The Grateful Dead's Wall Of Sound: A Musical Revolution [Episode 307]

Uncover the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead's innovative Wall Of Sound system with insights from author Brian Anderson. A captivating journey into the world of music technology and its influence on the industry today. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On this episode of Booked on Rock, the Grateful Dead's
Quest for Audio Perfection. This is the story of the
Wall of Sound. We're totally rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I mean, I'll leave you you're reading.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Little Hands says it's time to rock and roll up.
We are totally booked. Everybody. Welcome back to book don
Rock podcast for those about to read and rock. Am
Eric Senich very excited to talk about this book today
with this episode's guest who's making his first appearance on

(00:35):
the show, Brian Anderson. He's the author of Loud and Clear,
The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for
Audio Perfection. Brian, thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Thanks for having me, Eric. This is great.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
There are a lot of books on the Grateful Dead,
but this is a first here. This is the first
to really zero in on this topic, which is the
wall of sound. Right.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, there are so many books that are out there
on the Grateful Dead, and there's so much scholarship out
there on the Grateful Dead. Dead studies is like a
legitimate field of research, and all of that I think
speaks to the enduring force of the phenomenon of the

(01:15):
grafel Dead. Right that, like books are still coming out
about this band that is just about to well, you know,
currently sort of celebrating sixtieth anniversary, which is very crazy.
But I knew that going into this project that I
didn't want to just write another book about the Grapel Dead.
And you know, as a journalist, you want to break ground,

(01:41):
you want to be additive. And I knew that if
I was going to do this, that I couldn't just
write you know, fanfare, and I really couldn't just pander
to dead heads, right, And I say that lovingly, like
as a Deadhead myself, and as someone who is surrounded
by dead Heads people who love this music. I didn't

(02:01):
want to just pander to deadheads, like, I wanted to
sort of hit a crossover audience, right of people who
maybe aren't super familiar or even interested in the Dead's
music per se, But independent of how one feels about
the music, whether they enjoy it or not, I think
there's still so much for people to dig into in

(02:23):
this story. So all of that is to say that
I knew that if I was going to do this
book justice, because it's a massive story, that I really
had to break some new ground somehow, right, So there
was sort of a moment where early on, like when
the book project was starting to kind of gain momentum,

(02:44):
where I kind of had this realization, like I can't
believe no one else has written this book yet about
the Wall of Sound, right, because you know, this groundbreaking
piece of technology, the Wall of Sound still doom's large
and grateful dead lore and history, and you still see

(03:05):
it in the stage dressings in the form of like
you know, homages and the sphere or whatever. So yeah,
I was like, I can't believe no one has done
this book, but I guess it's going to be me.
I guess I'm going to be the one who's gonna
take this on. So it was a fun challenge, and
we're like a little bit over a month post release,

(03:29):
so it's it's crazy that it's out there in the
world now.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
There's also a personal connection for you. There's that moment
in November of twenty twenty one that you write about
in the book. Have me thinking of a scene out
of Indiana Jones. You have in your possession a very
special piece of dead history and it relates to the
Wall of Sounds. So tell us about that. How this
story is personal because your parents were at some legendary shows.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, for sure. I mean you can see right behind me.
So this that's the artifact.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
That's it. Yeah, it hangs out in my office wow
behind me.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
So this is a piece of the wall of sound.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
And for those who are listening just the audio version
of this, you got to go to YouTube and check
this out because it's right there.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, it's a hulking speaker busted up speaker cabinet that's
sitting right behind me in my office. And there was
an auction in late twenty twenty one through Southeyby's and
Southeby's partnered with Grateful Dead Productions to auction off around
one hundred and fifty lots of decommissioned Grateful Dead gear

(04:35):
and ephemera and so forth from the Grateful Dead's Northern
California warehouse. So I knew that this auction was going on,
but didn't really bother to start looking through sort of
scrolling through the lots and like the descriptions of the
items until there was like twenty four hours left to
place a bid. So you know, this was this wasn't

(04:58):
an in person auction. This was like all remote sort
of digital auction. So here I am sitting on my
couch scrolling through the items with twenty four hours to go,
and you know, there's so much neat stuff that was
up for auction. But I'm a writer. I have a
very limited budget, and I didn't have hundreds of thousands

(05:18):
of dollars to blow on Garcia amplifiers from the Wall
of Sound. But I came across this item here that
had the lowest starting bid. I was like, gee, just
out of curiosity, like what's going for the lowest bid?
And it's this busted up speaker cabinet that I now own.
And compared to some of the other items in that auction,

(05:41):
this had a very kind of bare bones description. It
just said monitor speaker used onstage. And then it had
like the dimensions of the box compared with some of
the other items. And that auction that had like super
detailed descriptions, and some of the bees worked with a

(06:02):
long time former Grateful Dead roady Steve Parrish to sort
of like fill in some of the details on some
of these items, and so some of them had really
detailed descriptions, whereas this was it was very bare bones
in terms of like information about it. But I had
already looked at enough imagery and photos of the Wall

(06:23):
of Sound to that point, really across my entire life.
And I'll sort of speak to that personal component in
a moment here, But I had already looked at enough
photos of the Wall of Sound to that point in
late twenty twenty one to know just kind of looking
at like the vintage and the condition of this cabinet
that I was pretty sure it was from this early

(06:45):
seventies era, so like seventy three seventy four, kind of
right in like peak Wall of Sound era. So I
put a bit in on it, and I ended up winning,
and I had it shipped to my parents' house, my
childhood home out in the suburbs of Chicago, where it was.

(07:06):
It was cheaper to ship out there than it was
to send it to my apartment here in the city.
So this massive crate arrives, and yeah, as I describe
it in the book, it was like something out of
Indiana Jones, like some ancient artifact being moved between museums
or something. Right, So this huge crate shows up and

(07:30):
with my folks were in their garage and we open
it up, right and the first thing I did was
I stuck my head inside of it. So you know,
you can for those who are watching on on YouTube,
can you can see there's two of these twelve inch
speaker cones that are in this type of speaker, and
there were a bunch of there were a bunch of
this type of speaker within the Wall of Sound, but

(07:52):
one of the twelve inch cones got cannibalized at some point,
so probably post Wall of Sound the dead in a
later configuration of their sound system, someone probably said like, hey,
we need a twelve inch JBL cone. Just grab it
out of that busted old speaker. So like, there's just
this gaping hole in it, right, So the first thing

(08:13):
I did after my folks and I opened this box
up is I stuck my head inside that hole. And
immediately I picked up a couple of clues that kind
of confirmed my hunch that this was in fact right
from that Wall of Sound era seventy three seventy four.
There's some dates that are stamped inside of it that
confirmed that hunch. So that really set the book into

(08:38):
high gear. I knew that owning a piece of this
sound system, this artifact could provide this window into telling
this much bigger story about obsession and Titanic human achievement
and the Grateful Dead to unrelenting quest for audio perfection. Right,

(08:59):
So I mentioned my parents being there and how that
was kind of special, and that feeds into your question
about the personal dimension of this story, and that is
I was raised by two hardcore deadheads who were seeing
the band beginning in the late nineteen sixties here in
Chicago and in the Tri State area up in Madison, Wisconsin,

(09:23):
over in Des Moines, Iowa. Chicago kind of in this
Midwest region. The Midwest was a real crucial proving ground
for the Grateful Dead and their amazing sound system as
it was scaling up to the wall sound. So both
of them were going to shows right in this era,
and both my parents were kind of orbiting each other
and the band at this time. My mother when she

(09:46):
was still in high school, when she was still a teenager,
she got hooked up with a local promoter that was
putting on big rock shows in Chicago at the time.
So not only the Grateful Dead but three other band
going at the time. So Black Sabbath who Ozzy Osbourne
just passed away today, So.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Like yes, rest in peace. Yet on the day we're
recording this ye.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
They were recording this Yes. So she worked some Black
Sabbath shows, Hawkwind, The Who, the Kinks, every band that
was going on back in that era. She my mother
would work day of production odd jobs backstage at those shows.
And at the same time, my dad was going to
the shows, but he was in the crowd right like

(10:30):
as a member of the audience. And then fast forward
into the eighties, after they had met each other, my
dad got hooked up with The Grateful Dead's Midwest local crew.
So he was a stage hand and he would roll
out the ornate Afghan rugs that the band would perform on,
and he would help the roadies rig up the speaker

(10:53):
arrays that they were using at that time, a much
different type of sound system in the late eighties than
the Wall of Sound, right, But a lot of that
work that they did in this crucial early to mid
seventies era sort of informed where they were going with
their sound later in their career. So all that is
to say, I sort of grew up with this music
around me. Some of my earliest flashes of memory are

(11:15):
of the Grateful Dead performing on stage. So my very
first concert, when I was three years old, just a
toddler in nineteen eighty nine, was the Grateful Dead up
at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. So my dad was working
those shows. He was sort of at the end of
his Midwest local crew stage hand tenure at the end

(11:35):
of the eighties. So I just grew up with this music,
and I absorbed so much knowledge through my parents over
the years and on long family road trips, long drives
grown up, my folks would sort of regale my sister
and I with stories about seeing this band back in

(11:57):
the early seventies when they were performing through this mountain
of speakers right and in this sound system just kept growing.
Every time you'd see the band, it got bigger and
bigger and bigger. So it's really just captivated me my
entire life. And over the years, I just kind of
did the survey of reading every Grateful Dead book out there, right,

(12:20):
Like going back to your point about there being so
many books about the dead that have been written, and
you know, if you're going to write a book about anything,
you kind of have to do that survey of every
other book that's been written about that topic, and even
adjacent books just to get like that lay of the land.
So I feel like I've kind of been doing that
my whole life, just like working through all of the

(12:42):
existing dead literature and dead books out there. So when
it finally came time to write this book, I had
done a lot of legwork and a lot of groundwork
had been laid. Of course I had to finally sit
down and write the thing, right, But I feel like
I've kind of been leading up to this my whole life.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Way Book on Rock podcast will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
We're gonna take a break, He'll be back.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
What was it that made this particular sound system so
extraordinary for not just the band but the audience.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
I think it was the clarity of the sound was remarkable.
The wall of sound was really six individual pas, so
each musician had their own stack and they could control
everything from right there on the stage. So the wall

(13:36):
sound kind of got rid of the need for a
front of house mixer, someone like out in the crowd,
kind of right at a sweet spot in a mixing
booth mixing right. The dad still had folks in their
circles who would be out in the venue at points
during a show to be listening, and they would come
back and report back to the band like, hey, we
can take out a little bit of this, add a

(13:58):
little bit more of that. But the band was mixing
everything right there on stage, so they could respond note
by note and beat by beat the energy that was
feeding off of the audience, right. But because each musician
had their own stack, their own individual pa, effectively, the
wall of sound eliminated what is known as intermodulation distortion

(14:23):
by having no two sounds go through any one particular speaker.
So the clarity was just pristine. It was like crystalline,
and people who saw the band at any of these
shows that they were performing with the wall sound still
talk about that clarity. And it was loud for sure,

(14:45):
you know, like on stage noise level readings through the
wall sound would measure at one hundred and twenty decibels, right,
which is about as loud as a jet engine at
close range. That's really loud. That's like enough to to
do permanent hearing damage. But the noise, the sound was
so clear and so inoffensive that you could be out

(15:10):
in the audience and hold a normal conversation if you wanted.
It was that clear. So I think the clarity is
really what made it so special, and related to that,
I think the wall of sound, the connection between the
dead audience and the dead the musicians was always crucial, right.

(15:33):
They were always in this symbiotic relationship, and the fans
were always as much a part of the show or
the experience as the band was. And with the wall
of Sound, they got rid of traditional monitor speakers that
are like at the musician's feet right through which the
band can sort of hear themselves playing, and they moved

(15:57):
all of those monitors behind the musicians. So if you
look at photos of the wall of sound, everything is
behind the band in a unified back line like a
literal wall.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Right. The front cover of the book is a good
example exactly.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, that effect was twofold. Basically, the wall of sound
effectively was the band's monitor, right. But because of that,
the musicians in the audience all heard the same thing,
so they were all in the same sonic envelope kind
of trap.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
No matter where you were sitting or standard.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Matter where you were sitting exactly. And that was a goal,
was to ensure that the person who was sitting in
the very back seat in an indoor hall or like
an outdoor stadium, whatever the case was, that that person
in the furthest backseat was getting a quality of experience

(16:53):
that was on par with someone who was right up front.
So the dead went to great pains, and like they're
their audio wizards and their sound technicians and consultants and
roadies and all these people who were involved in making
this thing go went to great pains to be sure
that one hundred percent of the best sound was going

(17:14):
to exactly where it needed to go in any venue, right,
and every venue is a little different. So if you
look at photos of the wall of sound at all
of these shows, the configuration is a little different at
every stop because they were, you know, taking acoustic readings
of every space that they were going to play in

(17:35):
so that when they could set it up, you know,
you might see like a couple speakers kind of angled
off this way right to like project into the upper
reaches or like you know, angled down a little bit.
So that was sort of by design. The wall of
sound was never set up exactly the same way twice.
But yeah, I think to your question, it was it
was really the clarity that made it so special and

(17:58):
that it sort of dissolve the barriers between the band,
the performers, and the audience so that everyone was sort
of in it together. I think those are like the
really the two key takeaways about what made this thing
really so unique and special.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
That second chapters titled The Mother Rig nineteen sixty four
to nineteen sixty six to get into the eventual formation
of the Warlocks who became the Grateful Dead and the
Mother Rig that was the origin of the Dead's quest
for audio perfection. So let's go back to those early
days the Early Dead PA. Jered Garcia's mom gifted him
with the equipment that became the Dead's first PA.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
That's right, Yeah, And in the same Selby's auction at
which I acquired the artifact here, when I was scrolling
through those one hundred and fifty lots, I came across
this pair of speakers and the item description read the
earliest speakers in the Grateful Dead story and a pair

(19:01):
of clipsch speakers, which at the time in the mid
sixties where those were pretty nice, those were pretty high end.
The average household in the mid nineteen sixties probably couldn't
afford to have that sort of gear that was for
like more kind of aficionados. More like audio file types
would seek out that sort of gear. But I'm scrolling

(19:25):
through the lots and I'm reading the description of this
pair of clip speakers, and I go on to read
that it was Ruth Garcia, Jerry Garcia's mother who realized
very early on that her young son's band was onto something,

(19:46):
so she purchased these speakers for the Warlocks. Right, they
weren't known as the Dead yet, so this is really
really early early days in the history of the band.
You know, they were playing pizza parlors in Menlo Park, right,
and like little dive bars in the Bay Area, So

(20:07):
those were the sort of spaces that they were playing
at the time, really just kind of getting their chops,
kind of earning their stripes. But I loved that that
it was Garcia's mother, who wasn't macan Bank at the time, right,
but who still believed in what her son was doing
and purchased really nice gear for them, so nice that

(20:30):
like from the get go, this band sort of had
a leg up on most any other bands out there
at the time. It was unheard of for a band
to roll into a club with their own like their
own rig, you know, their own pa, like that, and
people took notice in the book. You know, I speak

(20:52):
with folks who were seeing the Warlocks in this era
in sixty five at some of their very first shows,
and they noticed right away, and you know, they sort
of caught wind that, you know, Garcia's mother purchased them
this really sweet gear, and they took notice of that
for sure. But I knew that this story wasn't just

(21:16):
going to be the story of the year nineteen seventy four.
In Grateful Dead history, nineteen seventy four is a year
that a lot of people when they think about Grateful
Dead and Wall of Sound, they think about nineteen seventy four,
which was the culmination, the full expression of the big,
big system. But I knew that if I was going
to tell this story, I kind of had to start

(21:36):
at the very beginning with this very first iteration of
the Grateful Dead sound system, the mother rig as I
call it, right, and it's sort of a play on
words there. But I knew that I had to start
there with that embryonic system and then just sort of
show and track how it sort of evolved and grew
over the years on into the seventies right to this

(22:00):
much bigger bigger thing. And you can see with each
chapter in the book, each chapter is mapped onto basically
an iteration or a version of the Grateful Dead sound
system as they were kind of figuring things out and
like trying different things out, buying different off the shelf gear,
and then by the late sixties or early seventies starting

(22:22):
to build more of their own custom stuff. So yeah,
each chapter is like a version of the Dead sound System.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
It's like the Yellow Brick Road. All the people. It's
like Jerry's Dorothy and he's just getting all these people
that are involved that help to create the sound, like Bear,
Rightousley Stanley is it's pronounced ously right, it.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Was as Ousley. Yeah, Ousley Stanley.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
He provided the band LSD, but he also knew his
stuff when it came to sound equipment, and he claimed
to be able to see sound thanks to a diving accident,
and that leads to the Walls sound. Was a writer,
Steve Silverman, a dead head and science writer who felt
he was autistic, which would be utilized to great results.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Right, Yeah, Owsley Stanley aka Bear.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Is always that where the dancing Bears comes from? Is
that have any.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
There was an artist later on he sort of made
that design. He drew those bears. But yeah, the name
like the Bears, that sort of an homage, sort of
a tribute to Bear. They called Owsley Bear because he
was very her suit. He was like kind of a
hairy dude. Yeah, he was the Bear. But Owsley is
a huge and important character in this story. He first

(23:38):
saw the Warlocks. They weren't the Grateful Dead yet in
late nineteen sixty five, he saw them performing at one
of the Acid Tests, which were these psychedelic fueled audio
visual happenings that were taking place on the West Coast
from Portland down to Los Angeles, and they were organized
by the novelist Ken Keasey, who was sort of riding

(24:03):
high on the success of his breakout novel One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he had this sort of
troop of Mary pranksters who were kind of like roving
performance artists. So Keezy would throw these acid tests right,
and the Warlocks and then eventually the Grateful Dead were
sort of the in house band at the acid tests.

(24:24):
But the LSD that was fueling these events was manufactured
by Owsley Stanley, who had a massive underground LSD manufacturing operation,
and they were making millions of hits of LSD. Right, So,
Owsley sees the band in late nineteen sixty five, and

(24:46):
he's so taken with their sound that he basically has
this realization that he has to follow this band kind
of to the ends of the earth and contribute to
their very revolutionary project in whatever way he could. And
initially that took the form of funding for better equipment. So,

(25:09):
using funds that he was making from his successful acid empire,
he would funnel those funds to outfit the Dead with
really really good gear. And eventually, after about a year
of the Dead performing through the Mother rig, they kind
of mothballed that system and Ousley sort of took the

(25:33):
role as their first official soundman. He was their patron,
their original patron, but he also very quickly kind of
became their soundman, and he said, hey, why don't you
use my home Hi fi system as your rig as
your sound system. That is known as the Ousley Stein,
which is a combination of Ousley and Einstein. People called

(25:54):
him Ousley Stein. So that's chapter three, right, the Ousley
Stein Rig. So in early nineteen sixty six, the Dead
were living for a couple of months in Los Angeles,
Ousley was paying their rent, He was paying for all
of their groceries, and they had to adhere to his

(26:15):
very strict all meat, all milk diet. He had some
really interesting ideas, and he was such a force of
influence that he kind of brought everyone in with him. Right,
So he's like, if I'm going to be paying your
rent and buying you the best gear available, you're going
to have to stick to my diet.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
But as the Dead were rehearsing and performing around LA
using his home Hi Fi system that was now their
new rig, he would be high on his own supply
of LSD and he would experience the Dead sound flowing
out of the speakers, these big all tech voice of

(26:59):
the theater speaker which you know you'd see in like
movie theaters at the time, and he would see the
sound waves coming out of these speakers as color, interacting
waves of color is what he described it as. And
Owsley had synesthesia, which is a condition where you experience

(27:22):
one sense through another, so he saw sound as color.
And this happened on a couple of occasions when he
was watching the Dead perform and it had such a
profound it sort of it shook him and he was like,
I have to remember what this feels like. And over

(27:43):
the years he would sort of set them on this
course to eventually build up the big system, the big
Wall of Sound, and that big system was really kind
of a vehicle for Ousley to kind of conjure that
experience of taking in the sound as color. So he
had some pretty out there ideas and Owsley was very

(28:08):
much the force of ideas behind this whole project, and
at times that could bring him into conflict with folks
on the Dead Road crew or like you know, some
of the sound texts, little turf wars started to enter
the picture, but they needed that force of ideas which

(28:30):
Ousley could provide. They needed that to sort of point
them in the direction of where they needed to go.
But Ousley also needed folks with hands on expertise to
really actualize some of the ideas that he had. But
a lot of individuals will kind of take credit for
the Wall of Sound. I came across this in my reporting,

(28:53):
when in reality, it took this whole cast of characters,
and there's a list of characters at the beginning of
the book. There's fifty seven characters who are like prominent
in the book. So there's a lot of people in
this story, and it took all of them coming to
the table and being in the room to make this
thing happen. But if there's one person who, or rather

(29:17):
without whom, the Wall of Sound probably would never have
come to be, it would be Ously. Very early on,
he set them on a path to always be questing
for a better sound. And you mentioned the late great
Steve Silberman telling me about Owsley probably being on the spectrum.

(29:38):
And Silberman wrote a fantastic book called NeuroTribes, which really
changed the conversation around autism and what it means to
be on the spectrum. So Silberman really knew this stuff,
and he spent a couple of days at a Grateful
Dead scholar's conference with Ousley, and he walked way convince

(30:00):
that Ousley was on the spectrum in the best possible way.
And part of that manifested in Owsley's aversion to unclean signals, right,
So that fed into this wall of Sound being basically
distortion free by eliminating intermodulation distortion, which I sort of

(30:20):
talked about earlier. Yeah, Owsley's aversion to like distortion and
uncleaned signals from very early on. That set them on
this course to like build the ultimate sound system that
delivered pure not just loud, but pure sound. That was
the goal.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Booked on rock podcast, We'll be back after this. You've
got to come back with me. Where to the future
you write in the book quote By the early seventies,
when the wall was further scaled up and they started
seeing real success and employees shared in the wealth. The
Dead pulled in tens of thousands of dollars on big
stadium gigs and festivals, but even those figures won't cover

(31:00):
the organizations ballooning overhead as the band's rig including labor costs,
accounted for an ever growing percentage of every Dead dollar.
Talk about the challenges the Dead were facing now in
the early seventies. They had the sound, but the band
was now in a state of chaos just trying to
keep all that together.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
There were so many individuals who were on the payroll.
It took this small army of people to keep this
sound system going night after night after night. It was
a herculean task, and it took so many people behind
the scenes to make this thing happen. And from the

(31:41):
very early days, the Dead had this ethic where they
would always funnel money back into furthering the sound. So
through the end of the Wall Sound, even the musicians themselves,
the band members were kept on very modest cost of

(32:01):
living salaries because they were they had a lot of
mouths to feed, that a lot of people on the payroll,
but they also allocated a big chunk of every grateful
that dollar to furthering the sound. But at a certain
point that ethic kind of caught up to them. Throughout
the you know, the late sixties, that was a very

(32:21):
righteous approach. We're going to keep ourselves on like very
meager salaries, kind of live communally. Whatever money we make,
we're just going to like funnel it back into like
getting better and better gear. Right, But eventually, as the
whole operation was scaling up, things were becoming more mechanized,
more success, they're playing in bigger spaces. That approach to

(32:45):
furthering the sound by always funneling money back into their
gear it kind of became untenable, kind of became unsustainable,
and by nineteen seventy four, there was a fuel crisis
on at the time, so like the cost of gasoline

(33:07):
alone was astronomical. They also had to often pay rent
at two venues simultaneously, so there was one wall of sound.
There was like one set of all the six hundred
plus speakers and the dozens of amplifiers, right, but there

(33:27):
were two identical sets of staging and scaffolding, and those
staging and scaffolding sets would leapfrog venue to venue, so
that when crew A would roll into a given town,
crew B would already have the scaffolding and the staging
all set up so that they could just basically load

(33:48):
in all of the gear, get wired up, and then
those crews would just flip flop kind of leapfrog from
show to show. But they had to pay rent, you know,
at two venues sort of simultaneously, So that's a huge
cost and right, just also the overhead of paying all
of these people who were working for the dead at

(34:08):
the time. Very early in nineteen seventy four, the writing
became very clear on the wall, right that this wasn't
going to last. So by the summer of nineteen seventy four,
some band meetings were taking place where they talked about,
you know what, this isn't really fun anymore, and fun

(34:30):
was so key to the Grateful Dead project from the
very beginning. Garcia in particular, was like, this is about
having fun, right.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, I was about to say I love that was
his thing about having fun.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
It's all about having fun, yeah, man. But by summer
of seventy four, like the burnout was creeping in the
grind of the road. The late Grateful Dead Rody Joe Winslow,
who's a character in this book, he talked about how
the road turned you into gristle. That was his word
for it. So just burn out hard, drugs starting to

(35:03):
creep in, right, and that just kind of that takes
its toll. And you know they were burning money too,
just to keep this thing going.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
So things they never planned when they started. You just
don't think you're going to get to that point. You
don't even when you start a band. You're just thinking,
I just want to go out there and play, make
enough money to go out to the next gig, put
some food on the table, and that's all we need
and we're.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Good, exactly, yeah, Because it was all just kind of
this natural progression over really like the first grand ten
year era of this band, from like sixty five through
the end of seventy four. It was all just kind
of this progression, right, and they had no way of knowing.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
And then it happens again after touch of gray. Then
they have a whole new set of problems.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Then like, yeah, I think things get really crazy.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
At parking lots are overcrowded with people. There's just all
this thing. Yeah, things they could never have anticipated. It
never have anticipated that term wall of sound. By the way,
for those listening and watching who may be wondering where
did that all come from? The first documented term you
have this in the book may very well have been
on February fourth, nineteen seventy. This was at the Family

(36:16):
Dog on the Great Highway in San Francisco. How many
people were could you fit in the Family Dog? This
sounds like a couple hundred people.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Couple hundred Max Yeah Dead.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Played alongside Santana and Jefferson Airplane. How about those three
bands at the Family Dog. A reporter from the Yonkers
Herald Statesman Robert W. Newbert wrote, by the time Grateful
Dead leader Jerry Garcia brought the jam to a triumphant halt.
Members of the audience were straining on tiptoes toward the

(36:46):
shattering wall of Sound. When the jam ended, most of
the crowd was emotionally and physically exhausted. So there is
most likely the origins of the wall of sound by
seventy two, logistical issues, mounting costs for equipment, how many
people it's going to take to move and set it up.
Now we're talking about the safety of the road crew,

(37:08):
right insurance their tech Tim Scully said, you're not going
to get a union got to do this stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, you know, it's it's amazing when I was just
doing the reporting and researching for this book that no
one died as a direct result of working on this
wall of sound. Thankfully, at a time before OSHA standards
were enforced. Right here, they were stacking up three stories
tall worth of speakers one hundred feet wide, quite often

(37:37):
at like outdoor venues, a little bit more along the
lines of like eighty to eighty five feet wide indoors.
But this massive assembly of equipment, they carried their own
power supply with them. They had enough power to light
up six blocks of tracked homes because they couldn't rely
on venues to supply enough juice to make this thing

(38:00):
go right, So they had so much power with them.
But I was amazed that nobody fell off the top
rung of scaffolding and bashed their head open. Nobody got
crushed under a stack of speakers that went thirty two
feet in the air, right, Nobody got electrocuted to death.

(38:20):
Some people definitely got the shocks of their lives working
on this thing. And there's some pretty wild stories about
dead roadies and texts told me about working on on
amplifier in like a dark backstage area and getting the
shock of their life and being thrown you know, ten
feet back, you know, wow, nearly blowing themselves up working

(38:43):
on generators backstage and so forth. But it's amazing that
nobody bid it. No one died as a direct result
of this thing.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Booked on Rock Podcast. Will be back after this. We
suspense is killing me. Can you share the story about
the fire department in Munich. They're hassling that. They're saying,
you guys are not up to code. They doubled their crew.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah, that very famous europe seventy two tour they hit Munich,
and the fire marshal and the fire brigade were like
really hassling the crew when they were setting everything up.
You know, they were like looking at the manifest of gear,
like the inventory that they had with them, asking all
these questions about like how much power they're going to

(39:27):
be using and so forth. The show gets going and
the fire Brigade in Munich doubled the number of fire
brigadiers I guess present on the scene, so like the
venue was crawling with folks from the fire brigade. They
were backstage. They were standing on the stage behind the

(39:47):
back line, which was like kind of a no no
at the time. They were out in the crowd. And
supposedly some of these fire brigadiers had buckets of sand
to like snuff out fires. Right, so they were convinced
that the Grateful Dead were like using up so much
power through this like crazy electronic beast, that they were

(40:08):
going to set the venue on fire. Right. So, as
the show got going, on top of Garcia's on top
of one of his amplifiers, he had like a big
hash joint, right that he.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Was, well, it was the exact wording from the book,
A huge, fat, badly rolled hash joint.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
There you go, a huge, fat, badly rolled hash joint.
So and that was like sat on top of his amplifier,
you know, the smoke from that was like going up
into the into the lights, and apparently one of the
fire captains freaked out and instead of a bucket of sand,
got a bucket of water and threw it like kind

(40:47):
of over Garcia's amp and the whole place went dark.
You know, the audience in response started you know, lighting
matches right in the darkness, and that like pissed off
the fire captain even more, right, So eventually they got
the power restored to finish the show. And there's some

(41:08):
conflicting reports because you know, memories from this time. It's
memory is a funny thing, right, And I talk about
this in the book, but there's some people who remember
that incident leading to like half of Munich being like
blacked out that night, and supposedly you could hear, you know,
later on after the show at night, you could hear

(41:30):
like transformers around town.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Just like oating.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, so that sort of thing was just sort of
illustrative of the dead being way out on the edge,
insisting that they do everything their own way, and you know,
they knew they couldn't rely on some of these old
decrepit European venues to like supply enough power. So what

(41:57):
they would do is they would clamp into the main
like the municipal line, which is crazy. They would like
drill down into the ground and like clamp on to
like get enough juice.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Right. It just shows you how serious they were about
the sound. Absolutely serious they were about the live show.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, like whatever it took, they're going to
do it. But there's all sorts of stories in the
book about like, you know, close calls like that, you know,
and everything was electric. It was such an electric time.
Like electricity is such a kind of character in this story,
especially with the Wall of Sound. And yeah, really amazed
that like nobody nobody got fried to death quite honestly,

(42:35):
but there were some close calls.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
Tell me about the birch tree in Finland. They discovered
this in the early seventies and this tree is very
important to the Wall of Sound for sure.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, they realized some of their audio wizard types who
were working at Olympic, which is a still active custom
instrument and electronics company but was co founded by bear
by Ousley Stanley in nineteen sixty nine. It was him
and a fellow named Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner. These

(43:09):
are all characters that you can read about in the book.
But it was the folks at Alembic who landed on
a particular type of material in which to build these
cabinets for the Wall of Sound. So the artifact behind
me is made of this material. It's finish birch wood,
Baltic birch. This stuff is like basically bulletproof. It can

(43:34):
take a beating tailor made for a life on the
road with a rock and roll band right like, it
can withstand a beating, but it could also like hold
in like the internal reflections inside of the speaker. So
they were getting whole shipments of this Baltic birch that
would arrive at mcbeethe Hardwood, a hardwood store in Berkeley.

(43:56):
So they would buy the entire shipment of Baltic birds
that would come into mcbeef. They would buy all of
it and they would take it to their workshop in
Santa Rafel, California, that was the Dead's workshop, and they
would also take it to the Alembic workshop, which was
in San Francisco at the time, and they would construct

(44:18):
hundreds of these speaker cabinets out of this fourteen ply
finish birch. That's like the ply that they landed on,
and I love it. Like I picked up a story
in the reporting of the book that on one hand,
they were doing some real high flute heady acoustic engineering
in terms of what they were doing to assemble the

(44:41):
wall of sound, vocal microphone system and so forth. But
then also some of the stress testing that they would
do for these boxes was just pretty kind of almost
like low brow, pretty kind of brute force testing. And
some of these boxes they would just take them to
the parking lot and throw them up in the air
as high as they could and to see like when

(45:02):
they landed if they could just withstand before so just
getting thrown around. So yeah, Baltic birch, that is the
material that was prized within the Dead Crew, And supposedly
they caught wind of that material from an ex con
who was building high pressure cement forms building the Bay

(45:25):
bridge for example, So they would use Baltic birch when
they would construct the massive pillars that would basically hold
up something like the Bay Bridge. So supposedly this ex
con sort of turned them on to hey, like baltic birch,
you might want to look into Baltic birch it's really rugged.
I think it might be good for building speakers, right,

(45:45):
you know, at the time, like the Dead were open
to any idea, if there was a good enough proposal,
they were open to it.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
It's almost fictional. It's like Robert Redford in the Natural World,
totally wonder Boy the bats.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Made out of a tree.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
Brian Anderson, he's the author of Loud and Clear, The
Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound. In The Quest for Audio
Perfection January of nineteen seventy four, the final element in
the building of the Wall of Sound arrives. There was
a center cluster being developed. Tell us what the center
cluster is, What was the end result that the crew
was hoping for with this, and how do they go
about making it happen.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
So if you look at any photo of nineteen seventy
four peak wall of Sound, you can actually see it
on the cover of the book.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Here that's from where by the way, which city is at.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
This was in Los Angeles. This was the Hollywood Bowl,
an amazing outdoor show. But you'll see in the middle
of the system there there's this kind of death star
looking cluster of speakers, and that was the vocal cluster.
That was arguably the first time that a curved speaker array.

(46:55):
So this cluster, it was curved to throw or like
sweep the sound across an audience, right, So it wasn't
just like a flat surface. It was curved so that
they could throw the sound across an audience. And the
theory in the mathematics existed for a curved array, but
no one had built one and then flown one, suspended

(47:19):
one up in the air, and the Dead were the
first to do that. They built that in early nineteen
seventy four at a local fabrication shop that were friendly
with the Dead, and it was a couple of roadies
and the designs were drawn up by some of the
sound technician types Olympics Ron Wickersham, another individual named John Curl.

(47:45):
Some of those folks were sort of involved in actually
designing this thing, but when it came time to build it,
it was some of the Dead roadies who kind of
led the charge to build this curved array. And to
that point, if you look at photos of the Gravel
Dead sound system in late nineteen seventy three, for instance,
and even very early nineteen seventy four, you can see

(48:08):
in the middle of the system. They were using like
individual cabinet stacks just sort of like fanned in a curve.
But here was the first time once they had it
built and it debuted in May in Reno, Nevada, which
was the first time that the wall of sound proper
was set up outdoors. They debuted this curved center cluster,

(48:34):
which is really like a sonic sculpture because it was curved,
and again that was in order to throw and sweep
the sound across the audience. And they would, you know,
depending on the configuration of the venue, they could tilt
this cluster up or down, so quite often it would

(48:55):
be like a four degree tilt downward, and that was
just like the optimal spread for the cluster. But yeah,
like I said, that was really the first instance that
a curved speaker array was ever you know, suspended. So
they hung it with these heavy duty granger winches and

(49:16):
that was the first time that had ever been done before.
And if you go to any concert today you go
to like a giant stadium, you go see Metallica right
in like an eighty thousand seed stadium, to like a
two thousand seat auditorium or down to just a little

(49:37):
beer soaked dive bar that puts on shows. You're probably
you are going to see a curved speaker somewhere in there.
So that's, you know, just one lasting legacy of the
wall of sound, the whole idea of a curved speaker,
And there were a whole other there's so many other

(50:00):
like sonic firsts that the Grateful Dead notched through to
the wall sound and their adjacent audio activity. Right, they
were the first two stack speakers in a linear array.
You look at the wall sound and it's stacks and
stacks and stacks of speakers, and today that's kind of

(50:21):
like a no brainer, but no one had done that
in the early seventies. Phil Lesh, the bass player of
The Grateful Dead, his stacks alone were thirty two feet tall,
thirty two feet being the height of a standing basewave.
So they're like to get the full effect of a
base wave, we need to build his stacks thirty two
feet tall. Right, So the whole idea of like a

(50:42):
linear array, a stack of speakers that can propagate sound
like as it moves forward. You see that everywhere today.
You sometimes see like curved hanging arrays on the side
of a stage. That's the Dead. That's the lasting impact
of the wall sound right there. You also see it

(51:03):
with the lay towers. If you go to a big,
gigantic show, there's the sound reinforcement or the PA system
that's on the stage, but then out in the crowd
there's often like a ring of these delay towers, so
speakers that are projected out into the audience to account
for the distance that sound needs to travel to hit

(51:24):
the upper decks of the stadium. And the Dead were
the first to really figure out the lay towers. In
the summer of nineteen seventy three, there were a series
of shows where they kind of figured that out. So
they were the first with so many things when it
comes to sound reinforcement as we know it today.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
The book Down Rock podcast will be back after this.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
You're on our like to ask for a recess.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Find the bookdown Rock website at bookdownrock dot com. There
you can find all the back episodes of the show.
Late this episode in video and audio links to all
of the platforms where you can listen to the podcast,
plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
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Find your local independent bookstore. Find out all the latest

(52:11):
hot rockbook releases, and before you go, check out the
booked on rock online store. Pick up some booked on
rock merch. It's all at booked on rock dot Com,
March twenty third of nineteen seventy four. You write, the
Dead's years long pursuit of audio perfection had come to
this moment. It's billed as the sound test. The Dead
ran ads for the show at the count Palace in
San Francisco on the radio for a month. This is

(52:34):
when the band and the audience would be the same.
How does that night go for the band, the crew,
and the audience.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Yes, that was a very momentous date in the evolution
of the Wall of Sound, and right like I wrote,
like they had kind of been building to that. So
there were a couple shows. There were three shows in
February of nineteen seventy four at the WINTERLND in Tem Francisco,
a smaller space than the Cow Palace. That Cow Palace show,

(53:01):
March twenty third, nineteen seventy four. Some people sort of
point to that as like kind of like the debut
of the Wall of Sound, And I sort of take
issue with that because I think, as you read in
the book, I really think like some of the first
wall of sound shows were like late nineteen seventy three,
where everything was behind the band, But that show in

(53:21):
March of nineteen seventy four was really like they had
the room to breathe, to really like set that whole
thing up. But there were still snags. At the beginning
of playing in the band, the whole system drops out
and the musicians were sort of totally exposed, naked to
the audience when that happened, right because they had eliminated

(53:44):
the monitors at the musician's feet, so like they were
right there with the audience when that kind of thing happened,
and like the whole song falls apart. They needed to
like you know, fix something that went down in the system.
But by that point their road crew were so kind
of dialed in, and like the divisions of labor were
like such that it was very clear, like you know,

(54:06):
if something went down on stage right or if something
went down on stage left, certain individuals would sort of
be like quick to hop on fixing whatever needed to
get fixed. Yeah, things fall apart at the beginning of
playing in the band, but like they recover, it was
an amazing show. It was later released as a dix Picks.
So Dick lot Valla, for those who don't know The

(54:29):
Grateful Debt's original archivist, he had a series of official releases.
He would release live shows, so that Copalace Sound Test
was eventually released as a dix Picks. It's a great show.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
It's Volume twenty four, Volume twenty four.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
There you go, yeah, But then I think you really
start to hear the wall sound like in its full effect.
By like May of nineteen seventy four, May and June
of nineteen seventy four, I think everything had clicked into place.
If you listen to the indoor show in Missoula, Montana
in May of nineteen seventy four, the clarity that I

(55:07):
talked about is just undeniable. It's amazing. You listen to
this recording that's, you know, over fifty years old at
this point, and it's pristine. It's amazing. But yeah, I
really feel like every show leading up to and through
nineteen seventy four was such an event and that they
could pull it off. There was always going to be

(55:28):
like some technical difficulties. Bob Weir In particular, he had
a couple of lines pretty much every show, a song
or two, and he'd be like, all right, well bear
with us, we're experiencing our first technical difficulty of the evening.
Like that was kind of par for course, but that
was also kind of like the charm. They were way
out on the cutting edge.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
What was the show in Miami in seventy four they
played something called Sea Stones? What was Sea Stones?

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Sea Stones was a piece of ambient music, computer music really,
and it was written by an electronic musician and composer
named Ned Lagan who met the Dead in nineteen seventy
when he was a student at MIT, and him and

(56:13):
Phil Lesh really hit it off because Lesh was like
a student of avant garde music, right, So him and
Ned really really hit it off, and Ned got the
invitation to basically come out to California. So all through
you know, seventy seventy one, seventy two, seventy three, and
then again at seventy four, here and there, not every show,

(56:35):
but Ned would sit in and play keyboards and some
piano as well, so I would sort of consider him
like a member of the band. In those years, not
a lot of people know his name.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
But kind of like a Bruce Hornsby type of.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Thing, exactly right. So Ned had been working on this
piece of computer ambient music, which at the time was
like so out there, like no one was really doing this.
Ned was the first person to perform with a computer
on a stage, which is amazing to think about nowadays.

(57:08):
But Phil, being very into like avant garde music, collaborated
with Ned on this piece of music called Sea Stones,
and during the intermission of Around I believe like just
over twenty shows in nineteen seventy four with the full
wall of sound the intermission, so between like set one

(57:28):
and set two, Ned and Phil would come out and
they would perform Seastones, which would be usually between like
fifteen maybe close to twenty minutes or so, and people
really didn't know what to make of it at the time.
You know, it's just very kind of like harsh dissonant feedback.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Not drums in space type of thing.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
It was sort of a kind of a precursor to Space.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
Because Mickey Hart is into that stuff, and I'm sure
Mickey Hart dug that to.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Mickey Hart like very much into that stuff show. But
it was interesting, like in one of my interviews with Ned,
he considers sea stones in the same continuum of the dead.
They did feedback in the late sixties, you know, feedback,
and then there was seastones, and then there was drums
in space, so he considers it kind of all in
the same continuum of just very out there musical exploration

(58:25):
and experimentation. But during these Seastones intermission sets, Ned and
Phil would come out and perform this piece of music.
And Phil had a quadraphonic bass and he could throw
each of his strings to a different cluster of speakers
in his thirty two foot tall stacks. So that's pretty

(58:47):
crazy in and of itself. But Ned basically had like
an infinite pallette of noises because he was using you know,
this very like expensive computer rig and synthesizer rig to
perform seastones, and all of his signal would go through
that big center cluster that I was just talking about,

(59:08):
and Ned could move so much air through the wall
sound that he could bounce this seventy five ton system.
He could bounce it up in the air by a foot,
that's how much power he could push through that thing.
So it would freak people out understandably, like no one
had really heard harsh ambient music like this at the time.

(59:31):
But I wanted to include and give some love to
Seastones in the book, which Seastones debuted in Miami, like
you mentioned, in June of nineteen seventy four, that's where
they first performed Seastones, and then they did it kind
of through the end of the year. But I wanted
to really include that and dig into what it was
like to pull that off, because I think Seastones is

(59:52):
really the like farthest and most radical application of the
Wall Sound and Sea Stones was the studio version was
released in nineteen seventy five. It was sort of a
commercial flop, but in more recent years it's been reissued
and it's kind of become like a cult classic. If

(01:00:14):
you listen to Seastones, it's still so ahead of its time.
It kind of calls to mind Brian eno A, but
a little bit more like a little bit more out there,
a little bit more alien, kind of super ahead of
its time stuff. But I had, you know, amazing interviews
with Ned. He told me, this is kind of the
last time I'm going to talk about this stuff about

(01:00:36):
like my time and involvement in this scene. So I
was very touched and honored that he would open up
to me about all of this stuff. But yeah, Seastones
is just like amazing stuff. Listen to any live any
of those twenty or so live shows where Sea Stones
was performed in nineteen seventy four, and it's like, Wow,
this stuff still sounds futuristic. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Books on Rock podcast will be back after this. Look,
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(01:01:19):
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at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back

(01:01:41):
to the show, Chapter nine, titled The Other Side nineteen
seventy five, and you'd lead with quote post mortems rolled in.
So what became of the Wall of Sound and the
Grateful Dead in nineteen seventy five?

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
The band decided to shut it all down at the
end of nineteen seventy four, and you know, as Dennis mcnae,
the band's former longtime publicist and their biographer, as he
put it to me, the band was too chicken shit
to fire anyone. So they were basically like, we're going
to take a break, We're going to go on hiatus.

(01:02:14):
You all need to find something else to do for
a while. So they would eventually come back and hit
the road in like spring of nineteen seventy six, but
sort of in that year and a half the Dead
worked on a new studio album. But right, what happened
to all of this stuff? So that question I wanted
to unpack that what happened to the wallside, all of

(01:02:37):
this gear, seventy five going on eighty tons worth of equipment.
What happened to all of it? So you can see
in the book there's sort of like a number of
different streams through which all of this gear got sort
of disassembled and parted out and eked out into the
world at large. Some of it was gifted to like

(01:02:59):
smaller Bay area bands that needed gear, right, the Dead
would be like, here, we can give you your own
sound system basically, so that happened. Also, some folks who
were involved in this scene told me that basically everyone
who was working for the Dead at the time had
components of the Wall of Sound in their home high

(01:03:20):
fi systems. Right, So people would take maybe a couple
speaker cabinets, maybe an amplifier and have a sweet home
high fi. Right. Other parts of the system went into
crew Chief Ramrod shirt Lift. His real name was Lawrence,
but everyone called him Ramrod. He had a farm in Pataluma,

(01:03:40):
and some of phil Lesh's Wall of Sound speaker boxes
went into a chicken coop. They formed a chicken coop
in his farm. Right. So, like all of this stuff
kind of fell into different buckets as the whole system
was disassembled and you know entropy, right, Like, some of
the stuff just kind of like broke down as the

(01:04:02):
years went on, maybe got water damage, some of it
maybe just got trashed. Because you know, you have to remember,
I was speaking with some sources in the book who
worked for the band and had parts of the Wall
of Sound in their home High Fight, for instance, And
they were telling me that by the late nineteen seventies
that stuff was just considered old gear, you know, like

(01:04:24):
they didn't necessarily know that this thing would go on
to be the thing that it is today, right and
like have all this lore and hold this huge presence
in the Grateful Dead story, it was just old gear.
So maybe they would sell that stuff, they would trade it.
Quite a few of them were like, maybe I shouldn't
have sold that stuff, right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Sure, yeah, well I was gonna say the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame maybe trying to get HOLDI as soon.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
I mean, yeah, I mean it's pretty amazing that, like,
you know, there's is it for sale though it is not.
This is not for sale currently, Yes this is this
is here in my home. But but yeah, it's amazing that,
you know, there's not much of this stuff survives today.
And in the later chapters, I connect with who I
call like fellow keepers of parts of the Wall of Sound.

(01:05:11):
So there's a network of people out there who have
you know, maybe they have a speaker box kind of
similar to this one that I have. Maybe they have
an old Macintosh amplifier from the Wall sound. So it
was really cool to like connect with some of those
people because there isn't too much of this stuff surviving today.
So that's what makes it like really special to have

(01:05:32):
a part of this like really groundbreaking piece of technology
and rock music history right just sitting here in my office.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
And like you say, whenever you go to a concert,
chances are you going to see something in that setup.
That's a connection. There's a straight line you can draw
from the Dead's Wall of Sound to what you are seeing,
like a curve speaker, things like that. You keep that
in mind. Loud and Clear, the Grateful Dead's Wall of
Sound owned and the Quest for Audio Perfection out now

(01:06:03):
find out wherever books are sold. You could look forward
at your nearest bookstore. Go to book don rock dot
com to find your nearest independent bookstore. And Brian, where
can people find you online?

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
You can find me on socials so you can find
me on Instagram, you can find me on Blue Sky,
you can find me on Facebook as well. I can
give you my handles maybe you can put them in
like the show notes or something.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
And be happy to absolutely but uh.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Yeah, my dms are open. I always love to hear
from people, So if you've got a line on where
a piece of the wall sound, maybe the plan did,
hit me up, or just say hello, Like I'm always
open to chat.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Brian Anderson, thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
Thank you so much for having me. Man, this was
a blast. That's it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
It's in the books.