafter across the world, assuming you had an account there and they'd let you log in and all that. And you could send email to other places, you had to address what machine it was going to. The whole idea that you could talk to people far away like this and was pretty novel. You could transfer files. FTP was file transfer protocol. And even in its earliest days, people grumbled that it didn't mean food transfer protocol because the AI lab was far away from any place to get anything to eat if it was in the middle of the night and you were starving. So we always joked about the next step for the network would be to be able to order a pizza and have it show up.

[Narrator/Host]

The tech has progressed a bit since then. In fact, just by listening to this, your local pizza place now knows that you want pizza and will be dispatching one momentarily. Blink your eyes for five measures and seven, four. Time to opt out. It was by these means that Paul and Dave's lyric file began to make it out into the world.

[Paul Martin]

At one point, we started seeing copies of the thing floating around and other people not necessarily saying where they got it. So that's when we decided the Bondi Pier belonged in the collection. We've got a great new chart buster just lubbed in from Australia who's going.

[Narrator/Host]

To sing you one of his most meaningful and urgent compositions.

[Paul Martin]

And that's an old Australian drinking song A guy named Rod Brooks who was at the Stanford Alab and went on to found iRobot as a big proponent of going to Mars one way. Brooksy sang that song for us and we wrote it down and we added it to our lyrics, even though the Dead never performed it. So if you ever found a collection of their tunes that had that song in it, you knew they'd ripped it from ours.

[Narrator/Host]

I was down by Bondi Pier Drinking.

[Eric Davis]

Tubes of ice cold beer With a.

[Narrator/Host]

Bucket full of prawns upon me knee.

[Daniel Kotke]

When I swallowed the last prawn I had a check me colour yawn and I chucked it in the old Pacific sea Drink it up, drink it up Crack another dozen tubes and draw it.

[Paul Martin]

With me if you wanna try your voice.

[Narrator/Host]

Bondi Peter was Australian and it was certainly about drinking, but it wasn't that old. Its real name is Chunder in the Old Pacific Sea and was written in 1965 by Australian comedian Barry Humphries. Where the original lyric was Manly Pier, it appeared in the 1972 comedy the Adventures of Barry Mackenzie. The title was incorrect, but a copy of the Sail lyric file made its way deep into the Internet. To this day, if you search for the phrase Bondi Pier, you get nothing but Grateful Dead related search results. Plus one SPOILER tweet from me. Sorry about that. Partly it's because it's not the song's real name, but it's nonetheless a testament to how deeply rooted and redundant Grateful Dead related information is out on what's left of the open Internet. Sometime in 1974, an actual member of the Grateful Dead showed up at Sale.

[Paul Martin]

Phil was good friends with Ned Lagan and a couple other people who shared the computer up there to do computer music research. In fact, they made one of the very first ever CDs ever made. But Phil came up to visit and hang out with these guys one evening in the mid-1970s.

[Narrator/Host]

Ned Lagin's Seastones project was the place where Computers and the Dead's music intersected. We delved deeply into the world of Ned, legend and Seastones during our Nedcast episode of season two of the Deadcast. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh had befriended Ned when he was an undergraduate at MIT and started making music with him soon thereafter. From 1970 through 1975, Ned collaborated heavily with the Dead, David Crosby, and members of the Jefferson airplane especially. By 1973, Ned had relocated to the Bay Area.

[Eric Davis]

Andy Moorer Ned and Phil came down and we chatted about everything we were doing. And you know, they were quite interested. And Phil Lesh wanted to dive into that more deeply. He approached us because he was interested in some of the stuff we were doing, some of the sounds. You could do it on these large, sprawling mainframe computers, which you couldn't do much in a forum where you could take it on the road.

[Narrator/Host]

Ned Legion would be the Grateful Dead's deepest link to high technology in the early 1970s. We are so happy to welcome back to the Deadcast. Ned Legion.

[Ned Lagin]

John Chowning's professor there, Andy Moore was a PhD or postdoc. Chowning went on to create and own the Yamaha FM synthesis patents and was a great guy, or is a great guy. Andy Moore was the same. And he eventually left to form Sonic Solutions, which was a noise reduction algorithm company. And they're the ones that invited me and Phil when they heard about Seastones, to come to Sail.

[Narrator/Host]

As an MIT undergraduate with an interest in all things new. Ned had heard about Sail.

[Ned Lagin]

We were invited to visit the Stanford facility, which we did. When we got there and drove up, there was some robot drape, crude robot crawling, rolling around the parking lot. In any case, we were invited in. We were toured everything. They were enamored of Phil, of course, of fandom, but Phil knew nothing about what any of this was. I was invited to have an account there, a user account there, and a password and everything which they gave me. And I was loaded up with almost a carton of manuals. One was Sail, which was their programming language at the time for using their system, and Bail, which was their debugging writing programs.

[Narrator/Host]

Obviously the Sail Deadheads were psych that Phil Lesh was visiting Paul Martin.

[Paul Martin]

We knew he was coming and wanted to have a chance to shake his hand and all that. And we printed up a copy of the current state of our lyrics and presented it to him. And he said, oh, this is great. We don't have all this shit written down anywhere. And we said, well, you know, I'm not sure these are right. Especially some of the Bobby tunes. Sometimes he sings it one way and other times it sounds like he's doing something else. And he said, oh, no, no, these are right. I'm going to show it to Bobby and tell him to sing them this way. That's one way to get it right.

[Narrator/Host]

Mainly they were there to speak about ways to control quadraphonic sound. A going concern at sale.

[Eric Davis]

Andy Moorer Phil Lasch had his guitar wired for Quad. The original setup was one string, one speaker. Or he said he had great fun bouncing stuff off the speakers.

[Ned Lagin]

It wasn't initially a quad bass. It was just having a separate amplifier and pickup for each of four because there was only four strings. So it could be used as a quad base because there were four outputs. But it was initially quad in the sense of four channels, rather than quad in the sense of quad space, because there were no quad spaces.

[Eric Davis]

We did have a prototype quad reverb device, but it was really a joke. It was really to demonstrate the principle more than a practical musical instrument. Like, for instance, the reverb was done by an old car stereo spring reverb that we had down the bottom of it. And the quad panning was done by just radio potentiometers that we swiped out of trash radios. But I'm sure it helped inspire them nonetheless.

[Narrator/Host]

They lent it to Ned to try out.

[Ned Lagin]

I was loaned their quad joystick because at that point in time they were doing experiments in how you detect changes in the position of sound sources. And that led to FM synthesis and all their other stuff. But they were originally, how do you encode and decode positions of sound moving in space? So they had a quad joystick, which they loaned to me and I used on Seastones.

[Narrator/Host]

This little bit is from our Nedcast episode.

[Ned Lagin]

The interesting thing about Quad that I discovered in playing with it. Dan Healy had set up a primitive system of four speakers and amplifiers for me at Mickey's to experiment a little bit with. It was how disturbing Quad could be, how it wasn't necessarily immersive, which is what we were looking at as the desirable effect of Quad. When you hear sounds behind you, you turn around. So it wasn't really a very desirable thing to have people turning around or hearing and being frightened by sounds behind them.

[Narrator/Host]

Ned dove in slightly deeper.

[Ned Lagin]

I went back there a few times because of the long commute and driving and everything down to Stanford, and use their system. But I never really got totally into programming their system. More exploring it. Phil never went back during that period of time. I was using the system to learn the system so I could do music on it. And you got to remember this was a time when hard drives were big cabinets and most of the backup was done on tape machines, which you see in old science fiction movies. And the most valuable tool was obviously the Quad joystick, which I wired up and used.

[Eric Davis]

Ned eventually settled on a system where he had a computer controlled analog synthesizer rack from EMU systems, which are acquaintances of ours down in Santa Cruz.

[Narrator/Host]

Seastones was biomusic, a place where music and computers were beginning to exist in mutually programming harmony. As Richard Braudigan put it. Here's how Ned described it to us on the Nedcast.

[Ned Lagin]

One of the key things in Seastones was that you could extract signals from one musician through envelope followers or triggers and gates and then use them to modulate or affect other musicians sound. Okay, so you could have the personality imprinted by one or more parameters. Say Jerry plays guitar. We're not hearing the guitar sound, we're hearing the attack sustained decay of the of the guitar. But it's affecting my piano sound or Phil's bass sound and vice versa. With ring modulators or voltage controls amplifiers, you could have two signals cross modulate one another. What this did was it changed the hearability. If I can create a word of musicians from their personality being directly identified by their musical or vocal sound into their idiosyncratic personalities independent of their musical instruments. And of course during the times that we were doing this, we were all heavily intoxicated lsd. We were in alternative places and space times. This made a lot of sense at the time, not because we were so high, but because we were looking at new forms of expression and new forms and ways of being musical. And one of the ways was to. And one of the reasons to use computers was to extract the personalities, the imprinting, the techniques, the habits that various musicians had and used them to affect the sound of other musicians or the entire ensemble.

[Narrator/Host]

That was from the expanded edition of Seastones. The voices of Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick and David Fryberg. Not so much harmonizing as completely fusing. The CD is available from Ned's website spiritcats.com along with much of Ned's writing and visual art. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast if you're intrigued by Seastones, we definitely encourage you to check out our episode about Ned, the expanded Seastone and especially Ned's more recent album Cat dreams. Starting in October 1974, the dead took a road hiatus that would last until June of 1976. During this period they pursued a number of tech projects as alternatives to touring. Some more vaporware than others. One was holographic sound technology.

[Ned Lagin]

That was a Garcia Rackhousing and they just cooked up lots of stuff.

[Narrator/Host]

A surprising number of publications reported on it.

[Ned Lagin]

Straight faced Rakow was a monster bullshitter.

[Narrator/Host]

Though the holographic sound technology may have been bullshit, the Dead kept very earnestly looking for the next path even as they were retired from the road. Apparently even commissioning legendary theorist R. Buckminster Fuller to design a floating venue. Dan Healy has said that copies are in his collection and I Hope they surface someday. It was during this period that Garcia threw himself into the production of the Grateful Dead movie. When they shot the film in 1974, they employed a very early sound sync technology, different from the very early sound sync technology Ron Wickersham devised when making Sunshine Daydream in 1972. And when the Grateful Dead movie was released in 1977, you might be shocked to learn that the Grateful Dead did it their own way, bringing in promoter John Cher to distribute it.

[Ron Wickersham]

I think they only cut about less than 10 copies of it, all right, 35 millimeter. And what we did, which was sort of innovative at the time, is we went to each city that we knew the Dead were the biggest. And we four walled movie theaters, meaning we rented the movie theaters and took all the chance ourselves whether people would come or not. We advertised it and we knew where and how to advertise a Grateful Dead anything. It was very successful. And then we took those prints and piggybacked to, say, another 10 or 15 markets and brought in sound systems. Instead of using. In those days, the movie theaters just had like one big speaker behind the screen. So we brought in concert sound systems.

[Narrator/Host]

Later on, the film went through a normal independent distributor with presumably more normal sound setups. But those original 1977 screenings sound amazing. We're going to backtrack just slightly to talk about an important Silicon Valley company founded by a pair of live bootleg fanatics during this period. We are so pleased to welcome to the Dead cast Daniel Kocki. Technically, Daniel was Apple employee number 12, but that's only going by badge number.

[Daniel Kotke]

The very first day I met Steve Jobs, which was like two weeks into freshman year at college, and I had another friend who was on the same floor in the same dorm as Steve. He said, you should go meet this guy Steve. He's interesting. So I went up to his dorm room and there were other people hanging out. And Steve had a big expensive tac reel to reel tape deck. Like a multi thousand dollar tape deck. I don't know where he got it or how he afforded it. He didn't really have any money, but he obviously got a good deal on it. And what he was so proud of is his hours and hours and hours of bootleg dealing. Decades later, I learned that it was Woz who was going to UC Berkeley. Woz knew the underground den sourcing.

[Narrator/Host]

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were serious Bob Dylan freaks. They'd been involved in an earlier business venture that possibly resulted in Jobs being able to afford a sweet stereo.

[Daniel Kotke]

Steve was still in high school at the time. But it's also true that that is the year that Woz and Jobs were doing blue boxes. That's the year that 1971 is when the Captain Crunch story came out in Vanity Fair all about phone freaking. And since Woz was already at Berkeley, he tracked down Captain Crunch and he brought Steve Jobs along and the two of them went and interrogated him to find out how this whole scheme worked of phone freaking. And then was immediately went and designed his own better version and started building them by hand. And between him and Steve Jobs, they went and sold them a few hundred dollars each, which was a lot of money back then.

[Narrator/Host]

Daniel and Steve Jobs, who traveled together in India in 1974. Back in California in the spring of 1975, a new group had started meeting in Menlo park, the Grateful Dead's home turf, the Homebrew Computer Club.

[Daniel Kotke]

I went to Homebrew meetings with Steve Jobs and Roz would always be there. And I was such a newbie. I didn't know anything about computers or electronics in general, and so I was just like soaking it up. But I didn't understand how exciting it was that the Altair had come out.

[Narrator/Host]

Also attending the Homebrew Computer Club meetings was Ned Lagin, who dropped out and gotten a job at Processor Technology.

[Ned Lagin]

I went to some of the early Homebrew Computer Club meetings at Stanford Wilmer Accelerator because I was required to for my job at Processor Technology. There was only two or three companies at that point in time.

[Narrator/Host]

Many of the hackers at the Stanford Lab and elsewhere didn't take the Homebrew Computer Club seriously, thinking of them as hobbyists.

[Ned Lagin]

It's very simple. It's academia versus grassroots.

[Narrator/Host]

But the Altair, the world's first truly home computer, had opened the door.

[Ned Lagin]

I have number 113 and I have all of the manuals and schematics and everything about it. And I have even the original popular electronics from January 1975 when it first appeared.

[Narrator/Host]

There's a fantastic photo that recently surfaced of Ned at the center of the Full Seastones ensemble with Garcia Lesh and David Crosby at Dominican College in san Rafael in June 1975. Posted on Nedbase, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast.

[Ned Lagin]

It's sitting right there in the center of the picture on top of the other computer. That picture includes the whole bunch of technology, has Jim Furman's state of the art preamps. It has an EMU modular synthesizer, it has a polyphonic computer keyboard, it has an Altair Computer, it has an inner data computer and other stuff. I mean, at that point in time it was a snapshot of the present and future of technology and music.

[Narrator/Host]

But a few months later, Ned was onto a different fork to the future, working at Processor Technology. Some of the long hairs from Homebrew showed up at Processor and Ned was sent down to talk to them.

[Ned Lagin]

When Jobs and Wozniak came to Processor Technology, well, they offered. What they offered me was could I help them make this computer work? The circuit board?

[Eric Davis]

Really?

[Ned Lagin]

And I said no. But certainly it was an offer to do work for some compensation.

[Narrator/Host]

Ned had a job. The two Steves found their own path.

[Daniel Kotke]

Daniel Kopke, my college buddy Steve Jobs, started this little computer company in his garage. And so I showed up in his garage in 1976 to help build Apple ones. And during that year, no Grateful Dead. We were listening to all Bob Dylan all the time, his blood on the Tracks. We wore that tape out.

[Narrator/Host]

Whether or not Steve Wozniak drew the connection between live concert recordings and open technology platforms, he was definitely into both.

[Daniel Kotke]

Was he was completely in favor of open. Open. They didn't use the word open source, but open technology and was, you know, the schematic for the Apple one that was freely given away, the code for the Apple one was freely given away. The Apple two was not secret. The schematics were available. Apple DOS source was not available. But anyway, Woz was and it still is in favor of open source.

[Narrator/Host]

It wasn't until Apple got going that Daniel really discovered the dead.

[Daniel Kotke]

American Beauty and Working Man's Dead. That was my senior year in high school. I was not a deadhead. I never, you know, one of my regrets of high school is that I never took the train to Portchester to the Capitol Theater. My first Dead show was in Manhattan in like 10th grade, which was 1970. And that was okay, but not earth shaking, not life changing.

[Narrator/Host]

That was probably the Manhattan center in April.

[Daniel Kotke]

By 1977, Steve and I had rented a house together in Cupertino. And he wasn't on much. He was just at Apple all the time. Always just all the time. And then he had a girlfriend and wasn't even sleeping there anymore. And I didn't really have any friends. And it wasn't till I went to a Winterland show up in San Francisco and it's like, oh my God. My people and Daniel connected to the.

[Narrator/Host]

Deep and wide scene of Bay Area Deadheads. Some of them working in various tech related fields, plenty of them not.

[Daniel Kotke]

The bright line in my mind is the acoustic shows they did at the Warfield in 1980. There was a whole series of acoustic shows in October of 1980. So I mailed away for. I think I went to three of those shows and for one of them I got A. A. Tickets. A.A. and I thought. I thought A.A. came after Z. So I was expecting to have seats way in the back. No, I was front and center. And as the concert was starting, some guy came down like with the Visine bottle of lsd. Put out your hand. That's a life changing event. Oh my God.

[Eric Davis]

Sleep.

[Daniel Kotke]

In the stars. I was in this Grateful Dead cover band called Graceful Duck. And we used to play. We played at this. We played at the Stanford Coffee Shop. We played, played at parties just around Palo Alto. I didn't know all the Dead history in Palo Alto at the time, but I wasn't very good anyway, so those two guys moved on. But I started a three ring binder writing down all the lyrics and the chords to all the Dead songs. I was on the map design team, right? I was a co designer of the Macintosh. I left Apple at the end of 84 with a leave of absence. Got my backpack and traveled all around Europe. Great experience. And then when I got back, I was at a Dead show. And one of my Deadhead friends was Fenn labaume. And so I ran into him at a Dead show one day and he goes, well, all of the lyrics for all the Grateful Dead songs are all online for free on usenet. It took three Macintosh floppies because the floppies only held 440k, right? So what he had done is he took that giant file and split it up into three and put it on three Macintosh floppies. And then I ran into him at this Dead show, might have been the Greek Theater. And he. He traded me those floppies. I might have traded him some LSD or something.

[Narrator/Host]

In turn, Daniel split the songs into their own individual files and recompiled them onto a few more floppies.

[Daniel Kotke]

And somebody copied the floppies that I had created with all these Dead songs lyrics and brought copies of it to the Dead office in San Rafael and left them there without my knowledge. And then another couple of months go by and I'm at a Greek theater show. And what year is this? It's probably now late 85. And Alan Baum walks up to me and, and slaps me with a backstage laminate, goes, barlow wants to see you. That was kind of a life changing event. So I made my way backstage. I didn't even know who Barlow was, but as you can imagine, he was the only member of the extended Dead circle who had a Macintosh. He had one. And what he said to me when I met him that day is, Daniel, I want to thank you because I wrote all these songs, all the songs that you wrote. Anyway, I never had a copy of my own songs on my computer, and now I do. So that became my long friendship with Barlow because Barlow was a very smart guy, very inquiring mind, very interested in all aspects of technology.

[Narrator/Host]

By the turn of the 1980s, the dead were well established as rock and roll's premier research and development lab. Their Bay Area shows had become testing grounds for new equipment. And when we spoke with John and Helen Meyer of Meyer Sound, we learned how the band's new ultrasound system acted as demonstration equipment for some of the best sound engineers in the world. When Dan Healy let them use the setup during the afternoon off between the band's 1983 Madison Square Garden shows when.

[Daniel Kotke]

They were at Madison Square Garden, they had a whole system at Madison Square Garden and they let us use it for a demo for AES. We brought a whole bunch of customers to Madison Square Garden in the afternoon and we turned on the whole system and we did this amazing demo for. We went from this very, very low level sound to shaking Madison Square Garden at full power.

[Rich Mahan]

And I said, this is what digital can bring us.

[Daniel Kotke]

You cannot do this analog.

[Narrator/Host]

For the rest of that story, check out our in and out of the Garden 1983 episode. The piece they used was from an early digital demonstration CD that also included a very short track composed by Andy Moorer of Stanford, which is where we're going to end today. We've got a lot more to say about the grateful veteran technology. Tune in again next time for the rest. Andy's piece was written in 1982 and originally titled the Deep Note. We've posted a link to the sheet [e-mail] deadcast as well as Andy's latest project, the man in the Mangrove. Counts to an opera novella, but this is definitely Andy's biggest hit. You might recognize it. Sing along if you do.

[Rich Mahan]

We'd like to thank our guests in this episode, John and Helen Meyer, Daniel Kotke, Ned Lagin, John Scher, Andy Moorer, Paul Martin, Les Ernest, John Markoff, Ron and Susan Wickersham, Eric Davis, John Morgan, Frank Barron and Steve Silberman. Extra special thanks to our friend David Ganz for contributing audio from his amazing interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe. It really helps and keep your tour stories coming by recording yours [e-mail] See you next time. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Dorin Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.