By COLLIN GALLION

8-18 Media

Special to the Journal

And we’re back with another edition of Collin’s Guide to The Grateful Dead. How far can we go with this? I don’t know! I’ll try not to turn this into The Simpsons.

In today’s column, we’ll be going back to the mid 70s to examine one of the band’s most elaborate and ingenious inventions in the history of modern music: The Wall of Sound. We’ll be taking a look at what exactly this contraption is, how it came to be, how it ended, and how it paved the way for more advanced stereo sound systems. With that said, let’s begin.

By the mid 70s, the Grateful Dead was becoming a national phenomenon; drawing in crowds by the thousands, filling in arenas, concert halls, and even football stadiums! However, their current sound systems weren’t producing enough power for everyone in the venues to hear. In response, the band turned to their trusty friends at Alembic, sound engineers Dan Healy and Augustus “Bear” Owsley Stanley III, to design a system that could produce enough power for everyone to hear, without sacrificing any power through monitors or mixers, as well as avoid any harsh feedback and distortion.

In 1973, Healy and Owsley designed the Wall of Sound, a sound system capable of producing a powerful, distortion-free signal that could be heard from miles away, without the need of a mixing board or a monitor. The system itself was actually quite simple; it featured three stories worth of amplifiers and speakers stacked on top of each other, all wired to their designated instrument and microphone. About 604 amplifiers (both solid state and vacuum tube) were used for the instruments, producing a grand total of 26,400 watts. Weighing at 75 tons and able to produce a signal from 600 ft to a quarter mile, the Wall of Sound, while simple, was the biggest and most powerful sound system at that time.

The Wall of Sound was first used on March 23, 1974, at the Cow Palace in Daly City, CA. For as iconic and useful the Wall of Sound was, it wasn’t the most practical to transport. The Wall had to be broken down and separated into chunks between five trailers and took about 21 crew members to assemble it. According to Bear himself, parts of the Wall had to be “leapfrogged” to the next show to save on time. Also, the signal the Wall produced would often come out with a tinniness sound and an unnatural stereo quality, which would often ruin soundboard tapes during shows, and would sometimes lose certain inputs from certain channels and instruments. In short, while the Wall was useful and revolutionary, it was also a massive pain.

Due to rising expenses and the band’s awkward growth by 1974, the band decided to “retire”. The Wall of Sound was last used during the band’s five night stay at Winterland Auditorium from October 16 to 20, 1974, only 8 months after the Wall was first introduced.

The Wall of Sound still stands as one of the most important relics in the history of the Grateful Dead. It stands as an example of the band’s drive for innovation in musical technology, and seeing just how far the limits are before something explodes. In 2021,

parts of the Wall were auctioned off, ranging from $17,640 to $94,500. Even today, it seems as though every Deadhead wishes to get a piece of the Wall.

Stay tuned for part 12 of Collin’s Guide to The Grateful Dead, where we’ll take a look at Jerry Garcia’s incredible guitar collection. Until then, stay Weir’d!