Put frankly, Garcia or Jimi Hendrix live, at their loudest, sounded chaotic-in a not-so-good way. Even the day's leading edge of amplification technology carried bands only to a point, before the mixes muddled. Perhaps the drugs had something to do with it, but there was a vitality to music, something unprecedented that resonated for those who believed their generation's moment had come. Compared to virtually all electrified musical output to that point, music was louder and more urgent than ever before. It seemed the sounds of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the psychedelic rock Holy Land to which the Dead were revered almost as gods, had beamed to the Moon and beyond. "You know, the solution is the PA system has to be behind the band" The Wall of Sound, or simply the Wall, would occupy only a blip on the long horizon of the Dead's history, though it remains a touchstone for sound systems of all shapes and sizes, from boutique disco PAs to the massive PAs deployed at any of today's mega festivals and at 61,500-seat stadiums like Soldier Field in Chicago, where the four surviving members of the Dead, including Weir and Lesh, wrapped up a string of farewell shows this weekend to commemorate the band's 50th anniversary.īack at the pink warehouse, they were about to revolutionize sound engineering, acoustic theory, and the way people experienced live music for decades to come, and they likely didn't even know it. Its name could only be the Wall of Sound.
This singular work of engineering would come to weigh over 70 tons, comprise dozens and then hundreds of amps, speakers, subwoofers, and tweeters, stand over three-stories tall and stretch nearly 100 feet wide. It was a signal moment in the history of sound that set in motion a years-long work in progress that would culminate in what's arguably the largest and technologically innovative public address system ever built, and it started not with a bang, but with something of a casual, stoned proposition. For their 1976 tour, the Grateful Dead ended up using a more practical sound system.They brainstormed over "the technical, the musical, and the exploratory," remembered Rick Turner, an instrument and amplifier designer among the Dead kin gathered that day in Novato. The Wall of Sound didn’t last long and had to “retire” on October 1974 because of fuel costs and tension among personnel. The Grateful Dead gave the sneak peek of the Wall of Sound on Februat Stanford University’s Maples Pavilion but it was on Mawhen they debuted the completed system during their tour stop at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. For their tour, it required 21 crew members and four trailers to haul the entire sound system from one place to another. The Wall of Sound projected high-quality sound at six hundred feet.
They also added a microphone system that prevents feedback.īasically, since each channel and set of speakers only carried one instrument sound or vocals, the end result was a distortion-free and exceptionally clear sound. Separate channels were also provided for the bass drum, snares, tom-toms, and cymbals. The bass guitar had a separate set of speakers and channel for each of the four strings. With the use of 11 separate channels, they combined six independent sound systems with the vocals, piano, lead guitar, and rhythm guitar getting their own set of speakers and channel. It did not need any delay towers to reach a distance of half a mile from the stage without degradation.” It was a massive wall of speaker arrays set behind the musicians, which they themselves controlled without a front of house mixer. Stanley said, “The Wall of Sound is the name some people gave to a super powerful, extremely accurate PA system that I designed and supervised the building of in 1973 for the Grateful Dead. And so in late 1972, he worked with the Dead’s sound crew Dan Healy and Mark Raizene, and Ron Wickersham, Rick Turner, and John Curl of Alembic to deliver high-quality sound to concert attendees. The brainchild of audio engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley, it addressed his vision of a distortion-free PA system that could double as its own monitoring system.