The Wall of Sound: How the Grateful Dead Changed Live Music

Welcome to the second edition of The Revival! Each week, we deep dive into a specific moment in music history to deliver a dose of nostalgia about little-known or forgotten aspects of culture. Last week, we kicked off our first newsletter about Red Rocks Amphitheatre. This week, we’ll explore one of the most innovative advances in live music production.

1974 was an exciting year in music. Here are just a few of the things that happened:

• The top song of the year was Barbara Streisand’s “The Way We Were”

• After an eight-year hiatus, Bob Dylan returned to touring backed by The Band

• Swan Song, a new record label from Led Zeppelin, was launched

• Bob Dylan and The Band kick off their 40-date concert tour at Chicago Stadium — his first since 1966.

• John Denver tallies his first number-one hit with “Sunshine On My Shoulders” – his first of four top singles for the folk crooner.

1974 also was the debut of one of the most innovative and influential live music creations.

It was called the Wall of Sound - an imposing wall of speakers that established a literal wall of sound between the band and the audience.

Origins of the Wall of Sound

Now, you may have heard of the Wall of Sound before. The name was originally coined for a music production formula designed by producer Phil Spector during his time at Gold Star Studios in the 1960s. It was a production technique that created nuanced layers of sounds that would help carry the record in the various mediums of the day – jukeboxes and record players.

But that isn’t the wall of sound we’re talking about today. Although, some interesting parallels are worth exploring in another post.

The Grateful Dead dreamed up this incarnation of the Wall of Sound.

In fact, it was dreamed up to help solve three of the band's challenges when they were playing live shows:

• Improve the low-fidelity PA-style speakers that often distort the sound.

• Help the musicians on stage hear each other playing.

• Improve the flow of sound in increasingly large, open-air venues.

You see, the 1970s ushered in an entirely new era in concert sound. In the decades before, live music was performed with relatively low-fidelity options – amps and speakers that had no issue playing loudly, but delivered a distorted sound.

This style was a relic of the rock-and-roll playing from the likes of Chuck Berry and Ike Turner. Distortion was a featured element in these shows.

In the 1960s, artists like Jimi Hendrix leveraged some of these distorted styles. It was delivered to audiences using little more than a public address system – speakers and amps pieced together that were rife with frequency gas and plenty of distortion. In those days, live concert experiences lacked the full frequency range and quality production sound we see today.

The other major challenge was live musicians being able to hear themselves while playing. It seems obvious, but until the emergence of the Wall of Sound, bands had to learn to play together and hope they were delivering their respective parts on tune and on time.

The Wall of Sound was designed at a convergence of two different musical styles – the syncopated, well-rehearsed, and structured sound of bands such as The Beatles and the loose, free-flowing, sonically-sculpted, musically complex worlds of emerging bands like The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead originated at a transformational moment for music. At the time, California – primarily San Francisco, was a melting pot of musical stylings from jazz to folk. Still, it was also the feature character for the cultural music revolution that was transpiring through the tunes of bands like Jefferson Starship and The Grateful Dead’s founding members, including Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron McKernan, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann.

Together, they forged forward with the contrarian idea of rejecting the formality and structure that came to define rock and roll.

While their sound was technically less structured, it was incredibly complex. And the band needed a way to transport that sound in large open-air venues where everyone could enjoy it.

Enter, the Wall of Sound.

To be more realistic, enter a legendary figure in the band’s orbit who helped create the system that would help redefine live music.

Owsley “Bear” Stanley was a fan and friend of the band, a sound tech, a former ballet dancer, and someone who dabbled in acid chemistry. He started studying engineering at the University of Virginia but eventually dropped out. He later continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There, against the burgeoning backdrop of the psychedelic drug scene, Stanley became one of the first to concoct acid legally, even providing quantities of the drug to the Beatles.

The acid portion of Stanley’s life is integral to the Wall of Sound origin story – he got acquainted with the Grateful Dead from Ken Kesey. Stanley started helping the band with all of the audio work and even used his creative energy (fueled by acid) to create the band’s iconic logo and helped design much of their merch.

One particular vision that came to Stanley became the basis for the Wall of Sound – the dream inspiring him to seek a deeper, richer understanding of how he could perfect audio.

That vision would have to wait. Stanley was busted with hundreds of thousands of LSD doses, and he spent three years in jail. When he came out, he was disgruntled to find that the audio guys for the band were complacent and hadn’t aspired to change anything. Yet, simultaneously, the band’s crowds continued to grow, and the venues they played in were getting larger and larger. Something had to give.

Stanley set to work to continue to see his dream through. The result became the Wall of Sound - the name he gave to the newly-designed PA system assembled and constructed in 1973. This towering wall of equipment and speakers would change live music forever – and the trajectory of their live performances.

Without this artistic vision, it’s an intriguing debate whether the Grateful Dead embarks on the industry-changing quest of perfecting the sonic landscape of live concerts. According to Phil Lesh in an interview with “Rolling Stone:”

“I started talking to Bear about our sound problems. There was no technology for electric instruments. We started talking about how to get around distortion and get a pure musical tone. He did some research and said, ‘Let’s use Altec speakers and hi-fi amps and four-tube amps, one for each instrument, and put them on a piece of wood.’ Three months later we were playing through Bear’s sound system.” – Phil Lesh

Schematics: How Wall of Sound Worked

Source: CC BY-SA 4.0

The Wall of Sound was enormous.

Few adjectives can accurately describe how it looked. It was something nobody had ever seen before at any live music show.

f you were at a Dead show in 1974 – virtually the only year it was used – there was no question why it was so powerful and how much it impacted the future of live music.

Think for a moment about some of the logistics that encompassed the wall:

• Four semi-trailers were needed to haul the wall.

• It took 21 crew members to move and stage the wall.

• The wall rose 100 feet high – nearly three stories tall.

• All the rigging, speakers, and equipment weighed more than 70 tons.

• The wall generated 26,400 watts of power split between 6 uniquely different systems.

• Each system was assigned to a specific component: bass, drums, piano, rhythm guitar, and vocals.

• The wall featured 11 independent channels.

• A unique channel devoted to every single string on Phil Lesh’s bass.

Ultimately, the Wall of Sound helped accomplish a few key things. First, speakers dedicated to vocals were strategically placed in the center of the Wall, curving to help the band hear each other, allowing them to achieve the loose, on-the-fly style. Second, one of the most innovative features of the Wall of Sound was how microphones were set up on the stage – eliminating feedback from the speakers. Every band member had two omnidirectional mics – they sang into just one of them, and the dual mic setup canceled all the sound fed into them.

The Wall of Sound was first used in a preview concert at the Maples Pavilion at Stanford University on February 9, 1973. The show began with an announcement for the band that this was a trial run for the wall – at that point, called the Alembic System – and that things could get crazy.

You can define crazy however you like with the Grateful Dead, but almost immediately, half the wall of speakers blew up. Yet, the band pressed onward.

In the pantheon of Dead shows, this one is up there. Not only was it the debut of the new Wall of Sound, but it was also a concert that saw the playing of seven new songs – which puts it high on the list of most historically essential shows.

The first show that saw the debut of the authentic Wall of Sound was the following year, kicking off at tspeaker feedbackly City, California, on March 23, 1974.

Source

So, Where’s The Wall of Sound Now?

Eventually, the wall came down.

While the Wall of Sound was short-lived, the legacy of its innovative and technological brilliance carried forward. Not only did it help evolve a new genre of music, but it changed how nearly every type of music was produced and fed to audiences in live venues.

Without a doubt, the Wall of Sound helped change the way Deadheads heard their favorite band. The sound was so loud that people could listen to the tunes up to a mile away. But, the challenges and manpower needed to set up and dismantle the rigging, scaffolding, and equipment proved too costly.

While one show was playing, setting up for the next show had to continue. Two identical versions of the wall were set up, one for the current performance and another that leapfrogged to the next venue – crews were essentially setting up and dismantling two separate riggings simultaneously.

The Wall of Sound would tour for just one season, and it was scrapped after the 1974 tour.

In 2021, items from the Wall of Sound appeared in an auction entitled “From the Vault: Property from the Grateful Dead and Friends.” Several lots included items from the Wall of Sound, including a handmade speaker cabinet and several amplifiers – one sold for $94,500.

But, the legacy of everything the Grateful Dead tried to solve for live open-air concerts lived on. Many of the elements they addressed are now commonplace at shows.