BEAR WAS NOT HAPPY. As the 1970s began to unfurl, live engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley was increasingly frustrated with the quality of the live sound he was in charge of mixing night after night for San Francisco’s multi-genre jam stalwarts the Grateful Dead. Seeing how the Dead had been quite steadily cultivating a reputation for creating a somewhat participatory multimedia live experience truly unto itself ever since they burst out of the Bay Area scene and vaulted into national prominence in the mid-1960s. And now, Bear had to address the growing pains.
One big reason was the Dead’s proclivity for insisting upon higher sound-quality standards for their studio recordings, as they were amongst the earliest bands to lay down their grooves with 16-track recording equipment—and Bear was adamant about how he could better translate that SQ-oriented aesthetic into the live arena by eliminating distortion, even in the 100,000-seat stadiums the Dead were finding themselves increasingly booked into playing across the country.
With that solemn charge, Bear began pursuing in earnest how to enact what would become known as the Wall of Sound exactly 50 years ago, in 1973. Unrelated to producer Phil Spector’s same-named magic-touch studio-production sheen of the 1960s, the live Wall of Sound was instead meant to harness the full performance power of a band that viewed itself as being unrestricted by any of the typical societal and music-scene conventions of the time. Bear’s vision for improving the Dead’s live sound was one massive undertaking, to say the least.
Though the ever-shifting sands of time have resulted in some conflicting confirmations regarding what exactly was what, by most accounts, the original Wall of Sound appears to have deployed (count ’em) 586 JBL speakers, 54 Electro-Voice tweeters, and 48 McIntosh MC2300 stereo amplifiers, all to the tune of delivering a staggering 28,000 watts of raw power fueling six independent sound systems that utilized 11 separate channels.
In effect, each Dead band member and their instruments—vocals too—had their own respective channels and their own set of speakers in order to more accurately relay what they did best onstage. The design team behind it all consisted of Bear, Dan Healy, and Mark Raizene of the Dead’s sound team, along with designers Ron Wickersham, Rick Turner, and John Curl of Alembic, the noted musice-quipment manufacturer..
The first show Bear got to test the complete Wall of Sound’s mettle with occurred, a 2 CD set released via Grateful Dead Productions in February 2002. (More about the historical series in a bit.)
