photo: Richie Pechner/rpechner.com

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On March 23, 1974, the Grateful Dead performed a one-off gig at the famed Cow Palace just outside San Francisco, which was billed as “The Sound Test.” This performance marked the debut of the group’s new audio reinforcement system that would become known as the Wall of Sound. The Dead’s sonic sculpture was scalable in size but at its peak, it stood over three stories high and weighed 75 tons. It encompassed 600 speakers and drew 28,000 watts of power.

The Wall eliminated the need for musicians to have separate monitors through which to hear their performance. Instead, everyone at a given show— concertgoers and band members alike—shared in what Steve Silberman has described as a “cosmic democracy.”

In his Dead biography, A Long Strange Trip, Dennis McNally writes, “There is a standard joke in rock-and-roll about turning an amp up to 11, given that all amp dials are calibrated to 10. With the Wall, there was so much power available that the musicians generally turned things up to 2.”

The group did just that through October 1974, at which point, due to the expense and challenge of transporting the Wall, the Dead decided to jettison the speaker system and stepped away from touring altogether for 18 months.

In 2015, journalist Brian Anderson wrote an extended piece for VICE about the underpinnings and evolution of the Wall. He has expanded on this account in his new book, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection. Anderson not only draws on his years of science reporting but also his perspective as a longtime Deadhead, whose parents occasionally worked at the band’s shows. What’s more, he owns a rare artifact, a piece of the Wall itself, which he secured via a Sotheby’s auction in 2021, propelling his decision to move forward and finally explore the subject in book form.

“One of the big points I try and illuminate,” Anderson indicates, “is that the Wall of Sound didn’t just fall out of the clear blue sky one day in 1974. A lot of people point to the show at the Cow Palace, and that was a momentous date to be sure. But they had been building up to that since the beginning of the band. This was a years-long project for them, so I do a full march through every iteration of the sound system until the end of ‘74.

“But this isn’t a gear book or a technical tome. It’s a character-driven story about people and obsession, although the main character in the book is the Wall of Sound itself, a mountain of inanimate objects that was finicky and had a personality of its own. From the very start, my goal was to bring the Wall of Sound alive as a central character.”

How would you characterize the general nature of concert sound from the mid-‘60s into the early ‘70s?

There was really no such thing as a musical PA in 1964 and 1965 during The Warlocks era, when this band was starting to play in bars and small clubs around the peninsula. At the time, if a venue did have anything, it was typically a PA just for voice amplification, and even that was two little boxes at each corner of the stage.

There’s the famous example of The Beatles at Shea Stadium [where concertgoers struggled to hear the group, especially over fans’ screams]. Many bands in the early and mid-‘60s were running up against a similar problem. As rock-and-roll was coming onto the scene, the technology couldn’t really keep pace with the sound and the need to project that sound over increasingly vast distances.

When the Dead were getting going, this was still technology from the 1920s, like the Western Electric-style audio equipment you’d find in movie theaters. The state of the art had gone stagnant for decades, and then here comes the Dead and they’ve got Owsley Stanley in their midst and things had to change.

At the time, if you’d go to see any loud rock band in a small club, the sound would be horrendous. It was a complete mess at a lot of those early Dead shows while they were working things out in order to clarify the sound and get separation between instruments, while at the same time wanting to be loud.

In the book, you suggest that the band’s ethos regarding its audience is manifested in the Wall. Can you talk a little bit about that?

The whole idea going back to the Acid Tests, which formed the model that the band would inhabit for the rest of their career and would sort of come to an apex with the Wall of Sound, is that the band and the audience are one single organism. Everyone was in the same envelope of sound traveling together.

So you have the Wall of Sound, which does away with the sort of foldback-style monitor speakers that are in front of the musicians and are pointed back at them so that they can hear what they’re playing. One of the innovations of the Wall was to put those monitors behind the band. Everyone was in the soup together, and I think that’s core to the Dead experience—the band was feeding off of the crowd, the crowd was feeding off of the band, and it was this symbiotic relationship while they’re all building to a peak. This is what the late, great Steve Silberman referred to as cosmic democracy. The barriers were eliminated.

So if the band completely falls apart, the gear completely melts down, everyone’s in it together, traveling through the vehicle of the sound. A famous example is March 23, 1974, at the Cow Palace during “The Sound Test” at the beginning of “Playing in the Band.” After 40-45 seconds, you can tell something is off with the sound and everything completely melts down, so they stop playing. Then Garcia plays a couple notes of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” When that happens, the crowd is right there with the band watching it all melt down, but that’s part of the experience.

As you detail in Loud and Clear, the decision to have the PA also serve as the band’s monitors required a major technological leap that was of interest to people well beyond the Grateful Dead community.

It was sort of a radically simple idea, but placing their monitors behind the band so that they could hear exactly what the audience heard was completely revolutionary. No one had done that up until that point and it came with its challenges. The microphones would pick up the sound of the Wall and you’d get feedback. So how do you adjust for that?

The Dead had their crack electronics team who helped design these feedback-canceling microphones—folks like Ron Wickersham and John Curl at Alembic, and Owsley Stanley, who was in the mix as well. The solution was this two-headed microphone that would basically eliminate or cancel out the feedback of the Wall of Sound and would also eliminate leakage into the microphones.

In 1975, after the Wall of Sound had been disassembled and the band was on hiatus, Wickersham gave this presentation at the 51st Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in Los Angeles. He did a demo based on some 16-track live recordings that the Dead made in 1974. It was standing-room only for his presentation and I think that was very validating for Ron Wickersham.

But there were so many people who came together to make it all go, including the roadie Sparky Raizene, who was in charge of running the vocal system. It took a cast of individuals from all different backgrounds, bringing certain skill sets to the table.

Stepping back to your initial VICE article, what prompted you to write about the Wall of Sound?

I was raised by two hardcore Deadheads who were kind of orbiting the band and orbiting one another, beginning in the early ‘70s. I mention this in the book, but when my mom was a teenager, she stared doing various odd jobs at shows for Howard Stein Productions— not just the Dead, but all these other big bands, like Black Sabbath, The Who, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Mahavishnu Orchestra. She saved all of her passes and it’s insane.

My earliest memories are seeing this band in the late ‘80s, when my folks would take my sister and I, as toddlers, to see them while my dad was working for the band’s Midwest local crew as a stagehand. So I had a very intense connection to the music and the community, and through my parents, I had heard about the Wall of Sound my whole life.

On long family road trips, some tape would be the soundtrack to the drive, and my parents would be talking about, “Oh, yeah, May 13, 1973, at the Iowa Fairgrounds. It looked like it was going to rain, it was threatening, but they played ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ and the sun came out and a rainbow appeared and they were playing through this giant mountain of speakers, and it was called the Wall of Sound.” That had always been so captivating to me.

Then, growing up, even as I was getting into punk and hardcore and noise, I thought it was so cool looking at what the Dead had done, as far as stacking amplifiers through the roof.

So fast-forward to the 2010s, and I’m an editor at VICE at the science and tech vertical Motherboard. It dawned on me at some point: “Oh, I should write a feature on the Wall of Sound, this groundbreaking piece of technology that sort of revolutionized how we experience live music to this day and changed the game in terms of live sound reinforcement.” Being the features editor at Motherboard at that time, it was something I could chip away at over a year and a half or so. A lot of my colleagues didn’t necessarily know me to be a Deadhead.

That story came out the weekend of the Chicago Fare Thee Well shows in 2015 and got a bunch of attention, which felt very validating. It was around 8,000-9,000 words and I remember thinking, “I really went in deep on this. Surely this is going to be the definitive take on the Wall of Sound.” But it only took a matter of weeks for me to realize, “Oh, I only barely scratched the surface. There’s so much more here. Maybe this could be a book one day.”

Can you talk about your participation in the Sotheby’s auction and its impact on the book?

I had been loosely picking up some signals from the universe that maybe it was time to start working on the book, but I had not even put together a proposal or anything. It was a loose, “OK, maybe sometime in the next couple of years, I’ll start working on this again.” Then I saw the Sotheby’s auction of decommissioned Dead gear. I actually didn’t click through and start looking through the lots until there were like 24 hours left before the bidding closed. By that point, the leading bids on a lot of these pieces were way outside my budget. There’s no way I would’ve been able to put in a bid on Garcia’s “Budman” McIntosh amp from the Wall of Sound, which went for over a quarter of a million dollars. But I was curious about what item had the lowest starting bid. It was the piece that I ended up getting, which had a starting bid of $800.

It was a digital auction and, in looking at the photos, I noticed the wear and tear of the cabinet and that it had the 2” x 12” JBL cones and then the 6” x 5” smaller speakers. I knew those were iconic to the Wall of Sound as vocal fill speakers, but the item description was super bare bones. It identified a “stage used monitor” with one 12” JBL speaker remaining and two missing 5” speakers. This was very minimal information, but I remember calling up my parents that night, being like, “Hey, is this crazy? I’m thinking about putting a bid in. It’s a piece of junk, but it’s a historical artifact.” They were like, “Go for it.”

So I put in a bid and ended up winning this piece, although in the very last hour, there was another bidder and things quickly escalated. Then, when it showed up, I stuck my head inside and picked up little clues like the 1974 date stamped on the back of the one remaining 12” JBL cone.

Once this piece landed in my lap, it all clicked in and I thought, “OK, now I’ve got this thing that can be a window to telling this much bigger story I’ve always wanted to tell. This will give me a wholly unique and fresh angle into the story because I own a little part of it now. So I can go and talk to all the people who built this thing and hear about what it was like to travel with all of this stuff.”

As you approached this topic anew, did you discover something substantive that had eluded you the first time around?

It would probably be the idea that the Wall of Sound changed every show. It was never set up exactly the same way twice. They would label speaker cabinets such that they’d know the 2” x 12” cabinets were for Garcia or the 1” x 15” cabinets were for Lesh’s giant 32’ tall stacks. But as far as how each of the individual cabinets were stacked up and angled at each show to achieve the optimal spread and throw of sound, it was never the same. Dan Healy made this point during one of our many conversations. It was designed to be adaptable to any space that they were in.

I also didn’t have an understanding of how much went into advancing a tour. The Dead really pioneered that. They had a revolving cast of folks who would go ahead a couple stops to check out the space a couple weeks before the Dead were scheduled to roll into town, in order to take note of the limitations or hurdles that they would have to overcome. Then they’d come back and report to the band, the management and the crew.

There’s a scene in the book from late ‘73 when Bob Matthews, who went back almost to the beginning of the band as an equipment manager, scouted out the Boston Music Hall. The Dead had performed there the year prior, but their sound system had grown such that, as he was advancing the Music Hall, he realized, “Oh, the stage isn’t going to fit all of our gear in the normal configuration.”

So it was backstage at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion where they were in the locker room, and he flipped around the coach’s chalkboard and sketched out the Boston plot. He was like, “Here’s how we’re going to have to array everything. We’re going to need to stack everything behind the band.” Then that Boston run was momentous insofar as it was the first time they stacked up everything in a unified backline behind the band.

I didn’t really have a complete understanding of the prep work that their sound techs would do. Dan Healy had 1/10 scale models of the sound system. He would basically build these little erector sets before tours just to do a mini dry run of what the sound system would look like and how it would be configured before they actually went and hit these venues.

There are these other little anecdotes that I was charmed and delighted to find out about. Sparky Raizene brought a hammock with him on the ‘74 tour, and once the full system was set up and the band was playing, he would go up to the top row of the scaffolding, hang his hammock and listen to the music. Courtenay Pollock had created the tie-dye speaker fronts in the early ‘70s, but they were removed because they weren’t allowing enough air to pass through. However, he ended up f lying some tie-dye banners from the top rung of the scaffolding at select Wall of Sound shows. He would climb up there with no harness or anything and just hang on for dear life while he put them in place.

Your book closes out at Sphere, where the speakers are behind the band and there are no monitors, just like the Wall of Sound. Can you talk about some of the other parallels?

I think the way I put it is that the Wall of Sound walked so the Sphere could run. I think you can draw a line in this perfect 50-year arc from the Wall of Sound to Sphere. You see so much of the DNA of the Wall of Sound in the Sphere. It’s just taken to a whole other level.

Like you mentioned, with both sound systems, everything is at the band’s back. The Wall of Sound was all about the point source idea of sound dispersion and you get the same exact thing in the Sphere. But instead of roughly 600 speakers, I think there’s like 167,000 speakers. Even the visual element of the Sphere has roots in the Wall of Sound, going back to the tie-dye rig era when the band was flying these mandala style tie-dyed speaker screens in front of the rig as a way of adding a visual dimension to the sound waves that were flowing out of the speakers. That really goes back to Owsley Stanley’s synesthesia— he could experience one sense through another. In the Sphere, you have that on four acres worth of a 16K resolution wraparound screen.

When I walked into the Sphere last year, I couldn’t help but pick up the lineage there from the Wall of Sound—even in that the Dead always wanted to build their own space on their home turf where they could have their sound system permanently set up exactly perfect and people could come see them perform there. That was an idea they wanted to actualize, although they never quite did. But at a certain point, when they were getting serious about building their own space, they went through a phase where they were thinking of it in terms of a Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic dome.

Again, it’s this perfect 50-year technological arc from one to the other. The night that I went last year, I also got the two-or-three-minute animated sequence of the Wall of Sound getting built. The Wall is still such a part of the Dead’s history and they know it, which is why they went to great lengths to animate it with this Pixar-style homage. I knew that visual was in the rotation, although, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it. But I did get to see it that night, and it wrapped up everything so perfectly.