The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound

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2024-05-07 18:30:07

A vision during an LSD trip is what inspired Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer’s mammoth feat of technical engineering, “The Wall of Sound”, irreversibly changing live sound and engineering for the better.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer. Though incredibly frustrated with the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation, they did not want to give up playing live, and the Dead had Owsley on board to help solve the sound situation.

The famous story goes that in 1974 the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart walked on stage to find Owsley “Bear Stanley standing in front of a wall of over 600 speakers with tears streaming down his face. Whispering to the huge mass of equipment, Bear said, “I love you and you love me- how could you fail me?” This story sums up Owsley’s obsession with sound, both as a concept and as a physical thing. A former ballet dancer and craftsman from Kentucky, Owsley was also jailed twice for manufacturing and distributing LSD, the profits of which he used to finance the Grateful Dead for some time. The band which formed in the San Fransico bay area during the hippie days of the mid-1960s boasted of a huge cult following. An engineering dropout, he met the Grateful Dead through Ken Kesey, during one of his infamous ‘acid test’ parties in 1965 and became friends with them.