Loud and Clear, which traces the creation, demise and legacy of the Grateful Dead ‘Wall of Sound’ P.A., will be published on June 17, 2025. Don’t miss our discussion with author Brian Anderson about the new book and his life-long fascination with the Wall of Sound!
The Dead’s years-long pursuit of audio perfection had come to this moment. The band was set for the second of the “2 sound experimentation gigs,” at the Cow Palace, outside San Francisco. The Saturday night event was simply billed “The Sound Test.”
The crew had arrived at the 16,500-capacity venue the day before the gig to construct the imposing mass of equipment, which had swelled in cost to over $350,000—some $2.3 million today. “We attacked it like a group of killer bees,” Candelario recalled. There were now a dozen-plus columns of variously sized speakers, 480 in all, held in place by scaffolding bolted to the custom staging. Combined, Garcia and Weir had thirty cabinets; Lesh had sixteen a side. The very tallest columns rose forty-five feet above the stage. The system essentially beamed nearly fifty-foot-tall notes over the band and into the soundfield. Despite so much air being moved above the musicians’ heads, they weren’t immediately overwhelmed by all that power, meaning onstage sound pressure levels for the Wall sometimes measured lower than out in the hall. Yet even in the crowd, one could hold a normal conversation. The sound was that inoffensive.
For the first time, too, an indoor venue physically accommodated the Dead’s load. “That was my real sound experiment, for everything,” Parish later told me of the Cow Palace show. “I felt that was where we really had the elbow room and the space to do it.”
Twenty heads had been present at yet another band meeting on March 14, ahead of the Sound Test. “Not ready to say yet what the final setup will be,” read minutes, giving an update on modularization. “There will be a shape of center clusters, movable stacks, and the packaging will be different making it easier to setup.” But Raizene, Healy, and others needed a little more time to complete that job, so the middle vocal rig for Daly City was still composed of individual speaker stacks. At that meeting, under “Gigs,” the assembled talked additionally about how, save the New Riders, “the PA isn’t compatible for other groups.” They discussed “ways to get around that (interfacing setup, 2 stages, etc.).”
Then, the following afternoon, a “Mike” called the Dead’s office and left a message regarding “sound system—Palo Alto” for “Ron.” It’s unclear if that meant Rakow, or, as likely, Wickersham. But the point remains: The sound was at the top of their groupmind. Money was, too, which always tied back to the Dead’s PA. On March 13, another call had come into Dead HQ, from a Bank of Boston representative. That year, the bank used the term “cult” to describe the Dead, when the financial institution registered that the band’s dedicated listenership meant the Dead and their in-house record distribution were a sound business bet. Yet the rep “wanted to discuss problems” and left a message for Rakow.
That month, while recording Mars Hotel, tensions were also building between band members. “But much of this comes from the pressure of running their own business,” Rock Scully said, which involved flying to record pressing plants to ensure quality control, “and not seeing each other—not practicing that much.”
They worked in a San Francisco studio with the capacity to sync up two 16-tracks. “As the band’s sound system seemed to be testing the mid-seventies attitude of ‘more might be nice,’” said Steve Brown, who was present at these sessions, “it was not surprising to find them filling up almost all thirty tracks with something.” But the Dead always struggled in controlled environments, in contrast to the full sonic spectrum they could now cover live with their Wall. “We can play down to the level of a whisper, and we can play as loud as twenty jet airplanes,” Garcia said that year. “So the expressiveness of our music is limited by recording.”
In the meantime, even he and his bandmates were on weekly stipends. “The Dead have kept themselves poor from the beginning by putting money into sound,” Wickersham told local reporter John L. Wasserman in a piece titled “The Dead: Committed to Sound Perfection” that was pegged to the Sound Test. “This project has been underway for about seven years,” Wickersham said. “I’ve only been into it for about five and it’s not finished yet. It’s an ongoing study. Each performance is not only a musical performance but a sound performance.”
Discover more great stories—get a free Mix SmartBrief subscription!
The Sound Test drew in a cross-section of Deadworld. Shuttles went to and from the Dead’s office and the Cow Palace. Guest lists ran to a combined 150-some-odd names. The core “Band and Crew” list noted twenty individuals (and plus-ones). A separate “Employees and Wives—Automatic Backstage & Special Seating” list accounted for dozens more, including familiar faces from earlier in the Dead’s sonic journey like Laird Grant, the band’s first-ever roadie and equipment manager. Also listed was Sue Swanson, who experienced the young band’s wall-rattling sound and would later serve as the Dead’s chief technology officer and webmaster, when the band’s legacy moneymaking blossomed online. Cardinalli, the Alembic/Quality Control carpenter, got in too. Turner and Wickersham also were listed (with a plus-one and -two, respectively). The gig was not one to miss.
For a month, the Dead had run ads for the show on the local Top 40 radio station, overselling the event. When the band took the stage, the musicians passed through a dummy Wall speaker into the space in front of the solid backline. But as the gig started, seconds into “U.S. Blues,” from Mars Hotel, the Wall balked. Garcia’s guitar volume dropped suddenly after his first few notes. Is there anything more Dead-like “than their state-of-the-art, astronomically expensive sound system immediately screwing up and Garcia’s guitar going missing during the opening song of the night?” said Ray Robertson, author of a micro history of the band in fifty shows.
The quick-acting crew had the issue sorted before long, and the band proceeded into a lengthy first set. “With speakers that reach as high as a three-story house, even in as uninviting a concert venue as the Cow Palace,” which primarily still hosted livestock conventions and sports, “the music is loud and clear and rich,” wrote Robertson, who did not attend the gig. And “not just to the audience, but to the band, an indispensable ingredient if the goal is symbiotic playing.”
Moments in set two were less than symbiotic. When the band false started “Playing in the Band,” something was off with Weir’s vocals, an issue because he sang lead on that song. A minute or so in, as the tune fell apart, Garcia played the ominous theme from Chopin’s “Funeral March.”
“Wait a minute,” Lesh said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
With no monitors in front of them, they were totally exposed—a direct line back to the Acid Tests, where no boundary existed between band and crowd. Everybody was in the soundfield, along for the ride. “The Wall was a very concrete manifestation of the idea that the band and the audience were the same,” Steve Silberman, the Deadhead science writer, told me. “It was cosmic democracy.”
Yet the band had broken what for so many groups is the number-one rule of live performing. “Even the most-novice garage band knows that if something goes wrong on stage—speaker or microphone malfunction, a busted instrument, whatever—you’re never supposed to stop playing,” Robertson said. But doing precisely that, and having the crowd cheer them on until the problem got resolved, was just like the Dead.
“How ’bout it,” Weir said as his mic came back on. “Ah, there it is. A thousand pardons, folks. We’ll try it one more time.”
The rest of the Sound Test went off without incident. The Dead “plays on and on, like they can’t get enough of their brand-new toy,” Robertson wrote. Firsthand accounts speak of an acoustic environment with no dead zones—anywhere in the audience, the sound was “just exactly perfect,” as Weir and others used to say. “Had no idea what I was looking at,” recalled one head, whose friend shouted “Look at that sound system” repeatedly. “It was definitely an impressive event.”
Another head remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor for that entire show, tripping on LSD. “No one tripped over me or was bothered by my non-verticality,” the attendee said. And fortunately, “the sound system was amazing! The music came from every direction with pinpoint clarity. It was everywhere and anywhere all at once.” When the show ended and Graham ordered the house lights turned on, the seated fan realized they had spent the whole evening facing the rear wall, with their back to the stage. “It didn’t really matter where you were inside the Palace or what you did that night or what you saw. There was audible musical magic in the universe.”
Yet another awed attendee similarly glimpsed the rig afterward. “That’s when I first saw the magnitude of the ‘Wall of Sound.’ It truly went from wall to wall and to the ceiling,” they recalled. “The speakers went right into the cloud of hazy smoke.” Still others in the crowd that night called the Wall “absolutely historic,” and said its qualities were “embedded in my soul” and had “shaped my life.” As one Deadhead explained, “the Sound Test did such amazing things to my blown-out head I almost forgot I was an oiled sardine.”
Weeks after the gig, a friend of David Gans, with whom he had also attended the Sound Test, acquired a tape of that show. At the gig, “it was just incredible how great the sound was,” Gans, the future Grateful Dead Hour host, told me. Notably, during “China Cat Sunflower,” “when they get to the bridge and they hit this giant E chord, Phil hit a note that caused the entire room to rattle.” Gans then sat at his friend’s place and listened back to the audience recording, and “when they got to that note in ‘China Cat’ it caused distortion on the tape too. That’s a memory that just sticks out in my head.”
Writing on the Wall of Sound: In Search of the Legendary Grateful Dead P.A. System
The Test was a turning point in Gans’s own collecting and trading of Dead tapes and also in the life of the sound system’s moniker. In the days following the Cow Palace, the San Francisco Chronicle, alongside a black-and-white photo of the rig, printed the first known reference to the Dead’s “Wall of Sound.” It remains unclear if one of the crew, perhaps, was overheard using that nickname in Daly City, or if the Chronicle’s photo editor can be credited. It didn’t stick immediately—but it would, given enough time.
Years later, the Sound Test was released as Dick’s Picks Volume 24. Dick Latvala, who likewise first got heavily into collecting tapes in 1974, tapped Bear to write liner notes about the Wall. “I told them before we began I was sure it could be done, the technology was available, but I was also sure they would not like it once they were locked into using it,” Bear said. Yet the system represented “the first successful use of line arrays in large-scale sound reproduction. All of our lines were mounted tightly together as a single unbroken wall.” Modern line arrays, by contrast, “are hung in isolation as two single, separated, multi-element line arrays. This arrangement will not radiate a cylindrical wave. Our only multi-element arrays were multiple line clusters.” The Wall was precisely that: “a radiating wall. The entire surface was working, the lines and clusters combining to produce a kind of sound no modern system can duplicate.”
The differential vocal microphones, featuring pairs of B&K instrumentation mics, for that matter, “caused a loss of low frequencies in the voice,” Bear admitted, “but it did limit spill quite nicely.” Had the differential design been pushed further, they might well have “eliminated” that tinny sound that came from losses in the low frequencies. But each musician now had control over their instrument levels, and could likewise dial in their own vocal settings. “It was a system which needed no sound man,” said Bear.
Besides Healy, Bear was synonymous with “sound man”—and long insistent on that being his role. But in “realizing this system,” Bear shouted out Wickersham, Curl, John Meyer, Matthews, and Healy for their technical expertise, and also said that “virtually everyone in the crew had some part in constructing this monster.” The Wall, Bear claimed, “was arguably the best large venue system for amplified music ever.”
The first show post-Sound Test was supposed to then take place at the University of California, Davis, only a familiar problem arose. The band was “unable to fit its new sound system on stage,” the California Aggie, the campus paper, reported.
So the Dead again did something they hadn’t done yet. They stacked the full system outside.
