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Brian Anderson’s “High and clear: Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the pursuit of sound perfection,” who hit shelves last week, offers the first definitive crown of one of Rock’s most ambitious feats of Live Sundteknik.
The 368-sided book dives deep into the fertilization, construction and collapse of the dead legendary sound wall-100 feet wide, three floors speaker systems such as redefined concert experience and continue to affect live audio design decades later.
High and clear: Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the pursuit of sound perfection
Anderson, a long -term music journalist and editor, is based on hundreds of interviews with band members, engineers, roadies and crews to tell the story of how a group of idealistic audio files tried, and briefly achieved, sonic perfection on a stadium scale. The Wall of Sound, which was first revealed in 1974, was the brain shield to the LSD chemist and audio visionary Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who worked with Dan Healy, Mark Raizene and engineers from Alembic, including Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner, to create a modular system. With more than 600 speakers and pressed over 26,000 watts, the system delivered crystal clear, distortion -free sound up to a quarter of a mile away and served essentially as its own monitoring system, with the speakers placed directly behind the band.
The system was also remarkable for its technical innovations, including a feedback prevention microphone set that used matched condenser Mic’s reverse polarity, a technique that made it possible to hear the sang clean without screaming on the stage feedback. Each instrument had its own channel, and even individual strings on Phil Lesh’s base was isolated to reduce sonic clay. But while the sound wall was praised by fans and critics for its outstanding clarity, it quickly became a logistical nightmare. The massive structure required four semitrailers, 21 crew members and a jump system with duplicated positions just to keep the tour in motion. Fuel costs and physical fatigue – in combination with the general chaos that defined Grateful deathIn the end, the mid-70s era-swinged the band to abandon the system after less than a year and retired after their exhibitions in October 1974 at San Francisco’s Winterland.
In “High and clearly” Anderson captures both the technical brilliance and the absurdity of the project, with stories of expected trucks, unintentional electrocutions, broken limbs and blown deadlines.
Buy “loud and clear” at Amazon here.