Whether you love them or hate them, the Grateful Dead were sound tech pioneers.
One of the greatest tributes to the band is this headline, which came from Pro Sound News, a trade journal for sound tech enthusiasts, after Jerry died: "The Ultimate Experimental Lab Closes."
The Grateful Dead spent most of their 30-year history exploring sound and taking music to new sonic frontiers. What makes their music so rich, even to listeners in 2013, is that each year, each tour, and even each concert could be so different and could evoke so many genres and styles that the music came to have its own style. A 35-minute experimental and hallucinatory “Dark Star” could suddenly melt into a cover of “El Paso,” a cowboy ballad originally sung by Marty Robbins in 1959. What also evolved significantly during the Dead’s 30-year tenure was the equipment that the group used to explore sound.
A significant aspect of the Dead’s history revolves around pioneering sound equipment that would eventually be adopted by other groups, and the principles they developed mark an important contribution to the field of music. Some of the Dead organization’s inventions and ideas, like the “Wall of Sound” were so extravagant and far-fetched that no other group has attempted to replicate them. Yet, still the Dead’s contribution to the science of sound and music cannot be ignored. Because the Dead were probably in the jazziest of their many eras in '74, precision in sound was crucial.The Wall of Sound created this perfect sound laboratory and allowed them to take explore new territory in an effort to create the clearest, most perfect sound for the greatest number of concert attendees.
Every instrument of the band had a column of speakers on the wall. Phil, had a different speaker for every string on his bass guitar! Separation and clarity of sound for Dead concertgoers was unparalleled at the time and the Dead were light years ahead of other amplified bands of the time.
The Wall of Sound was just a massive PA that used 92 tube amplifiers to push 26,400 watts through 604 speakers capable of projecting cosmic jams and thundering quadraphonic bass sounds up to a half-mile from the stage without distortion. The system weighed over 70 tons and stood over three stories high and 100 feet wide. Put together by gearheads, audiophiles and psychonauts who were escapees from the computer and engineering outfits of the Bay Area's budding computing business scene.
To this day, the Wall remains a touchstone for sound systems of all shapes and sizes, including the PAs deployed at the ever more popular mega summer festivals. But what was special about it was that it created a "macro-acoustic event." The band could play cleanly and loud enough for those in the back without frying the ears of those up front.
There are several officially released concert videos of the Dead and one is The Grateful Dead Movie, which was made during their 5-show run in October '74 in SF right before the band's hiatus to take a break from touring. A hiatus caused by the burdens of touring with the Wall, which presenteed the need for a slew of touring engineers and roadies and several semis. It's great to see the visual aspect of these shows but in general I find these videos a tad disappointing. I find the sound recordings better capture the energy and I like to picture myself there. But one of my little highlights of the Grateful Dead Movie is this brief clip in which Phil is just geeking out talking about the sound system for his bass. It's a little glimpse into the technical wizardry of the Dead's crack equipment crew and you can tell Phil is the ultimate tech music nerd.
Alembic, a custom guitar and pickup design outfit formed in 1968, essentially became the Dead’s Research and Development wing and took off from where the Dead’s original patron, Owsley Stanley aka “Bear,” started, and worked with “Bear” to ultimately take the Dead’s exploration of sound to new heights.
One of my favorite contributions that Alembic made to the Dead sound was Phil Lesh’s bass and how it fit into the Dead’s incredibly ambitious search for The Sound. For the sound nerds, check out the technical specs for Phil’s bass and speaker set-up here. Phil’s bass was the first quadraphonic bass ever made. Each string had a separate signal. On each of the bass and treble pickups there were five controls, which enabled him to select 1) the bandwidth of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter he used, 4) how much of the filtered sound reached the speakers, and 5) the mix of the unequalized and unfiltered direct sound. Not only was there an amazing pallet of sounds available to Phil, he was also able to amplify each string separately through four different speaker towers that could be set up at equidistant locations, effectively enabling him to throw his sound around an entire stadium or venue.
When the Dead played Winterland, an old ice skating rink in San Francisco, Phil would drop “Phil bombs,” bass tones at certain frequencies that would knock the plaster off the ceilings that would highlight wild explorations of sound like “The Other One,” an energetic and percussive piece about rambling on the bus with the Cowboy Neal Cassady made famous by Jack Kerouac.
In 1973, a New York Times article pointed out that the Dead “were and are experts in the art and science of showing people another world, or a temporary altering (raising) of world consciousness.” Showing people other worlds was made possible by the power of the technology behind the Dead’s music. Even if the Dead’s music is not your cup of tea, you cannot fault the group for its thoroughly ambitious (it often left them completely broke) Search for the Sound and their contribution to the Science of Music.
You can read more about how the Dead recruited NASAand Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab scientists to improve their sound in this informative Wired article "Call them hippies, but the Grateful Dead were Tech Pioneers."
